Entries in Life

Last week was my first RAGBRAI ever. (Poor quality camera-phone RAGBRAI pictures here. They’re only meant to covey concepts, not realistically portray anything.) RAGBRAI and I are the same age and its a real shame that this is the first time I’ve been. We’ve both been around since 1973. Some bits and pieces from my first RAGBRAI, recorded here without too much organization:

• The first night we got there we found a county-fair-like atmosphere in the small town’s town square. It was as if the whole town had come out, but the town was made up of 10,000 cyclists and their families and, instead of staying in one place, the county fair covered 70 miles of roadside.
• It rained the first night. Thunder and lightening woke up Jim (my cycling buddy) at 3AM. We both had trouble getting through the night. But we were both up with the tent packed and on the road by 7AM.
• The first day of my ride (Thursday) included an optional 27 mile loop to bring the day up to a full century (100mi). Jim and I split up and I took the century route. I quickly met a 60 year old contractor and we spent those 27 miles talking about work, family, death, and changing times. It was a great ride. We split up when I decided to take a ride in one of the ultralights that a group of pilots had set up beside the road.
• I didn’t get my “century patch”. This is kind of disappointing since I learned later that everyone who rode the century route could get the patch. Ride enough RAGBRAI centuries and you get to plaster a jersey with them.
• By the time I arrived at that night’s campsite, Jim had been there for two hours and had the tent set up. We had a choice of the primitive shower my team (the Road Hogs) put together or a $5 group shower. I was already soaked by the rain that came down during the last half hour of my ride. I chose the makeshift shower instead of paying $5.
• Pie! Practically every small (and medium) church along the route was selling pie or some sort of food. Pie is an essential part of the mythos of RAGBRAI — so much so that this year’s RAGBRAI poster depicted the ride stages using a pie chart — made up of pictures of a real pie being consumed.
• As a result of all the pie, as well as home-made ice cream and other heavy food, I actually managed to weigh in a couple pounds heavier at the end of the race. This, despite the 4000+ calories that the ride took each day.
• The thousands of cyclists riding 450 miles across Iowa were not the insane ones. Well, not the *most* insane ones. There was a woman attempting to run the 70+ mile route each day. I heard that she was admitted to the hospital at least once, possibly twice.
• The age and size of cyclists ran the gamut. Let no one say they’re too young, too old, or too fat to ride RAGBRAI. I saw men on recumbent who were easily 350lbs+. Fathers and mothers brought their kids on third wheels or tandems. I even saw one young couple on a tandem pulling their 2 year old in a bike trailer. Most of the men on my team were retirement age or older. One father from St. Louis told me that the team he was with was made up of a few different families with at least three different 11 year olds.
• Jim and I fell into a rhythm: we would ride together in the morning and then make our way to that night’s camp site separately. The third and last day, only 40miles, we split up after grabbing coffee (“Organic, Fair Trade!” the proprietor would repeat at every sale). Feeling relatively awake, I started pumping the pedals. I spent the last 20 miles that day chasing a cyclist from the Air Force cycling team. We blew past everyone at 23mph. In the end, he outlasted me, but it was a blast.
• Some people treat this rolling town as a big party and stop in every town along the way to drink. Don’t try this at home. It is only possible because of the sheer number of cyclists, the state police, and Ambulance drivers every few miles along the route. The partiers don’t generally arrive until sunset — about 9pm at night.

I plan on doing the entire RAGBRAI next year. I’d love to get a tandem so I could take two of my kids for at least part of the day. Highly recommended, even if you aren’t in that fit or are just a casual cyclist. The chance encounters were a great way to restore my faith in humanity. The party atmosphere and conviviality made the time on the road a ton of fun.

I’ve gotten some feedback on the mediawiki mode I’ve been working on.  So I’m releasing a new version.  Some highlights:

• Now works with HTTP Auth (I’ll write a seperate post on how Emacs handles credentials for HTTP Authentication).
• Introduced tab-completion of sites.  If you have multiple MW sites set up that you work on, this makes switching between sites super-easy.
• Started working on making it more XEmacs compatible.  As far as I can tell, XEmacs lacks the Unicode support that GNU Emacs has.  The released version of XEmacs also lacks the POSIX character classes for regular expressions and ships with a very out-dated version of url.el.  All these combine to make it very difficult.  But do-able.  I’m surprised there are still XEmacs users, but if it doesn’t cause me too much pain, I’ll help them out.
• Misc other clean up (including making the url.el wrappers much better).

Since I run 64bit Ubuntu, I couldn’t use use Google Gears. Which was annoying. The Google Gears site says 64bit OSes are not supported. But it is open source. So I grabbed the source code, tweaked a few things here and there and I now have Google Gears up and running on my 64bit OS. It hasn’t crashed and burned yet, but I haven’t really tested it heavily yet, either (suggestions welcome). Anyway, here’s the XPI to install it. I’ll post the source soon. Or maybe just the diffs to the Google Gears list.

The crude distinction between genes as implacable programmers of a Calvinist predestination and the environment as the home of liberal free will is a fallacy.

This sentence is the sum of what Matt Ridley does so well in Genome. He takes conventional wisdom and turns it on its head. He doesn’t shirk from the most dangerous ideas that can accompany genetic determinism — eugenics, selecting for ability — but he also wraps up his book with a very good argument that free will and determinism are compatible. Yes, you may have a gene that makes it means that likely develop Alzheimers. But that doesn’t have to run your life. And then he flips it around: isn’t it better for you — including your genes — to determine what you become than for someone else — the state, your peers, or even your parents — to proscribe a path for you? I have my own Libertarian tendencies (strongly tempered by communitarian Orthodox Christianity), so I find his reasoning pretty compelling. Matt Ridley is a special kind of journalistic genius. He can wade through volumes of technical arcana and create something like Genome, a very readable, very enjoyable, book. If you want an overview of what we know about genetics (or what we knew 10 years ago, at least) this is a great place to start. But, the book is over 10 years old. A lot has happened. He hints as much when he talks about developments in genetics that happened in the decade leading up to the publication of the book — sometimes dramatic developments. The story wasn’t finished when he wrote it and I am starting to look around for something more up-to-date than this. Like any good author, he has captured me and left me wanting more.

This week I’m at the Global Health Council’s conference in Washington D.C. IntraHealth (my employer) is working hard to promote our work in Capacity building and, especially, the work we’ve been doing in iHRIS and other projects with Open Source Software. Listening to great speakers like Hans Rosling of Gapminder.org is always fun and entertaining. Hans promotes a fact-based world in a way that challenges a lot of our assumptions about the world and isn’t afraid to kill sacred cows. “You should forbid the discussion of ‘HIV in Africa’” he said at one point after presenting data that showed the differences of infection rates across the continent. (I had a chance to meet Hans and talk to him about the iHRIS software when he came to IntraHealth’s event Wednesday night. He asked lots of great questions.) But it is often said that conferences are most useful for what happens in the hallways, not the main sessions. From the people I met during the conference, it made my time at the GHC36 much more valuble to me and, I hope, IntraHealth. Here are some of the more interesting people that I met at the conference:

• Martin Namutso — Actually, I met Martin last year in Uganda when I helped him implement a new Knowledge Management portal for the Ministry of Health in Uganda. He works as an Open Source developer in Uganda, implementing Open Source solutions like iHRIS. It was good to catch up with him and talk about future prospects. I especially like the story Martin tells about his decision to focus on Linux and Open Source right out of school in order to compete for different jobs than most of his Microsoft-focused classmates.
• Paul Biondich — Paul is one of the creators of OpenMRS. He’s a pediatrician and software developer bringing an Open Source EMR (Electronic Medical Records) system to low-income countries. When I mentioned that I had worked on a pilot project in which I created a PHP interface into the OpenMRS’s database schema, he asked for my help in maintaining the PHP interface to the OpenMRS API in any future work I do. I hadn’t found this when I was looking before, so I readily agreed. Working with OpenMRS’s API instead of the database directly would be a much more robust solution to building PHP applications that work with OpenMRS.
• Jørn Klunsøyr — Jørn is a registered nurse and software developer at the University of Bergen where he works on mobile projects like EpiHandyMobile to make form submission with cell phones much easier. Using a web-based application, it is possible to build forms and push them to a low-power J2ME cell phones. Later, after the data has been gathered, the data is sent from the phone via SMS, GPRS, or BlueTooth to the EpiHandy server and, from there, to applications like Clinica and OpenMRS. When he demonstrated the software, I immediately saw applications for iHRIS: making it easy to fill in the iHRIS information in the field when a laptop and Internet access might not be available.
• Eric Woods — Eric Woods is the Executive Director and Founder of Africa Aid. His org is helping distribute cell phones to doctors across Africa. While the phones are useful in and of themselves, he is looking for applications and partners that would make the phones that much more valuble for the doctors. One example he thought of was a cell phone directory. Making the contact information in iHRIS available to other doctors would make it possible for doctors to more easily consult with each other and develop relationships that they might not otherwise.

These are just a few of the people that stand out from those that I met. After talking to them, I can see ways that we could work together and I hope that before we meet at GHC next year, I will have worked with a few of them.

My friend Jim has a couple of good posts on listening to people from the “ex-ex-gay” movement. I think he is right: the Church does need to hear from people who have tried to convert from homosexual to heterosexual — especially those Christians who believed they could “convert” their sexuality from being gay to being straight. We need to listen especially closely to those men and women who have sincerely attempted to alter their own sexual orientation and failed. Most importantly, those of us (and, yes, “us” includes me) in the Church who believe that homosexual relationships are sinful need to listen. Before I tell you what I hear, let me explain a bit about where I’m coming from. It is no surprise that there are a lot of confused people out there. And by confused, I don’t mean the men and women who are homosexual. No, I mean the people who think that being a homosexual is, in and of itself, wrong. There is nothing wrong with being gay. I would go further, though, and say that if you are not actively seeking a relationship with God, then you are not better off in a straight relationship than in a homosexual one. The primary concern is our relationship with God. Everything hinges on that. In fact, morality doesn’t matter. Morality plays no role in our relationship to God. This should be clear enough from story of the Publican and Pharisee that the Orthodox begin each celebration of Great Lent with. The tax-collector was the morally disreputable person in Jesus’ day — the person everyone knew was doing wrong, cheating them out of their hard-earned money. In his place, I can imagine a gay man, someone all conservative Christians would “know” is a sinner. The Pharisee stands there proclaiming his piety, ridiculing the tax collector. Likewise, I see many conservative Christians holding themselves up as moral examples, making a very public display of their moral superiority. They kick and scream when they feel they’ve been wronged — when someone has stripped their courthouse of the Ten Commandments or a crèche — and loudly condemn those whose sins are more public. The answer is not to hide your sin, not to be discreet about it. “All have sinned” and no one persons sin is any less or any more than anyone else’s. No one is perfect. No one can exalt themselves above another or look down on another. Jesus told us as much when he said it was the tax collector, not the pharisee, who went home justified. Which means, of course, that I’m no better than the most flamboyant, promiscuous gay man. In fact, I have no right to comment on anyone else’s sin. I’m reminded of the story of Abba Sisoes from the fourth century:

Considered to be a very holy and venerable man, many drew near to Abba Sisoes while he was on his death bed. In his last moments, he saw choirs of angels and archangels, not to mention prophets, Apostles and saints. Wondering what was going on, those gathered around him asked, “With whom are you speaking, Abba?” “With the angels,” he replied, and indicated that he was seeking to do penance before he left this life for the next. Knowing his holiness, one friend said to him, “You have no need for penance, Father.” Abba Sisoes replied, “I have not yet begun to repent.”

Here is someone no one thought could be condemned, yet, truly embodying the spirit of the publican, he felt he had not yet begun to repent. At this point, I hope I’ve made myself clear: I am in no position to proclaim my own piety or tell others that they are condemned. So what does this all have to do with listening to “ex-ex-gay” people? One thing I hear is a gay man (Peterson Toscano, founder of Beyond Ex-Gay) who struggled for almost 20 years and spent over $30,000 to become “straighten” himself out. It didn’t work. At this point, it sounds like a bad Scientology tale. The first thing that comes to mind (and Peterson says as much) is the obsession with sex. Since the focus is on sex continually, it heightens the awareness and temptation. In another video, Peterson even says that he had more sex when he was trying to “de-gay” himself than he has since he gave it up. But that part of it, obsession with sex, seems to be a part of American Christian culture. Witness sites like Book22.com (a Christian sex-toys web store), or Christian sex toy parties, or even Exodus International’s methods — at least, those Peterson describes. The focus is on sex. Sure, we pay lip service to putting God before all else, but the idea of a married couple voluntarily abstaining from sex? That would be unheard of! Lifelong voluntary “marital fasting” that some saints of the Orthodox church undertook seems impossible and ridiculous to us. As one person described this fasting:

Rather than repudiating the legitimate pleasure taken in eating and in marital relations, fasting assists us in liberating ourselves from greed and lust, so that both these things become not a means of private pleasure but an expression of interpersonal communion.

The second thing I hear is the singling out of this particular sin. As Peterson says: “I thought I couldn’t be gay and a Christian.” While all Christians are called to live pious lives, many of us struggle with a particular sin or temptation. Sometimes, we sin and are not aware that what we do is sin. So, again, the focus on homosexuality, singling it out for special attention and treatment, and not on whether or not homosexuality is a sin, is where we’re going wrong. Consider the advice that St. Theophan the Recluse gave to a young girl: When confronted with a thought to pursue some sin, don’t fight it. Don’t grab onto it to beat it into submission. Instead, let it pass and immediately pray the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner!” By turning our attention to God instead of the thought to sin, we redirect our energy. Note, also, the parallels between the Jesus Prayer and the prayer of the Publican. Finally, and probably most controversially, it makes me wonder about things that we universally agree are wrong today, but that, at the time the New Testament was written, weren’t seen as huge sins. Slavery, for example. I see no evidence that new Christians freed their slaves or started treating them humanely. I also know of no restrictions on ordaining slave owners. Yet, today, we see any kind of slavery, not just the brutal kind sometimes practiced in the early American South, as universally wrong. So what’s the point of all this? What have I found from listening to this ex-ex-gay man? Well, to be honest, I haven’t learned anything. I have taken the opportunity, though, to think through my prejudices and to clarify them a bit. Peterson deserves our compassion: he has been ill-served by a church that tried to take him down a road he simply couldn’t travel — by a church that made his sexuality more important than his relationship to God. The focus should, as always, be on God, not our sin.

Have you not looked down … at a city and seen how much it resembles an ant heap, full of blind creatures who think their mundane little world is real? You see the lighted windows and what you want to think is that there must be many interesting stories behind them. But what you know is that really there are just dull, dull souls, mere consumers of food, who think their instincts are emotions and their tiny lives of more account than a whisper of wind. (from Soul Music by Terry Pratchett.)

Sometimes, as I’m driving down the road, I wonder about the other people I see and where they are going, how it might be interesting to follow a random person and see what they were doing. But the reality is that if I did pick a person to follow at random, they’d probably be going to work or home. They’d get out of their car, walk in a building, and wouldn’t emerge again for several hours. And whatever fantasy I entertain about how exciting someone else’s life might be would only be met by the reality of how depressing my own vicarious skulking was. Life is never as interesting as we think it should be. Life is never as exciting as we wish it were. There are bright spots, glimpses of excitement, but these are not the norm. I suspect that by the time they reach 35, most people have given up on whatever they thought life was supposed to be when they were 16, 17, or 18 and resigned themselves to the mundane and everyday. Perhaps this isn’t true for everyone, but this is how I’ve experienced life.

What is there to show for all of our hard work here on this earth? People come, and people go, but still the world never changes. The sun comes up, the sun goes down; it hurries right back to where it started from. The wind blows south, the wind blows north; round and round it blows over and over again. All rivers empty into the sea, but it never spills over; one by one the rivers return to their source. All of life is far more boring than words could ever say. (Eccl 1:3-8 CEV)

We can, as I think I have done, manage to find a great deal of satisfaction, even joy, in our mundane little lives. Once we understand how little the world cares of us, the love we share with those closest to us becomes incredibly precious. Amongst the black backdrop of life, we find that our accomplishments, our family, our friends are valuable precisely because of what they mean right now, not because we’ve managed to change the world forever. Our friends and children will carry on without us. Even most people who couldn’t imagine life without us now will manage to create a new, mundane routine without us after we move on. We can realize all this and still, while we’re here, savor the love of our wife, rejoice in our child’s accomplishments, and enjoy the company of a good friend. There is no such thing as a legacy except in our imagination. There is only now. We cannot change the world, no matter how hard we try. As Moses wrote, and Jesus later affirmed: There will always be poor people. Someone will always be in need. Still, this is not an excuse to do nothing. There is no utopia, and Sisyphean our task may be, but doing nothing will only lead to depression, despair and despondency. Hope can only live in action. Hope and Love are all we have. We cannot save the world or accomplish world peace, but we enjoy this brief little spark that is our life before it fades.

Via Dan Lyke, this story seems to be making the rounds: Christian Salt.

“I said, ‘What the heck’s the matter with Christian salt?’” Godlewski said, sipping a beer in the living room of his home… “This is about keeping Christianity in front of the public so that it doesn’t die. I want to keep Christianity on the table, in the household, however I can do it.”

We could just say he was confused. Or, more likely, cynical. Last I checked, Christianity was in no danger of dying out. And tagging music or food with the “christian” label never seemed like a good way to actually be a Christian. But I do think he’ll make plenty of money from all the publicity he is getting. (That, and any anti-semitic foodies will buy the stuff in bulk.)

Yesterday, I wrote about parenting in a way that caused offense to a number of my friends — including my wife. For this, I ask your forgiveness. Partly, I wrote to get a reaction — with a title like “Radioactive Content”, this should not be a surprise. I’ve revised it since to be less reactionary, but I spent a lot of time last night and this morning thinking about it. A good part of that time, I spent obsessing about what I should go say to defend myself, trying to come up with something devastating that I could say to make it obvious I was right and everyone else had better toe the line. This is something I struggle with constantly: trying to bend the world to my will, to convince others that I am right, that I deserve to be listened to. Of course, you all know better. I’m a narcissistic blow-hard. So I sat down this morning and read over Do not Resent, Do not React, Keep Inner Stillness by Metropolitan Jonah. In it, His Beatitude reviews everything I’ve learned from a number of Orthodox writers, but it was a review I needed this morning — a reminder not to provoke others, not to “enflame the passions”. It was a reminder to keep from causing resentment as well as holding onto my own resentment. It was a reminder that I am, as we pray before communion, first among sinners. I ask your forgiveness.

It is very difficult to write about a moral position without offending someone. is probably right: I should just keep my mouth shut, or, in the case of this blog, not purposefully post incendiary statements. I’ll try to do that more in the future. For now, though, and I have been having a very heated discussion about what I wrote. While she agrees with my practical reasons for two parents, she disagrees with the way I expressed it. She and others said I came across as “smug”. This leaves me confused. I don’t think I’m better than others. I admit I’ve had a blessed, and, in many ways, privileged life. I don’t think this makes me better than anyone else. I don’t think this makes anyone else less “worthy” than me. But still, that seems to be the sentiment I convey to many people. It could well be that I’ve been so isolated in my experience that I can’t convey to others the practical reasons for two parents, so I’ve challenged to do it without offending people. Her background is completely different than mine. She may have a better chance of writing about this subject without offending others. I still think it is nigh-on impossible to write that children need two parents without offending people, but if she manages to do it, I’ll gladly admit it. (Update: She did it.)