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“spiritual shortcuts” from nakedpastor

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Of course what we were really told was to wash our hands endlessly, for a full 20 seconds at a time. If you actually look at a watch for 20 seconds, you'll see that is a rather long time. So long, in fact, that you can't even come close to guessing it. Thus, you need to find something to say or do while you're washing your hands all that time. Something that takes a full 20 seconds to say or do. That something turns out to be two complete Hail Marys.

Now, given that I was born and bred a Protestant, one of the more liberal Protestant denominations actually (née UPC USA; currently UCC), how would I know about Hail Marys?

Well, it seems that when I was in 7th or 8th grade, I used to listen to the radio a lot. I had rather a good one, a Hammarlund HQ100 A. I liked changing stations on both AM and shortwave to see what I could find. I would listen to stations from Buffalo, Nashville, Cleveland, Boston, Toronto, Moscow, Quito. You name it, I probably heard it at one time or another.

One day, I chanced upon a group reciting the rosary. Over and over again they chanted:

Hail Mary, full of grace,
the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women.
Blessed is the fruit of thy womb,
Jesus Christ, Our Lord.

Holy Mary, mother of God,
Pray for us sinners,
Now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.

I may have this a bit wrong. Seventh or eighth grade was a long time ago. Whatever, when I started washing my hands, and looking at my watch to see if I'd done it for twenty seconds, those words from long ago popped into my head. I discovered that, when said at a measured pace, two full Hail Marys, at least as I had remembered them, took up twenty seconds.

So that's how we combat swine flu H1N1: we spend quality time at the sink saying our Hail Marys. The Pope would be proud of me.

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Introduction

Background

function dirBK($from, $dest) { 
// This function will recursively copy all files and sub directories 
// from a single directory, $from, on a hosting server 
// to a single directory, $dest, on a remote storage disk. 
 // rsync seems the best candidate for the file-copying protocol. 
}

 Another problem with rsync arises where, under a non-ideal scenario such as broadband disruption, rsync hangs and does nothing. We must, therefore, find a solution for this problem too.

 Given the above considerations, we now have three major tasks, each of which may include some subtasks:

1. Developing the dirBK($from, $dest) routine.
2. Developing a general driver to run this routine in a loop.
3. Scheduling the driver (e.g. running the back-up routine regularly using cron.)

Back-up Routine Development

 We begin with the variable, $dirs, which is an array of all directories that need to be backed up. The driver routine then becomes:

foreach($dirs as $dir) { 
$from = 'path/to/dir/'.$dir; 
$dest = 'path/to/destination/'.$dir; 
dirBK($from, $dest); 
sleep(5); 
}

foreach($dirs as $dir) { 
$from = 'path/to/dir/'.$dir; 
$dest = 'path/to/destination/'.$dir; 
$pid = pcntl_fork();    // spawn child process 
if (!$pid) {          // a child process returns zero 
dirBK($from, $dest); 
exit; 
} 
sleep(5); 
}

foreach($dirs as $dir) { 
if ($dir == '.') continue;       //exclude '.' and '..' directories 
if ($dir == '..') continue; 
$from = 'path/to/dir/'.$dir; 
if (is_dir($from)) {            //make sure array element is a directory 
$dest = 'path/to/destination/'.$dir; 
$pid = pcntl_fork();          // spawn child process 
if (!$pid) {                // a child process returns zero 
dirBK($from, $dest); 
exit; 
} 
} 
sleep(5); 
}

 Above, we specified an array of the directories to back up, $dirs. There are a number of ways to populate this array. If all of the directories are in the rootBK directory, we can use the scandir() function to populate the array. Our basic routine is now as follows:

<?php 
$dirs = scandir('path/to/rootBK/');   //populate the array, $dirs 
foreach($dirs as $dir) { 
if ($dir == '.') continue;    //exclude '.' and '..' directories 
if ($dir == '..') continue; 
$from = 'path/to/dir/'.$dir; 
if (is_dir($from)) {        //make sure array element is a directory 
$dest = 'path/to/destination/'.$dir; 
$pid = pcntl_fork();       // spawn child process 
if (!$pid) {              // a child process returns zero 
dirBK($from, $dest); 
exit; 
} 
} 
sleep(5); 
} 
sleep(30); 
?> 

 rsync -r /path/to/existingsite/ username@newsite.com:/path/to/newsite/ 

rsync -azq --delete -e "ssh -i /users/home/myaccount/.ssh/ss" /path/to/backups/ myaccount@myaccount.strongspace.com:/home/myaccount/backups

• http://forum.textdrive.com/viewtopic.php?id=10126
• http://wiki.joyent.com/shared:kb:automated-backups (subtitle rsync to Strongspace)

$rsync = '/path/to/rsync -azq --delete -e "ssh -i /.ssh/ss"'; 
   $from = '/path/to/backups/'; 
   $remote = 'myaccount@myaccount.strongspace.com:/home/myaccount/backups';

system($rsync. ' ' .$from. ' ' .$remote); 

<?php 
$rsync = '/path/to/rsync -azq --delete -e "ssh -i /.ssh/ss"'; 
$remote = 'myaccount@myaccount.strongspace.com:/home/myaccount/backups'; 
 $dirs = scandir('path/to/rootBK/'); 
foreach($dirs as $dir) { 
if ($dir == '.') continue; 
if ($dir == '..') continue; 
$from = 'path/to/dir/'.$dir; 
if (is_dir($from)) { 
$dest = $remote.$dir; 
$pid = pcntl_fork(); 
if (!$pid) { 
system($rsync. ' ' .$from. ' ' .$dest); 
// echo $dir; 
exit; 
} 
} 
sleep(5); 
} 
sleep(30); 
?>

 If the name the file containing our routine backUp.php, we can run it manually from the command line, making sure to be in the proper working directory:

# php5 backUp.php

/usr/local/bin/php -c /users/home/userName/etc/php5/ /users/home/userName/backUp.php

 Once the routine works as intended from the command line, then one should write a cron job to automate the process. That is a subject for another time.

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I said something in my class a couple of weeks ago about visiting a Buddhist temple in Wakefield along with a comment on the art. That was a mistake, of sorts, in that my teacher, Catherine, then wanted me to post a link or two (which means work for me). Anyway, my friend, Roy, has a flickr page where he has posted photos of some of the art work. His photo stream has a picture of the dharma hall with the hanging lotus lanterns.
 
Every year, they tear down and remake all these lanterns. My attempts at paper art never got past folding origami cranes, so I found the description of the lantern making process quite fascinating. Roy blogged the process in steps: one, two, three, four.

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 Thus was born the idea of the Psalm o' matic. Now to figure out how to implement it. Of course, I thought it would be cool to write a computer program to do the work for me. I had a job at the time, and was a bit rusty on my programming, so I ended up with the coward's way. I used the random-number generator function in my spread sheet program to make up a list of numbers between 1 and 150. Then I copied the list over to a schedule, printed it out, and manually e-mailed out the Psalm scheduled for each day. Not all that o' matic, huh?

 I did that for a couple of years, but this year, since I was unemployed, I figured that I should brush off my very rusty shell scripting and try to make a real, bone fide psalm-o-matic. The shell script would, in theory at least, randomly pick out a number from 1 to 150, select the Psalm that related to that number, and do the e-mailing for me. All while I slept.

 The first thing I needed to do was come up with a method for generating random numbers from 1 to 150. Of course that's trivial if you are programming in C or C++, or using a spread sheet, but I was trying to do this in Unix shell scripting, the only way I knew how to send out e-mails automagically. It turned out that what I knew about sending out e-mails—learned in Intro to Unix back in the summer of 2000—was no longer valid, at least not on my system. But I didn't know that when I began this project.

 Anyway, it turned out that generating random numbers from the unix shell was relatively easy. My server at Joyent runs bash-shell scripts, and the bash shell has a build-in shell variable called $RANDOM. $RANDOM returns a random number from 0 to 32767 whenever it is called. To pare this selection down to 1 to 150, I merely had to multiply the $RANDOM variable by 150, divide by 32767, and then add 1 to take care of the fact that Psalms begin with 1 not 0 (zero).
psalmNo=$((1+150*$RANDOM/32767))
and the variable, $psalmNo would indeed be a number between 1 and 150.

 So far, so good. Now I just needed to select the appropriate Psalm and send it off. Selecting the appropriate Psalm was trivial, albeit tedious. I made up 150 text files with names like psalm_xxx.txt, where xxx was a number from 1 to 150. Then I just needed to combine three elements, the root of the text-file name, the Psalm number and the extension:
body="$filePath$fileRoot$psalmNo$fileExtension"
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention, the $filePath thing tells the computer where to find the directory that has all the Psalms in it.

 So now we get to what I assumed would be the easy part, e-mailing the Psalm. In olden days, we did something like the following:
mailx -s "e-mail subject" someone@somedomain.com <$body
That is, the file in $body is inserted in an e-mail message to someone with the subject given. Well, it didn't work. After thrashing around for quite some time, I asked for help and was told that mailx no longer worked because of security issues. I had to use sendmail -t instead.

 I'd never heard about sendmail -t before. I guess it didn't work in the olden days. Or perhaps it just didn't work at UMass/Lowell, who tend to be a bit behind the times (when I took Java Script, I was told to be wary about things that caused problems with Netscape 2.0. WTF? we were in a post-Netscape era by the time I took that class.)

 Anyway, I had to learn about sendmail. That wasn't overly difficult. I discovered that the -t option meant that the system used the header information embedded in the file. So eventually, I figured out that meant I had to make up the files I e-mailed out with stuff like "To: someone@somedomain.com" at the top of the file, and the text file containing the Psalm at the end. Well, crap, I didn't want to go through 150 files and put in all the header stuff first. What if I wanted to do something else with the files later on?

 Fortunately, this wasn't a problem. I suddenly remembered about "appending" things to a file. To append things, you just did a double carat thingie, i.e.
cat $body<<$filePath$mailMsg
and you get the stuff in $body, i.e. the Psalm file, appended to $mailMsg, the thing you created with all the header info. So I build it up a bit at a time, starting with the "To: someone@somedomain.com" stuff, adding in the From, Reply-to, and Subject stuff and finally ending with the Psalm file.

 So after all this ruminating, we ended up with

# !/usr/local/bin/bash 
# psalm o' matic script 
# 
#  This works as follows: me@myServer$ /usr/local/bin/bash psalm-0-matic 
#  If you don't precede with the "bash" it won't work. 
#  The fully qualified paths through out are necessary to make this work as a cron script 
# 
#    This uses my random number generator script 
# 
#    Why in the hell am I using vi? 
#    I'm not anymore -- using TextPad with sftpDrive (now ExpanDrive) 
 filePath="/users/home/myUserName/domains/myDomain.org/web/public/Psalms/" 
fileRoot="Psalm_" 
fileExtension=".txt" 
 # ***seed Random with a "random" number -- then select Psalm o' day 
 RANDOM=$RANDOM 
 psalmNo=$((1+150*$RANDOM/32767))  #all 150 -- Oh, yeah! 
 #  *****************prepare the message ****************** 
 mailMsg="MailMsg" 
 today=`/usr/xpg4/bin/date '+%A, %B %d, %Y'` 
 #  ***************** prepare header header ****************** 
 dateField="Date: "$today 
#toField="To: me " 
#later on it would be fccr-ace. 
addressFile=pomList 
toField="To: "`cat "$filePath$addressFile"`  #pomList is comma delimited: name , ... 
fromField="From: me " 
replyToField="Reply-to: me@myOtherDomain.net"  #later on it would be fccr-ace? 
subjectField="Subject: Psalm for "$today"--Psalm "$psalmNo 
 #  ***************** assemble message ****************** 
body="$filePath$fileRoot$psalmNo$fileExtension" 
 echo $dateField<$filePath$mailMsg 
echo $toField<<$filePath$mailMsg 
echo $fromField<<$filePath$mailMsg 
echo $replyToField<<$filePath$mailMsg 
 echo $subjectField<<$filePath$mailMsg 
echo " " <<$filePath$mailMsg 
echo " " <<$filePath$mailMsg 
cat $body<<$filePath$mailMsg 
 #  *****************send the message ****************** 
 /usr/local/bin/sendmail -t <$filePath$mailMsg 

 Ok, this worked. Getting it to send out automagically turned out to be more trouble than I realized, but I eventually got so I was sending myself Psalms on an hourly basis. Just in time for Lent.

 Addendum:
The scheme worked like a charm and we lucked out in that Ps. 119 never came up. Not sure anyone would have been able to slog through that one in one sitting.

 Addendum 2:
Formatting this was a real PITA. I'd have been better off just doing raw xhtml on my static site. Then again, I suppose that I needed to (re?)learn that'code' is not a block-level element.

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Ave Verum Corpus  
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artist - Ave Verum Corpus.mp3 (1949 KB)

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I Put A Spell On You by Screamin' Jay Hawkins  
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I_PUT_A_SPELL_ON_YOU__SCREA.MP3 (2893 KB)

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Harmonizing Four - Will He Welcome Me.mp3 (2369 KB)

  
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Harmonizing Four - Farther Along.mp3 (2602 KB)

  
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Harmonizing Four - Go Down Moses.mp3 (2884 KB)

  
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Harmonizing Four - I Shall Not Be Moved.mp3 (2867 KB)

Shenandoah by Paul Robeson  
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01-Paul Robeson-Shenandoah.mp3 (4012 KB)

Deep River by Paul Robeson  
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02-Paul Robeson-Deep River.mp3 (3126 KB)

Go Down Moses by Paul Robeson  
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03-Paul Robeson-Go Down Moses.mp3 (2766 KB)

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Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye by Vera Lynn  
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01-Vera Lynn-Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye.mp3 (2974 KB)

We'll Meet Again by Vera Lynn  
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08-Vera Lynn-We'll Meet Again.mp3 (2220 KB)

I won't get into why I up and left, but suffice it to say that I was not happy. I figure that after a few weeks of solitude and meditation, I'll have more positive views of the whole thing. So, to reflect this, I also left them all with the Edith Piaf classic, Non, Je ne Regrette Rien.

Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien by Edith Piaf  
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06-Edith Piaf-Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.mp3 (3188 KB)

Most likely, I should have also left them with another Vera Lynn song, a rather corny one, but one geared toward combating high levels of stress and uncertainty, Be Like the Kettle and Sing.

Be Like The Kettle And Sing by Vera Lynn  
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02-Vera Lynn-Be Like The Kettle And Sing.mp3 (2496 KB)

In the coming weeks, I may begin to document my unemployment chronicles. We'll see.

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Choir shuts down in June and we have to soldier on with volunteer musicians to provide special music in the summer, things like anthems and offertories. So, every year, I get volunteered to do music on the last Sunday of the summer, Labor Day weekend. The thought is that the fewest people will be in attendance for me to annoy. I view myself as a sort of Pete Seeger wanna be who is trying to sing gospel music.

One advantage to being at the end of the summer is that I can prepare music on vacation. In the evenings I sit down with my guitar, strum a bit, listen to the Red Sox a bit, sip beer a bit. A fine time. This year, it rained for all but about three days of my two-week vacation, so I figured the Good Lord was telling me to do music with a water/rain theme.

Before I understood the theme I was called to address, I had been learning a number of tunes I'd downloaded from Greg Scheer's site. Once I understood the theme, I only had two pieces from Greg that fit my water theme. Thus, I cast about for something else. Why not Send Down That Rain, by Bro. Claude Ely? Sure, the concept of latter rain led to heresy, but it's a nice tune, and the idea of a last-minute rain preparing us for the harvest, so to speak, isn't a bad concept.

I had learned Bro. Claude from an mp3 I acquired a number of years ago from the good folks at The Dove Song Foundation (who, alas, are no longer making mp3s available). I just made up some words and chords similar to what I had been hearing, and I was good to go.

As from Bro. Greg, I had learned the tunes from sheet music. This past Friday night, I discovered that Greg now also has mp3s available for many of his tunes. I decided it would be cheating if I heard how the song was intended to sound before I sang it in public, so I only listened to the mp3s after yesterday's service.

It turns out, I can't rock like Bro. Claude, nor can I be mellow like Bro. Greg. Sort of in the middle, I guess. My pastor said I made him think of Bill Staines. Perhaps what he was thinking was that I had a gray beard and glasses. I don't play guitar upside down and backwards, nor particularly well, for that matter.

For your listening pleasure, here are Bros. Claude and Greg. Think of me as being sort of in the middle, but with somewhat less talent. It's the spirit in which the gift is offered that counts, right?
 ------------------------------------ update -------------------------------

After choir last Thursday, I realized I should have said that you should imagine the songs as Willy Nelson might have done them.  My friends Brian, the crazy tenor in the choir, Norma, the woman who sits in the last pew on the right, and John, the late machinist where I worked, all told me that I was a dead ringer for Willy Nelson.  Again, I think it's the grey beard, with a hint of the red from former times.  But, who knows?  I've always liked Ol' Willy; I could do worse than remind folks of him.

  
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Claude Ely - Send Down That Rain.mp3 (1929 KB)

Wash Me In Your Water by Greg Scheer  
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wash_me.mp3 (2483 KB)

Maybe The Rain by Greg Scheer  
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maybe_the_rain.mp3 (4002 KB)

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This year was a bit different. I still read a lot and strummed a bit. But it rained and rained and then, rained some more. The state of Maine was getting into the Olympic spirit by trying to set a record of its own: the rainiest August on record. By the 10th we were halfway there. No surprise then, that the music I've selected for August 31 all has a "water" theme.

Most years, I take lots of pictures of plants and reflections on the lake and, of course, myriad pictures of Brewster playing in the water. This year, it's pictures of fog and clouds and water coursing down to our cottage and mushrooms, lots of mushrooms. The one thing that likes cold and damp seem to be mushrooms. This year's pictures of Brewster mostly show him feeling confused by the cold and lack of sun.

But, we did have one nice day; we had some interesting cloud formations; Justin and Kim came up for a couple of days and Brewster got to swim with a human; and I made eight mini-strings of cranes. I call them car cranes because they're just the right size to replace the stupid fuzzy dice and St. Christopher medals people hang from their rear view mirrors.

So now we're back and the weather is nice again. But I'll spend the next 11½ months dreaming of Parker Pond. Even a bad week up there beats all hell out of anything else.

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After my son took me to visit Hiroshima in 2003, I began folding origami cranes.  Eventually, I wanted to see how small I could make them, so started making them from graph paper.  The graph-paper cranes eventually became dubbed, "nerd cranes".  Nerd cranes of different sizes make a nerd-crane family.  If I use different kinds of graph paper, it becomes a mixed-race, nerd-crane family.  As you can see, I have piles of them on my desk, computer and monitor.

At home we have flocks of them on most available horizontal surfaces, file cabinets, book cases, the piano, etc.  My wife is not thrilled with this, but she takes it with good grace most of the time.

The small strings of colored cranes are just right for hanging from a car's rear view mirror, in lieu of fuzzy dice or St. Christopher medals.  I talk to my car cranes as I drive.

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My son forced me to go canoing on the Ipswich River a few weeks ago.  He does this every summer.  Anyway, we saw a bird that I thought might be a crane. I'm a bit of a crane nut, having folded thousands of paper cranes in the past five years. However, the guy who supplied us the canoe, Foote Brothers, said it was a white ibis snowy egret [thanks, Zach].  That's cool, but not a crane.

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