Lofland bLOG

Here are a couple of articles to help you be a good fundamentalist.

http://www.av1611.org/nkjv.html

If you ever spent any time listening to a man by the name of Bill Gothard, this next article might not even seem funny, but rather, just normal. I’ve heard all of these methods of proving a point “biblically” used by Bill before. This guy even brings the CDC into it!

http://www.dbhome.dk/carlo/cat.htm

All that comes to mind is “Your logic is dizzying.” Someone should have tried that line at IBLP headquarters sometime.

Posted 3/29/2007 2:33 PM

5 Comments:

Wow. That second article is some complete and bitter satire. But you are so right - every one of those methods is used - frequently - all over the place…
Posted 3/29/2007 3:51 PM by novisigothsorkangaroos

Wow, how do you find this stuff?

I’m thinking that little symbol with the phone and the Bible looks familiar. It really resembles something used by…oh, who was it. I’ll have to do some research.
Posted 3/30/2007 6:48 AM by jonathan_camenisch

Yea, I mean, I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been tempted toward idolotry of my cat numerous times! This guy needs to write about what the Bible says about dogs. According to Duet. 23:18 ‘dog’ is the Biblical word for male prostitue. The book also states that unclean meat should be thrown to the dogs. Would a true follower of Jahova allow such a creature in his house hold? I think not!

LOL

That first guy though, is seriously spastic. I can feel him yelling at me through the screne. I mean, he’s mad that the translators used the original greek words for hell instead of an english one- that really makes sense. I refuse to be stressed out by this.

~Tegwin
Posted 3/30/2007 4:05 PM by Tegwenava

that is some heavy stuff about the nkjv! guess i will have to get up and leave if they ever decide to read from it in church. :-p

i wish i had God’s email address, so I could send Him the one about cats… I mean, do you think He knew this when He created them? :-/ I like Tegwin’s point about dogs…

I found a pretty good book recently, A Matter of Basic Principles. First time I’d tried to think seriously about iblp in a long time.
Posted 3/31/2007 4:51 PM by miracles_start_now

You’re right. I’m not saying everyone lies on Xanga. They just don’t say everything. Not that they’re supposed to. But what’s anything without context? Guess that’s where knowing the person who wrote it comes in. Sort of like with the Bible.
Posted 4/6/2007 1:53 PM by Godseeker23

From The Writer’s Almanac:

“It’s the birthday of one of the great American journalists of the 20th
century, A.J. (Abbott Joseph) Liebling, born in New York (1904). He got
his first real writing job working at the New York World, and began
writing about New York City saloons and nightclubs, racetracks and corner
stores, gourmet restaurants and boxing rings. His favorite subjects were
food, journalism, and boxing.

“In 1939, he began to cover the war in Europe for The New Yorker. Unlike
other war correspondents, Liebling didn’t write about politics or combat
strategy. He wrote about day-to-day life among the soldiers and the
civilians. He later said that he missed the war years. He wrote, ‘The
times were full of certainties: We could be certain we were right—and we
were—and that certainty made us certain that anything we did was right,
too. I have seldom been sure I was right since. … I know that it is
socially acceptable to write about war as an unmitigated horror, but
subjectively at least, it was not true, and you can feel its pull on men’s
memories at the maudlin reunions of war divisions. They mourn for their
dead, but also for war.’”

A. J. Liebling also said, “Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of
inexperience.”

Like life at a training center, full of certainty and purpose.

Life, looked at objectively, often does not give the full picture.

Posted 3/23/2007 3:43 PM

2 Comments:

Wow, he seems like an extremely interesting writer, one that will make an excellent source in centurys to come of WW2 life. I love these sort of studies.

The last quote you have there is very good and very true.
Posted 3/25/2007 6:23 PM by Tegwenava

He was right, and that was a good point about knowing so certainly that you’re right.

Are you a cynic?
Posted 3/29/2007 11:28 AM by Godseeker23

From The Writer’s Almanac:

“It’s the birthday of one of the great American journalists of the 20th
century, A.J. (Abbott Joseph) Liebling, born in New York (1904). He got
his first real writing job working at the New York World, and began
writing about New York City saloons and nightclubs, racetracks and corner
stores, gourmet restaurants and boxing rings. His favorite subjects were
food, journalism, and boxing.

“In 1939, he began to cover the war in Europe for The New Yorker. Unlike
other war correspondents, Liebling didn’t write about politics or combat
strategy. He wrote about day-to-day life among the soldiers and the
civilians. He later said that he missed the war years. He wrote, ‘The
times were full of certainties: We could be certain we were right—and we
were—and that certainty made us certain that anything we did was right,
too. I have seldom been sure I was right since. … I know that it is
socially acceptable to write about war as an unmitigated horror, but
subjectively at least, it was not true, and you can feel its pull on men’s
memories at the maudlin reunions of war divisions. They mourn for their
dead, but also for war.’”

A. J. Liebling also said, “Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of
inexperience.”

Like life at a training center, full of certainty and purpose.

Life, looked at objectively, often does not give the full picture.

when Solaris goes into singel user mode due to disk problems, just type:

fsck -y

do that over and over until it is happy, then exit

if it is still not happy, it will dump you to single again, so fsck -y again

eventually it will be happy and finish booting.

Now if it boots ok, another reboot is probably in order, for a test.

I used this script to find to find out what version of Sendmail was on each server by package:

for i in $(cat SystemList);do ssh $i ‘hostname;pkginfo -l Sendmail | grep VERSION:;pkginfo -l OtherSendmail | grep VERSION:’ >> output;done;cat output

What ouput looks like is this:

hostname1
VERSION: 8.12.10
hostname2
VERSION: 8.13.7
hostname3
VERSION: 8.13.8
hostname4
VERSION: 8.13.8
hostname5
VERSION: 8.13.8
…

This is hard to parse, I wanted it on one line.

Per this web page: http://unix-simple.blogspot.com/2006/12/awk-script-to-combine-lines-in-file.html

I modified the code slightly and ran this:

cat output | awk ‘{d=d”"$o}
/VERSION/ {
print d
d=”"
}’

and got this:

hostname1 VERSION: 8.12.10
hostname2 VERSION: 8.13.7
hostname3 VERSION: 8.13.8
hostname4 VERSION: 8.13.8
hostname5 VERSION: 8.13.8
…

VERY cool, and easy to parse, and even to stick into Excel.
____

Make it comma delimited:
for i in $(cat SystemList);do ssh $i ‘uname -n;echo ,;crontab -l|grep -i SEARCHTEXT1;echo ,;crontab -l|grep -i SEARCHTEXT2;echo done’>>output;done;less output

cat output | awk ‘{d=d”"$o}
/done/ {
print d
d=”"
}’

Here are the step by step (maybe to script soon):
Open a console connection to the box and log into it. Just leave it there for emergency.
from SSH login
cd
pwd
mkdir /root
ls -la
rm .profile.orig
mv .forward .profile .rhosts .sh_history .ssh .Xauthority /root/
mail -f mbox
mail -f mbox
rm mbox
ls -la
vi /etc/passwd
SSH in again and see if it works.
Log off and back on at console to make sure it works.
pwd
whoami

Expect is really cool, and you can use autoexpect to MAKE an expect script from a session, like a macro recorder!
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3065
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/expect/chapter/ch03.html
Here is my script to just telnet to port 25 to see the Sendmail version:

set timeout 10
spawn telnet $argv 25
match_max 100000
expect -exact “sendmail”
send — “quit\r”
expect eof

It was made with autoexpect and then edited, there is some more stuff in the file autoexpect spit out.
Here is how I loop it:
for i in $(cat MissingList);do echo $i >> output;test2.exp $i | grep -i sendmail >> output;done;cat output

I just love this quote, I laugh out loud sometimes when it comes to mind. I think it may be from the movie “We’re No Angles,” but I’m not certain.

Anyway, here it is:

“You’ve gotta admire him, even if you don’t.”

Can you think of anyone you would say this about?

Posted 3/16/2007 12:15 PM

8 Comments:

I tried but I can’t. I think I know what you mean, though. Can you?
Posted 3/16/2007 4:34 PM by Godseeker23

You’d have to meet them. The list starts with funny (as in “makes you laugh”) but I don’t know the rest of it offhand.
Posted 3/16/2007 4:35 PM by Godseeker23

Posted 3/17/2007 8:24 AM by jonathan_camenisch

I think you meant “Angels”. They were closer to angles than angels.
Posted 3/19/2007 9:25 AM by ThoughtForFood

I think you meant “Angels”. Those guys were closer to angles, I suppose…
Posted 3/19/2007 9:27 AM by ThoughtForFood

Although the Angles were real people. The Angles were a group of Germanic people who invaded Great Britain way back in the day. In fact, there name has been used as a pun with Angels for a long time. Supposedly Pope Gregory I saw a group of young Angle children for sale at a Roman slave market and was shocked by their beauty. He inquired about their origin and when he was told he responded “Not Angles, but Angels”. He therefore resolved to convert their homeland. Somehow it seems that buying their freedom might have been more helpful…
Posted 3/19/2007 6:56 PM by novisigothsorkangaroos

Yes, Jared. They invented fishing, right?
Posted 3/19/2007 7:54 PM by ThoughtForFood

Alright Christen, I’ll be more precise then. In Latin supposedly he actually said:
“Non Angli, sed angeli”

Wouldn’t it be fun to be able to go around making Latin puns?

And yes Jerusha, I like the way you think. They may well have been some of the first anglers…
Posted 3/20/2007 11:16 AM by novisigothsorkangaroos

Currently Listening to Awake by Josh Groban

When I become a world famous singer/song writer/musician I need to put strict usage rights on my work.

Josh Groban has gotten really popular with his latest CD. Several of the songs are on the easy listening stations that people at work listen to, and are even being pumped out into retail stores . . .

Now his latest music can be heard in the same venue in which we were putting up with the typical pop trash from girls who shave their heads and no name artists re-singing old songs from venerable institutions of the past like Culture Club . . .

I am sure this is great for Josh’s royalty earnings, but somehow it seems to erode some of the work, just the slightest bit maybe . . .

to wit:

Somehow, standing in a large warehouse style home improvement store in the customer service lane to return some building supplies does not feel like quite the right environment to appreciate Josh Groban’s “February Song.”

Then again, maybe it should. Maybe all of that trash music I’ve learned to put up with in such places has lowered my standards. If I could expect such quality music in retail establishments, I might drop my URGE subscription in favor of a SAM’s Club membership.

As it is, I dislike going to the grocery store almost as much as I dislike listening to Boy George.

Does Dillons really want to hurt me?

Posted 3/1/2007 1:33 PM

8 Comments:

About Dillons–you are missing the point. It’s not that they WANT to hurt you, or that they want NOT to hurt you. Whichever helps their bottom line, they would prefer. Do you, or does Jerusha, spend more money on groceries when you do the shopping? Then that is the person with the musical preference to which they would prefer to acquiesce.

And no, I’m not (quite) a cynic. There is, like, 1/2 mm on the scale between the actual cynic and me.
Posted 3/3/2007 4:45 PM by miracles_start_now

I agree about the grocery store. Why does food shopping have to be such a terrible experience? I like it fine when I do it with Jerusha and just have to talk with Melissa and push her in the cart, but it’s a different story when I have to do it for myself. After spending your whole life learning to invest in permanent rather than temporary things, you find yourself compelled to pour money into things which you know will have either been consumed or spoiled withing a week. And all in an atmosphere reminiscent of Home Depot. Can’t you at least make me feel good about loosing my money? Recently I did have one contrary experience. I stopped by a high-end import and natural food grocery store. All the fruit look great. They had a whole section devoted to chocolate. A large one devoted to import cheeses. The store smells nice. The food all looks beautiful and fun to eat. Shopping was so much fun. But alas, the financial damages are even more severe. So I continue to shop at the 24hr Wal-Mart Community store…
Posted 3/5/2007 8:32 AM by novisigothsorkangaroos

I missed something. If the word of God is like the spoon, where does “there is no spoon” come in? (I thought the spoon=reality. There is no reality; it is your mind that you bend. Postmodern worldview.) Can you explain again?
Posted 3/7/2007 1:02 PM by Godseeker23

Okay, I’m curious: how do you decide whether or not to give eprops? I can’t draw a line between when you do and when you don’t give them. Explain?
Posted 3/7/2007 1:38 PM by Godseeker23

Not real to us, but I think you were on to something when you talked about God being outside of time as we know it. (Like the Dilbert cartoon: “To you, is time a linear stream of events or a trail of endless possibilities?” “To me Time is a magazine. Now ask me about ‘Life.’”) Like Shakespeare wasn’t limited to Romeo and Juliet’s timeline; he lived outside it. And the analogy does break down: Unlike us, Romeo and Juliet didn’t have any choice on what they did, so there was no room for chance. (Which makes God that much better because he works it out for good to people who love him in spite of what sinful people choose.) Are we arguing or agreeing?
Posted 3/10/2007 4:10 PM by Godseeker23

“Are we arguing or agreeing?”

Yes.
Posted 3/12/2007 8:31 AM by ThinkingOnTheEdge

Yeah, I think it just went from one side of my hand to the other, and maybe just a little through my forearm. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t grounded anywhere else, as I was sitting on carpet. Definitely dangerous enough to prevent me from repeating it though.
Posted 3/13/2007 2:50 PM by madhatterb78

Oh and a typo. I was adjusting a belt, not a bolt
Posted 3/13/2007 2:53 PM by madhatterb78