Archive for October, 2014

He Wears a Funny Hat

Friday, October 31st, 2014

It’s Halloween. Earlier this week Pope Francis took time to remind his flock of more than a billion Catholics that Evolution and the Big Bang are not only good science but completely compatible with creation of mankind and the universe by God.

I had to ask God if this was a Trick or a Treat.

She was insulted. She said it was neither. She said it took a lot of time and work on her part to get the Catholic Cardinals to elect a Pope that wasn’t insane and she didn’t like me devaluing her effort.

I apologized and thanked her.

Actually, I thank her pretty much every time Pope Francis comes up in the news.

Up, Up, and Away

Friday, October 24th, 2014

The “South” has been dragging down the United States, politically speaking, for a very long time. It really all goes back to slavery and anybody that tries to tell you different is lying to you or lying both to themselves and you. I’ve seen a lot of the arguments and some of them are pretty good at the misdirection but ultimately they all resolve back to that root.

The modern version, if you can call something that’s been going on for more than a century and a half modern, is summed up in the slogan, “the South shall rise again.”

I hadn’t thought about that phrase too much, but it came up while God and I were talking politics this week. “The South shall rise again.” God asked me if I knew how they planned to do that. I gave it some thought, but I couldn’t come up with anything that resembled a coherent strategy. Then God told me that as near as he could see they planned to take the “rise” part of it literally, and their current strategy revolved around getting lifted up as part of “The Rapture.”

He also said they probably shouldn’t get their hopes up too high.

Spider in My Room

Friday, October 17th, 2014

God has his own way of decorating my house for halloween. He gets spiders to move in and set up their webs. They don’t really wander around much, seeming to be the ultimate homebodies, content to stay in the same few inches of space day in and day out.

God asked me if they bothered me.

I decided that the spiders don’t bother me nearly as much as the notion that they’re getting enough to eat.

A Blog of Your Peers

Friday, October 10th, 2014

Sometimes it helps to have friends in high places. I’m pretty sure God got me out of being put on a jury this week.

Normally I wouldn’t consider that a good thing. I’d actually like to sit on a jury. I think I could make good judgements, and I have a keen eye for detail. Also, I’d like to see the process from the inside out. This week, however, I had better things to do. I had a trip planned that would be cut short by having to be in court, so God pulled a few strings, not that she’ll admit it.

They asked me if I had a blog. They hadn’t asked this of any of the previous twenty-something prospective jurors. They prefaced the question by noting that I work with computers, but really, the connection between working with computers and blogging is pretty tenuous.

And I didn’t even mention talking to God.

New Versions for Old

Friday, October 3rd, 2014

God and I were talking about the computer industry the other day, about the big consumer facing companies. God asked me how many tries it generally took for Microsoft to get things right. I was tempted, of course, to say that they never do, but in fairness, when I really look at it, it’s usually about the third version of something that Microsoft gets it more or less right.

Then God asked me about Apple and the fanboy in me wants to jump out and say that Apple gets it right, right out of the gate, but again, if I really look at it they don’t, but they usually have something really good on the second version.

So then God asked me about Google and Facebook. Well a trend was clear, from three to two, to…? The trend suggested that I could expect God to want me to answer “one,” to say that Google and Facebook get it right the first time. I wasn’t buying it though, so I thought hard again and I realized that you can’t tell what try it is when they get something right. Unlike Apple and Microsoft, Google and Facebook aren’t putting out discretely packaged things. They have the advantage that most of their product lives on the server side of the client/server relationship so they don’t have to put out new versions in a discrete fashion, they can slip in little improvements here and there until one day you realize that things are working better than they used to but you don’t really remember when the problems you used to have went away.

I asked God if this was some sort of parable. I asked what the moral was, what was the lesson I was supposed to learn. She told me there wasn’t any, it was just something she noticed. I’m not convinced that was true, but what am I going to do, call God a liar?