Category Archives: miscellaneous

miscellaneous

The Hard Work of Evil

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[Sorry for my absence of late. As I said in my last post, work was particularly busy, but I have just passed that time. Plenty to do at home, but maybe I can be more regular in posting. But hey, this week I have “captured” three writing ideas, put them on paper, and put them in the notebook.]

On CNBC, Wednesday nights at 8:00 PM Central Time is a show American Greed. I don’t know how long it’s been running. I’ve seen three or four episode, each one about someone in the corporate/financial world who got ahead by cheating/milking their company, but who were eventually was taken down. Tonight was the CEO of Tyco, Kovlowski.

Last week was the founder/chairman of CyberNet Engineering Group, a Grand Rapids, MI company. I don’t remember his name, though I might look it up and edit it in. He had earlier in his career embezzled money from his own companies or otherwise cheated investors out of much money. He dodged prison, plea-bargained down, moved to a new city and set up his evil shop again. He did this three times, ending up in Grand Rapids. There, he co-founded CEG, a value-added reseller of computing systems. In the 1990s the business was perfectly positioned to make money from the burgeoning computer market. What did he do? He set up a small legitimate business, and a huge fake business, complete with fake invoices for fake inventory for fake customers. The deception was an incredible web of deceit. Moreover, the deception must have taken just as much work as a legitimate business would. The work of doing evil was not less than the work of doing right, and might have been more. So why did he do it?

For now, evil pays more than doing right–most of the time. I believe doing right–i.e. doing good does pay well compared to doing evil, especially if you take a wall-to-wall view of costs and benefits. However, those who are evil have trouble seeing it. It appears the internal evil blinds them to the good, the right. They see the apparent huge payoff for doing evil, and they go there.

Somewhere there is a lesson in this for us.

Christianity, miscellaneous

So Much To Do

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The whirlwind of life never seems to slacken. Or maybe I should phrase that otherwise, for life is not always a whirlwind. The things that tug at my time, things I would rather not be doing, continue to tug. When I resist, I feel the tension. When I yield, harmony reigns in life, though in my inner most being, I feel less fulfilled.

Today was the Lord’s day, the Christian Sabbath, meant to be a day of rest and worship, recovery and devotion. So how did I spend it? Slept till 8:30 AM, since we were having a special service today and no Sunday School. Before leaving for church, read 1 Kings 16, 17, and 18, from which I will be teaching an adult Sunday School class beginning next month (on the lives of Elijah and Elisha). Church was in the gymnasium today, a special service for Upwards Basketball. We had a huge congregation, with many, many visitors. Drove by someone’s house to loan a book, but they weren’t home. Drove through their neighborhood, for some reason. Dropped off our recyclables. Went to Wal-Mart for grocery shopping. Came home and had meatloaf sandwiches. Read a few pages in a book. Took a nap, which lasted from about 2:15 to 4:00 PM. Spent time on the computer, posting to a political blog, then reading at a writers site. Read more in the book. Cooked a frozen pizza and ate. Read more in the book. Fixed popcorn and ate it. Read more in the book. Came downstairs, where I first filed some papers and checked e-mail before deciding what to post hear.

So did I keep the Sabbath? I hope so, maybe except for that shopping. Now, downstairs in “The Dungeon”, as we call our computer room, I’m faced with choices of what to do. I filed a few papers, as I said, but a stack remains on the table. Still, if I file as many each day as I did a few minutes ago (11, I think), I will soon be caught up and can stay up to date. If I spread out reading writer websites and blogs, I’ll recover perhaps 75 minutes a day (between work and home). Maybe, just maybe, that would help me see my way clear to write more often.

Christianity, Documenting America, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, miscellaneous

Getting Things Done, Part 2: The Impact of Lent

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Lent began yesterday, and, while I haven’t been in a church that practiced Lenten rituals in over thirty-five years (I do miss the hot-cross buns), last year I decided to use Lent as a springboard to give up a negative habit: computer games. I did so sucessfully, not even playing games on Sundays (which are not part of Lent), although I did backslide one day near the end of Lent and play a few. In the ten and a half months since, however, the bad habit has returned, and now I find mself eliminating mines and moving cards instead of tending toward business, that is, my avocations of writing, genealogy, and Christain studies. Thank God that all games are deleted from our computers at work, and it’s only at home that I have the problem.

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of a new Lent season, I decided to do it again. So Tuesday night was the last time I’ll see Solitare and Free Cell for forty days plus Sundays. Maybe, this year, the habit will stick and I will find myself still game free when Lent begins in 2009.

So what did I do with the time? Did I write a column in the Documenting America series? Did I work on a chapter in In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming Poeple? Did I market anything? Did I pursue a new ancestor, and try to drag him/her out of the depths of some Internet web page? Did I start a new poem?

No, but I did something perhaps more important for the needs of the moment: I started on my income taxes. I had the goal for the evening, only one or two hours work, of making a start on the taxes for our (my wife’s and mine) home business partnership taxes. I hoped at best to copy the spreadsheet from last year, wherein I calculate profit and loss, and make a handful of entries to check the formulas; in addition, I hoped to gather all the papers needed to complete the calculations another day. Instead, I was able to enter ALL of the transactions for our main business, leaving only the irregular items to do tonight. Since these are a much smaller set, I should be able to finish that tonight and know what profit we made. Yes, we appear to have made a profit this year, the first in four years of operating.

Which gives me a wonderful feeling of getting things done. Oh what I might accomplish in life if I could wrap my brain and body around getting things done that need to be done. If Lent can help me with that, I will celebrate it every year.

miscellaneous, technology woes

Technologically Challenged

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I received an e-mail from my son-in-law, Richard Schneberger, who said that the comments feature of my blog limited comments to team members. When Richard helped me set this blog up over the Christmas holidays, I thought I had that set to allow anyone to comment. Obviously not. That is now taken care of. Any one who drops by, feel free to make a comment on any post. I realize this blog is not really the type that will generate comments, at least it isn’t right now. Maybe in the future, if I really become published, that could change.

Richard said he added a link to my blog on his blog. I intend to do the same for his, but right now I haven’t figured out how. Several times in previous posts I tried to add a link to some web site, only to find out the link didn’t work. I haven’t learned the code using the < and > characters. On the message boards I frequent, you use the [ and ] characters for code. Substituting characters that designate code is coming should not be a problem, but the links still don’t work. So there is something else I have to learn.

I’m planning on taking a community college class in web site building during the month of March. Maybe then I’ll learn what I need. In the meantime, I hope to learn how to post a clickable link, and add a blogroll.

miscellaneous, movies

A Good Story

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We decided to go to the movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets recently. However, before we went we discovered this is not the first National Treasure. I guess I should have known that, since the NT ads were some time ago (was it really 2004?), but I tune out TV ads very well, and I forgot. Not knowing if this was a sequel that required the first to appreciate the second, we decided to rent and watch the first NT (thanks to our son for the Christmas gift that allows us to watch movies on a 21st century medium instead of the 1980s medium we were limited to).

We did so Tuesday night. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. No swearing, no sex scenes, no real blood and guts, limited violence. An excellent plot. Like most movies, much of it has no basis in reality, but rather is based on plausability. It seems like it could be true. Like The DaVinci Code, enough nuggest of truth are spread throughout that you realize it’s possible it could be true, and every now and then you have to shake your head and say, “That just couldn’t be true.”

While the movie production was excellent, the plot is what most engaged me. Whoever came up with this plot knew how to write a good story, with many things going on: The Gates family history and legend, leading to estrangement of dad Patrick and son Benjamin. The status of the Gates family in the world of legitimate antiquities, requiring unconventional methods. The obsession of Ben Gates resulting in losses in personal life (which leads to the attraction between Gates and Dr. Chase). The converging yet diverging interests and methods of Gates and Ian Howe. The importance of documents and codes, a popular theme right now in books and movies. And more that I could comment on.

In fiction, it seems that good plot trumps good writing for reaching success. I’m not saying good writing isn’t important, or that a writer should not strive for good writing, but so many books are well-written, yet don’t achieve commercial successes. Why do some, and not others? I think it’s plot. So, to reach success as a novelist, I really need to work on my abilities to weave a plot.