Reality Check
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Life, Philosophy, Values on February 29, 2020
What is the United States of America? Is it land, a place with borders, or is it mainly a body of people that reside in that land? Pardon me while I lead the witness. I would argue that it is the people, and lay out the first words of the constitution of the United States of America as evidence to support that idea. I would also go further and solidify the the meaning of the USA (we the people) with a statement from the declaration of independence. The statement is simply “all men are created equal” which I read as meaning all mankind, every person is created equal, and equal meaning no one person or their time is worth more than another.
What is money? Specifically what is the American dollar? What is its purpose? What is the intent in the United States of America having the US Dollar? Evidence here will be a bit harder to come by. Here comes a little more witness leading. I would argue that in the most basic self interests of the country that created the US dollar that it is for the better of the USA “we the people”, for a strong and fluid working economy, to strengthen “we the people”, and our country as a world entity.
What if, with the above in mind, certain people managed to manipulate the economy, fix it at the governmental enforced policy level, all the way to the day to day squeezing of citizens to maximize collection of the US dollar, and then they horded the vast majority of all US dollars in bank accounts, on and off shore.
What is treason? I would put forth that the meaning of treason is “the crime of betraying one’s country”. Is hording that which was intended to strengthen the USA (we the people, everyone created equal) a betrayal of the country? If not so clear, when would it become clear that there is a betrayal? What if 50% of the people had 90% of the US dollar? What about if 10% of the people had 90% of all the US dollars. How about 1% of all the citizens of the USA had 90%+ of all the US dollars? At what point does hording the prosperity of the United States of America become betrayal. At what point is it not just being a strong man, or a rich man, but a man hording prosperity from the United States of America because of their refusal to reinvest in their own country, but instead hording it.
What if a time came when one person working 16 hours a day could not pay for proper child care, rent, or healthy food for their family, because of the hording of the US dollar, manifest by the underpaying for nearly every profession. Isn’t it a slight against our country for one person to work 16 hours and only pull in 224 dollars, and another work 4 or less, but bring in thousands or more? How can “all people are created equal” even mean anything in the light of such clear inequality.
Is it socialism to put boundaries on hording the US dollar, and forcing reinvestment in the USA, to strengthen the USA (we the people), so that we can be a strong country, not just a country of people weakened by the few hording prosperity.
I don’t suggest the persecution of the rich. I suggest that the USA needs to use its governmental powers to place boundaries so that the USA (we the people) can share in the prosperity of being a part of the greatest, riches, most influential, and powerful country in the world. We need the US dollar to be reinvested, not horded, and that can only be done via taxes, and reasonable wage limits.
The Pillars are Falling
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Family, God, Life, Love, Relationships on April 26, 2018
I have been here for a long long time. My world was held up by the characters and the living forms around me. I felt safe with my environment always there for me when I needed something solid to lean on. Its crumbling away. There is no one to support me, there is no one to talk to anymore. I have to become that which is crumbling around me, the pillar. Many lights have fizzled out, it feels so dark. But I realize that the light was not them, it was not the people, but it was God at work in them showing through. That is what I loved, that is what caught my eyes, that is what attracted me to value them. The light is not gone, it is kept, and it is time to be lit up, to have God in me filling me so much, that others can look at me and find something worth something. Something beautiful, even if they don’t know what it is until I am gone some day hopefully at its rightful time long into the future.
Its time to change, perhaps mourning is part of it. I can’t live without the light, but the Light needs to fill me. I say that “God didn’t make us to be puppets”, but today I stand as one who is little to nothing without God filling me. Its Ironic, or is it. Not puppets but nothing without my maker, my God, like a person and his heart, one is nothing without the other.
I don’t get to tell my dad about things anymore, he won’t get to see Serena grow up. Serena won’t know him. It was part of the plan that he would be here when we moved here. Plans change. Now I get to work out what life will look like without him. Pick up the pieces, and make something of it, not what I expected, but something good, it has to be something good.
I no longer get to talk to my closest human friend about spiritual things, bowels and poop, movies, music, or life. Larry I miss you. I wish I could share life with you even now. I wish. Who could ever fill that hole, I can’t imagine. The last unicorn, is there anyone left on this earth like you? Truly unimaginably darker now that light is gone. You shown through him Lord, there has got to be more. I need there to be more like him.
Ed, the last of 2 lights that shown like the sun in College Place. Old and precious. You righted many wrongs in more ways than you know. Murial, you died laughing, how wonderful, but how sad for all who knew you. Ed, a giant in a small frail old man’s body, sharp as a sword, beautiful, and shining with love! Truly you both have met Christ, how else could you be so much like Him. I had hoped to introduce my daughter to you, to show you the life that you were an important part of.
Grandma, holy hell, what can I say. Your prayers kept Jesus on His toes, to jump at any chance, any opening I gave. And not just me, so so many prayers for family, and who did you not consider family. I am who I am today by your prayers. A shell of a person, finally left an opening, and I am a new man, 10 years later, nearly back where it all started, but with a wife, daughter, job, and a relationship with God, because of your constant prayers. There is no replacing that! How does the world even turn anymore! Surly when you finally closed your eyes, we all should have been snuffed out, but by God’s graces we remain.
My friend, my neighbor, you were there from when I was in high school. Always so kind and loving. I know of no other neighbor like you. God gives us a window, and sometimes we don’t take it, and the opportunity passes. I hope you know how much we loved you, even though we missed the window. Your children and their friends remain as a testament to who you were and your character.
Why Are We Focusing On The Micro When We Are So Macro?
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Life on December 21, 2016
I keep on running into this in science, medical, and psychology fields, the denial of the macro. Here is what I mean by this. How many nutrients does it take to sustain a human or any other animal or plant life? How many elements, proteins, and chemical compounds are needed in every small but vital process of life? The answer is clearly many elements, many proteins, many chemical compounds, many nutrients, no one can deny that. Basically we as a thinking society need to come to grips with what that means. We are made up of many many many things, and though one missing can kill a person, the majority of the illnesses in this world are not based on missing one nutrient or vitamin.
First I suppose I need to expose my bias. I have a biblical outlook on life, a biblical perspective. I believe that we were designed and created intelligently to be robust resilient machines able to self repair, self regulate, etc. as long as we give ourselves the foods engineered for us to sustain our lives. I believe that a lot of shit has happened and that life and this world have deviated and degraded from that ideal for many reasons, but it takes more effort for us to keep healthy now than it used to take in the past. I could go on with more reasons, but I think that gets the point across about where I am coming from. I don’t believe we are evolving, but if anything, we and life in general is degrading from a long long ago point of perfect creation. With the bias out of the bag, let me say, my observations still have merit even without that bias, as observationally there are some facts and natures that can be derived from nature as it is now.
So, it comes down to this. I do not know how a logical being can look at such a macro organism and even suggest that a pill made of a certain concentration of a given man made substance or extracted substance could possibly actually cure anything. The most we have been able to truly cure with simple single nutrient compounds or the like are things like scurvy and other deficiency based issues. The body has so many needs that we can’t live off of minerals, we have to eat other life in order to fulfill all of our bodies needs, and when something is missing, then we get diseases. People who nearly exclusively ate corn became greatly deficient in the past and diseases resulted, so not even one plant alone can sustain us, and a plant has a ton of different nutrients. We have to eat a variety of plants to provide what we need.
I believe our bodies, if sufficiently given the right amount of the right nutrients on a regular basis, which I believe to be completely fulfillable by plants alone if done right, can fight off more than 90% of the diseases which are epidemics today. This includes even the big ones, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and others. I included diabetes because that falls into too much (not the right amount) of something on a regular basis overworking an organ to failure. I believe our immune systems can fight off much more when at peak efficiency, and that includes the proper handling of mutated cells we only call cancer when it reproduces too fast. I consider any DNA damaged cell that sustains its life to be in the same category as cancer, even if it does not reproduce as fast as what the medical community classifies as cancer, because the body treats them the same. I believe the most effective “cure” to cancer that we can get is to eat perfectly, non processed fruits and vegetables of a good variety and of a good organic and holistic nature.
Plants provide every element that our bodies need to be in their best shape, with the strongest immune systems, ready to respond to any issues that come its way. The weaker the immune system, the weaker the response, and the more the diseases win. I would not say that we as a race have the ability to be completely immune to all things, but I am saying that we can be immune to most of the epidemic diseases we are dealing with today in society simply by giving our bodies exactly what they need, which can be perfectly provided by a balanced variety of high quality fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and legumes, etc.
Donating money to a corporation to do for profit research and development to find a new product that they can tout as a cure or even temporary remedy and sell back to that same society that paid for that product to be developed, and at insane profit margins seems illogical to me. Basically you are paying a company to make a product that probably wont “cure” cancer, but even if it did, you probably could not afford it. In essence, because it is a for profit venture, and for profit, when it involves saving a life, tends to have the highest profit markup known to mankind, you are just encouraging a company to profit in one end and out the other, and the poor people die, and the rich people live. This does not sound good to me. I do not understand how people can rationalize this. Just like “chemotherapy” as they call it, I don’t logically understand why people choose to take toxic chemicals that often all by themselves kill a patient, in hopes that it kills the cancer more than them, only to typically die a few years later because your “chemotherapy” ravaged body is so damaged, it can’t have a fighting chance to kill the cancer off itself anymore.
I believe that God made all life and the universe that supports it, and I believe that in the beginning everything was as it should be, but by our choices, we are on a degraded path. We have diseases and illnesses as a result, and bodies that are not as well equipped to fight those issues. I believe that the more we return to the original design, the more healthy and resilient we will be. I believe that the for profit influences in this world have caused a lot of propaganda to be believed as fact, and a lot of the foods are designed to be more attractive than ever, and that is throwing the balance off in every area of life. One change will not fix it, one chemical will not fix it, even a hand full of chemicals or changes will not fix most of these giant issues. I believe that it will take many many small changes, many many chemicals and nutrients effecting many many complex systems and organs, and then we will find the cures. We need a macro perspective.
Why Be A Bible Thumper When God Is Active Today
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Bible, Family, God, Life, Love, Philosophy, Relationships, Values on November 28, 2016
I was thinking the other night about my daughter, and how I could reflect that God is relevant today in everyday life. When I was growing up, hell, into my 20s, I didn’t read the bible and most of the described events in there, that I have heard from various sources surrounding me, were very hard to relate to today, to the struggles we deal with just trying to survive in this society, bent on rich people getting richer on the backs of the poor most of all, and then the middle class. Today I can see some major similarities, some relevancy that I have never seen before, but that was only due to the insightful people I have been exposed to, and the research I have done. I will do my best not to get off on a rant about legal tender, and the hording of it, using government as a tool so that those with it get to keep more of it than those without. Regardless of what I see today that I didn’t when I was younger, how can I relate to my daughter how God fits into:
- Being different than everyone around you.
- How to make friends.
- Where to find the right people to surround yourself with.
- How to get a job in a tough market with an inadequate skill set and education.
- How to find the right person to spend your life with.
- Then, how to actually spend your life with a person you live with for the rest of your life.
- How to tell when it is time to leave, a job, an abusive situation, a community.
- How to find a way to stay when things are tough, and why.
- What kind of car to buy and why.
- A reason to live.
- How to deal with debt, and what it really is.
- How people work, their motivations, and how it makes everything in society predictable and sad.
- How to keep on going when you know how broken society is.
- How to deal with difficult people.
- How to actually forgive someone.
- Why to forgive someone.
- What is love.
LOL, as if I could list all the things. But the list goes on and on, and every human needs to learn how to live, and every one of these elements fits in, and God fits into every one of these elements. I have heard from people this sad misunderstanding where they say “God doesn’t really fit in to taking care of my family, making ends meet” extremely paraphrased of course, but the idea is clear, they could not fathom how God fit into everything it takes to live today. Like finances, you can bible thump a lot of verses out about that, and not that they are worthless, but the societal gap, the lack of understanding of how things were then and how things are now, and how they were very similar, really kills the application of the bible to today. Subject after subject, you will fail to relate, so much lost in translation, and not just in translation of language, but translation of the situations that were in play then, and the same damn thing happening in one form or another today. David was right, there is truly nothing new under the sun, but starting out in your understanding and if you are lucky, study, none of it hits home.
As a father, I can’t help but revisit how it was when I was young. I still don’t know how I can help a young person see and believe that it is real. As a young boy, I was a hard case, one even today I would not know how to crack. Sometimes I wonder if the best thing we can do is raise them as close to how you want them to be, and pray. However, I worry about being just another “Christian” family that makes a little atheist because we paint and live such a hypocritical life, oh Lord, let us not live a hypocritical life. I believe that all atheists are in one form or another the fault of God believing people being terrible in the name of God, or while living under His name as “Christians”, okay I am getting off topic.
So, to summarize, I have come to the conclusion that the bible is good, but only after seeking God with all your heart and having Him guide you through it, otherwise it can be used as a tool of evil, just remember, even Satan used it for evil, and still does. Spiritual things are spiritually discerned. I think something that may help relate to a young person who God is, and what He wants for us, is to write down the statistically anomalous events in our lives where God clearly pulled some strings. Not to discourage described events from the bible, but without described events from a little more recent time, it will be very hard to relate. One day I want my little girl to recall a story of where we had no food and no money, and the very day we prayed, out of nowhere people were cleaning out their pantries, and started to show up with boxes of food, and I want her to pray, and see what happens. I know my Friend, He will not disappoint a humble prayer, from a pure honest heart, who seeks Him, with all of their strength. Or I want her to look back, when she finds herself in a hard place with work, to recall daddy telling about how he just could not make it, there was no way to get out of debt, and prayed, and within a month was being paid nearly 3 times as much in a new job.
Heh, “doesn’t really fit into life”, that is really missing the mark. The wife I have, the home I have, the car I have, the child I have, the health I have, the fact that I am alive here today, only because of God. I have experienced how He really does fit into life, in every way. Its not simple, its not easy, it takes work in prayer, study, choice, belief, and action. You can’t con God, He is a *person, and I wouldn’t expect Him to respond to someone being a shit saying “prove you exist” (I did that once, didn’t work), but He will respond to someone who humbly believes in Him and calls on Him, asking some of the simplest of life’s questions. Many would say to that “how convenient”, and I would say “yup, deal with it, it is His choice, what would you do if for thousands of years you have interacted with your creation, and then a generation decides to discount a portion of written history for all kinds of reasons, and someone who still believes asked for help, and one who doesn’t believe asks for you to prove yourself again, who would you rather respond to?”. I can’t presume to speak for God, but I can say it seems fair at this point in history to let people believe what they want to believe, and respond to those who believe and call on Him. From my perspective, God has nothing to prove, at least not to me or mankind, He has done so quite enough in history.
I am so glad God is in charge of all that. I am not equipped for His job. The story is never quite as simple as I put it, I classically, at least part of me, wishes it were. Frankly I took the long way around, as I put it, I had to hit some walls before I even thought to ask God about any of those line items. Terrible relationships, before I finally asked Him to take care of that, but I was fine being single, ether way was ok at that point. I ended up going to bars to find friends and such, and I found that doesn’t always end well, and dare I say, from my experience, it has a high statistical probability that it is not going to end well. So I asked where I can find a good woman.
My next blogs will tell those stories, and how God responded.
Logically Looking at Vaccinations
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Health, Life, Medical, Values on July 23, 2016
First, let me state that I am all for vaccinations! Vaccines have eradicated many terrible diseases, and greatly helped to reduce many many other occurrences of disease. I do however have a problem with shortcuts, toxic ones, and the effects they can have on people. I am against choices being taken away that lock us into paying corporations for sub par products, or products where harmful short-cuts were taken. I want vaccinations without toxic compromise. The argument that it is “only a little amount of toxin” is bullshit, it is the little things that add up to create big problems, or increase the incidents of big problems.
This has kept me up at night a lot, being a parent, which means every choice I make can have effects throughout the rest of this little precious person’s life. Vaccinations, a hot topic for sure, and for understandable reasons on both sides. There is a ton of money in vaccinations, it is not a non profit organization, there is world wide good that it has effected, and giant pharmaceuticals are behind these products, with a lot to loose. Parents want what is best for their children, diseases are terrible, suffering children is terrible, the irreversible effect of some diseases is terrible, no one wants their child sick, fear is one of the most powerful driving forces humans have, sometimes illogically. Another note about feelings in general, I have observed that the more feelings a person has, the less logical and fact/metric based their decisions become, the more facts/metrics are even flat out ignored.
As much as the “free market” is often rigged, there are still many concepts that are real and factual. A corporation without any incentive to change, will not put forth any effort to change a profitable thing. The only forces that drive change, are money based, as in, if they can easily make more money, they will, or if they can do something to prevent loss of money, they will do it. One element of this is a consumer driven one, where a consumer has the choice to evaluate and choose to buy, or not to by a product. When that is taken away, this leaves a disconnect between what customers want or don’t want, and what a corporation produces. Over the years, corporations have slowly bought their way into government, via lobbying, and via money to put their people in office for the specific goal of making governmental market controlling changes, basically you can read that as, they take away choices or effect of the people on their corporation’s product, usually locking their product in, and others out, but sometimes making their product a mandatory requirement. Vaccinations are well into the “being made mandatory stage” and they have good arguments for it, ones I agree with, how could you disagree with eradication of terrible diseases. However, mandatory goodness turns ugly when money is involved. The “save the world from disease” has lost all incentive to do the best they can for the good of the people, and has cut corners, and refused to change, because it doesn’t have to, there is no monetary benefit to change, no incentive. Any “for the good of the people or product” is not enough to drive business changes, not in this economy, not in this accepted corporate structure and society. I know this because I have seen it from the inside, year after year, the only incentive for change is money, the blood of a corporation. If you’re “bleeding” fix it, and if no one notices the problem, or we can cover it up, that is good enough, because it has prevented “bleeding”. Corporations always act to make more money, and that is not a bad thing, but how they do it can be, and what they ignore can also be bad, especially in medical or other bodily products.
The world is united to eradicate as many diseases as possible, new vaccinations are being produced constantly. The vaccine producing corporations have leveraged the Government to help organize and enforce this through many mandatory measures, and have the CDC promoting all that they do. We have even reached the masses with media convincing people of what ever they want with regard to their product’s goodness. Yay, all is good….. But wait, as with all giant things and momentum, it is good until it isn’t, but at this point, it is so big, who could possibly stop it if something were wrong. Skydiving is great until you find there is something wrong with your parachute, and then what. That brings us to this day and age.
Here comes the problem, or the punch line, if you will, with regard to vaccinations. History has taught us that metals are tricky things. Even from ancient times (Roman empire, etc.) people have noticed that many metals are toxic, such as lead and mercury. We have also learned that our body needs some metals such as iron, zinc, copper, manganese, chromium, molybdenum and selenium. What what we need to note is that there are some metals that are not good, and many of them cause neurological disorders among other things. Both lead and mercury are well known for causing neurological issues. Aluminum is repeatedly showing up as having links to neurological issues as well, especially clear with Alzheimer’s disease, where they have found 4 times the concentration of aluminum accumulation in the brain when compared to a normal person’s brain. Aluminum bioaccumulates in the body, tissues, and organs over time, and I suspect some places it does not ever leave from. Just like other diseases that vaccinations are eradicating, these metal based diseases are terrible, and there is often no significant reversing of the effects. Mercury is still often used in vaccinations, and aluminum is present in most vaccinations. The thing with aluminum is that it is big big big business, it is used all over the place, and even its refining byproducts which they used to just dump as worthless toxins, has turned into another often mandated no-choice product that makes money, called fluoride. Fluoride is another subject that is worth discussing at another time, as it does play a part chemically in the body if both come together, they do tend to bond. Aluminum is found in cook ware, dishes, food, building materials, electronics, toys, body care products, health care products, and injectable medicals supplies as a preservative and as an adjuvant, and on and on, just about everywhere. There is very little that would have such an effect on the economy of the world and corporations around the world as finding that aluminum were toxic and a cause of neurological disorders in children and adults. This would be the thing to hide if there ever were a thing to hide, especially with regard to vaccines, which are government and often community mandated in schools and child-care, or other group child scenarios. Vaccines are the most direct intra-bodily delivery system for aluminum, and mercury for that matter, there is no absorption ratio, it is 100% in the body after injected, and its removal is fully loaded on the body’s ability to dislodge it from tissues it accumulates in, and cleanse it out of the body through the kidneys and liver. Eating aluminum has a 1% absorption ratio, and is not comparable, call bullshit if anyone tries to compare the 2, because it is just ignorant bullshit, nothing more. Back in the day it was clear enough for the American Academy of Pediatrics to recommend that aluminum and mercury be removed from vaccines, but recently they mysteriously reversed their recommendation with regard to aluminum, without good reason in my opinion.
Now to further the perspective. If you were one of the people driving to eradicate diseases through vaccinations, and it was found out that your adjuvant was causing neurological disorders in children, perhaps through statistical analysis, in a secret meeting, you would really be careful to make sure that this problem did not stop vaccinations dead in its tracks, because it is fighting diseases. Wouldn’t you at least consider hiding it so that corporations would have enough time to reformulate, excluding aluminum as an adjuvant? Because it would be obvious that the vast number of increasing cases of autistic children would result in enough lawsuits to bury any vaccine manufacturer, halting any faith in vaccinations, because people overreact, especially in emotional situations like this. Who would want that, especially when you have dedicated your life to eradicating diseases, and succeeded in many areas? The flaw here is the idea that a corporation’s good will towards people is enough to drive change. People ride it until it is dead in the water, and despite the world at large becoming slowly wise to the issue, it is still widely government, community, and organizationally mandated, there is plenty of riding left to be done until congress changes that, and we know how quickly that happens these days, considering how government works these days.
Corporations are in the denial stage, just like with tobacco. They are producing all the propaganda required to keep aluminum where it is at, all of the studies promoted by those profiting from aluminum that counter any proof or study that says aluminum is a neurotoxin. There seem to be stages that organizations go through, something like; denial with counter evidence, acceptance of the problem but blame something or someone else like by putting warnings on labels, and then in some way acceptance of responsibility but limit of losses. If there were just more money behind real research looking for truth, and only truth, this process would be so much quicker. But where is the money? It is in the hands of the corporations, and just like we all know with elections as an example, who ever has the money has the advertising/media power, and who ever has the most advertising/media power convinces the most people, so in turn, corporations will win with their convincing propaganda/advertising/media. The internet helps spread ideas, sometimes truth, but if nothing else, it gets people thinking, looking, and researching, and that is currently the only counter the world has to the hiding of the truth.
Oh, and one more thing, weather you believe in evolution or God, or both, you have to admit that the body is well tuned to know what is good for it or what is not good for it, and the entire idea behind using aluminum as an adjuvant is simply because it causes such an uproar in the body as the body does all it can to contain and remove the aluminum, that it amplifies the immune response to the actual antigen. Basically the immune response to the weakened strain of the disease causing microbe is amplified by association to the toxin. Our bodies know that aluminum does not belong in our bodies, but it is being ignored by people who think they know better.
If you need references, here is some fun casual reading about aluminum, after you are done reading, you tell me how much you want to inject your child with aluminum containing vaccines or other things (like the good old synthetic vitamin K shot newborns typically receive):
“Trace elements in scalp hair samples from patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis.” (2015)
“Aluminum-induced entropy in biological systems: implications for neurological disease.” (2014)
“Are there negative CNS impacts of aluminum adjuvants used in vaccines and immunotherapy?” (2014)
“Autoimmune/autoinflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants (ASIA syndrome) in commercial sheep.” (2013)
“Aluminum toxicity and astrocyte dysfunction: a metabolic link to neurological disorders.” (2011)
“Aluminum vaccine adjuvants: are they safe?” (2011)
“Metal ions affecting the neurological system.” (2011)
“Aluminum hydroxide injections lead to motor deficits and motor neuron degeneration.” (2009)
“Aluminum adjuvant linked to Gulf War illness induces motor neuron death in mice.” (2007)
“Mechanisms of aluminum-induced neurodegeneration in animals: Implications for Alzheimer’s disease.” (2007)
“Inflammation, neurodegenerative diseases, and environmental exposures.” (2004)
“Neurotoxic effects of aluminium among foundry workers and Alzheimer’s disease.” (2004)
“Neurological adverse events associated with vaccination.” (2002)
“The potential role of aluminium in Alzheimer’s disease.” (2002)
Why I Believe What I Believe: Introduction
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Bible, God, Life, Philosophy, Values, Why I Believe What I Believe on April 28, 2016
I feel it is time to write down what I believe, and why I believe what I believe. I think that somehow it will be important in the future, and quite often I find that it is an important process in working out thoughts, and even finding misperceptions in beliefs, ideas, or thought processes. Writing also has a nice way of solidifying things in the mind and memory when writing them. If I were to forget for some reason, this is a good way to remind myself as well. Below are the points that I plan to expand on, and for the title, shorten up.
- I believe in the spiritual world.
- I believe Jesus Christ is the son of God
- I believe in creation of the world as it is reflected in the Bible including it’s timeline
- I believe that evil spirits can prophesy about God and truth
- I believe that God limits Himself by the rules He has put in place for free Will’s sake
- I believe God gave us free will
- I believe that the law of free will explains why things happen
- I believe in miracles in the modern day and that God is active with us constantly
- I believe that every prayer is heard and God acts even if we don’t see it
- I believe God talks to us and communicates with us on a regular basis and sometimes we don’t even know it
- I believe Satan is the destroyer and a legalist, the ultimate lawyer and Heaven has been turned into a sort of court room as a result
- I believe the spiritual world has rules and those rules allow for quantifiable things like multiple people praying together having more effect than a single person
- I believe that the closer you are to God the more intense the spiritual and physical world results of stances, decisions, and actions.
- I believe that the 7th day is the Sabbath, and that is Saturday, and I do not believe that God or Jesus ever authorized it to be changed to Sunday
- I believe that Elijah was torn between 2 spirits, the spirit of God, and another spirit at times. The disciples asked if they should call fire down from heaven to consume them, Jesus said, “you do not know by what spirit you are of”. They were referencing the historical acts of Elijah, and I believe that this shows that it is a mistake to assume all the things that the prophets have done are of God, spiritual yes, but of God, not all of it.
- I believe Satan has had a lot more to play in biblical history accounts than we know, reflecting again that the simplistic view of the infallible bible just messes your picture of God up. I believe that all of the fire consuming people acts were from Satan, as a legalistic move due to the seriousness of our close interactions with God. I believe he is allowed to play in an equal access duality as to be legally fair to the legalistic Satan, so a person can be working powerfully for God, and yet be a part of something that is not of God, or even on the other hand call on ungodly powers for wonders.
- I believe that God never intended for the people of Israel to kill their way through the promised land, but it was a concession for their hard hearts, and their war cultured minds.
Free Will and The Spiritual World
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Life, Philosophy on March 18, 2016
There is a wall, some guy built it, in the middle of a field. He willed, he chose to put it there, his will was put into action, and through the effort driven by his will in this world, over time it was built, no matter what his reason was, it is there.
A woman was traveling, and willed to pass through the field. She was reading as she walked and passed by the wall without even noticing it. Her will and the effect of her will in this world did not conflict or intersect in any way the will of the man who built the wall.
Another man was in the same field after the wall was built, mowing the brush down in a riding lawn mower. It was his will to go out that day and mow down the brush, so he put forth the effort to do so. He ran into the wall, it damaged his mower, so he decided to circumvent the wall, and mow around it. His will to mow the entire field was effected by the will of another when all was put into action in this world.
Yet another man was driving through the same field, and he ran into the wall with his vehicle. He got out and looked at the wall and decided he wanted to drive through where the wall was. He got back into the vehicle followed his will to run through the wall, and by his will put into action, and the resulting effort he put it, in very little time, the wall was destroyed. The will of the driver, put into action, over time, overturned the will of another man who built the wall.
God has patterned things in His creation, and in many ways they are harmonious with other realities, and that is why you can look at the properties of what He has created, and get hints at how other hidden realities work. We are free willed creations, and our wills conflict sometimes, and sometimes they do not, and sometimes they don’t even intersect. The strength of these wills, and the action that it creates can cause one person’s will to overturn another person’s will and the effect it had. The hidden worlds I believe this works in is the spiritual world, the world of faith, belief, prayer, and the resulting effect by God’s hand that some may call “super-natural”.
In the spiritual world, I believe the will of the man driving through the field overturned the will of the man who built the wall, even before he ran through it, right when he decided he was going to run through it.
Medical Industry Letdowns
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Business Ethics, Health, Life, Medical, Values on November 3, 2015
I am finding it harder and harder to trust anyone in the medical industry these days. Just today we went in for a simple frenotomy, and the doctor told us they would not do it because they would not risk the health of our child, who is having a hard time breast feeding because of her tongue tied status. Her issue was that we were administering vitamin K orally, and did not get the standard vitamin K shot that is considered standard and is administered as a matter of fact in the medical industry these days. Here was our reasoning for not having the shot administered. It is a mega dose of synthetic vitamin K, that uses aluminum as a preservative. Aluminum is a heavy metal with known neurotoxic effects on human and animal nervous systems. After a week of sleep deprivation I did not recall what was in the shot, so I asked her if the shot contains any heavy metals, or aluminum (at that time not being sure if it was a heavy metal). She promptly said no, and continued to insist that she would not perform the procedure because of the apparent medically significant risk of bleeding in the brain due to how hard she would cry with the procedure.
Too little too late, we got the shot, and asked what the ingredients were. Sure enough, aluminum. I know all the arguments for and against aluminum in injectable medications, and I understand the claimed use in vaccines as an adjuvant, but as a preservative, I consider that just damned lazy and cheap. I believe that the arguments for its use as an adjuvant are, though understandable, it is still a cop-out. I believe any alternative should be found and used, even if it costs more, or is harder to manufacture, or requires boosters or a longer procedure. What ever the case, I think it is logically unsound to say that it is good to inject neurotoxic heavy metals into infants or anyone for that matter, just as long as it is a little bit at a time. Bioaccumulation is a real thing, and guess what, aluminum is bioaccumulated with the best of them, which means over time there is more that builds up in tissues, like the brain, the more a person is exposed, and it is dead simple logic to understand that more of a neurotoxin build up in nervous system tissue typically means more neurotoxic effect with the increase.
And damn it, what about the risk to our daughter’s optimum health when she can not be breast fed due to her tongue tied status? I consider formula an option that is far from what I would call healthy. It is a must of course in many circumstances, I get that, but to deny breast feeding for the first month, I consider that a health risk, when it could be avoided with a damned simple snip.
I should not need to do a bullshit test every time a doctor tells me something. I am tired of running into this.
Oh and if you are curios, the stats for infants that were given vitamin K orally having bleeding complications are .0014% to .0064% have late VKDB, which is the only type that we could have at this point. That is the risk that the doctor was so desperate to avoid. I think that there is a higher risk of us getting in an accident on the way home from the wasted trip to the clinic today.
I Don’t Like It Here Sometimes
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Business Ethics, God, Life, Love, Values on September 3, 2015
Some days this world bothers me more than others. Who can stop by a grocery store, gas station, bank, or anything along those lines on a regular basis and not run into someone with a sob story, and illogically they think the best place to get help is at these common areas. I have been a liar, a con artist, and I was wonderful at it. I could convince anyone of anything to get what ever I wanted, and oddly enough, it usually centered around money. I know the game, I can get into it and probably turn on the tears if I needed to. How can I believe any of these people? Like some kids in an Audi saying their wallets were stolen, while one of them is texting on their phone in the car… “We need gas, or money for gas” they say. Each one has a different story, all of them sound so sad. They paint such a heart breaking story about how there is some medical issue they have, or the classic, they are trying to get to the hospital to see their daughter in a different state. Now if that were true, it would be sad.
Now think about this logically, what would you do if you had your wallet stolen? Or what would you do if your daughter was in the hospital? What if you didn’t have a bank account or enough money for a trip? Well, if I didn’t have the money, I would not go. It is that simple. If I had my wallet stolen, I would report it to the police, and call friends and family for help, and start arranging to have what was in my wallet replaced. I can not relate to any other situation, they are all illogical! The places that these people are popping up and playing their sad story is not the place that people should go for help.
I believe there are real issues happening in the world, and some people have no support system, but more often than not, it is due to burning bridges, as sad as that is. It does not mean they should not be helped. But in this world, how can a person discern truth from untruth, when so much is a scam, and any scammer can come up with a better story than the true stories?
On another note, why does this bother me so much? Why do I have it swirling around in my head while I try and sleep? Am I afraid that it was true and they needed help and were just really stupid and illogical about how they handled the situation? Maybe it is the nagging thought that it could be true, despite how illogical.
Lies hurt the world! Never is a single lie resulted in more good than harm! If you think otherwise, then you have not thought hard enough, and far enough! If no one lied (did anything to hide the truth, or anything with an intent to keep truth from being known), then the world would be something that people have not seen before. It is probably unimaginable what a world would look like without lies. Every bad thing in this world comes from a lie, from illness, birth defects, debt, divorce, job loss, no support system, the income gap, injustice, sadly most of the government and its dysfunction, crime, everything.
I don’t belong in this world. I am not sure who or what does, but it feels like a bad joke, and I really don’t like it. I see life, I don’t think it belongs here either, I think it is also prey to this bad joke.
Hard Days, Sleepless Nights
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Health, Life on May 22, 2015
Life has been moving on. Great things have happened! I hold up all that God has done for me as wonderful. A job, a wife, a home, a daughter, time away. However, despite all of that, life still seems worthless. Apart from God and all that He has done, worthless. All this shit that I spend my days doing, worthless! It will all fail, it will all burn. Every bit will fade away and no one will remember, apart from that which was of God.
I tell myself, I have to keep going. I have got to work. We must pay off the debt. Just a little longer, just a little harder. “We just have to keep on going” I say. But do we? Is this the right way? Should it be this hard? Should I be this sick this often? “But we are doing everything right”, I say. Then how can things be this sad. How can I feel so disconnected? Why can I never seem to get enough sleep? Tired, so tired, yet relief seems so far from me.
I hate this world, at least the way it is. All the things I used to love are crap, what is left? God, you have shown me things, things that make this world look so bad. I guess in the dark, you never notice. You could pick up a rock, and not know. You could lay down, and have no idea. You could be content eating your food, doing the things you do. In the dark, you would never know that it was a world of shit. Then the light was turned on, and the dark peels away, and how can you not be disgusted. But after so many years of only knowing the life of crap, how do you change? Where is the abundance of non crap to fill all that you leave behind?
Where are the meaningful things? Where do I go to find them? Who do I talk to, who do I seek? Who knows the things that matter? I want to meet Him, and ask Him some questions. There is only One, but He seems silent, or my ears can not hear. What has happened to my ears? Why does it seem like I am trapped in a pit?
The First Shall Be Last, and The Last Shall Be First
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Bible, God, Life, Relationships, Values on September 13, 2014
The first one to run to the parent when they come home to tell on the other, they are counted as right, regardless of the truth of their story, or rightness of their perspectives. The first one to tell the teacher about something is counted as right, regardless of the truth of what they say, as they may weave untruth, or have heavy biases to suit themselves. Many would perceive he gay community as flamboyant, loud, lisping, and always outgoing, this is not the case, not for all, but how can someone perceive a group of people but by what they hear and see, and they only hear and see the ones that are loud and visible. When in a position of perceived authority, quite often the only people who will come and talk to you are the ones who are having a problem, and so all you hear is the one side, a people already clearly biased to something being perceived as an issue. Are you going to take that as a nice even balanced approach, or should you not logically seek out an exact same number of people not complaining or “concerned” and talk to them about the issue?
We need to know our selves better than this, otherwise we will end up being tools of what ever comes our way, and when the only thing that comes our way is those who already see something as a problem, despite it being a problem or not, what then? When dealing with people, imperfect people, there will be some of each person that is imperfect and broken, and there will be some of that person that is good, and we better see that, because we will be accountable to our reactions and how we handle the situation. We have the power to condemn a person who is seeking the light, and to turn them to darkness by how we respond, we better not forget that! Or we can have hope, and beat things out with God, and He will let us see things as they are, despite the only vocal ones being biased to one direction, because who comes to authority to complain but those with a complaint, while all the others who see good things happening do not speak up, because as the kingdom of this world goes, who goes to the authorities but those seeking power over, and have a complaint.
We need to never forget the example of Jesus Christ, what did He say to Pilate? What did that mean? Who did He say was the Good Shepherd? Who did He say our teacher was? Who girded Himself and washed our feet? His Kingdom is not of this world, it is not like this world, people do not come to an authority figure in His Kingdom so the the authority can control or force about a change or an action overwhelming the will of another. We are not to be like them, that have perceived authority, and lord it over others.
Human Assumtions, Contrary to His Will
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Bible, God, Life on July 23, 2014
How often does this happen. I tell you I have seen it time and time again, and now I have stumbled onto this story reflecting that in relation to God and what He says, we have been running this scenario over and over and over, even in the days of Jesus.
Luke 22:36:
And He said to them, “But now, whoever has a money belt is to take it along, likewise also a bag, and whoever has no sword is to sell his coat and buy one.”
And now the assumptions:
Luke 22:49-51:
When those who were around Him saw what was going to happen, they said, “Lord, shall we strike with the sword?” And one of them struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his right ear. But Jesus answered and said, “Stop! No more of this.” And He touched his ear and healed him.
So where did they, or we, for that matter, go wrong. What did He mean? By human standards, when we are told to arm our selves with swords, aren’t we clearly suppose to use them? Where did we go wrong? Perhaps we just need to be more attentive to what He says, combined with who He is, rather than assuming He means something He did not say. I don’t have the answers, but this happened over and over with regard to God or Jesus speaking, and how humans take it. We not only tend to take things so literally, but we go one step further and then assume what we are to do next after the literal is carried out.
What I do see this saying is that, even when we take things God says, and interpret them wrong, you can trust Him to heal the brokenness we have caused by our assumptions, but we should also take a step back and ask Him to keep us from stepping ahead of Him and doing what He did not say to do. And we need to be more attentive in the future. Perhaps even the body, the church is needed, to help interpret what is being said.
I Finally Understand Why Jesus Had to Die!
Today I was reading through Hebrews, and God showed me something I had been missing. It seemed so simple, but somehow I have been missing this the entire time.
Let me start by explaining how I see the God and Satan thing. I will not get into the big questions that I can not answer such as, why did God allow Satan on earth in any form, ever. Or the question of how can a being created good by God turn evil in the first place. I leave those for God to answer, and I always hold dear the reality, that just because I have a question that I can not answer, it does not mean anything, other than there is a question I have that I do not have an answer for. Some people take that lack of a good explanation, and believe what they want to believe, and say, well I don’t have an answer, so God must be evil for things to be like this. To think that way would be arrogant to the greatest extreme. I believe that I know a little, and in the vast domain of knowledge and understanding that I do not have, in it could exist a perfectly reasonable and moral explanation to these questions.
With that out of the way, I see this earth as a court room, where someone is trying to hold a charge against God’s ways. Satan is the one making the accusation, and at least one of these accusations is against mankind for betraying God, and going against His ways. Satan claims that because they believed him over God in the garden, and time and time again throughout history, that mankind belongs to him and he has dominion over them, like God. Much of this perspective is pulled from the setting laid out in Job, and it seems to fit in such a larger scale, that I suspect that much of the goings on here and in heaven with regard to humans, earth, and Satan, are just like what was revealed in Job. You can find other hints of how God recognizes authorities set up by mankind in Daniel 10. It seems clear that God has set up rules, such as free will (required for the existence of love), and authority, which He will not break or ignore. Mankind, who He originally setup to have dominion over the earth, also has the ability to stet up over them rulers, and by taking Stan’s word over God’s word, we believed God was a liar and what Satan said was true, and thus set him up as our “god”. Satan has since then perpetuated these lies, that God is bad, His ways suck, and that Satan’s ways are the only ways that work, or something like that. It is hard to follow what Satan’s point is, when you know God, because all of his arguments against God just fall apart, especially after Jesus.
On to my point, I understand that by God extending Himself into the human flesh, Jesus, and then giving Himself up, showing what sin does, and at the same time showing His love and forgiveness, that He also fulfilled something powerful in the heavenly court case going on since the beginning. I understood that humans sinning is an offense against God, and that the offended legally can forgive the offense. That made sense. It also made perfect sense that by dieing on the cross, Jesus proved the point that in the garden, the first lie by Satan, that God is selfish, holding back things from mankind, was false. That alone is enough to throw out the entire case, because all of the accusations of Satan are based on a deception now proven wrong. Think of it this way, if a piece of property is obtained by a false pretense, in court, it would go back to the previous owner. In this situation, we are the “property” obtained by false pretense, and now with Jesus and His selfless giving up of His life on the cross, and continual forgiveness and love, that false pretense was fully demonstrated as false. God is not selfish, He is the opposite, He is love. I got that, but what I didn’t get was the rest of the story. This is so totally God, when He does something, it means far more than just one thing, it ripples and echos truth and goodness in all different directions. The wrong that was done was not a simple theft, the wrong that was done in this court scenario is sin, and the wages of sin is death. If it were just theft, the wronged person could forgive the theft, and he himself would simply suffer the loss of what was stolen. In this situation, with the wrong being sin, and the wages of sin is death, the wronged Person can forgive that wrong, but only by suffering the wages of the wrong, which is death. The wages of theft forgiven is loss of the stolen item. The wages of sin forgiven is the loss of the life of the one who is forgiving.
I don’t know if you can follow that, but it was a very neat piece that I had been missing. Now it all makes logical sense, that is why He had to die, at least one of the reasons. The other reason was to show the most pure expression of love, which is being willing to lay your life down for someone. When I was a little kid, maybe kindergarten to 4th grade, somewhere around there, I called out to God, what is this love thing, how can I know if I love someone. His answer was clear, if you are willing to lay your life down for someone, then you love them.
Oh Paul, So Stuck In Your Ways
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Bible, God, Life, Relationships on March 29, 2014
I have been working through the daunting task of reading the writings of Paul. He was used to spread the gospel to so many, and so far, but I have to say, that he should have set himself aside and his deeply engrained ways aside so he could simple preach Christ and Christ alone. If he were just to echo all that Jesus said and did, if only. But he does not, in fact for some reason in his writings he is often speaking things in direct contrast to what God said in Genesis, where God said “it is not good for man to be alone”, and indirectly, “Go forth and multiply”.
Specifically I am reading through 1 Corintians 7, and there is much said that I can not get on board with. I understand that there is much that can be inferred into writings that is not there in the first place, but I can not help but get the feeling that there is a measure of arrogance as Paul speaks of marriage. In 1 Corinthians 7:1 he starts by saying “Now concerning the things of which you wrote to me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman”. Now maybe I am reading it wrong, maybe Paul is saying that they wrote to him saying it is good for a man not to touch a woman, and then he was addressing that, but without the quotes, it is left looking like Paul is saying this to them in response to the letter Paul received. But here comes the touch of arrogance that starts weaving in; 1 Corinthians 7:5-9:
Do not deprive one another except with consent for a time, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again so that Satan does not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. But I say this as a concession, not as a commandment. For I wish that all men were even as I myself. But each one has his own gift from God, one in this manner and another in that.
But I say to the unmarried and to the widows: It is good for them if they remain even as I am; but if they cannot exercise self-control, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion.
I see parts of this as completely reasonable, and who am I to say that being able to be alone without issue is not a gift from God, but to say that it is only the lack of self-control that is a reason for a man and a woman to be married, that is not truth, as God himself said “it is not good for man to be alone” and then He created Eve for Adam as a helpmate. Now people joke that in the garden, perhaps it was because Adam was looking at the animals a little funny (read, burning with passion), that God decided to create Eve, but that is not what is said. I believe there are many reasons that it is good for a man to be married to a woman. Just as God said, a helpmate, yes, I can absolutely say that my wife is the biggest human helper I know in my life. She takes care of so many things, and with us working together so much more can be accomplished, yes, even so much more can be accomplished for God.
I was accepting of being alone for the rest of my life, but God knew better. He knew I needed someone, even though it was not apparent yet. I had not gotten seriously sick before, been without work before, bought a house before, or had a child before. God knew what He had in store for me, and he knew I could not do it alone, and so He chose the perfect match for me, a self proclaimed freak, an oddball, so unique I could not relate with others. I think differently, I act differently, I relate to people differently, and I see things differently than the majority of people I have met in this world. He found a beautiful woman who would stand by me and support me no matter what.
I guess my main point is, people are not perfect, no matter if they have writings in the bible or not. Paul was far from perfect, in fact, I have referred to him as a pompous ass at times, and other things. He is human, God touched his life, but he is still him. He has to fight against who he was brought up to be, and God used him and his strengths for much good, but it did not mean he did not have a bunch of worldly funk still attached to him that he has to fight against to keep God’s word and heart flowing without being over colored by him, a legalistic, hard, emotional guy. This is a powerful lesson for all of us as we walk with God. Never think anyone is perfect, except for God and Jesus Christ. I am not saying to not trust anyone, but I am saying never get to the point where you treat everything that a person says as 100% perfect, unless you are talking directly to God or Jesus. You must weigh what you hear, with the character of Christ, you must know Jesus that well, the heart of God. If you don’t, then you risk being tossed by the waves, no matter who is making the waves.
The concept that the bible is infallible, is in itself a powerful deceptive tool. It was written by men, God is reflected in there, but so are the ways of men, and written on the pages of the bible are the historical accounts of the horrible concessions God had to make, when there were only bad concessions open. God’s plan was not genocide, murder, theft and death. It was to make a place for a people who were to be a light on a hill, showing God’s love to the world and teaching people, ushering them into God’s way of living, the way He created His people to live, and ushering them into the knowledge of who God is, and how He wants the best for every one of His children on the face of the planet, the entire human race.
Talking To People
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Life, Love, Relationships on March 29, 2014
Meet with them where they are at, walk with them, or ask if they would like to walk with you. If they don’t want to walk, ask if it would be ok if you were to sit with them, etc. The worst that could happen is they say no, or say yes and not mean it, or resent it. Be open and honest. Have a goal, but don’t think you can convince or coerce them into thinking or believing anything. Be willing to share perspectives, but meet them where they are at in their minds and hearts. Do your best to not override their perspectives, but search them out, find out why they think that way or believe what they do, and ask if you can present a different perspective, but not too aggressively. Harmless or innocent as doves, but wise as serpents, which I believe also includes patience.
Who Is This Jesus Guy
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Life on March 26, 2014
Shortly before I was baptized God gave me a gift, a vision, a dialogue, more than I could have even imagined could happen. He showed me who Jesus was in an intense, direct, complete, and special way. It all started with a question, a question I had because of how my mind works, and how I had a hard time believing in something fully without understanding how it was possible. I simply could not wrap my mind around the creator of the universe, a non human being, having a human son through a woman on earth. How does that work? How can a reasonable, logical, methodical, scientific, and extremely skeptical person, actually accept something like that in this physical world. The unspoken scientific way is that anything that is real can be explained, and it can be explained by what we already understand. I had no foundation of knowledge that could render the possibility of Jesus, as the Son of God.
I believed in God. I knew that as fact. He had been moving in my life strongly in ways I could not understand, and I observed the reality of it. Things were changing and happening in ways that could only be reasonably explained by a higher power responding to me, a simple arrogant man. God answered prayers quickly, powerfully, and in ways that it would be foolish to think were a coincidence. God is there, and I knew it, no question. All creation does not make sense without God. That was my foundation, and a strong one. I was reading the Bible, and I was seeing the same character revealed in the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, throughout all of the history recorded in the Old Testament. But this Jesus guy, the Son of God as a man — how does that work? I believed that it had to be so, but how? It didn’t make sense.
I started to pray, asking God, “who is this Jesus guy?”. He was clearly a big part of the picture. I read what the Bible says he is, but it does not make sense. I can’t have such a big gap in understanding. God surely could help me make sense of this nonsensical reality. I mean really, if Jesus is so important, why would God not help me understand it? So I prayed, and continued to pray. I knew God could do all kinds of things I did not expect or think possible. I didn’t let up.
One day I was talking to God, as I had grown accustomed to, while I was getting ready in the morning. The shower had become a sort of holy place for me, as I felt it was how I wanted to be before God, nothing to hide. I believe anything that needs to be worked out, any darkness in me, He is faithful to reveal it to me and while constantly forgiving, he will help me right any wrong. I know I have nothing to fear from God, simply by his character.
I did not believe the lie that the Jews did at Mt. Sinai (Exodus 19-20), where they feared death from God because they did not know Him. I asked God that same question, happy, but pleading, my spirit crying out with whatever words came to mind at the time, basically, “who is this guy, how does he fit in the picture, how does it make sense?”. As I got into the shower, He showed me who Jesus was. It was unlike any experience I have had before in my life, one I am sure my words can only poorly render. You could say it was a vision, a vision of the beginning of human history all the way through to the end of time, but strictly with regard to who Jesus is. Calling it a vision is really a horribly incomplete way of describing the situation. It was more like an open dialogue, not with words, but with raw expressions of a person, being instantly understood and responded to, in a full memory transfer, but clearer than a man’s memory of the most vivid part of his life. When I say memory transfer, it is much like you might have seen on a sci-fi movie, where a higher intelligence has just downloaded memories into a human’s mind. If you have watched the Star Gate series, then you get the idea. But it was fully interactive, I was communing with God. Every question and every concern was immediately responded to with an understanding given to me. In that dialogue, I knew what I was seeing could not possibly fit in my mind. There was too much to remember, and too much to see. Maybe before the fall [of Adam and Eve], a human’s mind could take that information in with stride and remember it, but not a human in our current state. So we agreed that it was good enough to walk away from this experience with a shadow of a memory, if I could just know that knowing who Jesus is could be understood. In those moments of dialogue, it was made clear to me that there is much more than I had ever understood in this world. In this existence, there is the spirit realm, which is as real as matter, and it works with its own set of laws, just like the physical world’s laws (gravity, relativity, etc.). God is spirit, and He extended Himself into the flesh of Jesus here on earth. God was not the flesh, but God bound himself to flesh to form Jesus, this is why Jesus really blurs the boundaries between Himself and God the Father. This is how it is true to say that Jesus is God, and yet Jesus, the combination of God’s spirit and flesh, still prays to God the Father. In that dialogue, in my memory I came up with a reference to a scene in a movie, just to see if that was a good enough idea, if I understood correctly, that the concept of God extended into flesh was sort of like in the movie “The Abyss”, where the deep sea creature extended itself in this watery tendril and interacted with people in a deep sea vessel. I knew it was rough, and an incomplete parallel, but at least an idea, and we settled that this concept in the movie was as close as I would find on earth to being like how God was extended into the flesh of a man named Jesus. Throughout the entire dialogue with God, I was shown the history line, event after event, a complete accounting of Jesus through history, from before He was rendered in the flesh, to after, all the way to the end of time when He comes back to call his people home, and to put an end to all things that cause sin. And then it was done. All I could express at the time was something like “Wow, wow, Jesus IS the way!” Even then, saying those words seemed odd for who I know I used to be, and where I came from. I used to scoff at such a commonly said, and seemingly meaningless cliche phrase.
Shortly thereafter, with that confirmation and direct communication from God, I was baptized. I did not tell anyone about this for a long time. Eventually, many months later, I came to a reckoning, where I would have to decide how I would take what had happened. I could either let the memory fade and eventually discount it, writing it off like it was nothing, a fluke, a brain glitch, or I could be logical and embrace the real tangible experience that I had, where I observed first hand, God communicating with me, and responding to me telling me who Jesus is. I chose to let the experience change me. Dealing with the fact that as a person gets older, memories fade, what was clear becomes muddied, and maybe eventually lost, I decided it was time to record this event that would forever change my life and the lives of those around me. I cannot let something this important slip away. It is a talent,
and I am looking to invest.
Life Is Complicated, Writing Helps
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Health, Life on March 24, 2014
From so many directions God is saying to write. There are so many reasons to do it, but finding the time, and dropping the procrastination is hard.
Work and life in general is a lot more work than I expected, it is a lot more complicated, and a lot more stressful than I could have imagined. Anyone who has bought their first home and gone through all the processes involved in that life event can attest, things are not simple anymore. I can only imagine what having children would be like on top of all of this. I can’t help but relate to Billy Madison:
If I only knew. Now medical issues, mysterious ones with no known root cause. Intestinal troubles so bad that I was suffering for years, seems to have gotten better now, but maybe I am just used to the changes that came from it. Then a UEDVT, really? Is life really so stressful that after a really hard day, or a scary orthodontist appointment will cause the blood to clot in my body, risking my life?
For all the complications and stresses of this life, I think I need to write. I think that is just how my mind works, if I write about it, the stress and worry, and maybe even emotional aspects of all this will be reduced or eliminated. I have used it in the past, and it has really helped me through the worst situations I have ran into in life. But now I think I may even have something worth saying. In fact I know I do.
God is real and he has done some things in my life that are really worth writing about. I have experienced these things and it is very unscientific to dismiss what you have experienced with your own being and senses, as that is how all things are learned. Why should some observations be dismissed while others kept, are we really letting political correctness dictate what actual observations we can share and which we can not? Being that this is my personal blog on my domain, on my server, political correctness can go to hell. I will not let PC dull my communications.
Egypt Is Calling
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Life, Work on March 18, 2014
Let me not turn back to Egypt, the old ways that I am used to, but let me fully embrace your ways. I hear you. I need your help. Every bit of the world screams a way that is not yours, how can I blot it out. How can I plug my ears so I can hear clearly only the right way, the true way which you have laid out! Thank you for your grace, let your staff guide me. The force which brought me here, let it keep my path strait. You brought me here for a reason, I know this, but work is killing me away from it.
SynergyKM problems on Lion
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Life, Technology on June 8, 2012
I love to be able to share my mouse and keyboard across all my systems, but I recently got a work upgrade to a new MacBook Pro, running Lion of course. After the migration, the only solution I found after many painful experiences with generic Synergy installs of all different versions, which was SynergyKM just sucked ass and stopped working. I don’t care so much about a GUI, I love a good CLI to everything, and I just want my end goal of sharing keyboard, mouse, and possibly the clipboard, to come true.
Here is a way to get it on with Lion as a server, and Win 7 Pro as a client. First, make a classic Synergy config file, save it somewhere on your Mac. Optionally copy the SynergyKM synergyc and synergys to /usr/bin (sudo of course is needed). Then treat the damn thing like vanilla (plus sudo) Synergy, and it works. Here is my command line:
sudo synergys –config ~/synergy.conf –name YoMamas-MBPro
Now you may want to remove/stop/kill all traces of SynergyKM until they come up with a version that works out of the box with Lion, which I may do myself, to avoid conflicts or confusion.
One thing to note about my Win 7 Pro setup is that I am using Synergy 1.3.8, nothing too special there, but worth noting.
Hazing With A New Job?
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Life, Work on October 26, 2011
Day 2 is complete, and I still have pending tickets from day one, when I did not even have enough time to know where the ticketing system was located. I finished one ticket yesterday after being given root access to all their systems, and being asked to resize a volume on the netapp. It blows my mind. I feel I am missing something, and it is keeping me up, as I am bothered by how this is playing out, I must be bothered, because the scenarios keep on looping in my head, and it is keeping me up. In the final interview, Adam said that in the past they just gave employees a login and let them go, and that was a mistake, so they had a better way to bring new hires up to speed. For all I know, this could be that new way, which is start assigning the new hire tickets about systems he knows nothing about yet, in a ticketing system he has not had a chance to even visit yet, because it is his second day and has not had a chance to setup his Mac which he has never had to use, which is using outlook, which he has never had to use, let alone on a MacBook Pro. Also, it did not help being without a phone the first and part of the second day, or needing a USB headset that I do not have.
They have enough systems that the first week should be settling into the new office, new computer, and new surroundings with a simple check list of what is needed for a new hire in that position, so that all of the systems can be logged into and at least bookmarked. They have all kinds of information for new hires, but if they do not give the new hires a chance to read it, what good is any documentation at all. All I have to say is, I am so glad they had a search on their wiki, otherwise many of the work task things that they asked me to do would have been near impossible until I had had a chance to read through several sections of information relevant to new hires.
It has been a hard 2 days, and in a way, I am glad, but on the other hand, it would have been nice to at least be given a breakdown of the training attack, and it would have been very helpful to have been given a few days to settle into the new systems, with a simple list of the main management systems I will be using on a daily basis.
God please give me strength, because though this is probably my dream job, it is not starting out reasonably enough for me to realize it though experience.
So, do I ask Adam for a few days (or even a day) to get familiar with their documentation, the systems that they use, to get settled into my new system and daily applications, finish setting the passwords, and familiarize myself with basic procedures so I can function best as an employee? I think that would be good. Putting in 12 hour days just to fit in those needed basic steps that I did not have the chance to do is a bit hard. Considering that I worked 8 hours above the average work day, I do not find it unreasonable to ask for a day where I can do all those things, and make sure I am well founded in all that I need to be, as it has been presented so far.
Please Lord, help me though this process, help me know what is good to ask for and what is not, please, I just want to do well in this position, and being burnt out the first week does not seem to be part of that picture. Please be with Adam, help him to understand, and give me what I need. Thank you for giving me what I need, and then some.
New Job
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Life on October 6, 2011
God has pulled some strings, and I am so grateful, and one thing to note is the stress. Even wonderful things can take their tole. I never knew this when I was younger, and even when people explained it, I was still not understanding how a person could have good things happen to them, and be stressed about it. But living life, you tend to realize when true things are true, and this is one.
It is around 4 in the morning, and I am having trouble sleeping, the day after the interview, I have too much buzzing around in my head, and I need to take it down on “paper”, or at least the best medium for the time .I type faster than I write on paper, and edits are so much easier, spell check is a very nice learning tool, and this way I have backups and can easily share the content if I choose to.
There is a lot of paperwork with a new job. I have the formal offer they sent, and then application, benefits, disclosure and the employee agreement. So much legal terminology and formatting. In this world, I understand why they need to legally bind you, and clearly outlined terms are very helpful, even if nothing more than a reminder of what you already know, but it is hardly a quick and easy process to work through.
I am really looking forward to the job, I mean, REALLY looking forward to working with them. I have never had an opportunity like this come up, one that is such a wonderful fit for how I work. It still blows my mind! But I think I need to take some time to unblow my mind, hence the private blog where I can simply dump my thoughts. There is such a deluge of new technologies for me to take in, I really do hope they have a good system to bringing me up to speed with what they have to work with. I suppose I have even learned a ton from simply the interview process. I just need to keep my sleep and good food and other stress relievers going, and take in the information as quickly as possible. Dear Lord, strengthen my body through this process, and bring me to use all the good tools you have taught me, and teach me some more. I need to learn as many stress relief tools as possible, as my body is not what it used to be. I now feel the stress as physical symptoms, how retarded. With God’s help, I can do anything though, so Lord, I am counting on you!
I will need to blog many more times I am sure, because more stuff will continue to cycle through my head as I go, so I will be back. But right now, I am going to first, Thank You God for the job!!!, now back to sleep. 70k, that still blows my mind…… I prayed for it though, freedom from this debt! He is totally listening, and totally caring!
So it seems I am back, still have some more stuff to take down, and Kathy got up horrendously early, at like 5:30am. I was still having trouble sleeping anyway. I was thinking about the Sabbath timing. I have not taken the time yet to talk to them about it, and I am not sure it would have been the right time to do it. I think it should be a fairly simple thing to work out, and I do not expect resistance to it, but the complication for me is how to treat the pager. I would not be working per-say, but on call if shit went down and services needed to be restored or addressed. These would be emergency types of situations. I have always looked at that as an OX in ditch situation. Not planning to work, but for the good of people, and I suppose business would benefit as well, so that we have jobs the next day, I would take care of what needed to be taken care of, and then call it good.
There is such a hard to define line between being a lawyer, following the letter of the law rather than the intended heart or purpose behind the law, and justifying doing something that might not be right to the intent of the law. Boy that is a hard one to explain at 5:30am. We could be stupid blind law followers totally missing God’s point for making the law, or we can take the time and effort to work it out with God, find out what He meant it to be, and go with that. Right now, as I understand it, I still hold to the Ox in a ditch perspective, it is doing good, it is working for the livelihood of other people, for their good, as to not ruin their means for living by causing the valid tools to not be able to be depended upon at all times. You could even go deeper and see if the tools are valid to be used apart from work on the Sabbath, but really as you cross that line, it turns into control and considering taking away other people’s choices for what you feel is best for them, and I do not believe that is a line that should be crossed. It would almost be like God putting a fence around the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, preventing Adam and Eve from being able to eat from it. They now do not have a choice, and with the all or nothing reality I understand choice to be, this would negate choice, and without choice, it would negate love, because how much can a puppet love it’s creator. I believe He created us with an intent for us to have the capacity to love Him, our creator. By God’s own actions, He shows us that He is a God of love, and in fact, by His actions, He shows us what love looks like, and in turn what love is and how to love.
I will be stubborn to find truth, rather than taking the simplest mindless approach of the letter of the law, or the loophole approach of a lawyer. Intent and heart are worth searching for, as they are the expressions of one’s spirit, and if we say that the expressions of a being’s spirit do not matter, then we are worthless, and nothing but garbage by our own definition. I mean what is a person if you take away their intent, their will? They would have no direction to make a choice, no more than a rock or plant does.
Facebook Photo Fetcher Test
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Photography, Website Software, WordPress on June 24, 2011
Here is my first attempt to work with a WordPress plugin. It is pulling the pictures from my Facebook account, which is actually quite neat. Looks like I need to include captions in order for it to really look good. Also seems a little buggy with the lightbox javascript code, the first row and all links above will loose the ability to be clicked on, except for the bottom part of the image, so I will have it disabled for now, you will have to live with having to use the back button for now. I may be able to find a way to fix it.
From Edmonds Waterfront, posted by Jonathan Kinney on 6/22/2011 (12 items)
Generated by Facebook Photo Fetcher
Beautiful Day, Beautiful Wife!
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Life, Love, Photography, Relationships on June 21, 2011
This is the view from my office on a sunny day.
Yesterday was a wonderful day (2011-06-20)! Kathy and I have been going through some hard transitions, hard choices, a lot of work, and a lot of stress, so we needed a day to play. It started out being one of those rare sunny days, blue sky, warm wind, just beautiful. Anyone who knows Seattle knows how rare those are. Right now we live in Shoreline, a beautiful neighborhood with trees, near a beach, in the view of the sound, and lots of well kept yards. From our living room area we see a full flower bed, in full bloom. God had really blessed us with a beautiful place to live! I do hope we can stick around for a while.
When Kathy made it home, we decided it would be best for us to get the hell out of the house! We decided to head down to the Edmonds waterfront, the first place we started to really get to know each other, and also the place I proposed to her, well also I believe we went down there for a while on our wedding day, after our wedding if I remember correctly. So we have some history there.
Kathy at Edmonds Waterfront
I brought my camera, the trusty little Cannon PowerShort SD600, which has served me well these many years. It still surprises me how good of a camera it is, with very clear shots, minimal grain, and a decent resolution. Eventually I do want to upgrade my camera, to something more than a point and shoot. A full on digital SLR (maybe a Nikon D3100) is what I am looking forward to getting, and we are slowly saving money so I can pick one out eventually. It will have a dual purpose. Since Kathy is going to be starting to do freelance soon, she will need a good photography source, and I can be that source, as long as I have a high enough quality camera. I have also wanted a chance to take some more professional shots, and many of the features I am needing for that are not possible with this point and shoot camera. I would like to be able to even sell some photos if possible.
My beautiful wife, Kathy.
We picked a perfect time to head down, the lighting was wonderful and it was warm enough I could run around in just a t-shirt and sweats. We ended up roaming from the ferry dock all the way up to the dog park at the other end. I was stuck on the idea of checking out all the beautiful plants that were in bloom and I wanted to hang around until sunset. Eventually we got tired of wandering around, and it was getting close to when the sun would duck behind the clouds above the mountains, so we just sat down near the water, talking, and watching the fish jump. I was having a lot of fun with the lighting from the sunset, and pulled a few really neat shots off with my beautiful wife as my subject.
A nice reflection shot off of Kathy's glasses.
Today is not quite as nice, but nice enough to leave the windows open, which is a very nice change. Baby (our cat) is going insane wanting out every door and window she sees, and constantly whining while I am trying to work. I am looking forward to more fun in the sun this summer, maybe even some vacation time. With the future so unknown, and unpredictable right now, it is not really something we can plan for like many people do, but God will provide, yes, even for our enjoyment. We will see what happens, life is good, and God is great!
Finally, A Real Hosting Account
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Routers, Server Administration, Technology, Virtualization, Website Software on June 17, 2011
I am so happy to finally get my wife’s sites (kdesign007.com and others) off of the Godaddy.com hosting account! It really didn’t seem all that bad, I mean, it did its job, but it sucked how they charged for everything, even having an email account looked to be billable. I guess it is good to be able to quantify a service into an actual billable value, but it gets really annoying to have to worry about if you will have to pay extra for something as simple as an email account.
Her hosting was on a Linux system, and that was neat, but it was lacking a bit. PHP was shown as version 4.x, though I am sure you could have had that changed to a version 5.x support, it said so in the help. I had to enable SSH for her account so I could transfer them over here easily, and that for some reason required them to transfer the site to a different server. What ever, I can live with that. But they had to call me and give me a pin number to do it, and it can take up to 24 hours, this time it took only around an hour (guessing). The server I found it on was running at a load of 5 at the time, and though responsive, it was a little sluggish when responding to any sort of IO request, and the transfer speed from this server to my hwVPS 2009 account was quite sad, it looked to be around 60 to 70 kilobits a second, and I do hope that was a specific bandwidth limit Godaddy.com hosting set for SSH data, because for a website loading speed, that would just suck.
Thanks to BlueOnyx, setting up the accounts and users took a minimal amount of time, and I love our DNS management system. By the end of the night yesterday, I had all but 3 domains fully setup with live websites and DNS settings for the new location. I am moving away from anything using FTP, so I have SSH enabled which allows SFTP access, which seems to even be supported by Dreamweaver! I simply used SCP to transfer all the site’s files to their respective places, and it went through perfectly!
With some custom hacks, I have IPv6 enabled for some of the sites on my VPS, and am going to setup a script that will automate that for me. At the moment I have IPv6 connectivity through a tunnelbroker.net / he.net account, which allows me to run a IPv6 6in4 static tunnel. I also modified dovecot, sendmail, and the rest of the software to run full dual stack. It is not really needed yet, but it is neat seeing all of my server backups and connectivity showing up on the six0 interface graph on my Asus RT-N16 router (I love that thing!, with it running Toastman’s build of TomatoUSB).
Now she gets to deal with me for support, muahahahaha! It is just really good to have the sites on a system and network I know I can trust! I also have the comfort of knowing that she will not be charged for simple things like email accounts, and she will be getting good support from someone who knows what they are talking about.
Good Works?
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Life on June 17, 2011
I was just reading the bible this morning, and after completing John, Jesus’ words echoed in my head, as He said in several different ways
“If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15).
It should be very simple to ascertain that when Jesus repeats Himself several times in several different ways, especially in the critical time just before He was betrayed and gave Himself over to be executed, that it is very important. It is also important to note that moments earlier He said:
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34, 35).
I believe that this “new commandment” He gave is to add back the lost frame of love that all the commandments were intended to have from the beginning, and all of these commandments He is referring to should be framed in this same love for one another.
On to my main point. I decided to head back to Matthew, and read all of Jesus words, searching out what His commandments were, so that I can keep His commandments in the most real and practical way that I understand and have the ability to do. So I read through “The Beatitudes”, which I have come to understand are more of a section of speaking where Jesus gives the true orientation of God, His kingdom, and His people. It is not a list of things to do, or I would quickly go find someone to morn, try and find a way to become poor in spirit, or find a situation where I could become persecuted for righteousness, and insulted because of Jesus, and that just does not make sense. Orientation of the hearers is very important, and so Jesus blesses them with the revelation of the true reality, quite opposing to what they have been shown by the world they lived in at that moment.
The first section that looks to be an actual command is Matthew 5:16, where He says:
“Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven”
So how do I put this into practice? What good have I done? What good works? I have been studying for some time and have learned that God is at work all around us, all of the time. I am blessed to have been able to see God powerfully at work around me each time He has shown me, and He has sown me several times. But that is His work, not mine, I did not do it, but I was graced to see it. I do my best to join Him where ever I see Him at work, but so often those are not public activities, but more of private situations and conversations with random people. I do help out with the church website for Edmonds Adventist Church (edmondsadventist.org), and I also put the Weekly Sermon Podcast and other special series up online. I also do this blog, and I do have some mention of God in it, and what ever else comes to mind that I am working through with Him or in life. I think that is as close to this first commandment that I can get right now. I am not doing it for myself, at least I do not think that I am. I really do hope that if someone were to read the things I write, that it will do them some good, maybe bring them to think, and it would be totally cool if people would look to God and thank him for something that they got in any relation to something I did.
On to the point where I turn what I have done to God, for His glory. I enjoy being able to make available the sermons and special series from Edmonds Adventist Church. It is a blessing to me to be able to put these things up online knowing that God can use it for His will, if He chooses to do so. It is exciting, and priceless to hear that God has used some of the things I put online, to change or better someone’s life, where they were able to move forward with God in some way, or forward in life in a good way. This is one of those “treasures” that no one can steal, it will never rust, and moths will not destroy it. It is one of those “treasures in heaven”. It is a blessing to me, and I pray it is a blessing to others. It is exciting to join God where He is at work, and I do know that He is at work in the Edmonds Adventist Church, that is why I am there.
Keep your eyes open for where God is at work, and then join Him where you find Him working. It is not easy, it takes a lot of work, time, and willingness to change, but most good things are not easy, and take a lot of time and effort. The cool thing is, nothing can ever take it away from you, it will never get old, these joys will not need an upgrade in the future in order for them to be of any use, they will never burn up in a fire, and you can never loose them. It still seems very odd for me to look at things this way, but I would just suggest you try it.
Asus RT-N16 as NAS
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Routers, Technology on June 7, 2011
Asus RT-N16 Router and WD MyBook 500GB
Loving my Asus RT-N16, just setup a 500G USB drive to it, partitioned it for 512M of swap, 1G for Optware, and the rest for Samba network share (custom hack for multi-user authentication). Auto mounting and setting up handled by a script loaded from the drive itself! Tested tcpdump install from Optware, works perfect, now looking to make it an Asterisk VOIP server! Totally cool! My nerd hairs are standing on end!
Updated PHP For BlueOnyx Totally Doable!
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Development, Server Administration on August 31, 2009
Is doable really a word? I guess so, I don’t see it popping up as a misspelled word. Anyway, I have been doing some development for some clients who had a desire for more functionality with the PHP install that BlueOnyx uses. Well that is a complicated bag of monkeys, can of worms, box of cats?, or what ever, because BlueOnyx uses the installed version of PHP for the control panel, and it has modules that it needs to use that were specifically compiled against the CentOS 5.3 included PHP 5.1.6. This makes things unusual when it comes to wanting to install a newer version of PHP. These clients also wanted zip functionality, and they were specifically pointing to having it built with zip functionality, rather than the PECL based install, which was too foreign to me at the time to actually consider and present as an option. PHP 5.1.6 or 5.1.x in general did not have built in zip functionality, as it seems that there was a bit of a drop out with the maintenance of the library it depended on during that PHP version’s time, so that made things even more complicated. Staying in the PHP 5.1.x range might have been close enough for me to build as a drop in replacement without breaking the BlueOnyx control panel requirements. Another thing to consider was that a drop in replacement might run into issues with a yum update overwriting it if done wrong.
So, this left me with few options. One of the clear needs was to be able to have a different PHP install that did not disrupt the PHP version that comes with CentOS 5.3. As I saw it, I had 2 options, build a custom PHP RPM install, or build PHP from source to be placed in a different location. Building PHP from source is not as clean and easily controllable as I would prefer, but as long as good backups were made, it was worth a try. One thing I have not mentioned yet is that we have ruled out PHP 5.3, as the changes seemed to be fairly extreme from the PHP 5.1.6 install, and the changes could be much more of a headache to work through than our client or many clients would like to have to deal with just yet, so we are focusing on PHP 5.2.10.
My first attempt was to built PHP 5.2.10 from source, but specifically building it to run from a different location, which I setup in a directory on the server as “/alt/”. First thing first, due to the fact that in the source build and install step of “make install” does not really fully take into consideration any concept of installing in a different location, I needed to back up all of the RPM installed PHP related files. To do this I ran the following:
for X in `rpm -qa|grep php-`;do tar cpjf $X.backup.tar.bz2 `rpm -ql $X`;done
This will iterate through the RPM packages that are installed that contain “php-” in their package name, and then backup all files listed in that package into a tar.bz2 archive, so that if anything gets overwritten or messed with that I did not want, I could simply restore by going to the root directory and then run “tar xpjf /root/php-*.backup.tar.bz2” (or wherever the backups are stored) and I would have all the related files restored.
Now that we have the backup made, I needed a good build environment, and with our base install of BlueOnyx, there are no development packages installed, or even a compiler (a BlueOnyx security decision). So here is a list of packages that were installed to get things going, but first I would suggest doing a full yum update and reboot:
apr-devel-1.2.7-11.el5_3.1.i386
apr-util-devel-1.2.7-7.el5_3.2.i386
aspell-devel-0.60.3-7.1.i386
at-spi-1.7.11-3.el5.i386
audiofile-0.2.6-5.i386
autoconf-2.59-12.noarch
automake14-1.4p6-13.noarch
automake15-1.5-16.noarch
automake16-1.6.3-8.noarch
automake17-1.7.9-7.noarch
automake-1.9.6-2.1.noarch
avahi-0.6.16-1.el5_2.1.i386
avahi-glib-0.6.16-1.el5_2.1.i386
beecrypt-devel-4.1.2-10.1.1.i386
bison-2.3-2.1.i386
boost-1.33.1-10.el5.i386
boost-devel-1.33.1-10.el5.i386
byacc-1.9-29.2.2.i386
bzip2-devel-1.0.3-4.el5_2.i386
ccid-1.3.8-1.el5.i386
coolkey-1.1.0-6.el5.i386
coolkey-devel-1.1.0-6.el5.i386
cpp-4.1.2-44.el5.i386
cscope-15.5-15.1.el5_3.1.i386
ctags-5.6-1.1.i386
curl-devel-7.15.5-2.1.el5_3.5.i386
cvs-1.11.22-5.el5.i386
cyrus-sasl-devel-2.1.22-4.i386
db4-devel-4.3.29-9.fc6.i386
dbus-devel-1.1.2-12.el5.i386
dbus-python-0.70-7.el5.i386
desktop-file-utils-0.10-7.i386
dev86-0.16.17-2.2.i386
diffstat-1.41-1.2.3.el5.i386
dogtail-0.6.1-2.el5.noarch
doxygen-1.4.7-1.1.i386
e2fsprogs-devel-1.39-20.el5.i386
elfutils-devel-0.137-3.el5.i386
elfutils-devel-static-0.137-3.el5.i386
elfutils-libelf-devel-0.137-3.el5.i386
elfutils-libelf-devel-static-0.137-3.el5.i386
esound-0.2.36-3.i386
expat-devel-1.95.8-8.2.1.i386
flex-2.5.4a-41.fc6.i386
fontconfig-devel-2.4.1-7.el5.i386
freetype-devel-2.2.1-21.el5_3.i386
gail-1.9.2-1.fc6.i386
gamin-0.1.7-8.el5.i386
gcc-4.1.2-44.el5.i386
gcc-c++-4.1.2-44.el5.i386
gcc-gfortran-4.1.2-44.el5.i386
GConf2-2.14.0-9.el5.i386
gdb-6.8-27.el5.i386
gdbm-devel-1.8.0-26.2.1.i386
gd-devel-2.0.33-9.4.el5_1.1.i386
gettext-0.14.6-4.el5.i386
glib2-devel-2.12.3-4.el5_3.1.i386
glibc-devel-2.5-34.el5_3.1.i386
glibc-headers-2.5-34.el5_3.1.i386
gmp-devel-4.1.4-10.el5.i386
gnome-keyring-0.6.0-1.fc6.i386
gnome-mime-data-2.4.2-3.1.i386
gnome-mount-0.5-3.el5.i386
gnome-python2-2.16.0-1.fc6.i386
gnome-python2-bonobo-2.16.0-1.fc6.i386
gnome-python2-gconf-2.16.0-1.fc6.i386
gnome-python2-gnomevfs-2.16.0-1.fc6.i386
gnome-vfs2-2.16.2-4.el5.i386
gpm-devel-1.20.1-74.1.i386
hesiod-devel-3.1.0-8.i386
httpd-devel-2.2.3-22.el5.centos.2.i386
ifd-egate-0.05-15.i386
imake-1.0.2-3.i386
indent-2.2.9-14.fc6.i386
kernel-headers-2.6.18-128.4.1.el5.i386
keyutils-libs-devel-1.2-1.el5.i386
krb5-devel-1.6.1-31.el5_3.3.i386
kudzu-devel-1.2.57.1.21-1.el5.centos.i386
libacl-devel-2.2.39-3.el5.i386
libattr-devel-2.4.32-1.1.i386
libbonobo-2.16.0-1.fc6.i386
libbonoboui-2.16.0-1.fc6.i386
libcap-devel-1.10-26.i386
libc-client-devel-2004g-2.2.1.i386
libdaemon-0.10-5.el5.i386
libdrm-2.0.2-1.1.i386
libgcrypt-devel-1.2.4-1.el5.i386
libgfortran-4.1.2-44.el5.i386
libglade2-2.6.0-2.i386
libgnome-2.16.0-6.el5.i386
libgnomecanvas-2.14.0-4.1.i386
libgnomeui-2.16.0-5.el5.i386
libgomp-4.3.2-7.el5.i386
libgpg-error-devel-1.4-2.i386
libicu-3.6-5.11.4.i386
libIDL-0.8.7-1.fc6.i386
libidn-devel-0.6.5-1.1.i386
libjpeg-devel-6b-37.i386
libmcrypt-devel-2.5.8-4.el5.centos.i386
libmhash-0.9.9-SOL2.i386
libnotify-0.4.2-6.el5.i386
libogg-1.1.3-3.el5.i386
libogg-devel-1.1.3-3.el5.i386
libpfm-3.2-0.060926.4.el5.i386
libpng-devel-1.2.10-7.1.el5_3.2.i386
libselinux-devel-1.33.4-5.1.el5.i386
libsepol-devel-1.15.2-1.el5.i386
libstdc++-devel-4.1.2-44.el5.i386
libtermcap-devel-2.0.8-46.1.i386
libtool-1.5.22-6.1.i386
libusb-devel-0.1.12-5.1.i386
libuser-devel-0.54.7-2.el5.5.i386
libvorbis-1.1.2-3.el5_3.3.i386
libvorbis-devel-1.1.2-3.el5_3.3.i386
libwnck-2.16.0-4.fc6.i386
libX11-devel-1.0.3-9.el5.i386
libXau-devel-1.0.1-3.1.i386
libXaw-1.0.2-8.1.i386
libXdmcp-devel-1.0.1-2.1.i386
libXevie-1.0.1-3.1.i386
libXfontcache-1.0.2-3.1.i386
libxml2-devel-2.6.26-2.1.2.8.i386
libXmu-1.0.2-5.i386
libXpm-devel-3.5.5-3.i386
libXres-1.0.1-3.1.i386
libxslt-devel-1.1.17-2.el5_2.2.i386
libXt-1.0.2-3.1.fc6.i386
libXTrap-1.0.0-3.1.i386
libXxf86misc-1.0.1-3.1.i386
libXxf86vm-1.0.1-3.1.i386
lockdev-1.0.1-10.i386
lockdev-devel-1.0.1-10.i386
ltrace-0.5-7.45svn.el5.i386
mcrypt-2.6.7-SOL2.i386
mesa-libGL-6.5.1-7.7.el5.i386
mesa-libGL-devel-6.5.1-7.7.el5.i386
mysql-devel-5.0.45-7.el5.i386
ncurses-devel-5.5-24.20060715.i386
neon-0.25.5-10.el5.i386
net-snmp-devel-5.3.2.2-5.el5_3.2.i386
newt-devel-0.52.2-12.el5.i386
notification-daemon-0.3.5-9.el5.i386
nspr-devel-4.7.4-1.el5_3.1.i386
nss-devel-3.12.3.99.3-1.el5.centos.2.i386
openldap-devel-2.3.43-3.el5.i386
openssl-devel-0.9.8e-7.el5.i386
oprofile-0.9.3-18.el5.i386
ORBit2-2.14.3-5.el5.i386
pam-devel-0.99.6.2-5BX01.centos5.i386
patch-2.5.4-29.2.3.el5.i386
patchutils-0.2.31-2.2.2.i386
pciutils-devel-2.2.3-5.i386
pcre-devel-6.6-2.el5_1.7.i386
pcsc-lite-1.4.4-0.1.el5.i386
pcsc-lite-devel-1.4.4-0.1.el5.i386
pcsc-lite-libs-1.4.4-0.1.el5.i386
pfmon-3.2-0.060926.5.el5.i386
postgresql-devel-8.1.11-1.el5_1.1.i386
pstack-1.2-7.2.2.i386
pycairo-1.2.0-1.1.i386
pygobject2-2.12.1-5.el5.i386
pygtk2-2.10.1-12.el5.i386
pyorbit-2.14.1-1.1.i386
pyspi-0.6.1-1.el5.i386
python-devel-2.4.3-24.el5_3.6.i386
python-ldap-2.2.0-2.1.i386
python-numeric-23.7-2.2.2.i386
rcs-5.7-30.1.i386
readline-devel-5.1-1.1.i386
redhat-rpm-config-8.0.45-29.el5.noarch
rpm-build-4.4.2.3-9.el5.i386
rpm-devel-4.4.2.3-9.el5.i386
shared-mime-info-0.19-5.el5.i386
slang-devel-2.0.6-4.el5.i386
splint-3.1.1-16.el5.i386
sqlite-devel-3.3.6-2.i386
startup-notification-0.8-4.1.i386
strace-4.5.18-2.el5_3.3.i386
subversion-1.4.2-4.el5_3.1.i386
swig-1.3.29-2.el5.i386
systemtap-0.7.2-3.el5_3.i386
systemtap-runtime-0.7.2-3.el5_3.i386
texinfo-4.8-14.el5.i386
valgrind-3.2.1-6.el5.i386
xmlsec1-devel-1.2.9-8.1.i386
xorg-x11-fonts-base-7.1-2.1.el5.noarch
xorg-x11-proto-devel-7.1-9.el5.centos.i386
xorg-x11-server-utils-7.1-4.fc6.i386
xorg-x11-server-Xvfb-1.1.1-48.52.el5.i386
xorg-x11-xauth-1.0.1-2.1.i386
xorg-x11-xinit-1.0.2-15.el5.i386
xulrunner-1.9.0.12-1.el5.i386
xulrunner-devel-1.9.0.12-1.el5.i386
zlib-devel-1.2.3-3.i386
I know that is a lot of packages, but its better to have everything you might need there, just in case, and you can always grab the section from your “/var/log/yum.log” where you installed these, put it in a file called, for example “/tmp/devel-yum-packages.txt”, and then do an “rpm -e `awk ‘{ print $5 }’ /tmp/devel-yum-packages.txt`” to remove them all when you are done with them. Next I downloaded the latest .tar.bz source archive of php-5.2.10 to “/usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/” and extracted them to “/usr/src/redhat/BUILD/” and configured it with this set of configuration directives:
‘./configure’ \
‘–host=i686-pc-linux-gnu’ \
‘–build=i686-pc-linux-gnu’ \
‘–target=i386-redhat-linux-gnu’ \
‘–program-prefix=’ \
‘–prefix=/alt/usr’ \
‘–exec-prefix=/alt/usr’ \
‘–bindir=/alt/usr/bin’ \
‘–sbindir=/alt/usr/sbin’ \
‘–sysconfdir=/alt/etc’ \
‘–datadir=/alt/usr/share’ \
‘–includedir=/alt/usr/include’ \
‘–libdir=/alt/usr/lib’ \
‘–libexecdir=/alt/usr/libexec’ \
‘–localstatedir=/alt/var’ \
‘–sharedstatedir=/alt/usr/com’ \
‘–mandir=/alt/usr/share/man’ \
‘–infodir=/alt/usr/share/info’ \
‘–cache-file=config.cache’ \
‘–with-config-file-path=/etc’ \
‘–with-config-file-scan-dir=/alt/etc/php.d’ \
‘–enable-force-cgi-redirect’ \
‘–disable-debug’ \
‘–disable-rpath’ \
‘–enable-inline-optimization’ \
‘–with-bz2’ \
‘–with-db4=/usr’ \
‘–with-curl’ \
‘–with-exec-dir=/usr/bin’ \
‘–with-freetype-dir=/usr’ \
‘–with-gd’ \
‘–enable-gd-native-ttf’ \
‘–without-gdbm’ \
‘–with-gettext’ \
‘–with-ncurses’ \
‘–with-gmp’ \
‘–with-iconv’ \
‘–with-jpeg-dir=/usr’ \
‘–with-openssl’ \
‘–with-pspell’ \
‘–with-regex=system’ \
‘–with-xmlrpc=shared’ \
‘–with-pcre-regex’ \
‘–with-zlib’ \
‘–with-layout=GNU’ \
‘–enable-zip’ \
‘–enable-bcmath’ \
‘–enable-exif’ \
‘–enable-ftp’ \
‘–enable-magic-quotes’ \
‘–enable-sockets’ \
‘–enable-sysvsem’ \
‘–enable-sysvshm’ \
‘–enable-discard-path’ \
‘–enable-wddx’ \
‘–without-oci8’ \
‘–with-pear=/alt/usr/share/pear’ \
‘–with-imap=shared’ \
‘–with-imap-ssl’ \
‘–with-kerberos’ \
‘–with-ldap=shared’ \
‘–with-mysql=shared,/usr’ \
‘–with-snmp=shared,/usr’ \
‘–with-snmp=shared’ \
‘–enable-ucd-snmp-hack’ \
‘–enable-bcmath’ \
‘–enable-shmop’ \
‘–enable-calendar’ \
‘–enable-mbstring=shared’ \
‘–enable-mbregex’ \
‘–with-pic’ \
‘–with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs’ \
‘–with-mysqli’ \
‘–with-mcrypt’ \
Then I just ran a “make all” and then a “make install” which got most of the files installed the way I wanted them to be, but not all of them, so I quickly restored the backups I had just created, as it replaced the old “/etc/httpd/libexec/modules/libphp5.so” and messed with the PEAR install. It also messed with the original httpd.conf, so to undo that, I ran “cat /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.bak > /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf” to get it back, it created the .bak with the “make install” command. All in all, this process worked, but it was dirty, and I felt dirty for doing it.
After a quick shower, so I felt a little cleaner after such a dirty install method, I looked at it again. There had to be a better way. I had tested and shown that there is potential in taking some updated RPM files I found on “http://dev.centos.org/centos/5/testing/i386/” and installing them in “/alt/” with the use of rpm2cpio, and then modifying the httpd startup script so that it set the “PHPRC=” environment variable so that PHP would look for the php.ini file in a different location. But there were complications with that which I had not fully overcame. The BlueOnyx control panel uses the same apache binary and PHP binary and modules, but it uses its own apache configuration file, php.ini file, and its own init script to start it up and set specific environment variables such as “PHPRC=/etc/admserv”. It however still uses the “/etc/php.d/” directory to setup its included modules, and that was a complication I needed to avoid. So, the only cleaner choice was to find a source RPM that I can extract and modify a bit, and then build a custom set of RPM files that I can use to rpm2cpio to the “/alt/” directory.
The closest starting point to building my own RPM files seemed to be here “http://dev.centos.org/centos/5/testing/SRPMS/php-5.2.9-2.el5.centos.src.rpm”. It was only slightly off from what I was looking for, I was so happy to find that to work with. I have not worked much with building my own RPMs before, so in my time frame, I could not really toss a spec file and patches together from the ground up to build my own custom RPMs. So to get this going, I installed the source RPM file, and opened up the php.spec to see what I had to work with. It seemed fairly strait forward. All I had to do was download the newer .tar.bz2 source, and change a few version strings, and then find and modify where PHP will look for the php.d directory. So up near the top, I changed the PHP version of 5.2.9 to 5.2.10, then searched for “–with-config-file-scan-dir=” and changed that to the hard coded “/alt/etc/php.d” location that it needed to be. Then for completeness sake, I added information to the changelog:
* Thu Aug 28 2009 Jonathan Kinney <[email protected]> 5.2.10-1.el5
– update to 5.2.10
– add mcrypt
Then to build it, while in the “/usr/src/redhat” directory, I ran “rpmbuild -bb SPECS/php-BlueOnyx.spec”. Oh, yeah, and to make sure that I made it unique enough, I change the “Release:” to be “BlueOnyx%{?dist}” and then I renamed the spec file. I wanted to keep it simple enough that I could also build updated RPMs for a plain old install of CentOS 5.3 without BlueOnyx installed.
One thing I am not going to explain the details about here is the adding of mcrypt, it took a lot of hacking to get in there, basing it off of the format of the other modules already built, and taking examples from the source RPM of the 5.1.6 PHP extras, which included mcrypt. It was requested enough by clients that I wanted to take the extra time and make sure I got that in there.
The only steps left after the successful building of all those RPM files was to install it. I just copied a, similar to what is already installed, set of the newly built RPM files to “/root/RPMS/” and then I went to the “/alt/” directory and ran the following command to get the files extracted:
for X in `ls /root/RPMS/`;do rpm2cpio /root/RPMS/$X | cpio -idmv;done
Then in the “/etc/php.ini” file, I changed the “extension_dir = ” to the new location of “/alt/usr/lib/php/modules/”. The only configuration change left to do is to edit “/etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf” and change the “LoadModule php5_module” to point to “/alt/usr/lib/httpd/modules/libphp5.so”. After restarting httpd, I was up and running with a fully featured installation of PHP 5.2.10, without a single related error logged. It is fully connected to the PHP settings that are set from the BlueOnyx control panel as it uses “/etc/php.ini”, but it gets its module includes loaded from “/alt/etc/php.d/” and the modules themselves loaded from “/alt/usr/lib/php/modules/”. I have been running things on this very server that you are pulling this website up from, for nearing a week, without problems.
Once again, I have to plug my hwVPS account running BlueOnyx, which is the only VPS account that I have used that is so seamless, I have yet to run into any issues that would bring me to want more than this type of Xen VPS.
We Are Screwed!
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Life, Values on August 26, 2009
Did you know that those who intend to break the rules and laws set about today are not afraid of digital rights management? Did you know that a person who is accustom to breaking the law and shooting people with a gun will not be worried about a new gun law? Do you think a rule is going to all of a sudden mean anything to someone who cares nothing about the law in the first place? Did you know that any encryption can and will be broken, any copy protection will be thwarted and it is guaranteed to be a level playing ground shortly after any encryption or copy protection is invented? Did you know I could do anything on the internet with full knowledge that no one can track me because organizations do not cooperate or work together? Did you know that anyone could do that if they knew enough?
Where does that leave us? If less and less people believe in God, who will settle all accounts, and bring about people to experience their own values, then everything is ok, as long as we can get away with it, righ? If all the rules in the world can be gotten around at some point in time, and people only care about getting caught or not, then how can order be kept? Crime and punishment, yay, how far do you think that can really keep things going? One police officer per person, maybe that would work, but who would police the police, because I am sure there are just as many law breaking law enforcers as there are law breaking people in the general public, percentage wise. Don’t you think we would run out of money fairly quick to pay all of the law enforcement? Throw them all in prison or jail, someone might say. Do you know how much money that costs just to keep those going? Don’t you think something is missing from our equation, because if you really think it out, and follow how things are going, it does not quite work out.
I think at some point maybe some focus should be put on teaching people why it is best to follow the rules. Do you know why the rules are the way they are, or where they come from, or even why it is best to do things a certain way? I am exploring that myself. It seems that somewhere along the line, love and truth come into the picture, along with justice and good. I am no hippie, and I have a very different idea of love than what I have been hearing the world scream since childhood. I had to take some time to define things in my life, like sex, love, feelings, truth, right, wrong, and the differences of each one. I had most of them confused, and wrongly connected to each other, some leading me to another, and in wrong orders. Without God in my life, or in my world view, I think it would have been really hard or impossible to define a lot of these points. Love is most simply defined at its most pure by this, if you are willing to die for someone, then you love them. Love is not a feeling or an accident (falling in love is a little off), it is a choice, and feelings are involved, but feelings should not be your lead, or you will eventually fall out of love, and then leave. Feelings are wonderful, but they should not guide your life any more than which way the wind blows. Steering back on course, I think we take so much for granted. We are living in a world that is graced by the benefits of principalities and values and we have forgotten where it all originated. If each of us would only get a glimpse of what the world would look like if everyone held our own values, we would have to rethink things a bit. We need to know where we have come from, the origin of the good laws we hold, and we need to understand that we came from God, who designed and created us for a purpose, who knows what is best for us as a master mechanic knows his engine, and has graced us time and time again with priceless information on how were were intended to function, how things were meant to be and be done, and we should be able to make the clear connection that when things are not done the way they were intended to be done, we run into problems, ultimately leading to destruction.
Hah, as if I have all the answers. I don’t, but I would hope that people would take a moment and think about it before they have no other choice and the clear natural results come knocking.
The Hated Honest Deal
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Business Ethics, Life on August 17, 2009
Lately I have been thinking a lot about hosting companies, customers, and what people care about, what their motives are and if an honest deal is at all appealing to many people these days. I just have been noticing a trend, which makes me sad, where honest companies asking for an honest price, can not get it anymore, because to the general public, it seems like it is asking too much. We are not talking big prices either, we are talking stuff that a kid could afford on an allowance. It just makes my skin crawl to hear someone say that for their business $45 dollars a month is just too much, and then in 2 days they spend that much money on just 2 of their 90 meals in a month, some spend that in one meal, I know I have. I am talking about business people, and people just doing it for the fun of it, they both seem to have that same outlook.
Why are people saying that it is too much? That is a good question that takes a bit to answer, and I am sure I do not have all of the aspects crystal clear, but I think I might have some of them nailed down. One of them is that larger companies who already were cash positive and had some money to work with, decided that they could diversify and start doing website hosting in addition to the services they already provided, such as domain name registration, Internet access, and many others. I am not sure if it was part of the plan to begin with, or if it just happened that they did not actually calculate how much hosting actually costs from the ground up, but they are selling their hosting for a fraction of what it actually costs, and they are eating the difference. Being that the attitude of the public in general is to watch out for themselves, not really caring about others or the impact that an unbalanced transaction has on an organization or the people that make it up, I would not at all be surprised to hear that a direct and intentional decision was made to undercut other companies pricing, for the purpose of stomping out competition (causing other companies to fail, and jobs to be lost, with hard times all around). That is just one idea that I am certain is panning out and in full play these days. I know that in some places people are able to purchase bandwidth, hardware, and datacenter space, for less, but in general this can not be big enough of an impact to explain the extreme trends seen today. There are also those people out there with very poor business planning abilities and they half-assed start a business selling hosting for insane prices before they realize that it takes more than they have to follow through with keeping the business going like that, but those die out fairly quickly. This too is a cause of the general perspective that people in the public will get from looking for hosting, but once again, I think this is minimal and not the main issue.
There are also the people involved that are the ones with the perspectives that say an honest price is too much. I guess one part of the issue with people is that they want to pay as little as they can for what ever they get. People are commended for getting a “deal” or the lowest price, as if it is a real good find and that it is great. But is it really? In the hosting industry, that question is not asked nearly enough… hell in any industry that question is not asked enough. Why does no one ask how that low price impacts the people and company that provide the service, or if it is at cost, and is a fair value?, which should be synonymous. Often the price directly reflects the quality of service, the more you pay, the more you get. No one really wants to hear that it seems. They just seem to be shooting for the lowest price and then crying foul when they do not get what they want, even if the clearest cut logic simply shows that, “well sir, you did not pay for that”, or “the amount you are paying for does not cover that level of service”. They want to believe that they will get everything they need for that lowest price they find, and so they do, and then blame the “horrible” hosting company for not honoring their delusions. Simply put, they believe what they want to believe, and then get angry when they are forced to see and deal with the reality that what they believe is not true, no matter how much they want it to be true.
People care about getting the most for the least amount of money, effort, time, and work. This is as far as their thought process goes, they do not contemplate the consequences to other companies, or the people that make them up. I can agree that today, it would be hard to calculate the actual cost of a given hosting account, especially from the end user’s point of view, but I guess my point is that even if it were as trackable as the “Dow Jones” (very interesting idea), not many people would even care enough to look. These days we seem to breed and train people to be selfish and independent, to watch out for your own interests at what ever the cost, and for the most part, to even not pay any attention to the cost or consequences of their actions. I have been that way myself, at least for most of my 31 years, but these days, things are looking a little different to me as I live life and see what that kind of attitude can do from a tiny scale to a massive scale.
In the end, I am left asking, what can an honest company do, when an honest deal is no longer appealing.
This rant was inspired by chatting with someone who was looking for hosting and had this all too common attitude. After thinking about everything he said, and evaluating his reasonings and purposes, I said this to my friend:
me: it is sad that today people do not value getting things at what they cost, they only care about getting things at the lowest cost to them, fair means nothing. Taking advantage, letting the person on the other end take a loss, that is attractive. Steal if you can get away with it, that is good to many these days. And doing things as they are intended to be done is often though as offensive to some, especially when labeling “doing things in a way they were not intended to be done” as wrong.
Loving My New hwVPS Account
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Server Administration, Virtualization on August 7, 2009
I am settling in quite well with this hwVPS account I am using for hosting this very blog. I have set it up with BlueOnyx on CentOS 5.3, and it is simply delightful. As an employee, I could have picked any account size I wanted, but I stuck with the 512 MiB version with 1 3Ghz CPU, because I have no desire to waste resources, and I believe that will be more than adequate for my purposes, if not I can upgrade, too many people don’t get that . It is a paravirtualized Xen domU running on some truly state of the art hardware, and setup in a state of the art way. I am not saying it is not possible to be done by others, but I am saying that very few have the skill to get the performance out of the hardware like it is done here. As it stands we are riding the edge of what Linux and Xen can do, and gleefully looking forward to patches and updates as the Linux kernel writers put them in the mainstream. We are not bold enough to toss in untested code, stability is a priority. So far, stability has been perfect for my installation. Not a hiccup to mention so far, and it is at least nearing a month (July 14th) of existence.
I love Xen as a virtualization software. It is as cut and dry as it gets, so in some aspects, and some applications, it may not have as big of an advantage as perhaps the software engineering marvel that was once called Virtuozzo, which has been taken over by an evil empire, which now call themselves Parallels. I do not know its state now, but I did know at least some of the engineers involved in the creation, and they were a good passion full bunch of people driven to excellence, and now they, if they even exist today, are being cut short and corrupted by the lust for money and corporate power. Their software started gleaming with passion, and excellence, but has been declining not too long after they started. But anyway, back to my point. In the beginning when Virtuozzo was in good hands, it allowed each VPS to use a templated operating system, that actually shared the same files in such a way that Linux could simply cache that one file set, and have it be used for all of the VPS instances, talk about totally nerd cool! And another cool aspect of that setup, all of the VPS instances could mainly run off of one file set, that’s right, one 600 or so megabyte set of files for as many VPS instances as you could fit in your ram, which was in our case, back in the day, several hundred. So in some aspects, that works well, people can have their own environment to muck up and destroy, or actually use, no one can crash the hardware, only their environment. The downsides were the fine tuning of many complex memory types and resources, which could not always be used across the board with the broad uses customers had in mind for their VPS instances. The other downside was that the instance would run many modified operating system files and packages, so that it could function correctly, so a yum update to the latest version of OS was not part of the deal, and keeping up to date with yum or the like was not possible for the end user. If it were one piece of hardware, under the control of one person for a specific organized use, then that person would be able to do wonderful things, but in the real world of a hosting company, that is not the case. That is where Xen comes in. Even though the concepts are a little hard to grasp at times, and it is weird having the virtual environments so totally separate so you can not as easily spy on what they are doing or help them when something goes wrong, once you get the hang of it and enact some good policies so that you gain access to the domUs (the name of Xen’s virtual environments) if and when you need to, it works quite well. The division of the hardware’s resources is much more solid, no sharing of memory as if they all ran off the same kernel and filesystem. This solidity leads to predictability, which is a must have in planning the use of the resources. It also seems that, for example, there are not any CPU over usage issues that can effect another domU in Xen. With Xen, you can run a fully virtualized with the emulation of various devices, with various minimal hits in performance, or you can run at near 100% hardware performance with a paravirtualized OS by using various Xen specific drivers. Most mainstream Linux distributions come with these Xen specific drivers, I believe even Windows has some drivers, even though they are considered unstable.
All the technical differences aside, it is just like I am using my own hosted hardware, with the added ability to restart or reboot my hwVPS, and watch the console if it ever has an issue. I can update like any plain old Linux install should be able to do. The big difference is that I have some major high end hardware backing my system, even a high end network attached storage system that allows my hwVPS to be transferred between 2 different pieces of hardware. How much would I be paying a month? In this case, it would be 45 dollars, which is really nothing compared to the actual costs associated with having that kind of hardware at your hands. I think I will rant about the misperceptions of the general public later, along with their lofty expectations with hosting that are not actually covered by how much they pay, but they feel they are entitled to more because they are comparing with larger companies who are undercutting to gain a larger footing in the hosting industry and to stamp out other competition.
WordPress Upgrades Can Be Painfully Annoying
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Website Software, WordPress on August 7, 2009
The day before yesterday I just updated my WordPress install to the latest, which at the time of this writing is 2.8.3, and well it was not as simple as I would have liked it. The auto-update function does not seem to work with my settings, and it seems that after reading up on what it requires to function, I an certain that many people’s PHP installations (if not most) are not going to allow it to function. It says the site’s files must be owned by the same user PHP executes as, or at least that is how I interpreted what they said in the instructions. Well that limits it to PHP installations that implement some form of suPHP or the like. Or they have all of their files owned by apache, or have some other really weird setup. Well my system does not use suPHP, and I am happy about that due to the performance differences. The manual update was strait forward, but still seemed overcomplicated, due to their not wanting to suggest anything that would hoze people’s custom changes, plugins, etc. It worked, and I am happy about that. I did have a full backup of everything just in case.
One thing I am grateful for is the fact that it will let me know when I log in to the administrative interface that there is a new version, please upgrade. I have seen too many fairly complicated PHP software applications get installed and never updated, and though that is often because people don’t actually think, look, or care in the first place, it is nice to see a feature like that to help people, who are not complete douche-bags, to keep their application up to date. If people only knew the horrible things that can happen when they apply the “set it and forget it” attitude to publicly available site software, or server software. I could tell you horror stories that would make you piss yourself, or well probably just laugh. They, as human’s have loved to do from the beginning, often get mad and blame the network administrators or web host for not being psychic and knowing that they didn’t pay attention to their ancient software and automatically update it for them. People need to own their problems, but at least a reminder helps make the need for an update clear to the person responsible, if they are actually using the software. I am sure there are ways you can even have an email sent to you when an update is needed.
The Importance of What We Don’t Know
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Life, Values on August 4, 2009
It is good to acknowledge what we know, but we damn well better acknowledge what we don’t know and hold it to equal value. If we hold what we know as more important that what we don’t know, we are holding tight to such a tiny sliver of understanding and perspective, we are quite likely screwed. We would be delusional and believe that what we know is the most important things to know, and that anything we do not know is of little consequence, without anything valid to back that belief up. We would have little encouragement to learn what we do not already know because we already know what is important, and it takes effort to learn. I would also speak from experience that learning things we do not know reveals things that we believed that were not correct in the first place, and that is a painful process, but a needed part of growing as a person. I would also state that learning something new, something that we do not already know is also quite uncomfortable. If you noticed, I just listed a bunch of things that grate against our selfish desires. We want to know important things, not be missing them, because it makes us feel important. We want to sit back and effortlessly do what ever we want, effort is not attractive to us. Who relishes feeling pain of any sort, we want to live a pain free existence, for some of us that is a major goal in life. Most of us hold high a lifestyle of comfort, we would rather our seats not be lumpy, or that we be cool on a hot on a summer car trip, and dread the though of being sticky at the end of a hot sweaty day. All in all, our selfishness, if given into, would totally prevent any growth, except for the uncontrollable things that happen in day to day life, and even then we hate, fear, and resist that.
Another aspect that plays into this is the fact that in play with our selfish desires, we believe what we want to believe and turn a blind eye to anything that contradicts it, depending on our level of selfishness. If we live a life holding highest the things we do know, and what we don’t know is unimportant, we will build a life on what we know, and as time goes, our vested interest in what we know will grow and grow, we may even write books on what we know. How much greater would we then defend what we know, even if all logic and truth point to us being wrong. We would turn to manipulation, sabotage, control, and other means to smash out anything that would contradict us in our world. That is another end that would totally suck, because it would mean you have grown the least, and end up being the least logical, and most emotional about what ever you believe in, no matter how devoid of truth it is. I have seen this too much, it makes me upset at times when I see people like this. They tend to also be the loudest, most publicized, as they try and convince people to believe them, and that they are right, because in their selfishness, that is what they want.
What percentage of everything there is to know do you say you have? Think about it. I would argue an unprovable argument that we would be dealing with infinity when measuring everything there is to know, but for argument sake, say there was a cap, we will put it at everything that everyone in the world knows about the functioning of the universe and everything in it. If you were super conceited and delusional you might say you could know at this point in time 50% of everything. Now with it in those terms, which is more important, what you know, or what you don’t know? In what areas of understanding would you assign that part you do not know, and really how would you know? isn’t that sorta the bummer dealing with what you don’t know, you also do not know what areas of knowledge or understanding you can assign it? I would argue that the odds are high that as a child to where you are now, you have not been lead to learn the most important things in life, considering how common it is to find people asking questions relating to that all the time. I myself have asked what the purpose of life is, I have even asked God to tell me a real reason to live, something that is worth something. Breathing for breathing’s sake is worthless, I would even argue that fun and pleasure are worthless and fleeting, they are a part of life, but that is not enough for me to live for.
If we could just realize, that it is of very high importance that we value what we do not know, equally with what we do know, then perhaps we could grow. I think selfishness is at the core of it. How do we deal with that one…. Perhaps that is where God comes in. Love is the opposite of selfishness, and maybe we just need to see more of Him, and that will help subside the selfishness so that we can grow. We only live 100 years, few even that long, and yet fewer past. I want to grow as much as humanly possible in the breath that God has given me, for his will, because that gives life meaning and worth.
Yet Another Theme
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Website Software, WordPress on July 31, 2009
I had to scrap that last theme, it would not let me change the “Blogroll” to something else. I mean what is a “Blogroll”? I don’t link to other blogs, and if I did, I would not call it a blogroll. I suppose some people do get into this blogging community thing, and that is cool, but I don’t have time to do that kind of stuff. I have some things that I want to say that I believe others could find useful at one level or another, and I want a place where I can share it with people in a modern fashion. In the future, maybe I will link to some specific ones which share some good or interesting information, but for now, I am even coming up short with what to put on my “Aboot” page.
The theme I had to scrap was called “Slate“. I decided to go with one which was clean, shadowed, textured, and just all around neat and simple. This one is called “Fusion“, and I found it somehow following several links while investigating some RSS plugin that I think might be able to take and generate posts on this site from an RSS feed. I was looking that up in hopes to archive and store old stuff I posted on my blogs in other locations like my MySpace account.
Moving forward with WordPress
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Website Software, WordPress on July 27, 2009
Yay! I have setup a new theme, and am pleased with it. I set it up last week sometime, after trying all kinds of different ones that just didn’t have what I wanted. Ok, so it is not really colorful or flashy, but it turns out this one seems to have a slick enough layout, it does not detract from the fact that this wordpress is there for the articles, not everything else around it.
I have also come to the conclusion that I will have all kinds of topics, screw the themed topic idea. I have all kinds of stuff rattling around in my head waiting to fall out and splatter on a blog somewhere. To tell you the truth, it is all connected anyway. For example, my biblical world view and belief in God will reflect in all the things that I do and talk about, or at least I hope so, considering that view point means that I believe God put everything here, for a reason, and our lives should reflect that in one way or another. I will also be replicating some posts onto another site, which from the get go, I planned to have setup as sort of a portfolio, and technical information repository. I don’t want to get too caught up in making sure I only post specific things on this site, and not on the other, I will just copy as I see fit.
Now I will be tweaking the rest of this WordPress install, as at this moment, I have not even customized the about page. For now I will keep it basic. In time, I am sure things will change, but one step at a time.
I Need a New Theme!
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Website Software, WordPress on July 23, 2009
Bleh… Not a fan of the default theme, that looks nasty. Ok, not to insult the wonderful people who put it together of course, but I want something with more color, less starchy blocky and plain. I am a colorful person, often hard to figure out, and many people do not understand me. I need a theme that can reflect a little more of my personality, with variety, color, and style. I guess the search begins…. Well at least it will as soon as I have some time to do it.
An Actual Live Site on My Domain
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Uncategorized on July 23, 2009
Welcome to my blog. It has been many years since I purchased this and a few other domains, so I figured it was about time I set something up on them other than the stuff that happens in the background that no one sees. For years now I have used this domain and a few others to test technology and setup sites on various other platforms and hosting systems. Usually it has been to test out a new control panel, or get use to a new system that I would support. Often I have used them for development of different technologies or, for example, setting up and debugging a piece of software so I could get the developers up to speed on features I needed it to have before I could implement it in production.
This is a new day, and even though this is my first install of WordPress, this is going to be a publicly visible and active production site. I have not yet set my mind on the exact theme of this site, other than the fact that I will probably be ranting about something in the technical realm from time to time, often related to my position as a Data Systems Specialist at Advantagecom Networks, Inc. We will see what comes up.
What is Infallible?
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Life on December 9, 2008
We are the Israelites telling Moses to go up and deal with You… We want the bible to tell us all truth, but that is not enough, we need You!
We want to believe and tell people that the bible is written practically by Your hand, and is infallible, because we can not bare dealing with uncertainty, or with having to ask for Your help to find the truth. We are afraid of the uncertain, perhaps we are afraid to talk to you directly. Maybe we want to feel bigger, so we say these words are perfect and directly written by You through the prophets. We want to be able to say we have all the answers for you, here read in this book. But in reality, we do not have all the answers, the book is just written by people who love you and worked with you directly, but they are just imperfect men, and imperfections reflect in the words they write. Perceptions that the writers had, those were their perceptions, formed by the society they lived in at the time.
Point being, we need YOU God, to be with us through all growth, learning, and reading, yes, even the bible. That is why some people can memorize word for word, and quote so much from the bible and be empty of truth, because like You said, You yourself are truth.
Just Keep in Touch
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Life, MySpace Blog, Relationships on November 20, 2008
Current mood:sad
“daddy I lost you, I need you so, just for you now, just keep in touch” Words from a song I heard, by a person who could not even put his own voice to the words, he synthesized them.
Over the many years of our lives, we are hurt, but sometimes we don’t have enough background to even know what hurts and what doesn’t. Some of the deepest hurts may just make your head caulk to the side at the time, because you know something is wrong, but you can’t really put together what it is all about. then 10 or so years later, you are listening to a song, and it says something, something that touches you, and your body tenses up, and you resist the feeling, but you know that something is there. Those words just touched on a sore spot, a wound from the past that can not heal without the realization that it is there. Once you know something is going on, you can do something about it. Touching where we are wounded causes us pain, and we burst into tears, shaking, uncontrolled, or we fight it, and resist feeling anything and become cold and hard like a rock, unhealing. I had to ask God for help to figure out what was going on, to let me feel, if something is there, I want to heal, I want to realize the truth about what hurt me so I can act, so I can change it, and heal. I want to be a whole person, not like a house that is full of many rooms, with their doors blocked off and boarded up, afraid to face what happened behind them. If you live like that, each blocked off room also blocks off some of who you are, some of your feeling, some of your function, more of what makes you alive. Room by room, I want to heal, so I can be a full whole person, who is fully alive.
I miss my Dad, I miss him really bad. It is as if I had lost him, or maybe never had him in the first place. I see him from time to time, but it is like there is a wall there, I know there is one on my part, but perhaps he has one put up himself. We are not actually connecting… Well sometimes, perhaps on a deeper level then many people connect with their fathers. But I still feel that we are both wounded and afraid of the deeper relationship that we both long for with each other. He is afraid, so am I. I can not say what he is afraid of, but I can say what I am afraid of. I am afraid that on a deeper level, he does not really love me, unless there is something in it to benefit him. I am afraid of a conditional love. No one said one’s fears have to be based in truth, I can say that they often are not. I might go as far as saying that anywhere there is a fear involved, you will find a lie that you believe as a truth.
How Easily We Forget
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Life, MySpace Blog on September 17, 2008
Current mood:confident
I wrote the following mid day sometime last week. I was having a hard day and being discouraged for one reason or another. Then I got to thinking, I have no reason to worry, to be discouraged about anything. God has gotten me through so many situations. He has taken care of me every step of the way, with boldly answered prayers, things that people do not believe when they hear it. Then my mind went back to the Israelite people, how they were taken out of Egypt with all kinds of undeniable acts of God, the Red Sea was even parted for them, and they were lead by a pillar of fire by night, and a pillar of cloud by day. God was with them, right there, but around every corner, they would start to grumble, forgetting that God has them all taken care of, every need will be granted. So I did a quick brain dump, here it is:
I want to spend the rest of my life remembering you Lord. It seems that over time all amazing things, all of the unforgettable things, all the things of greatest importance, they fade, they loose their value, their hold on our lives. This world degrades things, though the breath of life continues to flow against the destruction of this world, life is resilient, sin, or the knowledge of good and evil has tainted us, so that it is only because of the strength and love of God that we are still able to exist. I will put up pictures on the wall, write books or journals, read the bible, fill my life with all the things that show Your work in my life, so that I do not forget. Please God, give me the strength to do this, it is your life, your love that flows through me, I call on that Love that lives inside me, I call to you God who loves us. Let us never forget, not the walls of water, the water springing from the rock, the food from the sky, the miracles, the answers to prayer, the direction of our life, the direct speaking into my heart, the showing of unsearchable things. Show us how.
Jonathan Can’t Come Out To Play
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Life, Love, MySpace Blog, Relationships on June 17, 2008
Current mood:busy
Ok, it has been forever since I have last blogged, but I need to write something. Life has been continuing day after day. I am still heading my small group at the church, and attending another. I knew I needed the weekends so I moved my small group meeting to Tuesdays. I have realized that without structure or any sort of plan for the small group, I loose my confidence. I need to have a general direction and spend some time working in that direction myself before I feel comfortable asking people to come to the group, that should be a given, but somehow after the material Larry provided ran out, I have become lost. I have fleeting moments of inspiration, but only fleeting. I am recognizing that I do not put time with God high enough on my priority list. Part of me knows that spending time with God is a major blessing, He will help me find my center, my inspiration, my direction, and guide me through anything I go through, but there is another part of me that seems to be pulling in the other direction, the resistance, that same feeling one might get when approached with vacuuming or doing the dishes. I will call that resistance the flesh, the worldly part of me that tries to hold me back from doing what is best, from doing things the way they were designed to be done. I am slowly having my mind and heart changed, as I realize that I really want to spend that time with God. But it is so different than the way the rest of the world works, everything else seems to have very clear and direct results, so I find myself doing all of these other things before I finally get around to spending time with God. Day by day I feel the void growing as I let that time slip away. The verse “Abide in me and I will abide in you” keeps echoing through my head, and I know it is true, why is there any resistance? Maybe my motivation is wrong. My mind is cloudy, I can’t seem to figure this out. Maybe spending time with him will give me what I need to figure this out…. Sounds like a good idea to me, He has always helped me in the past.
Part of my problem these days is that I do not give myself enough down time, or alone time. Back in the day, I had not even recognized the need for down time or alone time, because other than work, that is all I had, sitting around watching TV, or reading once every few years. I had nothing going on. It is taking me a long time to recognize and admit that these are valid needs, now I need to find a way to bring a little bit of it back. This is a scary proposition though, something has to be cut back, and then your mind equates that to devaluing that thing, or person, or situation. For example, maybe less time with Kathy, or cut a group meeting out, or maybe some of my responsibilities at the church… I suppose I just need to evaluate where I am spending the most time.
My Beautiful Mental Exhaustion
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Life, MySpace Blog on February 4, 2008
Current mood:drained
I want to start out thanking God for the energy and perspective he has given me. Today has been a very busy day, and I have needed every bit of energy I can get. Yesterday was great, I managed to get a lot done, and spend some time with Kathy in the process. Later that night, after I got home, I went to finish some things up at my computer. I heard this strange crash outside, and with the sound having a strange familiar tone to it, I decided to poke around outside to see what was up. When I got out there, everything seemed in order, there was a person down the road to my right pulling out of his driveway, and no traffic either way besides that. I didn’t think much of it, but wanted to check my Jeep out to make sure it was alright, I mean it was there and parked, not smashed down the road like last time, but I had to make sure. As I went around the vehicle, I noticed debris on the road and I knew someone had some sort of an accident, so I was thinking to myself, I wonder who the poor guy is who smashed up their vehicle. As I walked up along the driver’s side door, I noticed that the wheel was turned, and I didn’t remember leaving it turned that much, and something didn’t look right with the front driver’s side corner of the car. Well, I took a closer look, and it seemed that I was the poor sap who had his car smashed into. This is the second time in a few months that my parked car has been ran into, in fact, the reason I am driving around a newer Jeep now is because, by the grace of God, my last Jeep was totaled while parked in front of the house. As I checked it out, and called the police, a small swarm of neighbors came to see what was up. I took pictures, and the damage consisted of some bent suspension parts, steering linkage, smashed bumper and some body damage. It is not drivable, with the wheels turned strait, it looks like it is trying to take a right and a left turn at the same time, that would not get me very far… Anyway, by the end of the night, the police had apprehended the vehicle and suspect, but I was not given much in the line of details, so I will have to get a completed report from the police department. I did hear that my vehicle was the second that the guy hit that night, and that was why the office appeared in about a minute of me finishing up my 911 call.
All in all, I still had a sincere smile on my face that entire evening. The neighbors and officer were kind and helpful, and I thanked the officer for his help. Though I am not troubled by the incident, or the fact that I will be without a vehicle for a while, I still am going to be pushing extra paperwork, and have to wrangle my insurance as they process this new claim. It is a bit draining. I already have a lot going on, so it seems I am now in training to handle more…. thats good. Now I am wondering if I am getting to a point here… Nope, don’t think so, no real point, except maybe I feel drained. You know, 4 accidents in under one year, that just seems like too many to me, maybe a little unusual, and only one of them was possibly my fault, the others were when the car was parked, and I was rear ended on I-5.
There is good that comes from this. I now get to spend some time with other people as they drive me around. I am gaining all kinds of experience with the courts, insurance companies, and the overall process of an accident. Oh, and here is a good one; one by one I am taking bad drivers off the road. Another really good thing I am seeing is that when an accident happens, people come out, and with sincerity, they care whether or not you are ok. Even my mother, after borrowing her new car, and having the front end of it removed, she cared how I was above concern for the vehicle. I think I needed to see that.
I just thank God for his perfect care for me. He knows what is important, and he takes care of me. My possessions are not so important, they come and go.
Jonathan’s Thoughts on Ephesians
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Life, Love, MySpace Blog, Relationships on January 23, 2008
Current mood:refreshed
I am slowly working my way from the beginning of the bible to the end of the bible, and I just finished Ephesians today. Here are some thoughts that came to mind when reading Ephesians 5 this morning:
Come to understand these ideas of your own heart guided by the Holy Spirit to see that they are good, and so that you do them out of love for God, not simply out of obedience of the rules for the rule’s sake. Rules and guides passed on from one person to another are but empty without the understanding that the Holy Spirit gives, and just as children grow to become adults, and realize the wisdom behind the rules they were taught, we too must grow in Christ, and gain the understanding, to build our foundation on Him, with his guidance. Each one of us, if seeking God with all our heart, mind, body, soul, and strength, will find God, and his good will, and we will be guided to do what is good and right in His eyes. We need but ask, and we shall receive.
I must say I liked Ephesians, it was well written. There is a lot to be said for being given time alone to think and spend time with God, even if it is in prison.