Relationship?

I just want to put my thoughts on paper.  I think I have some level of peace about the whole "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life thing." God does love us, but the whole plan for your life thing isn't really true. So that kind of helped me get out of the rut of "Am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing right now?"

Now the question is back to how do I relate to God. I keep hearing that I'm supposed to have this relationship with God.  Spell it with an "R".  But how does one relate to a being that cannot be seen or heard?  It certainly is not a relationship like the relationships I have with other my wife, my children, my family or my friends.  So how do I characterize this relationship.

So I was looking at Wikipedia, and learned that relationships are essentially characterized by two things: trust and intimacy.  So those can apply to my relationship with God.  I can trust him, and I can be intimate with Him.  I can be real with Him, and not try to conceal those things that He can already see anyway, and he can reveal Himself to me.  And basically he does that through His word.

So that's really what it boils down to. And I guess I knew that already.  We can try to make it all mystical or whatever, but it really isn't a secret that the Christian walk really boils down to prayer and bible reading.

This caught my eye in one of the Dark Reading emails that hit my box awhile back--How I Would Hack Your Network (If I Woke Up Evil). It mentions some tools that are definitely worth a look, but I don't want to look at them right now.

I did a Google search for "talking over people." Most of the posts were about why people do it and how to work around it, but I was looking for tips on how to do it myself.  I found a thread called Wait vs. Interrupt Culture that not only contained a lot of perspective on that topic, but one of the posters also mentioned about how his conversation is shaped by his aphasia. The only time I'd heard the term aphasia was an episode of Deep Space Nine. But what the poster described reminded me of some of my own issues communicating. I looked up aphasia on Wikipedia, and found that my issue falls into the category of anomic aphasia. The difference with me is that the word usually comes to me. It couldl take anywhere from 3 seconds to 5 minutes, but the word always comes. It wasn't clear from Wikipedia or from the poster whether the word ever comes to them or whether it is just lost.  Of course, even a 3 second gap in conversation can throw things off. The thing that got my attention was that it is linked to brain damage and Alzheimer's.  I think I'll go back to my primary care manager and follow up on this.

Top 10 Qualities of a Great Engineer

Even thought my days in the IT field may be numbered, I think this list may come in handy in the future. Top 10 Qualities of a Great Engineer is a product of engineeringschools.com; I hope it doesn't go away anytime soon...

Pina Colada Crunch Cake

Okay, so I'm not going to make this right now, and I probably won't follow the recipe either, but I definitely want to come back and make this Pina Colada Crunch Cake at some point.  At first glance, it reminded me of Aunt Jean's Cherry Cheesecake recipe, and upon inspection, I think it could be improved by borrowing from that recipe a bit. The main thought is that this recipe needs to be frozen to be firm, but the cheesecake needs no freezing.  Basically, remove the pudding and the condensed milk (heartbreaking, I know) and substitute some sweetened coconut flakes.  The hook for this was "The Best Dessert You've Never Heard Of." It got my attention at least.  Maybe some day we'll see if that claim is true.

Things Every Hacker Once Knew

Got a link to Things Every Hacker Once Knew today from Code Project.  I felt like this was something that I should share, but it seemed to pedantic for the Facebook crowd, so I'm posting it here.  I was especially intrigued by the explanation of the 0-31 codes from ASCII. I knew a couple, but many had eluded me and I had always wondered about them.

torrent as a service in Windows--thwarted by updates

So, I was ran a torrent server in Linux for many years, but last year I decided to take the plunge back into Windows.  I am running Windows Server 2012 R2.  Running a torrent as a service isn't as straightforward as in Linux, but I'd been through a similar process with Windows Server 2008 using srvany.exe.  That part hasn't changed, so I was able to get it going without much difficulty.

But then at the beginning of the year it stopped working.  I didn't have time to investigate for awhile, but when I did I learned that there was a torrent process running, but the process wasn't the same.  After awhile I realized that the torrent program was trying to update itself and instead of running the application, it was running the new installer, and was waiting for a user to walk through the install steps.  So I knew the problem, but wasn't sure of the fix.  I was pretty sure that the service was running as some privileged user and I didn't know how to run as that user.  The privileged user account is the SYSTEM account, and the solution was to download pstools and run psexec.exe.  I was able to use that program to start a command prompt as SYSTEM and then run the torrent program from there.  Problem solved.

Now I need to go back and figure out how to stop the torrent program from doing automatic updates...