http://andersoj.org/oddments oddments by Jon Anderson Sat, 03 Feb 2007 01:27:36 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en From Gerald May, Entering the Emptiness in The Awakened Heart: Excerpt available at my website. With both these people, as with so many others who have confided in me, the real problem was believing that their sense of inner restlessness and lack of fulfillment indicated psychological disorder. They had swallowed the ... http://andersoj.org/oddments/2007/02/02/entering-the-emptiness I have just wrapped up my visit to Leeds, UK for the IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems. I presented a paper on distributable thread integrity, some details are available here. --JA http://andersoj.org/oddments/2006/10/04/srds-2006-conference After some long delay, I'm writing the final message (we hope) from our trip to Africa. We find ourselves at Johannesburg International Airport (again) due to a slight hiccup in our space-available travel plans. This is the first time I've gone through immigration twice in two hours before. ... http://andersoj.org/oddments/2006/05/29/missive-4-from-our-journey Friends- Today I write from Gabarone, Botswana. We have been here with Phil Rotz for the last couple of days, and enjoying ourselves immensely. When last I wrote, we were in Cape Town. We rousted ourselves very early in the morning (as is our wont, and that of ... http://andersoj.org/oddments/2006/05/21/missive-3-from-our-journey All- This will be a short one. Today we visited the wineries of Stellenbosch and Franschhoek, the wineland of South Africa. (Nazarenes out there should substitute the words "grape juice" every time they read "wine".) Angela drove around quite a bit, maintaining her grasp of left-handed driving. Oddly, ... http://andersoj.org/oddments/2006/05/21/missive-2-from-our-journey All- I write from Cape Town, the first place we actually stop for a little while. We left on Sunday, arriving here midday on Tuesday, which with a bit of arithmetic wrangling yields about 45 hours of travel. Happily, some of that was spent asleep on a couch ... http://andersoj.org/oddments/2006/05/21/missive-1-from-our-joruney Ben's website is now online. --JA http://andersoj.org/oddments/2006/01/03/ben-cannon-for-oregon-district-46-rep Take a moment and listen to this installment of NPR's "This I Believe" by Dierdre Sullivan. Click on the "Listen" button next to Ms. Sullivan's name on the NPR page to hear a RealAudio stream, or read the transcript. --JA http://andersoj.org/oddments/2005/11/17/always-go-to-the-funeral Enough with this "virtual world" nonsense. I love to see it when folks use the internet to push people back into the real world in new ways. Here are a couple of services I've recently discovered and taken great pleasure in: The first is LibraryThing, a simple mechanism for ... http://andersoj.org/oddments/2005/11/17/fun-and-exciting-book-services Recently our adult Sunday School class at Blacksburg Presbyterian has been reading and discussing Jonathan Sacks' book, The Dignity of Difference. Sacks is the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, and Dignity is an excellent and challenging book I can recommend to anyone ... http://andersoj.org/oddments/2005/11/17/to-heal-a-fractured-world