Mission of Mercy

Posted on January 1, 2014 by ehurst

Your fundamental mission is always divine mercy.

Anything you do is holy if your first desire is to please God. His justice and mercy are all one thing, impossible to comprehend for the human mind. Ill informed though we may be of just what His justice is in any context, it is the desire that imparts holiness. We go into this fully expecting to learn better as we go.

What most people fail to realize is that this constitutes what is actually behind the New Testament term “evangelism.” To walk in the justice of divine mercy is evangelism. You aim to be a fount of sacrificial love, love as God defines it. Whatever you might say then merely follows upon your actions. This should put to rest the goofy salesman behavior most Western Christians consider “soul winning.”

Rather, people who live in divine justice are soul magnets. All the advantages guys and gals want from Game is merely a poor shadow of the drawing power of the Holy Spirit of God glowing in your mere presence. But while we might recognize this, we hardly aim at it.

That’s because living God’s divine justice is its own reward. Once you dive in deep and fully immerse yourself in the powers of the Age to Come, you just don’t care that much about this world any more. You care enough about God’s justice to extend it over everyone who enters your orbit. Only the mere necessity of dragging around the flesh places any limits on you. Since you cannot be all things to all people, you must discern when you cannot do someone good because whatever makes them unique includes a threat to your mission operations.

God is able to make you fruitful, but He is also able to give you clear vision for simply cannot and should not be. He can turn your mistakes into miracles; he can turn your weakness in power. He might decide to let you visit the role of Job for awhile, too. Let us be so faithful as he, because the same God may also call us to the blessings of Joseph. Whatever he put his hand to, it prospered.

All humans are called to this fundamental mission of learning to see and act on the invisible moral imperatives. Such imperatives are consistent with reality; they run according to the nature of the cosmos. If all you seek are the promised blessings of the Law Covenants, then you’ll never understand the real treasure of Heaven. Those blessings come in measure as needed for you to carry out your mission. It will be a generous overflow. Whatever God provides, you could always easily do it with less. Only your perception keeps you from seeing how glorious it is.

It doesn’t matter what you do for a living, or don’t do. When your basic activities are carried out as expressions of divine mercy in your life, you are on mission.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Mission of Mercy

Signs of Life

Posted on January 1, 2014 by ehurst

Life sucks on this plane of existence. It’s not as if you can’t find glimmers of grace and mercy, but this world is damaged goods and will not be redeemed. English translations of Scripture routinely confuse things by the ambiguity of “world” when it means either people, the planet, this plane of existence, the current age before The End, etc.

I’m not impressed by the current arbitrary marking of when one year ends and the next begins. For human existence, it makes more sense to begin the new year at some point in our experiential cycle of weather and seasons. I don’t celebrate New Years Eve/Day as most others around me do. I went to bed at the same time as usual, having consumed one glass of wine at dinner. I got up early, though just a bit later than usual for me — 5:45 AM.

Overnight some juvenile punk had celebrated by vandalizing a bunch of vehicles in our isolated community. He went along with a container of cheap table mustard and black marker scrawling obscenities on cars and trucks. Some was random, but we are quite certain it was targeting in our case. We got more mustard than anyone. My wife went around the neighborhood taking pictures for folks and someone has called the local law enforcement.

Of course, local community management is unresponsive. None of the staff lives here so they aren’t bothered by such things. After cleaning off my own vehicle — the permanent marker yielded to hand cleaner solvent — I spotted some shattered glass in the street near the main entrance, so I grabbed a broom and swept it off to the side. A survey indicates almost a dozen vehicles marked and/or splattered. Dozens of full trash carts were dumped and the contents scattered. The spillage had shoe prints it, not animal tracks.

Most of us suspect a particular little thug who has done some horrendous stuff lately, but management can’t be bothered to kick the family out as had been the policy at one time in the past. This kid has seriously injured other kids in full view of adults and has been implicated in other forms of vandalism in the past. He’s pretty defiant about it all, showing no sign of remorse. The mother was home one day when the police came to talk to her about her son, but she hid in the house and refused to answer the door.

Yeah, Happy New Year.

Posted in personal | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Signs of Life

One Shepherd’s Style

Posted on December 31, 2013 by ehurst

You can’t pretend you are someone else for very long.

Keeping secrets is dangerous, but keeping them from yourself is the most dangerous of all. I don’t want to know yours, but if my mission exposes me to secrets, I can keep them. I still hold stuff in confidence according to agreements I signed long ago. This, while I know secrecy is a blatant violation of God’s Laws. That is, I recognize domains and authority.

The shepherd doesn’t want any authority, but knows God has appointed him to it. He accepts the decisions of God, even when they come through men who hate God. The shepherd knows how human authority and politics work. As a Christian Mystic, I remain disentangled from the results; I am faithful to my appointed duties. Whatever I am building is not of this world.

The utility of this is placing me where He wants to display His glory. It would be like a divine secret agent, but I would never hide my ethical and moral philosophy. Rather, they will likely remain incomprehensible to anyone tied to this realm of existence. My morals are mysterious, not secret. I have boundaries and I can usually summarize them for any worldly context. I can’t imagine a need to hide from anyone where those boundaries are.

I’m not ambitious with hidden agendas. I’m not keeping any options open for my own welfare because I’m not that interested in human-grade welfare in the first place. I’m not that interested in my own interests, as most folks would think of it. My real agenda rests in Heaven, so I can afford a large measure of self-denial. So I’m not looking for an opportunity like a stepping stone to greater things — I already have the greater things. I’m looking for a place to exercise my gifts for their own sake.

I prosper under pressure. Not that I always get impossible things done, but I tend to do well even when there’s too much to do. I’m glad to hear about my superior’s priorities and willing to pursue them honestly because I really don’t have any of my own. That is, my own priority is blessing everyone I can reach, and I make no pretense that “blessing” means fixing anything in this world. I’ll do what the boss wants because he wants it, unless I really can’t. Then I’ll tell him and try to explain why I can’t, and leave if he can’t tolerate that. There’s no conflict. I’m not interested in fixing his problems or setting things right for the world. I’m convinced that simply is not possible. So I relax under pressure.

Coworkers are not my problem. I might have to deal with them, but I view them as a variable. I accept them as a part of my reality and won’t waste much time fantasizing about what they could be if they would simply change. Changing them is not my mission; God takes care of that for me. I can’t imagine anything anyone could offer that would persuade me to subvert the process and procedures. Not in the sense of hide-bound, but I have no needs that would benefit from sneaking past the boundaries. I’ll be faithful to what I can tell is the intent of the rules without any kind of wild semantic wrangling. I prefer sticking with the rules as simply as possible, even though I know no human can write rules that fit every possible variation.

I don’t give up; I’ll keep trying when I’m absolutely certain I’ll fail. You’ll get 100% of my human resources. My primary drive is commitment, not results. When I’m comfortable that God wants me involved in something, obeying the boss is obeying God. Frankly, I don’t want to be in the boss’s place. I’m content to make his job possible, even pleasant. I want to be an asset, a solution and not a problem. I’m content with the things I know I should handle. I’ll let the boss take all the credit and try to make him look good. My reward comes from obeying God that way.

This is who I am.

Posted in personal | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on One Shepherd’s Style

Truth and Facts

Posted on December 30, 2013 by ehurst

Just because I am a mystic doesn’t mean I ignore the facts.

I am still trapped in this broken reality and still subject to how it works. That’s why I make so much of God’s Law Covenants. While they point to ineffable truth, they still demand much of human flesh in the process.

Granted, I cling to an intellectual approach very much at odds with most of this world. Yet I have always maintained that the biblical mysticism does not reject what most men consider reason and logic. What it does is regard Aristotle’s logic as insufficient to handle divine truth. Such logic is just fine if you ignore morality and the Spirit Realm from whence it descends.

We do not deny the observations of science insofar as they go. We deny that science can arrive at what really matters, and most certainly cannot answer questions of moral imperative.

How much of a computer ministry would I have if I ignored computer science? I don’t wave my Bible over the machinery, nor stand around it holding hands with the owners, chanting to cast out demons. I do what just about every other computer technician does investigating the complaints of the user. I do pray before I arrive at the machine, but that’s usually a request for a clear mind and sharp memory.

Sometimes I pray for patience to handle the owner’s foolish notions about computers and what to expect from them.

For most issues, there is more than one way to handle things. Sometimes I take the long way around and realize that only later. But I seldom give up until I can pin it down to something I know about or realize it is beyond my expertise. Sometimes I can research it for awhile and figure it out. If not, I tell them I cannot help them and make a referral.

I tell the facts. I don’t offer them some palliative that might make us both feel good while failing to actually change the facts. It’s a ministry, so I have nothing to sell and nothing to gain from faking it. Given my ardent support for Linux over Windows, I still may never mention it because it just doesn’t seem to fit the occasion. Context is everything, but my preference for Linux is not everyone’s answer.

Your mission in this life must inevitably include giving the best you know. You should already know that what’s best for you may not work for others. Make a conscious effort to avoid the trap of needing affirmation from others for what drives you. If it isn’t already inside you, then there’s something missing and you are going to do more damage than good. You will wind up pursuing that affirmation instead of the truth.

Truth cannot be promoted with deception; God does not gain glory from manipulation.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Truth and Facts

Truth and Humor

Posted on December 29, 2013 by ehurst

Humility generally means not taking yourself too seriously. Humility is the inheritance of not taking the rest of this fallen world too seriously. It stands on the ultimate importance of truth, something rooted outside this realm of existence. Truth cannot be found in this world, but it can be indicated. That’s the meaning of parable and symbolism. Truth is ineffable because it is the Person of God. So long as we are in a human form, we are simply another crazy character in this mad stage-play.

Such is the primary reason for the narrative of the Fall. What you have around you is inherently deceptive. To then build upon what man can come up with from his own resources in this world is building on sand. Sooner or later it will wash away and your house will fall. Building on the bedrock of truth takes a whole lot longer; you may never get very far, but at least it will still be there when time drifts along.

Thus, the core of humility is the image of mortality. If nothing else, an earthquake should be enough to humble you. Or a tsunami, or a meteorite, or just about any of the other calamities that befall humans beyond all human control. We are dust in the wind.

Humility cannot breed arrogance, but fools might not know the difference. That is, fools will mistake your comfort and self-confidence for arrogance. Let me offer a few proverbs…

Never accept a moral judgment against your sense of humor. Own it. If it offends those around you, hang out with other folks. Never commit yourself to someone who isn’t prepared to tolerate your worst side, and vice versa.

Keep laughing when you leave their company. Attempting to turn the tables and make them feel bad for rejecting you is merely adding to the lie. Rejection itself is funny.

It’s never about you; don’t try to make it so.

Your sense of humor reveals your convictions, sometimes against your conscience. Adjust your conscience; it is variable.

Righteous indignation is unrighteous in humans. It’s also hilarious.

Anger is the backside of humor. Get to know them both, because where you have one you will always have the other.

Chase through your soul anything that makes you uncomfortable. You will eventually track it down to its source. Only then can you burn its nest and be free from it.

Do the work; don’t cheat by taking drugs. It’s like breaking into someone else’s home because you can’t own it, and can’t possibly use it, until you have earned it.

If you can see it, or touch it, or name it in human language, it cannot be sacred. Holiness is a quality of reflecting eternal glory. Symbols of God, symbols of our devotion to Him, are not themselves God.

All of Creation is a mere tool-set for God’s glory.

Humility is no excuse for failing to serve where the Spirit leads. Your worthiness was never the issue; your calling is. The likelihood of success by human measure was never the issue; your obedience is.

If you can’t imagine God laughing at you, then you don’t understand God. If you laugh with Him, you’ll be far closer to Him than you can imagine.

Never take proverbs too seriously.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Truth and Humor

Fate versus Glory

Posted on December 29, 2013 by ehurst

Fate as commonly understood is pure myth.

There is certainly no harm in using the word much as you would any other literary term. It plays a part in language and communication. However, to imagine a force controlling your human destiny separate from the hand of God is deeply deceptive. The problem is tightly wound here: You cannot righteously oppose apparent fate until you purge the false perceptions of which fate is a part.

More than once I’ve written at length the soul’s triage of context.

1. A strong move of the Spirit and convictions.
2. General principles of divine justice as currently understood.
3. Human reason (works better if conditioned on ANE epistemology).
4. Your whims and inclinations.

Feel free to rewrite that according to your own best understanding, but this is a rough summary of how I approach the question of, “What do I do now?” But this works only if you commit yourself to preparing the ground on which it is built. There is a sense in which you will spend the rest of your human existence renovating and fixing what you build as your frame of reference. You should expect to make adjustments up to the very end. This is what is behind the expression in the New Testament: “I die daily” (1 Corinthians 15:31). The old fleshly dominance dies by degrees and will never die completely until literal death.

As always, the objective is not objective, but a clarity of personal commitment first. We are striving to participate in the glory of God. Fighting one’s apparent fate is not a matter of whether you might possibly overcome, but whether such resistance is where His glory is found — not for everyone, but where you find His glory. You cannot know whether you should fight or go along or withdraw or any other choice until you have a clear view of that divine priority.

The result in concrete terms is generally mere entertainment for us. Was my prayer for a certain thing granted? I realize my human self is gratified in the thing, but my spirit rejoices in how it signals I am grasping God’s intent. If the thing never arrives, I feel certain I’ll stop wanting it soon enough. No, not everything; the flesh remains until I leave it on this plane. I’m still tied to it for now. A part of that quantum moral reasoning is recognizing when something seems tied to flesh and when it is does not, or when it is far more complicated than that.

Part of our fallen nature is an awareness of time and space as a stream of experience. The Spirit Realm suffers none of that; such consciousness is in the package with the Fall. Not the space-time continuum itself, but our awareness of it, how we experience it. So we have to recognize that pulling the trigger at one moment in a particular context is righteous, but a few seconds later would be wrong. It’s not a question of the trigger pull itself, nor even having a trigger to pull, but the shifting sands of human awareness.

Examine your own soul. Go where your convictions lead you at any given moment. Do whatever is apparent to you as necessary or just. Redemption is not in the doing, but in the care and commitment. You’ll get things wrong all the time; you should expect that. Own it. Be humble about it even as you proudly assert you were obeying your best impulse at the time. It may well be that in the sum of things you could not have done better. The humility is in the assurance that we participate in the broad ultimate failure of being a fallen human. Open that quantum recognition of simultaneous multiple levels of reasoning, and recognize you won’t really ever know until you are gone from this world. We are sampling the divine, tasting the Spirit Realm of operation and the ineffable joy of things to come (Hebrews 6:1-12).

If the context seems to hand you a role you never expected, run through the triage; sense your own convictions first. If the question hangs on something arising from human aspirations, engage it with full cynicism, the cynicism of the Spirit that flatly denies it will ever matter very much regardless of outcome. It may well be the right thing for you to do, but as a community of faith we generally avoid engaging human political actions. Within whatever course of action that consumes your human time and resources, keep an eye on the divine glory. There are boundaries and you will have to stop. Death in pursuit of the divine is just a circumstance. If you haven’t already laid hold of your own personal cross, you aren’t ready for anything. If you haven’t yet become eager for the end of this life, you aren’t ready for very much.

There is no particular nobility in accepting or opposing your apparent fate. There is great nobility of spirit if you are focused on much higher concerns. Fate is just a word for things as they come at you, things over which you have no real control. What you control is your response.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fate versus Glory

Job 21

Posted on December 28, 2013 by ehurst

Job finally gets around to a direct contradiction of the trio, while at the same time pointing out the subtle blasphemy of their words.

The first few verses are surprisingly terse. He begins by asking that they console him by listening, because their long winded accusations weren’t much comfort. They’ll get their chance to mock him again soon enough. If Job were lamenting bad treatment from mere men, he might expect some politicking sympathy. But this is God Almighty roughing him up, so what place does politicking have? Why would they pretend to curry God’s favor as if He were a mere human ruler? God needs no defense among men; He is the Creator and Lord of all. Job’s impatience with their silly posturing is wholly justified. Meanwhile, they should take a fresh look at what horrors are upon Job. This is no small discomfort, but the mighty hand of God ripping a man’s life apart. They should be silent and reverent out of fear they might be next. Job still quivers in fear of God’s hand.

Then he turns to his main argument. Have these men never seen how sometimes wicked men rise to power and wealth, grow old and die in comfort? Evil men have been known to go through life without any apparent misfortune. All the way to the end, they shake their fist at God but He doesn’t seem to notice. Are the trio so ignorant of human history that they haven’t seen God allow such things? Yet for all this, Job would not trade places with any of them. He remains faithful to God and upright despite the apparent mismatch in consequences.

Forget the rumors and stories. How often have they actually seen the wicked receive apparent justice on the terms they have described? Were they blind to the very real examples Job could cite? Anticipating their objection that God might visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, that would clearly violate the false morality of their pious assertions. If their version of moral justice holds any water, then let a man receive his own punishment while he lives. Amen to that, Job says. Are they going to teach that standard to God? Because it’s not at all how God does things.

Life on this plane of existence is inherently futile. Regardless of what men enjoy or suffer, death levels them all. What’s the point in walking justly before God? Whatever it gains a man to be righteous, it has little to do with the shallow blessings most men pursue. Job isn’t stupid to their pretense. Even if they have never personally seen the wicked prosper, they have no excuse, since they live right there on one of main trade routes in that part of the world. Were they silly enough to avoid interviewing travelers to hear their stories? Does every traveler lie about such things? The world is full of wicked men who gain noble treatment and great mourning by thousands at their funerals.But righteous Job can’t even get his friends to listen while he yet lives.

What kind of comfort is it when a man’s own friends are so utterly self-deceived?

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Job 21

Contagious Truth

Posted on December 28, 2013 by ehurst

The starting point is recognizing the failure of Western assumptions about truth. Truth is a Person; the notion of some objective thing out there that embodies pure truth is the greatest lie of Satan. The search for truth is inside your soul, not somewhere out there. There can never be even the possibility of objective truth that becomes collectively self-evident to any group of truth-seekers. The sum total of all factual knowledge correctly understood is still not truth. Truth is a Living Person who transcends this universe.

Truth will always remain personal. This is the ultimate elevation of the individual before God, because the whole issue is not laying hold of some mythical objective standard, but gaining His approval. Inherent in this truth is the assertion that it can be done. God has revealed in a thousand ways that you can gain His acceptance. The paradox of divine election is that it will always be on His initiative, yet He holds it forth as something within our reach. The moment you subject this to Western analysis, you will miss it. Not just make a mistake, but you will have tragically blundered away from it and closed the door behind you. God has always said, “Come to me” — making it clear there is some choice in it for you.

That we are stuck in this fallen plane of existence means we cannot actually touch His face until we escape. We refer to standing before Him in the parabolic sense, not literal. Our sole reason for living is to carry His Presence (truth) wherever we go and to make it as obvious to others as this existence allows. A critical element in that revelation of His glory is that it not appear to be objective, that our work in revealing Him be quite apparently otherwise. It must of necessity be confusing and paradoxical; it must not be reasonable. Not unreasonable in some overtly insane fashion, but we make it subtle.

There are times we do, indeed, thrust it in someone’s face, but the default mode is a presentation that only a few will notice. We must be ever ready to use words to explain that truth is inherently contextual in the sense of how it is expressed in human behavior.

This is why I often juxtapose talk of the gentle loving shepherd with the violent man capable of killing. On the one hand, I’m trying to shatter the myth that life is precious and sacred, a lie that arises entirely from human fear of the unknown. It is not peculiar to the West, but surely dominates all Western assumptions. Even when you get a Westerner to talk of being brave in the face of death, you still completely miss the ANE comfort with dying when the context calls for it. There was a time when you might have seen a good measure of that otherworldly spirit in Western Christianity, but that has almost died out over the course of my own lifetime.

As a starting point, we set out to offer the truth of God’s love. However, that word “love” is very poorly defined, almost slanderously perverted in our Western world. The truth of God’s love is love for God, with people as the recipients of that love. Human life is a tool for revelation, not the objective. We love God through loving what He created, and central to Creation is the human soul. Not love as Western minds presume, but we love as ANE minds would see it — that means an awful lot of effort striving to change our understanding of things. We are obliged to retrain the mind to stop formulating truth and confine itself to simply interpreting it. Love is whatever God says it is, not what your analysis would like to make of it. God said He loved His Creation enough to destroy some parts of it at certain pivotal moments when those parts had drifted too far away into a perversion He would not tolerate any longer. He sometimes chose other people to perform that destruction.

That those doing the killing suffered a major dose of arrogance was not the point, but a separate issue for which God had plans. That His sacrificial love for humans included sacrificing some to the stringent imperatives of His Laws is the key to understanding truth, revelation and love. Yes, things have changed somewhat, but the Laws of God still apply to all of humanity so long as we have rainbows in the sky. Christ did not change the character of God’s revelation and truth. He clarified it, including using a whip to cleanse the Court of Gentiles. It included interposing His own flesh into the legal penalties so that He could begin to reclaim some parts of humanity long neglected by His nation in their failed mission of revelation. He didn’t change God’s Laws, but came to teach how they are fulfilled.

The Cross did not end the necessity of taking the lives of those who threaten what His Laws require. How many times did Jesus warn people they deserved to die if they didn’t step back from sin? How horrific did He have to make it, talking of tossing folks alive into the burning garbage pits in the Hinnom Valley? Mythologizing Jesus into today’s metro-sexual nice guy is blasphemous, but so is attempting to make Him a closet Nazi. He was a Hebrew man, the ultimate expression of ANE culture, utterly foreign, alien to our Western minds.

If you don’t see how biblical records of genocide are part of God’s love for His creation, you cannot pretend to understand Christ on the Cross. For you to take up your own cross and follow Him is to reject the values of this Western world and embrace death as the final kiss of love from God in this world. You may have a calling that stays your hand from bloodshed, but Scripture does not condemn bloodshed itself. That’s just a common false assumption read back into Scripture. The New Testament pointedly condemns being too quick to kill, too eager for it. That’s what you get when you have stern legalistic applications of human law. You can go too far and find yourself in Noah’s day where anything goes, and that was evil, too. The condemnation is for those who seek to replace God’s truth with anything else.

Could I pull the trigger? As a shepherd, I must be able. His rod (Law) and staff (spiritual leadership) comfort me. Human nature means some humans will prey on others, and there comes a point where God’s Laws still say they have to stopped by whatever means necessary. While such holy protection may be buried in a flood of human murderous conduct, it does not weaken our duty to His truth. We spread His truth on His terms, not according to our own logic.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Meandering Mind

Posted on December 27, 2013 by ehurst

Nothing profound or even much entertaining today; I’m just trying to be consistent in writing.

My family returned to Oklahoma from Texas just in front of Hurricane Rita, September 2005. Less than a year later I was still trying to figure out how to keep from being kicked out of Baptist churches while teaching about the Hebrew understanding of Scripture. I had made friends with the IT guy at one church and he was telling me they needed a mail server. I got hold of one of my friends from Texas, a fellow who had quite a collection of server boxes he used for running FidoNet nodes. He agreed to donate one for us to experiment with.

So we managed to find someone who could meet this guy and take the server box and drop it off on his way through town here. This was an unusually tall case, with a half-dozen bays on top for optical drives. Try as we might, the IT guy and I could not get anything to install, so I took it to my brother. He couldn’t decide if it was the board or the CPU, but both were obsolete. The IT guy at church said he had no further interest in it and church gave it to me.

After saving up a bit, I got a more recent motherboard bundle with CPU and RAM to run an early Sempron 64-bit. You can be sure I ran over a dozen different OSes on that thing before I sold it to someone as an XP box. It was still running when that person graduated to Win7 not so long ago… and she gave the thing back to me the other day.

More than five years after parting with it, I now have this monster tall Sempron tower sitting here running XP, and not very well at that. She had it overloaded with stuff that launched on boot-up. I haven’t rechecked the specs; all I remember is that it was my first 64-bit system. Right now there’s no place to set it up and test, but you can be sure I’ll need to wipe the drive. At this point, it just about has the power to make a fine CLI box, just about enough power to run a modern system without a GUI.

No, there’s no moral to this story. It’s just an example of some of the weird stuff that happens in this world.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Meandering Mind

Reminiscing on Linux

Posted on December 26, 2013 by ehurst

I’ve been reading Unix in a Nutshell. I can’t remember where I got it, but it was probably at Half Price Books. That “nutshell” business is a joke; the book in paperback is nearly 2 inches thick. This makes my second time through the first part with the encyclopedia of commands on the CLI. Reviewing this stuff for the umpteenth time brings back memories.

It began with the old series of Red Hat 5.0 back in 1998 (before the enterprise editions). A few months later I got my hands on 5.1, which was a whole lot better. I recall using the desktop scripts on top of FVWM called “Another Level” — much easier to use that way. Once I moved up to Red Hat 5.2, that was about as good as it got in those days.

I read through several manuals, played with SuSE a bit, then got my hands on Linux in a Nutshell. It was a good bit smaller than the wider Unix reference. I read through two different editions, but lost my last copy somewhere.

That book confirmed my love for the command line. For once, I understood it and got to use it a good bit. Some years later I discovered FreeBSD and played with that a great deal from about 4.3 up through 7.0 before it went off on a different path. Still, I had learned even more CLI. These days, even if I’m forced to work with a Windows machine, I always install Cygwin — just the CLI portion — so I can use those comfortable tools. They work about the same on Windows, except the Lynx browser works even better.

In the old days, just getting the mouse to work on Linux was a major accomplishment. These days I could swear Linux is easier to use and works better than any version of Windows. Used to be any current version of Linux took much more RAM than the current version of Windows, but not any more. Current Linux distros are faster and lighter than Win7 and certainly faster than Win8.

I’m trying to make sure I’m as sharp as possible as I scan the shadowy horizon for the next mission. Yesterday a surprise intuition wandered out of the mists: I’ll most likely end up still doing a lot of Windows fixing even if I get some job ostensibly working with Linux. So I keep up with the latest security news for Windows, too.

It’s funny how being a serious MS engineer with all that training can keep you from being as quick to fix things. Most of us independent technicians are more narrowly focused on recovery and repair, so we aren’t distracted by all the official doctrines about how things ought to be. For the most part, we are interested only in what works. Aside from the seriously hard-headed clients who refuse to change truly awful computer habits, the things I fix tend to stay fixed. I specialize in helping the client understand what can and cannot be and how it works — at least they understand on some level. I don’t care why they do what they do with their computers; they need help staying out of trouble. For most people, it takes a handful of cleaners and locking tools to do that.

One of the smartest tools to come out in recent months is CryptoPrevent. I really wish more people would use this to lock down their Windows computers. It almost makes them on par with Linux for security. The only really dumb thing remains MS’s use of installer certificates. That’s where the installer program for something gains its own ghost administrator authority and you can’t counter it. You own the computer, but MS owns the OS and they can hand the keys to anyone they like. This is why software pirates flourish and thrive, and it’s why there will always be criminals producing new kinds of malware that takes advantage of the ghost admin powers.

Fifteen years. Once I managed to shed the fan-boy mentality, things got a whole lot easier using Linux. It’s not inherently superior to everything else, just best for what I do.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Reminiscing on Linux