Timex Sinclair ZX81: My First Computer

A NEW LEARNING

It was in the early 1980’s and computers were exorbitantly high priced for what you purchased specially by today’s standards. I was 39 years of age when I was introduced to a computer for the first time. I may have paid something like $60.00 for a Timex Sinclair ZX81 because this tiny appliance was priced for affordability and targeted to families. It was so small it could serve as a door stop.

The Timex Sinclair 1000 computer had 2K of program memory. The keyboard was printed on a large flat membrane, much like one might see on a microwave oven. It displayed B&W text and crude character based graphics on a TV set and it had no sound. It could be hooked to a cassette recorder or printer. A 16K expansion was available and I saved up enough money to buy one of these for $39 or so.

One could do some limited word processing, play chess and other elementary games. It was ridiculously slow but I had nothing with which to compare it so I waited while it did its thing. It wasn’t much but it was a mystery buster for me. From my experiments with this machine I soon moved to a more productive and utilitarian computer gifted to me by computer store owners for my use in the church office. I had joined the computer revolution.

One can still find these collector’s items. http://www.zebrasystems.com/zebrasystems/zx81/

Two Men Along the Hudson River in New York

A NEW LEARNING
My reading is so diversified these days and I surprise myself at times with my observations. Here is an example, a comparative study of two men whose connection is their involvement with the Hudson River.

The Hudson River was most recently in the news when US Airways Flight 1549 was ditched in her but stayed afloat for the rescue of all 150 passengers and five crew members. Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk, meaning the Great Mohegan is the Iroquois name for the Hudson River which flows its 315 mile course from the Adirondack Mountains to New York City emptying in the upper bay. Englishman Henry Hudson sailing for the Dutch East India Company explored the river and its uninhabited shores in 1609 naming it Mauritius in honour of Prince Maurice of Nassau. He himself was later honoured when his name was given to the river. European immigrants settled around the river. It inspired the mid 19th century Hudson River School of painting, a group of landscape painters influenced by romanticism and using the Hudson River Valley, and the Catskill, Adirondack and White Mountains as their idyllic inspiration. The river is a premier example of industrial pollution.

Donald Trump was born in 1946 in New York City, the fourth of five children of Fred Trump, a wealthy real estate developer. Go figure! So much of his highly publicized business career has located along the Hudson River. His own offices and Penthouse home look out upon the waters. The Donald, as Ivana, the first of his three wives named him has been in and out of legal bankruptcy throughout his career having filed it three times, yet staying afloat by restructuring the debt by surrendering large percentages of ownership. His is ambitious and aggressive. His name and his moniker is born by the Trump World Tower, Trump Tower, Trump Entertainments Resorts which include (Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza, and Trump Marina), to name only a few. He has been earning in the range of 32 to 40 million dollars annually. In 2008 he failed to pay a $40M loan to Deutsche Bank citing the crisis was an Act of God. His most recent Chapter 11 bankruptcy was filed on February 17 2009 on the Trump Entertainment Resorts. But it’s all business. He is on TV and he has written many books and his hair is lousy.

Pete Seeger was born in 1919 in Patterson, New Jersey near the Hudson River. His father, Charlie Louis Seeger Jr was a composer and pioneer ethnomusicologist and his mother, Constance Edson was a classic violinist. Although his parents divorced when he was seven, his stepmother, Ruth Crawford Seeger was one of the most influential female composers of the 20th century. In 1943 Pete married Toshi-Aline Ohta, a folk musician to whom he has been married ever since. Seeger himself became a key personality and contributor to the American folk music revival during the 50’s and 60’s. He wrote such memorables as “Where have all the flowers gone?” and “If I had a Hammer” and “Turn, Turn, Turn.” Countless other artists and musical groups have recorded these songs after Seeger made them famous. Seeger himself became famous for his anti Vietnam War activism and then later the environment and what has become his legacy, the efforts at Hudson River recovery. He also wrote “That Lonesome Valley” in 1969 to highlight the polluted Hudson River. He founded the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, built a sailing sloop used to education grade school children. Over time the US Government listened and began legislating and funding the cleanup.

Seeger is financially worth less than Trump but he may leave behind more that is worthwhile for everyone.

ROD DOERKSEN - WE ARE MISSING HIM

A NEW LEARNING
Rod Doerksen was my cousin. March 21st is the anniversary of his death in 2003. As far as his wife and two adult daughters and his sister were concerned, he was far too young to die. He was only in his middle years. Dying when he did, he missed his eldest daughter’s wedding. He wasn’t here for his first grandson’s birth. Because he was known as a good man by everyone in his community and church and family, he would have been a wonderful grandfather. All of us miss him very much.

I met him when we were both children. His parents lived in Minnesota. In following years I lost contact with both Rod and his sister. He resided in California. Then in 1991 Christine and I moved to British Columbia and I reconnected with both Rod and his sister. Now he and I were both adults, married and with grown children of our own.

Both of my brothers had opportunity to visit with Rod as well when they travelled west and for the three of us, the reconnection with these two cousins was like finding a long absent brother and sister. Rod’s father and my mother were siblings, the two children of Montana settlers who had come from Minnesota. When my mother was two years of age and her brother was four, their dad died, and their mother was alone without government assistance or any other help. She was directed to Saskatchewan where she met a widower with six children. Then together this pioneering couple had five more children. My mom’s brother (Rod’s dad) left the family home in his early teens to return to Minnesota. There he married and farmed and had two children. He died at an early age of forty or so and from what I recollect his death may have resulted from factors connected with the same genetic disorder that complicated Rod’s life and compromised his health.

Rod was strikingly tall throughout his childhood and youth and as an adult his height compared to some of the tallest NBA basketball stars. He suffered from Marfan syndrome (or Marfan's syndrome) which is a genetic disorder of the connective tissue. It was so named after Antoine Marfan, the French pediatrician who first described the condition in 1896 after noticing striking features in a 5-year-old girl. The gene that makes the protein fibrilin, and gives skin and connective tissue its stretchy feel, is faulty. Because connective tissue is found throughout the body, Marfan syndrome can affect the skeleton, eyes, heart and blood vessels, nervous system, skin and lungs. People with Marfan's are typically tall, with long limbs and long thin fingers. The most serious complication is defects of the heart valves and aorta. It may also affect the lungs, eyes, the dural sac surrounding the spinal cord, skeleton and the hard palate. There is no cure for Marfan syndrome which does shorten life expectancy which has increased significantly over the last few decades. The syndrome is treated by addressing each issue as it arises, and Rod lived through many procedures and corrective surgeries.

Wonderful husband, father, brother, son, friend and a good, good person. Thank you Lord for allowing Rod Doerksen to touch our lives.

David Wilkerson, the Prophecy of Calamity

A NEW LEARNING
There is a whole lot of scaring going on. There are so many websites and blogs written by professing Christians that are proclaiming the near end of the world. Recently a well known Christian pastor and leader, David Wilkerson, the pastor of Times Square Church in New York City, made a pronouncement that an earth-shattering calamity will happen and his comments focused upon New York City. He claims the Spirit told his spirit to publicize this prediction because the event is a demonstration of God’s wrath against wickedness.

The actual March 7 2009 blog entry says: “AN EARTH-SHATTERING CALAMITY IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN. IT IS GOING TO BE SO FRIGHTENING, WE ARE ALL GOING TO TREMBLE - EVEN THE GODLIEST AMONG US. For ten years I have been warning about a thousand fires coming to New York City. It will engulf the whole megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. Major cities all across America will experience riots and blazing fires—such as we saw in Watts, Los Angeles, years ago. There will be riots and fires in cities worldwide. There will be looting—including Times Square, New York City. What we are experiencing now is not a recession, not even a depression. We are under God’s wrath.”

Written on his blog, this entry swept the internet like a prairie fire. It has incited concern, fear and bewilderment. It may also have resulted in some repentance which was Wilkerson’s chief intention of course. What are we supposed to do with this? I must confess that the cynic in me shouts to immediately dismiss the man and his prediction. But because I have noted many sincere people lining up in support of his prediction, I determined that I would be biblical and respectful.

I feel compelled to respond, so this is a bit of a heavy blog. If you hang in here, I will be interested to know what you think by the end of it. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, you possess His Spirit. Wilkerson too is a Christian and he possesses the same Holy Spirit. With the same Holy Spirit, if the message is from God, shouldn't there be resonance? Does your spirit resonate with this prediction? Mine doesn't and that poses a problem for me. Here is a biblical prescriptive from 1 Thessalonians 5:20-21. “Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good." And that is what I want to do.

That means that I will not arbitrarily dismiss Wilkerson’s comments but I must test them and then hang on to what is true. I am testing for resonance and verifiability.
1. The segment of his prophecy which depends upon the Bible I do accept with unqualified sincerity. Canada and the United States have become secularized and the scripture informs us that rejection of Jesus Christ is punishable and may incur punitive calamity but also spiritual awakening (Romans 1:18-32; 2 Thessalonians 1:6-8). God has already said this. One does not require special revelation for that which the Bible already pronounces. We have resonance here. This is authentic. It’s true. God said it. Hang on to it but understand that this isn’t new information.
2. Anything within the prophecy that goes beyond scripture should be evaluated by biblical criteria. This is where there is resonance deficiency for me. Wilkerson wrote in his blog, “First, I give you a practical word I received for my own direction. If possible lay in store a thirty-day supply of non-perishable food, toiletries and other essentials. In major cities, grocery stores are emptied in an hour at the sign of an impending disaster.” Now God may have told Wilkerson this, but I am suspicious because it has no time reference. What kind of counsel is that from God? No starting date. In 1992 Wilkerson made a similar sounding prophecy and used the word “soon.” It was coming soon. Now he is unclear about a time for these provisions to be collected. That lacks authenticity. Make a scary claim without a reference to time and the odds are that eventually something will happen.
3. And when a prophet cites scripture he is not permitted to mishandle it to support his prophecy. Wilkerson advises in that blog that his spiritual advice is this. “As for our spiritual reaction, we have but two options. This is outlined in Psalm 11. We ‘flee like a bird to a mountain.’ Or, as David says, ‘He fixed his eyes on the Lord on his throne in heaven—his eyes beholding, his eyelids testing the sons of men’ (v. 4). This is not an authentic treatment of the verse. The verse is not a prescription of what David did in the face of calamity, so you do likewise. In fact, the words “he fixed his eyes” do not appear in the verse. Rather verse 4 is a categorical statement about God. “The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven; his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man.” This is not a small point. My spirit does not resonate with manipulation of God’s Word.
4. The Snopes site investigates the authenticity of various claims. Janet Porter wrote several articles in the WorldNetDaily about David Wilkerson, his prior predictions and the most recent forecast of economic holocaust. WorldNetDaily is right of right wing journalism, so highly sympathetic to the Wilkerson communications. In one article Porter wrote that God gave Wilkerson a warning in early Fall 2001 with a command to make sandwiches, lots of them. She told how he and his church made 2000 sandwiches through the night of Sept 10 2001 and at 8:46 am in Sept 11 the first plane hit the Trade Center. Her closing sentence was “…when the guy who made the 2000 sandwiches on Sept 10 warns us: ‘AN EARTH SHATTERING CALAMITY IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN,’ I think we would do well to heed it.” Then later an editor’s note was prepended to the article saying that: “The story in this column about Times Square Church making thousands of sandwiches just prior to 9/11 is false. Janet Porter confirmed the story with a church staff member as she wrote the column, but was given incorrect information. WorldNetDaily regrets the error.”
5. Hold fast to the written Word of God.

- Video of Wilkerson preaching 10 days ago on the subject of catastrophe in USA.

- In this free online document Wilkerson teaches on his subject of “God’s Plan to Protect His People in the Coming Depression.” He forecasts this worldwide economic holocaust and the hope held out is that God’s children will be preserved.

SKIPPED CHURCH - BIG MISTAKE

A NEW LEARNING
We didn’t go to church yesterday. It was a gloomy wet day.
I used to tell this joke. A despondent son says to his mother, “I don’t feel like going.” His mother answers with, “No, son you must go to church today.” He counters, “But I don’t want to go to church.” Just as insistently she says, “But you have to go, you’re the pastor.”

How many Sundays are there in thirty-four years of pastoring and six years of national leadership in a denomination? With few exceptions I was at church on Sunday. We didn’t go yesterday. We would read our Bibles and pray on our own was the plan. Christine followed through as usual. I began reading and writing e-letters, writing blogs and other bits. The two of us began a conversation that became the predictable difference of opinion and grew from there. Two first-borns and whatever ingredients go into wiring and rearing numero unos, that’s us. Christine and I are the poster people for Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. And as we made up for the unnecessary escalated disagreement, which was my fault, because that too is invariably the case, not because I have big shoulders, but sloping ones so the liability rolls right off for me to recommit next time.

Back on the right side of each other we took a drive in the MX5 sports car to sit on a windy day and watch the white caps at low tide. The sun peaked out occasionally so we drove 8th Avenue to 216th Street and stopped at Domaine de Chaberton to inquire about their quaint Bacchus Bistro with its marvelous food. But we are seniors and ultimately we drove home, picking up a pizza to reheat and we watched About Schmidt during the evening. We had no idea what we were about to see. That stars Jack Nicholson who has just retired at age 66. He and his wife adjust to living together 24/7 and they have big plans to see America in their brand new Winnebago bus size Adventurer. We learned how both of them had grown to despise each other’s myriad personal habits when the youthfulness of their love was gone yet they were mutually committed to the marriage. Christine and I looked at each other and smiled knowingly. One day he returned from an errand to find her dead on the floor from a blood clot to the brain. He was alone. Soon a daughter got married in a far away state to a man he couldn’t stand and the rest of the movie is a marvelous character study of numerous people in this unblended family whom the scriptwriters understood perfectly with all the reactions, tired clichés and behaviours of ordinary people in ordinary life situations. Nicholson’s character finds an iota of joy in a note from an African Foster child whom he supports with $25 monthly cheques. And that was that. The credits scrolled. An overcast ending to the day I missed church. Oh, we kissed one another goodnight.

"So did you learn a lesson from the day?" "I don't want to learn a lesson! This is my memoir."

ALBERT EINSTEIN

A NEW LEARNING
If someone says to you, “you are an Einstein,” it’s a compliment. The term has become synonymous with ‘genius.’ The term “Einstein” derives from a phenomenally brilliant person, Albert Einstein.

In 1999 Time magazine named Albert Einstein its “Person of the Century.” Born in Germany in 1879 Albert Einstein died in 1955. Born into a Jewish family that didn’t observe Jewish practices he attended a Roman Catholic elementary school. A theoretical physicist Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics specifically for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. He is renowned for his theory of relativity and specifically his mass–energy equivalence that is expressed by the equation E = mc2. During his career he wrote 300 scientific works and 150 non-scientific works.

He was a profoundly complex man and because of his fame and genius he was expected to pass judgment on numerous subjects unrelated to physics or mathematics and he didn’t hesitate to express himself. He defied the growing Nazi movement in Germany and spoke passionately for the formation of the State of Israel.

Einstein occasionally used the term "God" as has Stephen Hawking, and I am dismayed by any in the Christian community who immediately claim that he was a believer. It is much better to ask which God, what kind of God or what did he have in mind?

Einstein did not believe in a personal God and believed the idea was a childish concept. He termed himself agnostic rather than atheistic because his admiration for the structure of the world was so ardent that this emotion served as God. He himself wrote: "A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man." (Einstein, Albert (1949). The World as I See It. New York: Philosophical Library. http://www.einsteinandreligion.com/worldsee2.html ).

Einstein in a 1 min clip, teaching E+MC2

PASSED OUT

A NEW LEARNING
Guess how vulnerable I feel.
Not a classy move.
I woke up, gradually, with some neck pain; face down on the bathroom floor. Christine trying to get my attention.
Four in the morning. Customary nightly pit-stop but something went wrong. Some synapses misfired.

I can recall walking rather thick-headed from bed to bathroom, thinking some muddled thoughts and sitting down on the throne. Now as I contemplate, maybe I fell asleep. Perhaps I just dozily tumbled over on the floor and cracked my noggin. Actually writing this episode is therapeutic because I have been somewhat paranoid about this event. It rendered me fearful.

Four summers ago I suffered a grand mal seizure, unconsciously convulsing on the kitchen floor. Christine witnessed this and called 911 and the rapid response team of paramedics arrived in force I have been told, subdued me with a tranquillizer and whisked me away to the hospital where I gained consciousness three hours later. Fifteen minutes of violent physical thrashing left me with two weeks of muscle pain. Beyond that however, I spent the next four months with driving privileges withdrawn, going through most medical examinations known to medicine. All serious causes were eliminated and the seizure was termed an anomaly. It was acknowledged that blood sugar imbalance might have caused this. So life resumed, cautiously, always with a remote fear of a recurrence. Then this.

Well there is no resemblance between the two situations. Nonetheless, to wake up face down and pajamas down as well, is disturbing at the least and concerning, certainly. But as I say, writing about it has been good for me because I have been unnecessarily anxious that I am vulnerable, when in all likelihood I was simply not awake enough to assume the throne position. I hate to think where my head may have ended up had I been standing upright at that appliance.

I can’t blame anyone. I am my own pain in the neck.

THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD

A NEW LEARNING
I have only until February 22nd to complete and send my resume and video application. I think I have found my perfect retirement employment. It requires that I work only twelve hours per month for a six month term of service. Part of my responsibility will be to feed island turtles, feed the fish, whale watch, clean the pool when the filter misses an odd scrap and pick up island mail. I am to explore the nearby islands to see what they offer and then to provide a weekly blog update. Good communication skills are a prerequisite and I think I have that wrapped up. I have a relatively new Nikon DX80 for photos to illustrate the blog entries. I think that I can do this.

I will need to relocate to the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia. Specifically the job location is Hamilton Island. There is clearly some isolation pay factored into the compensation, $100,000 Canadian ($150,000 AUD), plus use of a luxury villa. My airfare will be paid from Vancouver and all accommodation, transportation, travel insurance and equipment for the job will be provided. My job will begin July 1, 2009 and be a six month contract. I believe I want to do this job.

So, Christine and I have plans until early June and we will only have a few weeks to prepare before we leave for Australia and the Great Barrier Reef. You will be able to read my Barrier Blog every week until January 1, 2010. I return in time for the Olympics and all our house guests during the games.
Look at the Best job in the World website.
Video clip of my new home, Hamilton island
My best job competition so far.