Who knows how many parts this is going to be, but here goes.

Our vacation basically consisted of traveling to New Jersey, spending a couple days there with family, spending a week with said family and 250 others at a family camp, spending another couple days with said family, and returning home. Sounds pretty simple, well it was, and it was great.

On Wednesday the 16th we drove to Arlington, WA to stay the night at my folks house. We had decided to fly out of SeaTac instead of PDX because it saved us about $200 for the two tickets. I took off work early so that we could avoid traffic getting up there, but we got hit by traffic anyway. Dad and I had originally planned to go play a round of golf that evening, but instead we got to have dinner with my cousin and his family were in town from Southern Cal.

The next morning mom (wonderful mom) got up and drove us to the airport. Our flight was leaving SeaTac at 7:50am, so we all got up at 4:15 so that we could be at the airport by 6-ish. It is a good thing we did because as it was with getting dropped off at the curb, waiting in line at the ticket counter to check in our bags, and getting through security, it was 7:35 before we got to our gate and they were saying ‘last boarding call’ for our flight! That proved to be a much more hairy experience than we had planned. However we were on the flight and very thankful to be there.

Due to our requirement to travel cheaply, our travel plan consisted of two different layovers. The first leg of the flight was to Vegas. Also due to the face that we needed to travel cheaply, Ben was a ‘lap baby’. We were hoping that there might be an extra seat that he could use, but there were none. Ben did well on this short 2 hour flight, and we were thankful. In Vegas we had a small layover and quickly hustled to the next plane. This next flight was even shorter as it was only a quick hop to Phoenix. Ben again did well, although he was stuck on our laps again the whole time. This layover lasted a couple of hours and gave us more than enough time to get food, walk around a bit, and give Ben some time to roam and play. The last leg of the flight left a little late from Phoenix, and left us sitting in the non-AC plane waiting in line for the runway. If I remember correctly, Phoenix was in the range of 100 degrees that day, so it was hot in the plane. After what seemed an especially long wait (20 min.) we finally took off and began our 4.5 hr flight to Philly. This flight proved to be a bit harder for Ben to be able to handle. By this time we had already been traveling for 7.5 hours and he hadn’t been able to get his usual 2-3 hr nap in the afternoon. This flight was hard, exhausting, and slightly irritating for our family, but thanks to the help of the nice young lady next to us reading a Korean/English Bible, it went much more smoothly than I thought it was going to turn out. When the plane rolled to a stop in Philly we were all so very thankful for not only a safe trip, but still having our sanity. Praise be to the Lord for giving us that much, and if I ever fly with a baby under 2 years old, although they don’t have to have a seat of their own, I will get it!

Now it is 10:30pm Philly time (EST) and we have been traveling for just about 12 hours. Man are we tired. Beth’s parents were there to meet us at the airport. They had flown in earlier that day and had rented a mini-van to carry all of us to NJ were Beth’s grandparents (Father’s side) live. They met us at the gate and helped us with our bags. After we acquired all of our suitcases from baggage claim, we walked out to the car and loaded it up. This year the weather is Philly was a ton cooler than when we were there 4 years previous. That year when I walked out of the AC’d airport and into the parking garage I was instantly drenched by my own sweat, but this time I only perspired a little bit.

Once we retreated from the parking garage, we left Philly and crossed into Jersey. Since we were hungry, Dad stopped by a McDonald’s for a little food, and we properly devoured an extra value meal plus an extra burger. Then we continued on our way to Heislerville, NJ. When we pulled into Beth’s grandparent’s driveway it was well after midnight, and we quickly got Ben into a borrowed Pack ‘n Play and we all got to sleep. It made for a very long day, but we were very thankful for the safety and the strength the Lord gave us for the travel. We were finally at our destination, and we were well pleased.

More to come…

Our vacation was a blast! Right now I am too busy at work to do a decent log of our activities, but I hope to do that later this week. We all had a good time and really enjoyed spending time with Beth’s family back in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

More to come.

In about an hour my wife and I are beginning the first leg of our vacation. Weeeeee!!!!

Hopefully I won’t have too many ‘interesting’ things to blog about when I get back.

I received a link to a pdf via the PLUG mailing list. Although I am only into page two, this document gives an excellent synopsis of the differences between personal HDs and enterprise HDs. If you are at all interested in PC hardware, I suggest you give this a read.

Warning, this is 13 pages.
More than an interface - SCSI vs ATA

Tomorrow my family leaves for our first vacation since college. My wife, 17 month old son, and myself will be leaving for Pennsylvania on Thursday morning, but the trip starts tomorrow evening as we are driving up to my folks house in Washington. We were actaually able to save a couple hundred dollars by flying out of SeaTac instead of PDX, and since my folks are gonna help us get to and from the airport, that was no-brainer.

Vacation, vacation, vacation…

A strange thing happened today, I actually had to reset my linux server from a hard-lock. Somehow my server got it’s brain fried and refused to even reset correctly. I cannot remember the last time that this happened. I know for a fact that the last several times that I have reset my linux box were for kernel upgrades and re-complies, not for a system lockup.

Now when I say ’server’ I am referring to my old celeron 300A overclocked to 450mhz with 256MB of SDRAM, and a 120GB IDE HD. This truely isn’t a ’server’ box, but it has done me well for several years. In fact, I am currently hosting this site along with the Salem Linux User Group (which I will certainly blog more about later). As I am a family man with the financial considerations of a house, family, and a variety of short and long term debt, I doubt I will ever buy myself a real server, i.e. Dual Proc, 1GB DDR RAM, 5-disk Raid 5 array of 200GB 10K rpm SCSI drives, so this ‘little engine that could’ will just have to keep on a trucking.

However, I really am content with what I have. It serves all of my needs, and that is a major blessing from the Lord.

Pastor Ron’s sermon today was excellent. He has been preaching through the book of 1st Peter for the better part of the summer now, and this week we were at 1 Peter 2:13. The topic was ’submission’. Pastor sure preached on a fun topic, though one I know that I certainly needed to hear.

This is my brief synopsis:

Submission is almost a dirty word today, even in Christian circles. Many Christian husbands wrongly use 1 Peter 3:1 to say that their wives are supposed to be submissive to them, while not even truely understanding what the Bible is really talking about.

Submission is NOT:

Instead, it implies:

Thus submission is defined as:

To make yourself available with a good attitude, so that you may receive what is offered.

Pastor’s ‘Final Thoughts’ were what hit me the most.
#1. Our submission to Christ really does determine how the rest of our Christian life is developing.
#2. Spend more time praciticing your submission to Jesus Christ and less time worrying about submitting to others.

Pastor’s goal was to show us that if we being properly submissive to Christ, that will line up everything else in our lives. If we are obedient to God and His Word (Bible), then we will be submissive to the others whom we are supposed to be submissive to: Christ, church, spouse, government, etc..

I really appreciated the encouragement and exhortation of this lesson. Not only did I better refine my idea of what Biblical submission is, but I also was powerfully encouraged to be obedient to Christ and be submissive as he has commanded me to be.

Over the course of the last couple of months I have been playing a free online game called Kings of Chaos (KoC). I got interested in it by a buddy of mine who goes by the handle of bozoman. He has aparently been playing the game for quite a few months.

Kings of Chaos has been described as an old-school BBS style game. The goal of the game is to develop the strongest army possible by increasing your armies daily production, buying weapons, buying fortifications, and training your troops. Each turn you get 1 ‘attack’ and an amount of gold relevant to the number of soldiers that you have. Using the gold you can buy more weapons, mercs, fortifications and spies. All of this will help you achieve the goal of having the largest, strongest army.

I have found this game to be quite enjoyable, and quit addictive. You only really have to play once or twice per day, though you can play more often if you like. Currently I have around 1700 soldiers, and am steadily working my way up the ladder.

If you are interested in playing, either click here to join me and get some help from me, or go directly to the Kings of Chaos page and start out on your own.

*Edit 12/13/03*
My new KoC link is http://www.kingsofchaos.com/recruit.php?uniqid=7s4442dq

It looks like I was listed on Oregon Blogs, yay me!

This weekend my folks are in town. They got in Friday evening and will be leaving sometime Sunday afternoon. Today dad, Ryan, and I went up Mt. Angel to play a round at the Evergreen Golf Club. It proved to be a very hot day for golf, I think I drank 3 cans of pop, a Sobe, and several paper cups full of water. Ordinarily I would have brought a 32oz Gatorade with me, but we were late getting there for our tee time as it was, so I didn’t want to stop to pick one up. The final scores weren’t too encouraging. Dad ended up with a 51 & 57 to total 108, I had a 56 & 61 to total 117, and Ryan had a 63 & 67 to total 130 (which is a better score for him). This was a departure from what I scored last time I played there, which I think was a 49 and a 56. It did turn out to be a nice day for golf, but not the best played golf.

While I was brushing my teeth tonight I had an interesting idea. Why is it that we who have automated many, many things with machines, don’t have a better way of cleaning our teeth. I was thinking that we should have something that we bite down on, kind of like when you had floride put on your teeth as a kid, and it should both scrub the teeth, massage the gums, gargle with Listerine (or something like it) and then rinse your mouth out. This seems like a great idea to me, but I guess nobody else thinks it is.

Time to go to bed as tomorrow is Sunday, and we get to go to church to worship Christ Jesus, and learn more about Him and how we can be better pleasing to Him.

Well now that I have this blog I need to get listed.

I went ahead and setup this blog software to ping weblogs.com.

As I reside in Keizer, Oregon, I figure that I will try and get listed on Oregon Blogs.