The Hundred

It’s now been a week since that fateful phone call from Chip I last blogged about. While the decision was made last Friday morning, I haven’t actually gotten around to mentioning it on here yet: I’m going. After all that time thinking and praying about it and talking with other people, it became pretty clear to me that this is what God wants me to do with my spring break. So thank you for all of your prayers, thoughts, and thought-provoking questions that helped me have assurance about this.

In other news, today has been substantially better than most of the rest of this week for me. For various reasons I won’t go into, I have been emotionally drained down to about zero in the course of the last week. Several of you probably noticed my “blah” state the last few days because of it; I just didn’t have the emotional energy to express my interest in other people’s lives, support them, or have an attitude of joy in my own life. I was able to spend some time talking with Chip last night about everything, and after a little venting about what was going on, confessing some attitudes aggravating the situation, and praying together about it, things started to get better. I felt more rested than usual this morning and after some praying and worshiping as I showered and got dressed, I was able to spend some time with Him over breakfast and the effect has been powerful. God really revitalized me this morning and man, that makes a huge difference on your day.

On Tuesday I hosted the Third Annual Singles Awareness Day Party down in Meredith and it was a huge success. As a point of background, a couple of years ago I realized that there were way too many Cru people sitting alone in their rooms on “V-Day,” so I decided to put something together so single people had something to do. In the past we’ve had a good time doing things like watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 and playing GoldenEye/Halo, but attendance was pretty low. This year attendance went up 575% to a peak of 23 and we had a great time watching a movie and playing games afterwards. BTW, the movie of the night was a Robert Redford flick from ’92 called Sneakers and it was pretty funny, so I’d recommend it if you want something to watch (Sarah was kind enough to suggest it and then bring the tape back from home so we could borrow it instead of having to rent something). One sad note was that I had to explain to Dustin (with great remorse) that he wasn’t welcome at the party this year, even though he’s been a staple at the S.A.D. Party in the past. Then again, the reason he wasn’t welcome is that he is now in a relationship (the only requirement to get in is that you have to be single), so I don’t really feel sorry at all about turning him away because he’s got a really awesome girlfriend. In any case, the party was a big success and I think people enjoyed having things to do. Three notable absences that night were the ARK girls (Amy/Ruth/Kathy), but you’ll have to hit the link over to Amy’s blog to find out why (see the links section to the right of your screen).

Seeing as how it’s been forever since I gave you a Perelandra update (I think the last one was in October), I might as well bring you up to speed. Last I mentioned it, we were in the midst of competing with another station about trying to establish contact on the “Betry” channel. Not very long after that update, our Station Manager decided the lack of any promising results weren’t worth spending any more of our resources on, so the plug was pulled on that project (incidentally, the other station managed to get a pretty reliable signal and has been communicating at about 36kpbs since sometime toward the end of Christmas break, so congrats to them). At the start of the year we shut down the station completely for about 3 weeks to upgrade some components and have been operating at a reduced capacity since then. Even though we have some more upgrades to do (and might have to go through another complete shutdown for an even longer time to install them sometime in the near future) and the ones we just installed aren’t perfectly tuned yet, we’ve still managed to detect a previously unknown channel using the new CSS-TRIO array. Preliminary analysis seems to be indicating that this new “Saron” channel is giving us better signal quality than Betry (we’re even getting an occasional “ping” reply!), but doesn’t necessarily have the same potential for a wide-bandwidth connection farther down the road. Right now the Station Manager is going over our data and the reports on our findings so far and is deciding if we should go after this one or wait to decide until after those upgrades I was mentioning earlier. If we go for the upgrades, we’ll probably be shutting down until after spring break at the earliest while we install some components and wait for others to arrive. The good side of that is that they would be some pretty significant upgrades, but the bad side is that we can’t realistically shorten the amount of time they would take to do. So basically we’re just waiting for a decision to be made before we start sending out stronger signals or shutting things down.

Some of you actually still reading at this point might be wondering why this post is entitled “The Hundred.” Quite simply, this is my 100th blog since I made my first post back on the 5th December, 2004 (where I explained that I’d only signed up for blogger so I could comment on friends’ blogs, I didn’t start actually blogging until February 26th of last year). A hundred posts in a year, that’s averaging slightly better than a post every 4 days! (and this, from the guy who hates to write)

Anyway, I should get this posted so I can head back to the Quad and watch Smallville with Purv, GE, and King Richie (as is our weekly tradition). Ok, fine, I’ll give you two links to go along with this 100th of posts:
What could I possibly link to that’d be appropriate for today? Hmmm…what better than the 100th Strong Bad Email? (coming to you in exclusive "Huge Screen" SWF mode)
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemailahundred.swf
And, just for kicks, one of the funniest Strong Bad emails ever: VIRUS!!
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail118.swf