fixed the server, sort of
my mum left yesterday, and so I cleaned my computer area. I found a check from somebody from last summer, i hope they don't get mad at me..... yeah...
i really liked having my mum visit. since i've been home for over two weeks, there was not as much "helping" around the house as i think she anticipated, but she found things to do, some of which helped around the house, and some of which were just really nice. like eating fast chinese food at the mall (she got a LAMB gyro, just like a Brit) and eating not-fully-cooked paella (you GOTTA try that stuff... my recipe is a little different from that one, maybe i'll put it up here someday). and walking the dog and babysitting so karen and i could go watch a movie for my birthday. we saw Mystic River, which I was surprised to find out was not a sequel to Mystic Pizza.
THANKS FOR VISITNG MUM!!!!!
SO... the evening that my mother left, i decided to reboot the server which i built, and it wouldn't i stayed awake until 5:30am trying to get it back up. I installed Mandrake, Redhat, used a Operating System On A Bootable CD system called Knoppix (what a trip!) but couldn't figure out how to get my pages and data off the cd! Finally i settled on Xandros (which IS linux, but not TECHNICALLY open source, since there's a couple for-pay packages on there like "Crossover" that lets you install MS Office, and you can't get the Xandros File Manager withoug buying Xandros, but I didn't install Crossover, and it's an old version (i'm hanging my head in shame)) mostly because SMB shares work FLAWLESSLY and EFFORTLESSLY. I may mess with Debian in the future, since that's what Xandros is based on... sho nuff. (Sho nuff added to keep that sentence from ending in a preposition, a just invented, and more elegant solution, in my opinion, than the one up with which Churchill came).
RIGHT, well, we just saw Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ this afternoon. Turns out it's not a romantic comedy, even though it has the word Passion right there in the title. SO, an amazing movie. I respect it for (trying) to GET IT RIGHT, and i think it succeeded in many ways. I think the real event was bloodier, I think Jesus looked less like an anglo-saxon and more like a JEW, and I wish the line about God foresaking His Son would have been delivered more realistically.
Jesus spent his entire life in perfect communion with his Father, who IS LOVE, and when Jesus took sin upon himself, and the Father left him, the pain would have been worse by magnitudes than the greatest suffering any human has ever felt (worse than crucifixion!!!), but the line was delivered in the tone you might say "Mom, why didn't you put a twinkie in my lunchbox?" Hmm... maybe not that whiny... But i gotta say, they depicted the best Lucifer/Satan i have ever seen.
But we liked it. It was a MUST SEE, but not a must re-see. Nonbelievers will be moved, people who do believe and haven't really thought about the implications of Christ's suffering will be blown away, and people who have read and heard a great deal about it will be impressed. I pray that people will watch the movie and GET CURIOUS and want to read the Gospel. Mark is a good starting place.