OS X MouseZoom

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I’ve had problems with my mouse tracking speed in OS X; the cursor simply moves too slowly! That’s why this guy made MouseZoom: an extra preference panel which cranks up your OS X mouse speed to a more comfortable level. Now I no longer need to lift my mouse off the pad to move the cursor half a screen from its position.

Piper’s “Desiring God”

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Thanks to Valerie for the copy of Piper’s Desiring God. I’ll start on it as soon as I’m done with Dickens’ Bleak House, which has occupied my reading attention for over a year now.

(I’m almost at the end, though. Mr. Tulkinghorn has revealed to Lady Dedlock his knowledge of her secret past, and Mademoiselle Hortense has offered to Tulkinghorn her services to ruin the Lady, only to be rebuffed with the threat of arrest. Lady Dedlock’s illegitimate daughter, Esther Summerson, however, annoys me to no end with her syrupy first-person narrative. And Mr. Skimpole, the caricaturish idiot, deserves to be dragged out into the street and shot repeatedly.)

How Firm a Foundation

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“The soul that on Jesus has leaned for repose,

I will not, I will not desert to its foes;

That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,

I’ll never, no never, no never forsake.”

– How Firm a Foundation

Struggling with Lost Love

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Put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these, the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. (Col 3:5-8)

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. (Col 3:12-13)

This has been a struggle for me as of late. As most of you know, I suffered a severe blow some time ago when my girlfriend, my best friend of 8 years, whom I loved with all my heart and had intended to marry, deceived and left me within a matter of months, even weeks. The sudden abandonment broke me almost utterly, though I managed to survive through sheer numbness.

I had thought that time would begin to heal these wounds, but in the months since then, my anger and bitterness have grown, and I know in my mind that it is because I have not fully submitted to God. Easier thought than practiced: I do want in my heart to “count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus as my Lord,” (Phil 3.8) but I suppose my flesh wants to continue feeling justified in its righteous indignation.

And I miss her. Part of me still wants to love her, to hold on to that futile, feeble hope that she will come back to me in heart. Another more sensible part of me is trying to beat that hope to death. Yet another part plots senseless revenge, while yet another is tempted, sometimes quite strongly, to plunge into vain sensual indulgence.

Deep in my heart, I want none of that. I want nothing but to be free of these earthly binds and to fill this painful void in my life with Christ. Not with her, not with other relationships, not with another girl, but with Christ and Christ alone. He knows that is my weakness: the desire to find fulfillment in a romance rather than with Him. I know in my soul that I should be surrendering to Him completely, that I should forgive those who have so wronged me, that I should commit myself to seek things above; but theory and practice are two different things. Until Christ is seated once more in the throne of my heart, He will bring me to this crisis point again and again till I learn to surrender to Him completely.

So if I seem pensive when you meet me, that’s probably what’s weighing on my mind. I usually hide it well, though.

New Year 2003

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Happy New Year! My Scrooge-ish ways were changed when I heard that there were two fireworks shows going on at Inner Harbor, so I joined my neighbors and went to see.

Fireworks over Baltimore Inner Harbor, multiple exposure. Photo taken with an Aiptek Mini Pencam 1.3MP SD.

Back! Back! Back!

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Wayne Whitmer, who is now back, tells me that being Reformed is good for his butt. (He meant “posterity,” but said “posterior.”)

Rhesa, who I met in San Francisco, is back with Creative Slips, now at its own domain.

Bene Diction, who I think has seen better days, is now back, and he has a domain too.

Free Mi!

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I don’t think it can be stressed enough how important blogs are as content-filters for the overwhelming mass of information on the web. A decent OS X freeware text editor with syntax highlighting and FTP access, for example, is near impossible to find; but then, thanks to them, I found mi. (Update: It says “getting folder data” when I connect via FTP, then hangs. Forget that.)