Long Trip – Good Fellowship

Saturday I had the opportunity to preach in a deaf church on the other side of Buenos Aires. It only takes about 1.5 hours by private car to get to the church. I was taking a small group of people from our church with me. Those who went with me are interested in deaf ministry and are taking the sign language classes we are teaching. This was a good opportunity for them to see a different type of ministry in that I was going to be preaching in sign language instead of interpreting what someone else said.

Bus #1
We took a bus to get to the bus station. Fortunately, while we left 30 minutes later than I wanted to from the church, we were able to get a bus immediately upon arriving at the bus stop. On Saturdays it sometimes takes 45 minutes or more to catch a bus. We were able to get to the bus station relatively easily.

Bus #2
There was a bit of a wait to get on the main bus that was to take us across town. This was a direct-ish bus from our city to a city about 40 minutes from our final destination. We were going to be on the main highway most of the way. There would still be stops along the side of the road, but we weren’t stopping at every other street corner to pick up and drop off riders.

Just before we got to the highway our radiator sprung a leak. We all had to exit the bus and try to catch whatever bus came along behind us.

Bus #3
The first bus that came by was not going to the right destination. The next bus was going where we wanted, but it wasn’t a direct run. Even though we knew it would be slower, we decided that a “bus in the hand was better than two on the highway” (or something like that). This bus ended up taking much longer than we had hoped. While I buffered in 2 hours of delays into my travel times, each one of the issues that cropped up ate away at all the extra time we had.

Train
We finally got to the town where we were needed to jump on a train to get us close to the church. The train trip was uneventful and took us where we needed to be. The only issue was that it was packed and our group of seven had to split up a bit to find a place to stand. We got to our stop a few minutes after the church service was supposed to start.

Cars
Instead of catching our final bus to the church, the pastor came and picked us up. He only has one car, so we weren’t sure how that was going to work. But there was another family visiting the church from another town too who had a car to help us get from the train station to church.

Since none of the congregation had arrived yet, the fact that the pastor left the church to pick us up was not a problem. In fact, after the pastor dropped us off at the church he went and picked up the church folks.

Church
We had a good church service. There were only two Deaf in the service, but we had other hearing visitors. It was a good experience for the people from our church to be there. We also had good fellowship exchanging ideas and goals in the ministry. It was not until 11:00 when we started the trip back home. Thinking that it would take 3 to 5 hours to get home, we were not really excited about the trip. But, the pastor and the visitor from another town graciously offered to give us a ride home. This meant an almost 2 hour drive for them each way. While we would have never asked them to do us this favor, we are glad they offered to take care of us.

Just another reminder that getting around without a car is not impossible, but it sure is inconvenient at times. I don’t miss paying $4 a gallon for gas though. Each time I ride my bike by a gas station I have to think that I have a little more money in my pocket for other needs.

Shocking and Disappointing Revelation

I knew it was time to write a new prayer letter for our supporting churches. While I have tried to maintain a schedule of writing one at the beginning of certain months, or setting reminders in my calendar to help me get a new letter out, these reminders never seem to keep me on schedule. The reality is that I usually just write a letter when I remember it and hope that I remember every 6 to 8 weeks.

This week was one of those weeks I began thinking that it was time to get a new letter in the mail. I went to my ministry website to read my previous letter and see what I wrote so that I can pick up the new letter from there. I was shocked (and saddened) to see that the last time I wrote on the site was back in the middle of November. That was three and a half months ago! Sigh.

I did update the site today with a little snippet of news. I also wrote the first draft to the new prayer letter. I will try to polish it up by Monday and get it in the process of being mailed next week. I need someone who will send me a reminder every so often to help me stay on top of this. Any volunteers?

If you do not get our prayer letter by email, you can go to dpeach.com and sign up using the little box in the right column.

Creating Virtual Windows

Ever since I got my current notebook computer (over three years ago), I have wanted to install Windows into a virtual machine. A virtual machine is a computer environment that runs inside of another operating system. For example, my main computer operating system is Linux. With a virtual machine installed inside of Linux I can run another operating system as if I had an extra computer. However, because I was not sure on how to set up a virtual machine I have continued to dual boot between Linux and Windows. This means that each time I turn on my computer I have to decide which operating system I want to use. I have just a couple of programs that I use in Windows that won’t work in Linux and therefore I have continued to dual boot just to run those programs.

Last weekend I finally decided to tackle the task of installing Windows into a virtual machine. And by doing this, I would also free up 150 GB of hard drive space that had been dedicated to my Windows installation. To get started I needed to do a complete backup of Windows and Linux. After doing a standard backup, I then cloned each one of my operating systems which were installed on two separate partitions of my hard drive. Cloning a hard drive means that I made an exact bit by bit copy of one hard drive onto another. In my case I cloned each partition on my internal hard drive onto an external hard drive. To do this I used the live CD made by Clonezilla.

VirtualBox imageThe virtual machine that I am using is a free piece of software called VirtualBox made by Oracle. I have had VirutalBox installed on my computer for almost 3 years but have never been brave enough to actually try to install Windows in the virtual machine.

After having both hard drive partitions backed up and cloned on the external hard drive I used Parted Magic to resize my Linux partition. The program Parted is a nondestructive hard drive partitioner. I was able to delete the 150 GB partition where Windows was installed and increase the size of my Linux partition to use the whole hard drive. I was very pleased to reboot my system and find that my Linux installation worked perfectly without having to make any adjustments.

My original plan was to create a virtual machine by installing the cloned a Windows partition. But I realized that there were many programs and add-ons that I have collected through the years. Therefore, I decided to install Windows from scratch into the virtual machine. I then installed the few programs that I needed.

While this probably sounds like it only took a couple of hours, it actually took me close to three days. Cloning the two partitions took several hours each. The Windows partition took over 10 hours, and the Linux partition took seven. In the end, I did not need to have cloned either partition since I installed Windows from scratch and my Linux installation continued to work after resizing the hard drive. However, having the partitions cloned gave me great security and confidence as I continued through the project. Another 6 hours were spent migrating data from the external hard drive into the Windows virtual machine. While there really wasn’t that much data to bring back into Windows, I was constantly fighting the system because Windows had to install more than 130 updates. If I wasn’t monitoring the computer it would randomly reboot to install updates which would break my data transfers. Fortunately only the virtual machine had to reboot, not the actual computer which was running Linux.

I won’t be doing any gaming with this Windows installation. A virtual machine runs on limited resources. The few programs that I use Windows for are neither real-time critical nor processor intensive.

It is nice to use Windows without having to reboot my computer. I would normally have to boot into Windows once a week to do certain tasks, but am now able to turn on Windows for a few minutes to do what I need to do whenever I want.

While VirtualBox seems to work well for my needs, it may not be for everyone. There was quite a bit of reading that I needed to do to understand how to get some of my hardware working inside Windows. If you are needing to use the virtualized operating system for processor intensive tasks, then a virtual machine may not be your best option. Since I have 3 GB of RAM on this computer, I dedicated 1/3rd of that to the Windows installation.

Have you played around with virtual machines? Run into any major reasons why you would tell people to avoid them? I was afraid some of my needed hardware would not work, but everything works as if I was running Windows natively on the computer.

Review: Head First WordPress by Jeff Siarto

Head First WordPress Cover imageThis is the first book in the Head First series by O’Reilly Media that I have read. I was pleased with how well written and entertaining it was. Head First WordPress by Jeff Siarto came out in July 2010. With WordPress’ move to the 3.0 release, this was good timing to help new users know exactly what they would experience when installing the latest version of the software. I was hoping that it would also be a good insight to those of us who have been using WordPress for a while to know what are some of the fundamental differences we would expect with the new version of the software. However, this book is completely written for the first time installer.

The book is a good overview of WordPress and getting it installed. There is no attempt to explain the details of WordPress themes, even though there is a whole chapter devoted to it. There just is not enough time spent on any one subject to get a deep understanding. While there are exercises that help the reader work through modifying a theme, it would be a rare reader who could take what little they learned and apply it to a theme on their own.

There are other areas where the book seems to pretend to give detail, but the reality is that it is still just an overview. As a podcaster I was excited to see that there was a chapter on podcasting. Yet there are too many details that are missing to make it complete.

The best chapter in the book was the one about securing WordPress. While it still did not go into the greatest detail of security, there was enough to feel like you can protect yourself from most hacking situations.

I could recommend the book to someone who is interested in installing WordPress, but is intimidated by the actual process. The book was also well illustrated and entertaining. However, this book is not appropriate for anyone who has installed WordPress more than a couple of times. They won’t find much new information in the pages of the book.

Head First WordPress, 368 pages, Jeff Siarto, O’Reilly Media, 2010.

[I wrote a more detailed summary of Head First WordPress]

Been busy writing, but no new posts

Though things have been quiet on the blog-front, I was very busy during the month of December writing articles at InfoBarrel. I was trying to win the monthly contest. You get points based on the number of words you write per article. I wrote 79 articles that were worth 5 points each and 1 that was worth only 1 point. I earned 396 points for the month. By the time we got to the last 10 days, there were only 2 of us fighting for the top position.

The girl I was competing against may have won 408 points, but we don’t know yet. Or, at least I don’t know. I can’t see how many points her articles are worth until the daily point tally is figured out. It usually updates about 3 AM, my time. But since last night was the end of the contest, the admins seem to manually review the points before posting the final numbers.

So we are in a waiting game.

Having cranked out so much content the last few weeks, I feel like I had to write something today even though there is no news yet on the final numbers. It probably won’t be until Monday or Tuesday before we know since the admins take the weekend off.