I noted in a recent post that I have been studying various aspects of computer programming for the last several months heavily. While it is a fairly interesting topic, and an important one to me and to my family’s future, it can become a bit dry to say the least.
My reading list has not been updated in months! After a steady progress to start, there has been nothing for some time. I have not been able to read anything really enjoyable, or more properly stated, for leisure, at all. Learning new programming stuff is exciting and can be fun, but it is nothing like reading a nice novel, or historical text.
While perusing Craigslist, I found an interesting book collection, called “The Harvard Classics”. After some research on Wikipedia I learned that this is a collection of works designed to give one the equivalence of a “liberal education”. These books were compiled by the former President of Harvard, Charles W. Elliot in 1909. It was his thought that if one judiciously read the assorted works, if even for only “fifteen minutes a day”, the reader would come away with a worthwhile education, prepared for the upcoming century.
Having read quite a bit about this Five Foot Shelf, I found myself intrigued. It has its critics, one who decried the absence of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud specifically. These critics don’t see it as having a properly modern perspective. It is not dark enough, and shows just a little too much hope for the future. Having read these kinds of criticisms, I decided to purchase the set.
I have read pretty much none of these works, and find the prospect of discovering the collected thought of humanity, through the eyes, of a late Victorian, American perspective to be exciting. I really don’t care to read Freud, Marx, or Nietzsche just now honestly. This collection has a very large sampling of some of the greatest works of all time, and becoming familiar with them, should take a decade or more.
Having decided to purchase the set, some research as to the value of the collection was conducted. After some back and forth, the seller agreed to part with the collection for $250. This appeared to be a very good deal. So I met up with the seller and her father at their church to complete the transaction.
After clearing some shelf space, and unloading and organizing the set, I was horrified to find that two volumes were missing! There has still been no response to my emails, and I doubt that there will be, which is unfortunate. The seller seemed like such a good person. Whether she was deceitful or not, seems to be no longer in doubt. With every passing day, her silence indicates, that she knew the volumes were missing.
This sour note started to spoil my joy for having made the purchase of course. Staring at the not quite five foot shelf, really irritated me. I am a completist at heart, and two missing volumes just would not do. Luckily I was able to find copies of the missing two, from the same printing, on eBay, and should have them in a week or so.
I have dedicated to read the set in order, and have already started the first volume, which starts with His Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin. So far it has been a surprisingly enjoyable read. His style is very agreeable, and I plan to complete reading this selection shortly.
I will create a listing of the collection, and will dutifully review each work, except for the individual poems, as I have with my other reading list. There are not to many, if any, correlations between the two lists, so I will be going back and forth between them for years to come no doubt. I will post a picture of the shelf tomorrow if possible.
Already, well on the way to banning sharp sticks, a British inventor has come up with a safe knife, that is designed to prevent it being used as a stabbing weapon.
I have been busier than a two peckered goat lately.
My career is in transition at the moment. Luckily this has not involved losing my job. I am a software developer by trade, and am transitioning away from Java and into the .NET web development world. All of my spare time has been clogged with reading technical manuals and such.
While I am excited about this new opportunity I long to read something that doesn’t require much thought. A nice western or some such would be very nice. Alas, for now I am relegated to continue forward, with my quest to gain a professional amount of know how on this new platform.
This week’s song is “I Found The Lilly In My Valley” by Quinton Mills. This was one of Pa’s favorites that he sang all the time. Unfortunately I do not have on online copy of him singing it, but this will work.
My grandfather, Morris Byrom died last Thursday and we buried him in Bowie, TX yesterday afternoon. Yesterday was a very tough day. I finally realized that I will never see him again in this lifetime. That hurts my soul very deeply. Our Pa, as we grandkids called him, was the best man I have ever known.
I struggle to write anything about him, because I lack the skill to describe not only how much he meant to my family, but what a genuinely good and loving person he was. To say that he was a good man is missing it. He was a great man. A man that spent his whole life serving God, and a man that worked very hard to support his family.
While talking about him over the weekend we all came up with some of the same points. None of us have ever heard Pa say a cuss word, and as far as we all know he never drank a bit of alcohol, or smoked a cigarette. He wasn’t a judgmental teetotaler either. He just chose, at a very young age, to be the best Christian man he could be, and carried through with that throughout his life. He was not a perfect man of course as no one is, but he always strove to be as close to it as possible.
Pa worked for several different Ford dealerships throughout his life. He was a long time parts manager. The man forgot more about automobile parts than I will ever hope to know. Back in the 50s, before computers were available he actually had every Ford part number memorized. If you came in and told him you needed a wheel cylinder for a ’52 Ford truck, he would know exactly what it was and were to find it. Amazing really.
My Pa, worked hard to support his family. He was never a rich man, but earned an honest living, and always did a fine job, even when he was in terrible pain.
He worked as a parts man for his entire adult life. After retiring, he even worked part time at a dealership selling Ford parts, until he was physically unable to do so. Pa was a giant of a man. He was 6’5”, and weighed over 300 pounds. His hands were huge, and believe me, if you did wrong you found out just how huge they were.
The hardest thing for me over the last several years was seeing him in a weakened state. He had diabetes and suffered from many chronic health problems. The last several years of his life were spent in pain, and having to rely on others for everything. It had to have been a terrible experience for him. He spent his whole life being the strongest guy around.
One of his lifelong friends told the story yesterday of Pa playing football with them as kids. He was so strong the only way they could get him down, was to trip him. He would just carry several guys on his back if they tried to stand up tackle him. Pa had been known to lift up ends of cars from time to time, when his jack wasn’t handy in his younger years.
My Pa, was the strongest man I have ever known. He never used his strength to hurt others however. I believe the man would nearly have let you whoop him, before he would do anything about it. Say something to his wife or one of us kiddoes on the other hand, and you would have had a real problem on your hands. Of course as big as he was, there weren’t many that tested him.
As strong as he was, his most enduring and memorable quality was probably his gentleness. He was a real gentle giant. Many described him as a teddy bear. Pa had a very tender heart, which I inherited. He was not afraid to cry in front of others if he was overjoyed or extremely sad. At the same time he never complained about any situation he found himself in really.
He was very, very tender with us grandkids. We knew he loved us, and would have walked through fire for us. We also knew that he loved us enough to discipline us if need be. Of course, it hardly ever came to that. We knew where the boundaries where and didn’t cross them too often.
As a child, everything we did together was fun. He made it fun. I used to ride with him on a delivery route to Corsicana once a week, and he managed to make a boring day of riding in a delivery van fun for me. He always made sure that I was enjoying myself.
Fun came easy for him, because he had a great sense of humor. Pa was a consummate practical joker. He lived for the prank, and pulled them off well. They were never mean-spirited or intended to embarrass anyone though. Always, just in good fun. He loved telling clean jokes, and had great delivery.
His voice, had a great booming quality to it. This, he came by honestly. Our family has been a bunch of loudmouths for generations. You know when a group of us arrives, and we all tend to talk over others if more than one conversation is going on. Eventually it reaches a crescendo, to the point that we have been warned about it if we are in a public place.
Pa used his pipes to sing. He may not have had the best voice in the world, but it was very powerful, and he always sang with a lot of emotion. You could feel his appreciation for our Lord, when he sang songs about Him. He used this talent to lead the singing in many of the churches he attended over the years.
My grandfather, was a mighty man of God. He was a devoted Christian, and walked the walk. He was almost generous to a fault. The man would literally give the shirt off his back, to help someone, whether he knew them or not. There are countless stories of him helping people fix their cars with parts he paid for, and free labor when they could not afford to hire a mechanic or buy parts.
He went to church every time the doors were open, and was a fine example of what a Christian father should be. Pa was more of a man than I may ever be. This brief rambling can’t hope to capture what his life was, and what he did for our family and others, but it will have suffice for now.
I already miss him dearly, and the pain I feel for his loss is something that hopefully time will be able to heal.
Obama’s idea of slashing spending is to trim $100,000,000 off of his proposed $3,500,000,000,000 budget. Of course this will be parroted about by his underlings as change we can believe in. The stupidity of the masses will be tested with this one. Anyone that brings this up while discussing government spending needs to be punched directly in the throat.
This equals a reduction of about .003 percent of the budget or three hundred thousandths. It is quite literally only a drop in the bucket. A drop of water weighs about a tenth of a gram (0.1 grams). A gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds. Three hundred thousandths of a gallon of water weighs 113 milligrams, or .113 grams. Please excuse my mixture of metric and imperial measurements.
This is depraved. We have the President claiming he is being fiscally responsible by introducing a budget twice the size of any that have come before it, during the worst recession in decades. Then to lessen the blow, he literally tries to reduce spending by removing one drop of water from this disgustingly bloated bucket.
Well today apparently marks the two year anniversary of Harry Reid’s asinine statement concluding that the war in Iraq was lost. The fact that we were actively engaged in hostilities did not prevent this scumbag from using the war and our veterans as political pawns. So for the third of fourth time on this blog, here’s Harry!
