anchorite.org

John Basta, our ministry lead and good friend recently encouraged me to start reading The Bible in 90 Days. I started two weeks ago and have thoroughly enjoyed it so far, so much that I asked John to write up a quick review…

Where do I start. The Bible in 90 days – you must be out of your mind. It has taken a whole life time to not read the whole Bible and you are telling me I can complete the whole Bible in 90 days. Well believe me I thought the same thing you are thinking-not possible. To be honest with you I did not discover The Bible in 90 Days because I loved reading the word of God-quite the opposite-I was very much struggling with reading the word of God on a daily basis and even when I did read I did not have a hunger for it.

A few years ago I struggled in the realm of prayer and reading E.M. Bounds on Prayer – it completely changed and defined my prayer life. This past year I felt like I needed some book to do the same for me in the reading the word of God. I know what your thinking-dummy just read the word of God instead of books that get you inspired to read. Well since I am a bit slow it did take me a while to realize I just need to jump right in. I am a man of extremes it is all or nothing-so the prospect of reading the Bible in 90 days presented both a challenge the way a boot camp presents a challenge. You figure there is no way you can do it but figure once you get there you will have to do it.

I picked up The Bible in 90 Days and started reading it over vacation. Let me just say for the first time in my life I could not put the Bible down. I literally started falling in love with the word of God. I looked more and more forward to reading it everyday. You see the trick is not finishing the Bible in 90 days that is a lofty goal-the goal is reading 12 pages a day-now that sounds doable. At 45 minutes of reading a day it has been easy to read the word of God. I use to read religious books for about an hour and a half a day and the Bible for 10 minutes. Now all I can read is the Bible.

I have had some of my best quiet times just reading the Bible and nothing else. Plus reading at this pace puts all the stories and names (especially in the OT) together in a way that I was never able to do before. It allows you to really see character progression and also allows you to see yourself in each story. Many times when we read the OT we have a childlike view that God of the OT is very tough but reading everything together you get a better glimpse of the God of the OT-He is not tough-you feel sorry for Him-you clearly see how He provides for His people and He is constantly rejected.

The Bible in 90 Days is not for everyone –but it should be. My plan is to read The Bible in 90 Days year round. If you truly are struggling with reading or understanding the Word of God then stop reading this and go purchase The Bible in 90 Days right now. It will change the way you view and live the Word of God. Then you will be out of your mind-and into His.

Additional Resources:
www.biblein90days.com
biblein90days.blogspot.com

When I started running Linux servers on VMware Server resource management became much more important. The limiting factor on the boxes I am running is RAM. The less RAM I could get a server to use, the more servers I could run. I put in a call to an old buddy of mine, Anton Thaker. Anton is a RedHat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and knows Linux better than anyone else I know. Anton wrote a mini-howto on freeing up resources by disabling unneeded services. Here it is:

Here’s a mini-howto to free up resources on a server system by disabling
unneeded services. This is for a Minimal install of CentOS 4.4.

First, a note on “Minimal” installations. I’ve gotten into a habit of
doing minimal installs and installing additional software as needed
after installation. Using “yum” to install needed RPMs and their
dependencies is very easy. The minimal installation reduces the number
of packages requiring updates, makes it easier to keep a server clean in
the long run and eliminates any kind of graphical environment. It also
requires only the first installation CD, where any other type of
installation will usually ask for 3 or all 4 CDs.

The proper RedHat way to disable a service from being started at bootup
is to use the “chkconfig” utility.

After installation the machine reboots. When you login disable as many
service as possible with the following commands:

chkconfig acpid off
chkconfig atd off
chkconfig autofs off
chkconfig cpuspeed off
chkconfig cups off
chkconfig gpm off
chkconfig haldaemon off
chkconfig isdn off
chkconfig mdmonitor off
chkconfig messagebus off
chkconfig netfs off
chkconfig nfslock off
chkconfig openibd off
chkconfig pcmcia off
chkconfig portmap off
chkconfig rawdevices off
chkconfig rpcgssd off
chkconfig rpcidmapd off
chkconfig smartd off
chkconfig xinetd off

You can turn off “microcode_ctl” if this is an AMD machine, and
“irqbalance” if there is only one CPU. If you plan on using plug and
play devices you should leave “haldaemon” and “messagebus” running. If
you did not do a minimal install you’ll have more services enabled.

Run the following to see what else is enabled:
chkconfig –list |grep “3:on” |awk ‘{print $1}’ |sort

On my machine the above command lists:
anacron
crond
iptables
kudzu
network
sendmail
sshd
syslog

I left “anacron” and “kudzu” enabled, because it’s something that will
run at startup and will not stay loaded when finished. Sendmail is
there for email notifications, and can probably be taken out.
Everything else in the list is pretty much the minimum.

If you are not sure what something does, you can look in the particular
service’s startup script to see the comments at the beginning. The
scripts are in the /etc/init.d directory.

Also instead of running 6 virtual terminals, I have only two. To
disable them, edit the /etc/inittab file and comment out the ones that
you don’t want running like this:

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
#3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
#4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
#5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
#6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6

Since this is a new install, make sure to run “yum update” and then
reboot the machine to apply the kernel update and stop the services that
we just disabled. If you don’t want to reboot, you can run “/etc/rc” to
stop the services not enabled in the current run level. It’s a good
idea to reboot to make sure that the system comes up properly.

The minimal installation takes about 721 MB of disk space. On a system
with 64 MB of RAM this setup utilizes about 17 MB of RAM.

Thanks for reading.

Anton Thaker.
RHCE

We have our Asterisk phone system setup to receive faxes and forward them to email, it is a handy feature that saves a lot of paper considering that the majority of our faxes are junk. A few days ago, after an extended power outage, when we brought the system back up, fax to email stopped working. A quick investigation found that it would just drop the call whenever it tried to detect the fax tones. I remembered that getting fax to email working initially had been tricky and that the forums had stated that the feature was flaky. I didn’t have the time to troubleshoot but I couldn’t just leave us without fax support. I decided that I could temporarily forward our fax lines to eFax or something similar until I had the time to troubleshoot or upgrade the phone system to the latest version of TrixBox, where faxing is stable.

Before going with eFax I did a little searching and found a lot of discontentment on the web with them. Users were not happy that they kept raising prices and I did want to deal with limits on incoming faxes.

I stumbled upon a free unified messaging service K7.net that channels voicemails and faxes to email for free. They assign you a number with a 206 area code and your account will stay active as long as you receive a call or fax message every 30 days. We have used K7.net for several days now and it works great.

I also found FaxZero, a service that allows you to send free faxes by uploading a doc or PDF. There is a limit of two 3 page faxes per day for the free service and they put an ad on the cover page. It does come in handy when you are in pinch or just need to test faxing.

Just got podcasting up and running on OrthodoxSermons.org. We used the Joomla Podcast Suite to set it up. It works pretty well, allowing different feeds based on category. The suite is nice because it minimizes the additional work necessary to get the latest sermons assigned to the right feed.

There are two disadvantages with the suite when using multiple feeds based on categories. First, the feed title remains the same regardless of category and second – iTunes will only accept one of the feeds, thinking that they are all the same. It looks like both of these issues will be resolved in upcoming releases.

Also, we used FeedBurner so that we can get stats on subscribers and it sets up the details for iTunes. I need to do the same for this blog, just haven’t got around to it yet.
Coming up next, God willing, will be online video and video podcasting.

I read In a Pit With a Lion on a Snow Day by Mark Batterson a couple weeks ago, it is a great book about the opportunities that God can present in our lives to give glory to His name.

The book is inspired by 2 Samuel 23:20 “Benaiah was the son of Jehoiada, the son of a valiant man from Kabzeel, who had done many deeds. He had killed two lion-like heroes of Moab. He also had gone down and killed a lion in the midst of a pit on a snowy day.”

“Your greatest regret at the end of your life will be the lions you didn’t chase.” -Mark Batterson

I highly recommend picking it up,  you can read chapter one online (pdf).  The book is a quick and fun read that may very well change your approach to life!