I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned on this blog before (because it isn’t something I’m particularly proud of) that I received my Bachelor’s degree from Oral Roberts University. When I say that I’m not “proud”, I’m not talking about the quality of the education that I received there. On the contrary, I think that their academics when I attended were excellent — largely because Oral (who was president at the time) and other high-ranking administration officials purposely ignored the curricula, leaving that in the more capable hands of the faculty. In fact, Oral had a stated policy at that time that he would not read any book published by a faculty member, so he wouldn’t be forced to fire them. No, what has embarrassed me about ORU ever since I was a sophomore is its hollow, camera-facing facade: the image portrayed to television viewers across the nation of a highly homogenous, straight-laced but happy population of brothers and sisters in Christ who all think that the Oral Roberts ministry is the best thing since the original Pentecost.

Despite his showmanship, I’ve always believed that Oral was basically sincere. I really do think he believes that what he preaches is the truth. I don’t feel the same way about his son, Richard. Even back when he and his first wife, Patti, led the World Action Singers (we liked to call them the “Worldly Action Swingers”) on stage, he has always impressed me as the central incarnation of the insincerity and hypocrisy that infected the Oral Roberts ministry and spread into the university. He was the spoiled child of a great father. Before he divorced his first wife, the official policy of the University and the Oral Roberts Evangelical Association was to terminate anyone who got divorced. Any guesses as to when that policy was modified?

After I left ORU, I tried to have as little to do with the place as possible. I became even more disgusted with it when Richard Roberts assumed the presidency in 1993. The Alumni Association keeps sending me mail and email, mostly looking for contributions, which I often report as spam. But one message I received this morning caught my eye. It quoted the following statement from George Pearsons, Chairman of the ORU Board of Regents:

Today, a letter was sent from Richard Roberts to the Board of Regents of Oral Roberts University tendering his resignation as President of Oral Roberts University effective today, November 23, 2007.

The Board of Regents will meet Monday and Tuesday, November 26 and 27, 2007 to determine action in the search process for a new president.

Executive Regent Billy Joe Daugherty will continue to assume administrative responsibilities of the Office of the President, working together with Chancellor Oral Roberts, until the Regents meeting.

In his letter of resignation to the Board, Richard Roberts said, “I love ORU with all my heart. I love the students, faculty, staff and administration and I want to see God’s best for all of them.”

I had been completely unaware of a scandal brewing at ORU involving the alleged misappropriation of funds and personnel for personal and political purposes, centering on none other than Richard Roberts.

Here’s a brief timeline of the University’s history. How we used to joke about that 900-foot Jesus! The bronze hands in front of the City of Faith turned green almost as soon as they were put in place — a color that many students and faculty members considered apt. But the position of the hands is not correct — they should have been outstretched to receive your cash.

It seems that I’m not the only one happy to see King Richard abdicate.

As I said, I haven’t been keeping up with anyone at ORU. I don’t know if any of my old professors are still there, or how the academic quality has fared after all the money left. I wish them all the best — but before they can get better they’ve got to get real.

It’s an old, sad song that’s heard many times a day all around the world, yet its pathos never fails to bring a tear — especially when you’re close to the subject. Perhaps you’ve heard it before, or even sung it yourself. It’s called “Hard Drive Failure and I Ain’t Got No Backup”, and it recently received a soulful rendition by my sister-in-law. She and her family came to visit for Thanksgiving, so of course she brought her laptop for me to fix since I’m the techie in the family.

“Read failure on internal hard drive,” the system stated unemotionally upon attempting to boot, laconically omitting the grave implications of this state of affairs.

It didn’t take long to figure out that this drive was beyond repair — or even a temporary cryogenic resuscitation. I was just about ready to install a new drive and start from scratch when my oldest son called to wish us a Happy Thanksgiving. He works at Best Buy while on hiatus from college, and he told me that their Geek Squad offers a data recovery service that has a relatively high rate of success. They can remove the platter from a failing drive and transfer the data onto DVD’s. My sister-in-law was happy to give this a try.

Of course, they weren’t open on Thanksgiving. Nor was the Geek Squad available on the day after — they were all covering the Black Friday sales floor. Finally, they were able to take it in on Saturday. My sister-in-law paid extra to expedite service, since she wanted me to setup everything on the new hard drive and she needed to return home on Monday. We waited in anticipation all that day and the next morning, hoping for good news.

Every now and then one of us would say, “Well, I sure hope they can get that data back. All those documents and pictures — not to mention the email history.”

To which everyone would nod and say, “Yep.”

“From now on I want you to backup your system at least weekly, ” I would lecture.

“Oh, I will. If only they can recover it all for me.”

“Yeah — as long as the platter itself wasn’t damaged, they think they can. Tell me again exactly what happened when it failed…”

“I was just working along, reading my email, and the whole thing suddenly shut off. When I turned it back on, I got that message about a read failure.”

“And was there any unusual sound associated with that event?”

Her husband chimed in, “Oh yeah, it sounded like a jet airplane taking off!”

“Kind of a high-pitched screeching noise?” I asked.

“Uh huh.”

“Like the sound of 200 billion bits of data screaming in horror as they were being flayed alive by the head dragging across the disk?”

“Maybe.”

“Well that’s probably not a good sign.”

Sure enough, the members of the Geek Squad were unable to recover any data. “It’s fried,” they said. “Scrambled” seemed technically more accurate to me.

We retrieved the empty corpse of my sister-in-law’s computer, along with a new hard drive (at least she doubled her storage), and I spent five and a half hours yesterday reinstalling the operating system (XP SP2), downloading and installing the 122 updates, and setting up Microsoft Office 2007. I faced only one glitch: for some reason the installation couldn’t locate a suitable driver for the Ethernet controller — which severely limits connectivity. Using the Dell service tag number, I was able to locate the driver online and download it (what would you do if you had no other computers? I couldn’t help thinking). Her system doesn’t have a floppy drive and somehow I’ve misplaced my USB thumb-drive, so I had to burn a DVD just to transfer the driver to her system. But it installed fine, and by the end of three very good football games and several bottles of very nice wine, we declared the operation a poignantly limited success.

The No. 1 Brownie camera, introduced in 1901, used size 117 film.

The story behind xkcd (thanks, Eric). Speaking of which…

Art imitating life imitating game imitating life (sort of).

Speaking of imitating life… what happens when robots die?

Care and feeding of your own personal nerd (thanks again, Eric).

Haiku for the 21st century.

I can’t wait to get the next version of FeedDemon — it comes with an RSS-Overload Panic Button.

Widget watch: Jim Redmond uses my OPML Browser widget for WordPress.

Thanks for the link-love, Matt!

Constancy: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 declares the constancy of true love.

The Stupid Filter project (thanks, Assaf). I wonder if I’d be the beneficiary or the victim of this effort — or both. Hrafn has more thoughts on this.

Woo-hoo! Pandora’s got classical! I’m Bachin’ out right now.

Regardless of your stand on the vaccine controversies, if you value individual liberties you’ve got to be troubled by this.

An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything (thanks, Doc).

While we’re on the subject of unified theories…

Never getting off of your cloud.

If I did nothing but post links to everything brilliant that Reg writes, I’d have more than enough content. Here’s how to tip your hand to your programming partners.

Tish made USA Today, for her support of the Glaucoma Foundation in Blogathon 2007.

Cooper answered my three things meme tag with books, ideals, and a little fear — with peace and pornography on the side.

The Ominous Comma explains RSS.

Me on TechRepublic: keeping the books, hunting up business, and nailing down niches.

Thanks for the link-love, Mikko, Tim, and Eric!

For some inexplicable reason, my wife often gets confused by the controls for our TVs. I can’t understand the problem — it’s all pretty simple, really.

The simplest case is the TV in the exercise room. We have one remote for the TV, and one for the satellite receiver. You control volume and power from the TV remote, and you change channels on the receiver’s remote. But of course the TV remote has a channel control as well, so my wife sometimes accidentally changes that one and loses the picture entirely. I don’t know why she can’t remember that all you have to do when that happens is press the “AVX” button to get back to the incoming line. That’s intuitive, isn’t it? Why can’t she remember that AVX stands for, um, let’s see… ahem… yes — it’s right there on Wikipedia: Catalina Airport. No that’s not it — let’s try Google: AVanti eXperimental, Avid Visual Extensions, AntiVirus Expert, Available XML… oh I don’t know, just remember it already!

Then we have a Hitachi big screen in the den. We have three remotes for that setup, because we also have a DVD/VHS combo attached. All three of these remotes have a channel selector, so the chance of screwing that up doubles compared to the exercise room TV. Also, each of the sources has its own input channel to the TV. To enable the satellite TV signal, you press “VID 1″ on the TV remote. For DVD, use “VID 2″ and for VHS use “VID 3″. Often someone sets something on top of the remotes, pressing who knows what buttons, and the picture disappears. All you have to do in this situation is first check the input source (VID 1/2/3) and then check the channel selection on the satellite remote. Oh, and undo PiP and freeze frame. But my wife can never remember this simple sequence, so she always calls me in to fix it.

In our bedroom we have a wall-mounted Hitachi plasma, but we bought it a couple of years after the big screen so of course the TV remote is completely different. For one thing, the volume controls are the smallest buttons on the remote — you always have to hunt for them, and you often end up pressing something else instead, like the channel selector (which again, you’re supposed to control from the satellite remote). To keep things simple, we got a DVD/VHS combo for this room that’s identical to the one in the den. Of course, I did wire things together differently here, because I wanted to be able to record the incoming signal — so the satellite receiver feeds the DHD/VHS, which in turn feeds the TV. That means that you have to set the combo on VHS to see TV, and if you accidentally change the channel on the VHS you lose the signal (it’s supposed to be on channel 3… I think). At least you only have one TV input to worry about — but we keep rolling over some button on the remote that changes that. I haven’t figured out which one it is yet, so I just get up and press the “INPUT” button on the TV until it gets back to “Composite”. Simple, right? Unless the power goes out (which only happens every few weeks around here) — then the satellite receiver usually loses its channel database and has to be recycled and you have to reselect VHS and set the channel on the combo and select “Composite” for the input signal on the TV all over again.

Oh, and don’t forget to say “Simon says“.

Walking the dogs this morning, I ran into one of my neighbors whose name I can never seem to remember. I keep wanting to call him Mike, but the one thing I do know about his name is that it’s not Mike — because I called him that one time before and he replied, “No, it’s not Mike, it’s _______”. Now if I could only remember what was in the _______.

“Hi, Chip!” says NotMike, as we approach each other from opposite directions, each walking our respective dogs.

“Hi howya doin!” I reply, trying not to make it too obvious that my greeting is devoid of proper nouns. The look in his eyes and the way he says “Chip” make it clear that he knows that I know that he knows that I don’t know his name. I haven’t for some time now, and every time we meet he greets me by name and I don’t call him Mike or anything else. But I’m too embarassed to simply ask him his name again, and he doesn’t want to embarass me further by just saying, “it’s _______” again.

But it does seem like he should be able to carelessly slip it into the conversation if he really wanted to be nice about it. He could say something like, “Yesterday my wife asked me, ‘When will you be home for dinner, _______?’” and then I’d quickly memorize it forever. Except then I might mistakenly think his name was “Asshole” or “Aftersix”.

Why can’t he have his name sown into the front of his wool cap or tattooed on a visible body part, so I could discreetly read it? But names in tattoos are almost always either girlfriends or moms, and nobody has their name sewn on their clothing after about the third grade.

Couldn’t he stick a temporary name tag on his chest? He could excuse it by saying he forgot to remove it from his jacket after attending a conference the day before.

NotMike’s dog Kiki (funny how I can remember her name) was always cautious around Halley — but now that I have two over-exuberant yellow labs, NotMike has to keep Kiki on a short leash when around them. Kiki strains at the leash and growls at my two puppies, who likewise strain at their leashes in an attempt to inflict on Kiki their standard greeting of Death by Licking. It provides a good excuse for cutting our uneasy conversation short and proceeding on our separate ways.

“Goodbye, Chip!” says NotMike.

“Have a good one!” says I, not calling him Mike.

Maybe one of these days I’ll call him “NotMike” and see what happens.

UPDATE:  I finally apologized for forgetting his name and asked him what it was.  He replied, “Mike.”  So not only could I not remember his name, I also couldn’t remember the wrong name I called him that one time.  Unless, of course, he read this post and he’s playing with my mind.

Port 115 is used for sftp. The “s” stands for simple, not secure.

One of the more bleak prognostications for global warming (thanks for making my day, Paul).

Speaking of warming, Brent has some helpful hints for really heating things up.

Nick Carr on Marshall McLuhan’s electric media and how the web is and isn’t McLuhan’s vision incarnate.

Speaking of interactive media — iHate: automated troll content generator.

The Art of Hyperlinking. Is this link long enough for you?

I think we need to introduce homographic homophonic autantonyms into programming languages.

Sure, I can beat 1282 — how about 1189? I had a beer at Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem with some folks from Interchange while I was in Nottingham on a Crusade business trip.

Brian responds to my meme tag on the Three Things You Can’t Let Go. I once knew a young lady who wouldn’t let go of the pillow, but I managed to avoid suffocation anyway.

Thanks for the link-love, Assaf and lazycoder!

Widget watch: 4:14 uses my OPML Browser widget.

Last week, Mark Dykeman tagged me with the Three Things You Can’t Let Go meme. Hmm… did you ever notice that most bloggers capitalize every word in a meme title, even if they don’t capitalize their post titles? Or is it just me?

Mark innovated on the meme by dividing his three things equally between physical, mental, and emotional hangers-on. I like that twist, and will follow it here. BTW Mark, don’t ever let go of that desire to become a paid, professional writer. It will happen.

1. Physical: getting a little personal, aren’t we? But I do let go of it after a while, and I always wash my hands afterwards. Something else… I know — the handlebar of a roller-coaster. I’ve been known to delay the operation of a ride for twenty minutes while the attendant pried my white-knuckled fingers off… actually, I made that up. I love roller-coasters — it’s my wife that gets all woozy on them. OK, well the one physical item that I have had in my possession for the longest period of time is a Siamese sword that was given to me by one of my Dad’s Air Force buddies after he returned from Thailand when I was five years old. He handed me the sword and gravely remarked, “Here kid, go get your sister.” I dutifully unsheathed the weapon and pursued my screaming sister throughout the house, while my mother chased me in a panic and my Dad and his buddy laughed so hard they almost couldn’t breathe. After a lecture on valid targets, I was allowed to keep the sword — which stays with me in my office in case of an attack by xkcd Ninjas.
2. Mental: I have no trouble at all letting go of my mind — in fact I often let it wander off on its own. But it does keep coming back to certain topics over and over again. One of those is a growing sense of the triviality of my life and of all the things that I once considered so grand and imposing. But I see more humor in everything, which is more than adequate compensation for the disappointment.
3. Emotional: lost loves never quite leave you, especially those in which you invested more than you had, and I’ve done that more times than I care to remember. I’m extremely lucky that my wife and I have been together for more than twelve years now — if I ever lost her, that would be the very most difficult to let go.

Damn, that sure got serious at the end. Quick, think of something funny. I know, imagine me scanning my blogroll trying to come up with three people to tag who won’t think of this as such a burden and waste of time that they’d like to chase me around the house with a Siamese sword.

Let’s see, how about Cooper, Tish, and Brian. Anyone else who’d like to jump on the memewagon, pingback here and I’ll link to you.

Yesterday my lovely wife — wanting to quickly conclude business on a topic that had occupied too much of our time already — said, “Let’s put this thing to misery.”

This reminded me of numerous butchered sayings from our shared past. One weekend many years ago, we slept in late due to too much revelry the night before. After we had consumed a gallon or more of coffee and had eaten a bit, my lovely wife suggested popping a cork so we could “put some fur on the cat.” Of course the correct form is “to take some hair of the dog that bit you,” a reference to medicinal practices rooted in sympathetic magic — but that morning my wife’s version seemed appropriate: I felt like a cat that needed to have some fur pasted back on.

Scott Adams is famous for collecting mixed and mangled metaphors in his DNRC Newsletter, where they’re called “Induhvidual Quotes.” It seems like a lot of these get uttered by people in sales, marketing, or management. My wife used to work in sales for a software company that is still my client. Their VP and General Manager, Bill, is a great guy — but sometimes he can’t speak as fast as he’d like to communicate, and in the process familiar phrases get left behind to fend for themselves and cross-breed into the most grotesque and humorous verbal bastardizations. He’s so famous for them that within the company they’re called Billisms, and someone used to be assigned the responsibility of keeping a list of them. I don’t know if list that still exists, but I can remember a few.

Once we were having high-level product strategy discussions, and Bill said “I’m tired of following behind the rest of the industry. We need to jump out in front of the bandwagon.” Considering what usually follows from that action, the metaphor seemed appropriate.

When asked how his day was: “Did you ever have one of those days where everything is going along fine, and then someone throws a monkey at you?”

Or remembering someone who received ill treatment: “she got raped over the coals.”

After a big meal at a fine restaurant: “Whew, my eyes ate too much.”

Expressing intense agreement: “He’s not just blowing Dixie.”

Brainstorming: “I’m just shooting off the top of my head.”

Long before becoming VP: “I’m always the defuncto boss-like person.”

Do you know anyone who generates these kinds of sayings? What are some good ones?

P(18): 114 is the 18th term in the Padovan sequence, with the initial conditions P(0) = P(1) = P(2) = 1.

More fun burning hot links (thanks, Shelley).

Speaking of burning…

Leopard has no taste for Java, which kills the Java community’s taste for Apple. Mikael Grev voices the Java reaction, in Java. The outcry falls on deaf Leopard ears (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Thoughts on the status of verbs in OOP.

Everything gets simpler in Ruby, even point-free hylomorphisms.

Doug posted a tip on checking email addresses in Javascript using regular expressions, and then Ade improved on it in a comment showcasing Prototype’s $$ function.

Mohan provides some possible strategies for thwarting domain realtors. It’s good to brainstorm on this, but I suspect that the devious would devise means for getting around most of these suggestions. For instance, forcing the purchaser to hold the domain for a longer period of time might be easily accomodated by offering the domains under a sort of “rent to own” scheme: you pay us, and we’ll point the domain to your site even though we technically still own it, and it becomes yours when the ownership transfer restriction period expires. Raising domain prices wouldn’t help much, because it’s the specific names that are in demand that have more value — higher base prices would cut into squatters’ profits, but wouldn’t eliminate it unless the prices were too high across the board.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin (thanks, Paul).

Thanks for including me on your blogroll, David!

Thanks for the link-love, Randy and Arjan!

Widget watch: BOHEA uses my tag cloud widget for WordPress.