Luke 7:28 says, in part,

I say to you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John…

Pretty impressive words from the Word Himself. Among those born of women

• meaning among men, or among humans - John is the best example. But what was it that made John such a great man? What was it about him that Jesus held up so highly? I can tell you what it wasn’t - a man clothed in finery and living in luxury (Luke 7:24) or a “reed shaken by the wind” (Luke 7:25). No, John was the fulfillment of the role of the prophet. His message was simple: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near” (Matthew 3:2). Guess what Jesus’ message was? “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near” (Matthew 4:17).

So, if I really want to be a man, what’s the takeaway? Should I don a camel hair cloak and eat wild honey? (Well, I do enjoy wild honey, but that’s not the point.) I should preach the Gospel, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near!” It doesn’t matter how many pull-ups I can do, how well you’ve trained for defensive situations, or how good your hair looks on the soccer pitch (can you tell I’ve been stuck in Europe during the European Championships?). Let the rest of my life worry about itself (Matthew 6:25), and tell all those around me that the Kingdom of Heaven is near. One last thing John said that I should try to emulate (John 3:30)….

After posting my short review of Ubuntu 9.04 a couple of days ago, I felt that I had not done justice to it, nor to the effort I’ve poured into learning it. This post will attempt to both provide interested parties (myself included) with a complete reference, and chronicle my missteps in a (hopefully temporary) migration to Ubuntu.

First, set up your partitioning. I’ve been dual-booting Fedora 10 and Mac OS X on my MacBook for a pretty good while, so this was already done. If your MacBook has only OS X, you’ll want to follow the guide here to set up dual-booting with BootCamp, or if you’re sure Ubuntu is for you, then follow this guide to set up for single-booting. As I mentioned, I had Fedora 11 in a separate partition already, so I didn’t need to do any partitioning. At this point, be sure that you install rEFIt in OS X for dual-booting. If you want Ubuntu (or whatever you’re putting on your MacBook) to boot by default, uncomment the “legacyfirst” item at the end of refit.conf.

When I’m reading my Bible, I often find it helpful to mark certain passages because they seem especially important, but I’ve never had any method for deciding which ones to mark. A friend showed me this technique several months ago and I couldn’t find any place where it’s explained online (if you know of one, please post it in the comments!), so here it is. This is the best method I’ve found for highlighting important verses to find them later. I highlight using five colors; other variations of the technique exist using four, or six, or seven. Here’s the list, with a few examples:

I’ve spent the last few days helping out some old friends with their four Windows XP computers (all from Dell) and it amazes me the amount of stuff I needed to do. My friends wanted me to wipe three of the four computers and see what I could do to speed up the fourth (I couldn’t wipe it as it actually belongs to their church and too many people use it for me to have talked to each of them about what they actually needed backed up). Here’s a consolidated list of the things I did and wished I could have done to each of the computers.

I’ve discovered that BibleGateway has a great Lent Reading Plan

• all four gospels and a few other passages during the 40 days of Lent. I know I’m a couple of days late, but I’m going to add it to my daily readings for the next 38 days! BibleGateway has a few other reading plans available, as well, that I may delve into once Easter arrives.

This is a list of verses I’ve found that speak about real men, or what it means to be a man…

Genesis 4:26(b) -> Call upon the LORD
I Samuel 16:18 -> Musical, valorous, prudent, and the LORD’s favor
Proverbs 24:16 -> Persevere
Matthew 5:13-16 -> Be different from the world’s ideas
Ephesians 4:11-16 -> United with other believers and speaking truth
Ephesians 4:25-32 -> Speaking truth; not being controlled by anger
Colossians 3:19,21 -> Love his wife and children
Colossians 3:23-24 -> Do everything to the best of his ability
I Timothy 3:2-13 -> Above reproach, free from vices
Titus 1:6-9 -> Not addicted to alcohol or quick-tempered
Titus 2:2, 6-8 -> Temperate, sensible, sound in faith and doctrine
Hebrews 13:7 -> Imitating Godly mentors and models
James 4:10 -> Humble
I Peter 3:7 -> Love his wife and care for her
II Peter 1:5-8 -> Constantly growing in order to be productive

[EDIT 29 Jan 2009:] I just figured out something very important. Upon completion of the “Firefly” series on Hulu.com, I pop in my DVD of Serenity, and… nothing. VLC won’t open it, neither will xine, nothing. Having used libdvdcss in the past, I immediately go to yum and try to install it, but it isn’t there. Afer searching teh blagoweb for several minutes, I finally find, in a comment on this post, that the repo at rpm.livna.org is still up to serve one package that RPMFusion refuses to carry. Guess what that package was? The first long command in this guide now installs the livna repository and libdvdcss.[/EDIT]

Update to this post about installing Fedora 10 on a brand-new MacBook…

To make the sound work, at least from the headphone jack, I had to run this command, from a guide Naresh put up on his blog…

echo “options snd_hda_intel model=mbp3” >> /etc/modprobe.d/sound

This sets the soundcard model option for the sound server. I then followed this guide to get PulseAudio running by changing one line of the pulseaudio config file /etc/pulse/default.pa, adding tsched=0 to the end of the line load-module module-hal-detect. It also directed me to install a bunch of PulseAudio packages, some of which don’t exist and others I didn’t need. The command I ended up running is below. I’m not sure if all of these packages are necessary; most of them were already on my system. In any case, sound works now. Out of the headphone port.

That’s right, folks, I’m running Fedora 10 on my shiny new MacBook 5.1… and you can too!! Here’s how to do it.

1. Partition your harddrive with BootCamp. My harddrive is 160 gigs (yes, I bought the cheapest MacBook since it was all I could afford), so I shrank the Mac OS X HFS+ partition to 40 GB and left the rest for “Windows.” Note: don’t actually install Windows, just exit BootCamp once the partitioning is done.