This world is a pitiful mess at best, and you won’t get out of here alive.
So I’ll summarize the nature of my recent sorrows with this workstation. I updated the BIOS from around v.3 to v.14 and the settings were all whacked, unbeknownst to me. I honestly worried that the hardware was failing on me because my three favorite OSes were handling the crazy settings differently. Finally I got a clue from CentOS and inspected the BIOS. Among other things, it had been set to treat the drives like older ATA hardware. The proper default is the AHCI setting for Linux, and this happens to be a very fast modern high-end drive. Once I fixed that (along with a handful of other goofy settings) everything went back to computer nirvana. So I’m running my preference, Debian Jessie. Enough adventure, please.
I lost a couple of days’ worth of work, but that’s no disaster. I suppose the biggest thing I lost was the raw images from the Draper Lake ride, but I’ll shed no tears because I’ll go back out and shoot what I want or need sometime later. There are only so many picturesque spots around that gigantic red-dirt pond. That recreational facilities are being upgraded, but once they flood West Elm Creek the campground and motorbike trails will be under water. Back when Draper first filled up, the entire area was open to off-road motor sports. Now the one last area they are permitted is about to go away.
I’ve ridden and describe the Grand Boulevard Trail on this blog before. About half the distance on that trail is a high-crime area. During the summer it’s possible I’ll be accosted by thugs. My trust is in the Lord but I won’t fling a challenge in His face. The image at the top is from the trail where it wanders through Trosper Park. Troper Park is a hang out for gay meet-ups, but they tend to avoid the bike path. I can handle gay come-ons with grace, but some of these folks are not so polite. The polite ones hang out in other places. It was a nice picnic spot yesterday. I noticed a plaque on the bridge that indicated if your bike weighs close to 5 tons, you need to send it across ahead of you and follow after it clears the landing on the other side.
Can you and a dozen friends together pedal something that heavy? Could you be that heavy?
I’m entering a time when I will focus on reformatting and editing all my Bible study books. I’m working on Revelation right now and I savor it so much I’m moving too slowly. Part of the purpose for taking those long rides is to give my heart room to crowd out the silly concerns of my pitiful human reasoning. Extended physical exertion reduces the background noise.
Did you know that the major point behind John’s Apocalypse was how to handle human government? He knew that the last vestige of covenant government was gone, and could see how utterly dehumanizing Roman style government was. It was the end of Eastern feudalism, the thing for which we are all hard-wired by God, and the rise of the secular state. Even the church, founded on that Ancient Near Eastern tribal structure, was being sucked into the matrix of cerebral organization. The gospel would overcome, but the people would lose most of their moral power to resist sin. The revelation of Law as God’s moral character would be swamped. It was all driven out into some imaginary “objective truth.” How was he supposed to address that horror?
The ultimate Law of God is Himself. Faith is ancient Eastern feudal loyalty to His expressed wishes. Get to know Him by examining His covenants in their contexts. This is the power to live in a crazy world; it’s also the power to become so radically different that more ordinary souls will be puzzled enough to wonder, and maybe even moved to ask what it’s all about.
