Craig Berry

I mentioned in my post earlier today that my EGC crown disappeared at some point during preparations for the wedding I performed last Saturday morning.  To my great relief, the staff at the Grove found it and is holding it for me.  I can't help wondering if it's the strangest item ever to land in their lost and found box. :)

Wow, it's been quite a while since my last post.  LJ seems to be a cyclical thing with me; I'll post and read very actively for a month or two, then take a few weeks off.  I should gather stats on my posting and see if it matches one of the biorhythm curves or something. :)

For the last two weeks, I actually have a good excuse for not having posted: I haven't had five spare minutes the whole time.  The weekend before last,

belladonna93  and I flew to Las Vegas for a mini-vacation to celebrate her birthday.  We had a wonderful time; the highlights were a lovely dinner at Postrio in the Venetian, and a visit to the Bodies exhibition in the Luxor.  I recommend the latter very highly to all of my friends who are at least slightly morbid and not excessively squeamish...which is pretty much the same as saying "all my friends" without further qualification.

The only disappointment of the trip was finding that, as z111  had warned me, the Luxor has embarked on a campaign of systematic de-Egyptian-ification.  Many of the things I remember from my last visit several years ago -- gift shops stocked with interesting pseudo-artifacts, an exhibit of actual Egyptian relics, cheesy but fun Egyptian naming and decor -- are gone or much reduced.  Apparently management has concluded that middle America doesn't want to stay at a middle-eastern themed hotel.  That makes me so sad, frustrated, and disgusted I had to force myself to stop thinking about it in order to enjoy my stay there.

On Sunday afternoon belladonna93  flew home, and I changed gears from vacation to episcopal mode.  First, on Sunday evening I attended a Gnostic Mass at AHBH Camp, where I supervise several members of the clergy.  Celebrating Mass in a cramped living-room temple made me nostalgic for the olden times; watching the officiants having to move the font back and forth to make room for ritual activities quickly tempered that nostalgia.  The Mass was rightly performed with joy and beauty; my thanks and congratulations to the Mass team and the whole AHBH crew for what they're accomplishing in Las Vegas!

On Monday Sister C. and I discussed preparations for the wedding, and visited the site where the ceremony was to occur.  I'd kept the whole day free, but it turned out only a couple of hours were needed for preparations and nothing else emerged to fill my remaining time during the day, so I spent a few relaxing hours reading.  Ah, luxury.  Then it was out to a Nepalese dinner with a few of the AHBH members on the way to the airport, and back to Los Angeles.

There followed a crammed week of long days at work, fully booked evenings, and (around the edges of those) trying to prepare for a double-whammy Memorial Day weekend.  On Friday evening, I flew back up to Vegas to perform C and J's wedding.  The ceremony was held in a beautiful outdoor location on Saturday morning, and despite a few minor glitches -- most notably the truly mysterious disappearance of my EGC crown, which seems to have evaporated into the ether on the way to the wedding -- everything went beautifully.  z111  and I officiated as Priest and Priestess in a modified version of sabazius_x  and Helena's wedding ceremony, done stand-alone rather than as part of a Mass.  The funniest moment was when the very young and very terrified ringbearer came up the aisle, got within about ten feet of his intended position, then panicked and ran past us and out into the very large expanse of grass behind us.  He stopped about 50 feet away.  It took us a minute or two to coax him back into place.

Following a really pleasant reception and a quick tapas stop with z111 , it was back to the airport for an afternoon flight to LA, where I was due to join the Kaaba Colloquium already in progress.  I took a taxi from LAX to the conference hotel, arriving exactly in time to join the team for the Saturday debrief dinner.  We spent a couple of hours at that, then drove over to Star Sapphire Lodge for the reception, which I barely remember because I was hitting the wall hard by that point.  To say that I slept well that evening is a considerable understatement.

Before I knew it, my alarm was beeping Sunday morning, and it was time to get up and prepare for my four Kaaba presentations -- three of them before lunch.  Whee.  Fortunately, coffee reached my synapses in the nick of time, and all of my presentations went well.  As usual, "The Creepy Guy" was the big hit.  It's not necessarily the title I'd prefer to have associated with my name, but that's show biz.

Then it was another debrief dinner, then back over to SSL for a lovely Mass, followed by another definitve hitting of the wall, and a trip back to the hotel and my bed that I made largely in my sleep, so far as I can tell.  Monday was much more relaxed -- no public speaking!  No ritual lines to do from memory! -- but still intense, as the Kaaba team spent the whole day discussing the outcome of our "Kaaba 3.0" dual-tracking approach and made plans for future Kaaba topics and locations.

You know you're leading a busy life when you go to bed on the Monday of Memorial Day weekend thinking "Oh thank God, I can go to work tomorrow and relax a little."
 

 

I came down with the flu last Wednesday.  Given all the news coverage, it's hard not to think "OMG swine flu!", but I'm reasonably sure it's just regular old flu.  I'm calling it "piglet flu" -- like swine flu, only smaller.

My recovery process was not helped by the fact that I had about 14 hours of continuous work to do on Saturday, as we installed the new Master at Star Sapphire Lodge.  I can sometimes make a deal with my body where I fake being well for a day or so, with the accumulated sickness debt coming due when I'm done.  I pulled off that trick on Saturday, thank goodness, but oh boy, was there a high balance due come Sunday.

However, the event was well worth it.  The Lodge was jammed, with just about all the locals as well as a healthy contingent from Orange County in attendance.  We used a further-modified version of Fr. Dionysus's adaptation of a Masonic Lodge Master installation ritual, which is like a candy store for us ritual pomp-and-circumstance fans.  There were tears, laughter, and love in overwhelming abundance.  I think we got this thing started just right. 

Now I'm back at work, sniffling, achey, tired...and smiling.  That works for me.

Omnia in Duos: Duo in Unum.

My weekend at the Kaaba Colloquium in Ogden, Utah went amazingly well.  Thank you, members and officers of NOX, Horus, and Ad Astra Oases!  I'm back at my day job today, exhausted but smiling.  One of my coworkers remarked that it looked like I'd enjoyed my vacation.  Change that first "a" to an "o" and it's closer to the truth.

Despite my lingering head cold, it was a fun and active weekend.  Saturday evening, I had some friends over to watch Dark Star, John Carpenter's first film (it started out as his film-school project before being remade as a feature film).  Dark Star is a wonderfully bleak comedy about four bitter, bored astronauts who've spent far too many years cooped up together in a malfunctioning starship.  I'm not going to drop any spoilers, but any amateur (or professional) philosophers among my readers must see this movie.

The on Sunday I headed up to LVX to celebrate Mass with the lovely ardras156 .  Attendance was light, but I was in the mood for a cozy little Mass, so that worked out nicely.  And the ceremony itself was wonderful -- it was the first time she and I had worked together, after about a year of meaning to do so, and the wait was well worth it.  I even forgot I had a cold for that hour.

Now I need to turn my attention to preparing for Kaaba in Ogden this coming weekend.  I could use some rest, but that seems not to be in the cards.  Ah, well, at least I don't get bored. :)

 

Over the weekend at Kaaba in Philadelphia, we developed an idea for the first Kaaba-inspired lolcat image.  Thanks to my lovely and talented daughter madelineusher, it now actually exists.  It's rather large, so I'm putting it behind a cut tag.  slq, feel free to steal this for your presentation.  And if you don't get this, don't worry about it; it would take too long to explain.

I spent the Memorial Day weekend in Philadelphia helping to run Kaaba Colloquium, an OTO leadership training seminar.  We were jointly hosted by Thelesis and Tahuti Lodges; my thanks to everyone who worked so hard and so successfully to make us welcome.  My only regret is that I had so little time to explore Philadelphia; I ate at a couple of great old restaurants, and gawked out the car window at Liberty Hall twice, but mostly had to concentrate on business.  From what I saw, it's a lovely city, and I want to go back some time and really see the place.

We were staying in the central city area, where the street grid was laid out far before the age of the automobile.  As a result, most of the so-called "streets" looked to my West Coast eyes like narrow alleys; nearly all of them are single one-way lanes, often with parking on just one side, or neither side.  Over and over, we'd make a turn into what I took for a driveway, only to tool along for blocks on what turned out to be what the locals consider an actual street.  And of course the impression of crowding is very much enhanced by the towering office buildings looming on all sides, which are also unusual to my LA-accustomed eyes; we keep our skyscrapers in one tiny area downtown, where nobody ever goes. :)

This especially struck me when I got back to LA last night.  As my taxi headed up La Cienega, I was very aware of how wide it was, how low the buildings on either side were, the broad sweep of the sky above, the Hollywood Hills ranged across the horizon ahead of me.  It felt open, expansive.  And then I remembered returning from a previous Kaaba in Tucson, a city of enormously broad boulevards and low, isolated buildings set in sprawling lots.  Coming home from that trip, on that same stretch of La Cienega, I was impressed by how close together the buildings were, how they crowded the street, many with two or three floors, all nestled tightly around the narrow, traffic-thick lanes of the road.

Amazing how little of the unusual it takes to make the ordinary seem new again.

Like just about everyone I know who was at Massathon last weekend for more than a few hours, I have come down with the flu.  It's not horrible, but it's bad enough that I've missed two days of work this week.  I suppose there's a price to be paid for everything.

Yesterday was busy and fun.  The day started with a practice session at 93 Oasis with the reconfigured Ararita Chorus, which will be performing Oliver's arrangement of the Anthem twice at Mass-a-thon this coming weekend.  Since the original tenors dropped out, Tony and I were pressed into service, each of us to take the part for the other's Mass.  It's a tricky harmony, but I think I can have it nailed down by Sunday.  All that time spent singing harmonies with laurellady and the car radio over the years has really payed off. :)

After that, it was a quick drive across town to LVX Lodge, where we celebrated a Mass with three baptisms and a confirmation.  I sponsored one of those being baptized, which is always a wonderful feeling.  Turnout was very high; we had people on cushions on the floor and the Mass team members had to navigate around them at times.  The Mass itself was beautiful; magdalena_lvx in particular came at things from a different and surprising direction.  I love hanging around with magicians; they keep changing.  You never get bored.

Then, when I got home, I was so energetic and happy that I decided it would be a good time to get my taxes finished, so I won't have that hanging over my head anymore.  Thanks to TurboTax, that's no longer the horrid chore it used to be; I think I spent an hour total on the task, split over two evenings.  The good news is I've got a moderately large refund coming from the state.  Most of it will go into paying down various debts, but I might just carve out a little for a treat.

Now I need to turn my attention to preparing for Mass-a-thon, then the Thursday following arranging the monthly Gnostic Boot Camp session (this one is on the use of music in the Mass), and in parallel with all that getting my plan and materials ready for my "Astronomology" seminar on the afternoon of Saturday March 8.  I'm also working on a major change in how US Grand Lodge email is handled.  And my day job is heating up, too.

The nice thing is, I'm happy with this whole unwieldy load of tasks.  I've finally allowed myself to admit that I like being overcommitted; the mental dance to keep everything on track feels good in the same way enjoyable exercise feels good.

Yet another renegade religion has nailed its theses to the internet.  While their fifth proof ot the divinity of Google is technically unsound (even under IPv6), I have to say they make a pretty strong case.  Isaac Asimov wrote a story with the same theme, back when transcendently knowledgeable computers were still a subject for science fiction.

It's going to be a busy week for me, even beyond my rather frenetic day job.  Tonight, I'm hosting "Stump the VIIth" at LVX; Thursday, it's Gnostic Boot Camp at the new Blue Horizon location.  The latter is quite near the spot where I joined the OTO, at Chris Parker's home, back in 1987.  It's nice having a local body in that neighborhood again.  Chris's local body was named "Azoth Oasis", which makes another neat circle, as I'm finding myself increasingly fascinated by the azoth formula in alchemy.

It was a busy weekend.

Saturday, I attended an excellent "Psychology of Initiation" workshop at LVX Lodge.  The best moment came as we were discussing the behavior of repressed individuals, those incapable of expressing some aspect of their personalities.  An attendee asked, "What is the opposite of that called, where people dump personal details on everyone around them with no sense of appropriateness or self control?"  With no hesitation, another attendee replied "LiveJournal".

Saturday evening laurellady and I drove down to darkest Orange County to pick up madelineusher for her winter break.  It's still not quite sinking in that my daughter is halfway through her freshman year of college.  I've found that everything about raising a child is like that; you finally get used to their being at any given stage just as they're moving into the next one.  You always feel like you're behind the beat.

Sunday was mostly devoted to computer tasks for myself, for my day job, and for the OTO, in roughly that order.  The task for myself was scrubbing the last remnants of the Ubuntu dual-boot configuration off my PC.  This involved booting from the Windows CD and using the recovery console, which is a rather nerve-wracking experience.  To get to the tool I needed, I had to ignore several "For the love of God, turn back before you destroy your system!" warnings.  When I finally ran fixmbr, it gave me little information about what had happened, so when I went to reboot the system, I was prepared to see no change, or (more likely) a disastrous error.  However, for once Murphy was on a coffee break, and XP came up smoothly without the GRUB boot selection menu along the way.  After that it was just a matter of recovering the abandoned partitions previously used by Ubuntu, which Partition Magic made trivially easy.

The day job tasks revolved around our ongoing fight to improve performance.  I had a sudden insight based on some odd test results we collected on Friday, and dove deep into Tomcat connector-configuration documentation, our source code, and examples on various technical forums as I gradually put together a new and radical hypothesis about where our "lost" throughput is going when under heavy load.  The new configuration resulting from hypothesis is under load testing right now; please cross your fingers.

Finally, the OTO work involved handling the usual small requests -- address changes, content tweaks, and the like -- along with some long-overdue system maintenance activities.  I also did some more thinking (and reading) about my medium-term goal of migrating the public site from Perl and Mason to Ruby on Rails.  I think Perl will remain my favorite language, but modern practice is leaving it behind.  And Ruby was built by Perl zealots, so most of the same aesthetic values are there.

My next big decision is whether to work on completing a paper inspired by my "Humor and Initiation" talk for the NOTOCON proceedings publication.  I have the material organized, and I could easily have something ready for the 12/31 deadline.  The trouble is that a lot of other commitments are competing for that time.  I also don't know whether I can both strip out degree-sensitive material and convert a humor-filled presentation from spoken to written form and still have anything left that's worth saying.  I need to decide by Wednesday...maybe I should find my lucky coin.

I flew home today from Kaaba Colloquium in Houston.  Thanks very much to Starry Bayou Encampment for a great job hosting the event, and to everyone who attended.  My new presentation went over well, which was a relief; I was a little nervous about it.  As usual, I learned more than I taught, and the best parts happened in conversations during breaks and after-hours activities (including a marathon Kaaba-team debrief that went until midnight on Sunday). 

Oh, and I've finally had breakfast at a Cracker Barrel restaurant, which laurellady has raved about ever since she spent a few months in North Carolina.  These people are serious about their breakfast meat.  One of my companions ordered a dish which she thought came with sausage, bacon, or ham; it turned out to come with sausage, bacon, and ham.  If scientists develop a new way to process pig, I'm sure it will be added to that list.

I'm still getting used to being in this modern, well-organized, capable OTO.  Walking into the hotel lobby to find a "Welcome Kaaba" sign, for example.  This isn't your grandpa's OTO!

Fresh off the AP wire:  Student Slain to Death Near U of Chicago.  I didn't realize the writers' strike included journalists.

I'm having a good time scientifically tracking down what's hanging my home computer.  It's been a classic "divide the problem space" exercise.  It happens in XP but not Ubuntu, so it's not the hardware.  It happens when running dissimilar foreground applications, so it's none of those.  That leaves background apps, so I started disabling half of those and seeing what happened.  A couple of slices later, I think I've nailed it -- and I'm sad to report that the current prime suspect is BOINC, the platform on which SETI@Home runs.  Since disabling that two days ago, I haven't seen a lockup (knock wood).  There are reports on the web about similar (mis)behavior under XP Pro with a dual-core processor, too.  With any luck, this means my machine will be stable in both XP and Ubuntu from here on out.

Meanwhile, my day job is in an uproar over performance issues with our product.  Everything's fine most of the time, but periodically it slows to a crawl...and nobody can figure out why.  There's evidence that we're seeing several unrelated or loosely-coupled problems, none of them reproducible with any test case we've tried so far.  In the best Murphy tradition, they seem to hit most often during critical demos.  In a further WTF odditiy, they seem significantly more likely to happen around 11am PST.  (Yes, we've checked for competing cron jobs and the like...nada.)  So I've been at the office late, and seeing httpd config files when I close my eyes.  I sure hope we nail this down soon; it's driving me crazy.

It's hard to believe that in only 10 days I'll be flying to Houston for the next Kaaba session.  I'm really looking forward to this one, for some reason, even more so than I do normally.  As usual with Kaaba, I wish there were more free time to explore the host city; I've never been to Houston before, and I love wandering around new places.  But at least I'll get a taste.

Finally, a bit of good news: laurellady is updating her journal again, after a long hiatus.  She's done several good posts recently.  Enjoy.

Last night we held the first Gnostic Boot Camp session at Blue Horizon Oasis; until now, they've always been at LVX Lodge.  From now on we'll be doing them at the two location in alternating months.  magdalena_lvx was supposed to give a presentation on Pythagoras, but she got sick -- on her birthday, no less! -- and couldn't make it.  Get well soon!  But we had great fun with the presentations on Roger Bacon by JB (he of no LJ) and Melchizedek by maeghanne.  Both led to good discussions about relevant subjects -- the idea of empirical theology for Bacon, and the nature of priesthood for Melchizedek.

Then, in the free time where Pythagoras was supposed to go, I instead launched a discussion on how to prevent creeping rigidity and hidden assumptions from limiting our understanding of the Mass.  Just for example, the ritual refers to the Positive and Negative Child, but almost universally, they are called the "Fire Child" and the "Water Child".  But doesn't this neglect half of each of their formulae?  The Positive Child, after all, combines fire and air, and the Negative, water and earth.  Using the easy shorthand risks falling into a Korzybskian trap of letting our imprecise use of words limit and distort our thoughts.  And, indeed, many local traditions involve fire and water visualizations for the Children, with no explicit inclusion of earth or air.  We found many more examples of how casual shorthand language and local traditions can insidiously become dogma, and discussed ways of detecting and preventing this syndrome.  I'm very happy to have gotten people thinking about this.

Meanwhile, I'm still sick, but gradually getting better.  I slept very soundly last night, which was nice.  I felt like I could have slept another twelve hours when the alarm went off, but it was not to be.  I can sleep in both days this weekend, which should help me finish this flu off at long last.

The bad news: I still have the Death Flu.  I'm getting better, slooowly, but I still feel that icky-feverish-sluggish-blah combination that set in more than a week ago.  I'm supposed to be doing a complicated software design, and I can barely summon the energy to yawn.  This is not a good thing.  Immune system, come on, let's get on the case!

The good news: I have my plane tickets and hotel booked for Kaaba Colloquium in Houston, December 1-2.  My OTO friends are invited to join me and the rest of the Kaaba gang for the most fun you'll ever have at a leadership training seminar.  I'm looking forward to seeing if anyone can shut me down as thoroughly as ihateswine did in Minneapolis during the mediation role-play exercise.

The other good news: Despite both of us being sick, laurellady and I had a pretty good Halloween night.  We put out a small fraction of her vast storehouse of Halloween decor, ordered in dinner, and watched The Rites of Dracula (a Hammer classic with the incomparable Christopher Lee as the Count), the original Haunting of Hill House, and the beginning of Night of the Living Dead.

The weekend trip to AHBH Camp in Las Vegas went extremely well. Our little Gnostic Catholic Marathon (temple setup, z111's Priestess ordination, three Baptisms, the Mass, two Confirmations, temple teardown) was a workout -- maybe that's what St. Ignatius meant by "Spiritual Exercises"? :)

Working in a living-room temple with a congregation squeezed in so tight we had to turn sideways to get past the font gave me a nice dose of nostalgia for Ye Olden Days of my own home temple. And, as usual, confering the sacraments -- particularly the Ordination -- had me trying to laugh and cry and levitate through the ceiling all at once. There's nothing else in the world that feels like that.

Since I rode up and back with The Family of Three Js, I had a very welcome opportunity to hang out with them, featuring much enthusiastic singing along with CDs and spirited debate on the nature, purpose, and governance of OTO. I assume we solved all the world's problems at one point or another; my memory of parts of the trip is a little hazy.

Congratulations to those Baptized and Confirmed, to z111, and to everyone who is working so hard and so well to build AHBH Camp. I see a very bright future ahead for you all.

My new home computer, a sweet little custom-designed system filled with shiny toys, on which I intend to dual-boot XP and Ubuntu, will arrive at PC Club this afternoon. My very strong instinct is to go there now and wait for it, then take it home, lock the door, and not sleep for about 30 hours as I put it through its paces.

Tonight is a Crowleymas celebration at LVX Lodge, followed tomorrow by a road trip to AHBH Camp in Las Vegas, where I'll be involved in a whole string of EGC rites (including the long-awaited ordination of z111). When we get back from that on Sunday, odds are good I'll need to serve as Deacon for a Mass at LVX, which will keep me busy until after PC Club closes for the day. Then I really need to be at work on Monday, so I won't get my new toy until Monday evening at the earliest.

I hate it when my religions collide. :P

[Update at 13:32] Looks like I don't have to worry about serving as Deacon at LVX on Sunday; frater_pfdv has that covered. Given how fried I'm going to be after driving out to Vegas, doing four EGC rituals, and driving back all in a 28-hour period, that is a very good thing indeed.

Over the last few days I attended Blue Horizon's annual Babalon Puja, a group campout and ritual marathon which I had never attended previously. Now I'm kicking myself for all the years I missed. Despite periods of winds strong enough to snap tentpoles, everything came off beautifully. The moment when a pause in the invocation of Hecate was filled by a chorus of coyotes from the nearby hills was...well, let's just say "wow" and leave it at that. Performing Brother K's Deacon ordination under field conditions -- outdoor lantern-lit Mass temple, heavy clothes under my robe for warmth -- was wonderful. It's much easier to adore the body of Nuit when it's right there over your head.

Speaking of which: The Summer Triangle consists of Deneb, Altair, and VEGA. If I could just go back in time three days and say "Vega" to myself, I could save myself a lot of frustrated brain-wracking. Needless to say, I finally remembered it out of nowhere, while thinking about something else, during the drive home. Gee, thanks, brain. Of course, we just renamed Vega to "Dylanus the Pickle Star" for the weekend, which worked out fine -- Dylanus is always ready to fill in for random fixed stars, although she prefers being a little closer to the ecliptic.

I finally set up the USGL website to use Google Analytics.  I'd never bothered to do so, as most of the same information is available in the logs I already collect.  Then I realized that there is a big difference between "available" and "usable".  I also noticed that some of the GA reports depend on session tracking, which isn't easy for me to do on my own in my current site architecture.  I do run a log analyzer that produces some interesting reports, but it doesn't do some tricks with that data that GA does, and it can't match the GA session-tracking features at all.  I figure the two complement each other nicely.

So far, it's only collected one full day of data, so it's too early to tell how I will be using it in the long run.  But I'm already intrigued to discover that roughly half of my visitors leave the site after viewing the first page visited, and that roughly a third each arrive on the site from search engines, links on other sites, and bookmarks or direct URL typing.

The great weakness of GA for me is that there is no obvious way to thread together the main site with the various subdomains connected to it (e.g., the library).  I'm sure some of the traffic "leaving" the main site is actually going to the subdomains, and some "arrivals" from offsite are really coming from the subdomains.  I'll have to see if there's a way to make GA handle this better.