Keep In Touch

I maintain the inferiority of the most modern means of communication as means of human connection.  Which is to say, I think facebook, instant messaging (which is now passe?), text messaging, twitter, etc.  (I can’t keep up) are absurd, and maybe best left alone.

On the other hand, I don’t keep in touch with many old friends at all.  Maybe my generation (or at least me) just never learned how to keep in touch the “old-fashioned” way (telephone calls, or even postcards and letters).

So, do I throw in my lot with the ADHD/anxiety disorder inducing environments of facebook and the like, just to “keep in touch” with as many people as possible?  Or do I make a better effort to keep in contact with more people (though fewer than possible with the newfangled ways) via telephone and mail?

[Note of irony: I'm posting this on a blog, which, despite being attached to my name, is a pretty alienated way of spewing thoughts into the world.]

How to disable pesky drivers/module loading w/o kernel recompile in Debian [updated]

[Hi faithful readers. You might or might not know that I am somewhat a computer nerd, going back to junior high when I built a computer (and installed Redhat Linux 5.2!) with my brother. I have decided to finally begin documenting some of the more difficult and obscure things I figure out in computer-land, since they are generally difficult because no coherent documentation or guidance is to be found...]

The method for disabling the loading of specific modules is at the bottom of this post.

The scenario: I have an IBM ThinkPad X30 which has an Intersil Prism 2.5 chipset for wireless networking. The firmware is a revision which has support for WPA2 security. The process of updating the firmware to this revision was somewhat of an ordeal which I hopefully will document later. This wireless chipset is somewhat unique in that the Linux kernel has two different drivers which support it, orinoco (implicated by the hermes module) and hostap. The orinoco driver, however, doesn’t support WPA2 encryption. Guess which driver loads first by default in my Debian Etch (4.0) setup and precludes the other from working? Yes, the less functional orinoco driver.

Since for various reasons I require WPA2 encryption from time to time, I had to find a way to make the hostap driver load first. Of course, I could always recompile the kernel and exclude the orinoco driver, but this becomes tedious every time Debian security releases a patched kernel. Plus, it’s time-consuming, and isn’t the point of a modular kernel to make it possible to add and remove the modules you want without recompiling?

So after attempts with /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and other obvious methods of preventing modules from loading which didn’t work [I should retrace my steps and document the failed methods better, I am sorry], I found the right method on an online forum. I am posting it here hoping it might be easier for those in a similar situation to find.

(As root) create a file named

/etc/modprobe.d/00local

Edit the file to contain the following text:

install hermes /bin/true
install orinoco /bin/true
install orinoco_pci /bin/true

Replace “hermes,” “orinoco,” etc. with whatever modules you are hoping to prevent from loading.

You can list as many or as few modules as you need in the 00local file.

The program /bin/true is a program to “do nothing, successfully” according to the manpage (man true). So this method somehow changes what command is run when a process prompts the loading of a module from <modprobe modulename> to </bin/true>, thus doing nothing, instead of loading the module you never wanted. Beautiful. According to this discussion:http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/avoid-linux-kernel-module-driver-autoloading.html, where I found this method, it works for Fedora 7 at least. Not sure about other distributions. I confirm it works for Debian etch (4.0). This means it might work for Ubuntu as well.

Denying the Answer Doesn’t Remove the Question

This post is in response to the following review by Charlie Brooker of Richard Dawkins’s latest documentary “The Enemies of Reason.” I must admit I have not read any of Dawkins’s books nor seen any of his documentary work.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/columnists/story/0,,2145124,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,330358337-113623,00.html (printable, no ads)

Mr. Brooker says in his review: “Maybe you’ve put your faith in spiritual claptrap because our random, narrative-free universe terrifies you. But that’s no solution. If you want comforting, suck your thumb….”

To be fair, in his list of “spiritual claptrap,” earlier in the review, he lists a bunch of things that I think any Catholic would name as unreasonable or superstitious or worse. He does not really name anything which I recognize as part of my religion. In this regard, we agree that unreasonable, ridiculous activity should in no way belong to man. However, he acknowledges that man, or at least some men, maybe not himself, desire comforting. There are two possibilities here:

a. “Cold, clear, rational thought” (his phrase) is the only standard worth using to judge anything. Since my desire for comforting (or for truth beyond a syllogism or an empirically verified theory, or goodness, or redemption of the things we name as evil, etc.) finds no response from “cold, clear, rational thought,” these desires therefore bear a negative influence on my being. The best thing is to cut these desires out, to shut them up, because they merely serve to cloud my understanding of the universe as it truly is and my place in it. “This is the real world, stupid. We should be solving problems, not sticking our fingers in our ears and singing about fairies,” says Mr. Brooks.

b. I am a being, a man, who strangely enough finds himself desiring comforting, and many other things. I didn’t invent these desires. Sometimes I find satisfaction, however partial, of my desires, even those I name my “deepest” desires. I hope for, based on the present experience of satisfaction of these desires, for total fulfillment. Since I find myself with these desires, even when I lack fulfillment, I do not distrust the desires, for I was given them somehow, I did not invent them. Therefore there must be an adequate response to them somewhere.

The question may be better put this way: either the standard by which I judge reality, including myself, is imposed from without, or the standard by which I judge reality comes from within me since that is the immediate given standard–why impose another? The Christian religion at its fullest fulfills the second option. Christ, a man, meets my inner standard of judgment and leads me even beyond it to communion with the very Author of that standard.

In any event, even should you choose to say that “cold, clear, rational thought” is the better standard, you still haven’t done away with your desire for comfort, for a deeper meaning to things, etc. Denying the answers that some people invent or encounter hasn’t denied the questions they are trying to answer, the desires they seek to fulfill. You do violence to yourself to silence these questions, these desires.

A New Springtime

Photographs taken this spring:

First Sunday Liturgy in 60 years in a Romanian Greek-Catholic Church April 6 A.D. 2008

Way of the Cross over the Brooklyn Bridge to Ground Zero March 21 A.D. 2008

Digging Up Gold

When I was a young college-going fella, a friend of mine introduced me to a blog of someone he knew from his college days. It was called “Vomit the Lukewarm,” a splendidly upsetting title. The author of that blog has since moved on to the now-disappeared “Assimilatio Dei” (not to be confused with another blog of the same name) and now finally to “Just Thomism” (found among the links to your right).  I just wanted to provide a couple links to some really relevant, insightful posts on “Vomit the Lukewarm.”

Porn and alienation

The Myth of the Rebel

Just a note: It looks like all of the archives of “Vomit the Lukewarm” can also be found in the archives of “Just Thomism.”  Nevertheless, it’s still a thrill to see “VOMIT THE LUKEWARM” in enormous letters at the top of the page…

Don’t Be an Idiot

It’s Easter (Alleluia!), and I’m at home working on songs I haven’t worked on for a long time. My lyrics and musical sketches are in notebooks which also hold notes and writings about other things (since any strict method of organization for me is simply that, and never any help to getting real work done). Anyhow, I ran across the notes I took at a lecture given by Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, a good friend of Msgr. Luigi Giussani, the “founder” of the ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation. These notes seem very fitting to post on Easter Sunday. (They are somewhat edited to make them intelligible.) I apologize for the fact that they are quite fragmentary.

Perhaps the most honest thing I can say when I am feeling lost and confused about life and questioning whether my faith is of any worth at all is, “Lord, to whom [else] shall I go? You and your Church are the only thing that have ever given me any hope and any sense of lasting meaning, even if I am struggling to see that now.” (cf. John 6:68)

What we need is an education of the heart to live, confronting the actual desires of our humanity.

Why do we find ourselves living as if to say “I am willing to pay the price to settle for something less”?

If you crush the desires of your heart, Christ can never answer them. You can verify this by engaging your experience.

Allow yourself 5 minutes of unrestricted hope [!] and see what happens.

“Don’t be an idiot” and not follow a desire once awakened.

[The follwing was his recommendation regarding the book by Giussani he was promoting, but it applies to anything which is proposed to us as true and meaningful for our lives.] Does it correspond to my experience? Is it so? Is it the case? (Not, “do I like it?” Going to a shoestore and finding a good pair of shoes is not a “subjective” experience or merely a question of “Do I like it?”. My experience of life, honestly engaged, is an “objective” measure of the truth of things, just as a pair of shoes is either good or bad for my feet. A proposal of what the meaning of my life is is either good or bad, and I can judge this by experience.)

Making a Choice, Finding a Home

I read this here:  Making a Choice, Finding a Home

[Bertha Cobb] laughs, though, when describing what first attracted her to Catholicism. “I realized the service at the Catholic church was only one hour. At the other churches, you had to stay all day!”

That sounds about right.

Happy Easter!

After Mass

My ideal after-Mass conversation with someone I’ve never met before:

“Hi, I’m James and I’m fundamentally broken in many ways and also somewhat liable to hurt you; I know you’re similar in these regards. Can we be friends?”

A Little Lesson

A lesson learned, but not yet lived, from School of Community:

Everyone is living for something, for some reason. Everyone does what he or she does throughout the day for some reason. Everything is done for some reason. This includes you, and me.

The question is, Are these reasons adequate to the desire of the heart?

Once this question is taken seriously, life must become a drama, for it is no longer possible to remain silent before this question as it is played out in day to day life.

Answering this question in a satisfactory way is certainly the task of a lifetime. However, we must begin now, and not relent.

Love Is Before All Things

Some wisdom from the East on the spiritual life.