So, I’ve been pretty sick the last few days.  Thankfully, I only have strep and not the flu as well.  So unable to work and unable to read, I was able to catch up on a few movies I’ve wanted to see for a while.  The one that intrigued me the most after seeing it was the 2006, soma-induced, Americana neo-Buddhist, “scifi” flick The Fountain staring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz.  One of the things that intrigued me the most was how many similar themes this box office flop had with another title I had seen recently: Watchmen.  Both of these films were actually quite visually stunning, if not outright visceral at parts, and both received mixed reviews, mostly due to their inaccessibility (a problem I find with most post-Cartesian philosophical works which often find hubris their raison d’être).  Watchmen did considerably better in the theaters than The Fountain, I think due to the allegiance of the comic book crowd and the action-packed plot which forced the deeper meaning to the periphery.  It is the later of these reasons that gives Watchmen a subtle-quality not present in The Fountain, which opts for a rather predictably direct approach.

The Fountain features only Jackman and Weisz, with the small remaining dialogue (less than 10%?) handled by transient characters.  It is basically a mythos conjoining three separate plots:

1. Scientist (Jackman) with dying wife (Weisz) is driven through sleepless nights and spousal neglect searching for a formula to eternal life and finds it just after his wife dies.
2. Conquistador (Jackman) with near-to-execution queen (Weisz) searches for Tree of Life and, upon finding it, consumes its sap greedily to his own death (and presumably hers).
3. Cosmic traveller (Jackman) journeys to Xibalba in an ecosphere, consuming a tree (which symbolizes Weisz) to keep him alive, killing the tree in the process moments before reaching Xibalba where the traveller becomes enlightened, burmese zazen style, and sacrifices himself to give the tree life.

The main intention of the writers is to get across the following points:

1. Life is angst
2. Angst is caused by fear of death
3. Cessation of angst is attainable
4. The path to cessation of angst is acceptance of death and enjoyment of life

If you noticed similarities to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, that would make you an astute reader.  However, there are several departures from traditional Buddhism.  First and foremost, The Fountain does not deal with suffering, but angst.  In fact, shockingly, the film depicts almost no suffering.  To be sure, the Scientist must have felt deep pain at the loss of his wife, yet what is portrayed on the screen is not suffering but angst at his refusal to accept death, even at her burial this still haunts him.  Secondly, Samara (rebirth, reincarnation) is depicted not as a spiritual problem to be overcome but a material reality to be revelled in.  This is seen throughout the film, but most plainly in the last scene where the Scientist plants a tree above his wife’s grave.  Finally, the noble eightfold path or “middle way” is replaced by the dialectic of acceptance of death and enjoyment of life.

With this the recasting of historic Buddhism into Amero-existentialism is complete.  The inability of this film, and American neo-religiosity in general, to deal with the real question, the question of suffering, is I think what caused its failure to engage its viewers. While suffering is a universal phenomena, angst is the suffering of those with nothing to believe.  This is the result of a privileged life which, unexamined, faces the finality of death and, refusing to admit that he has not lived the good life, redefines the good life in his own image: a life where personal relations boil down merely to one’s own enjoyment.  This may be painted somewhat rose coloured for the well-to-do such as the characters in this film.  Yet, what hue should be used to write the icon of one whose life consists of suffering, punctuated by few moments, if any, of reprieve?  As Fr. Cantalamesa said in his 2007 Good Friday sermon: “Suffering is certainly a mystery for everyone, especially the suffering of innocent people, but without faith in God it becomes immensely more absurd, even the last hope of rescue is taken away. Atheism is a luxury that only those with privileged lives can afford.”

The Fountain fails to address universal human experience and, unsurprisingly, it provides a less than compelling answer to its predicament.

Stay tuned for notes from Watchmen and a comparison of the paradigms bolstering the arguments of each film.

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I just finished reading this article which I enjoyed. Its a fine article and a great stab at trying to understand Orthodoxy from an evangelical perspective.  He makes some mistakes, of course, but one can’t expect him to be aware of the subtlety of our doctrine as a non-Orthodox.  However, I would like to comment on a mistake I see quite often in people looking in at Orthodoxy from the outside.  I am speaking of his assertion that “The Eastern presentation of salvation can smudge the distinct steps of salvation. Justification and sanctification often get folded into the broader concept of theosis, and they become so blurred that Orthodox believers often don’t know what to make of the terms.”

Justification and Sanctification are, at their heart, sacramental terms and their proper context is the sacramental life.  We Orthodox are very clear on the (single) stage of both justification and sanctification: Baptism.  Our Baptism service proclaims (while the chrism is being removed): “You are justified; you are illumined. You are baptized; you are illuminated; you are anointed with the Holy Myrrh, you are sanctified; you are washed clean, in the Name of Father, and of Son, and of Holy Spirit. Amen.”

Our epistle reading during that service is Romans 6:3-11:
“Brethren, do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

Thus, I would argue that the protestant concepts of justification and sanctification have entirely lost their sacramental context and have become merely a philosophical construct.  St. Paul clearly warns against this “philosophizing” of salvation in Col 2.  St. Paul says essentially that the fullness of God exists bodily in Christ and is appropriated to us through baptism and faith.  He warns us to avoid “hollow and deceptive philosophy” which are namely: 1. Christ isn’t fully divine/human 2. Justification is appropriated by any other means than baptism and faith (i.e. circumcision, dietary codes, etc).

Much confusion arrives when protestants ask Orthodox “are you saved”?  For protestants, “saved” means “justified.”  For Orthodox, “saved” means a variety of things (including justification) but ultimately “fulfilling the purpose for which mankind was created; namely union with God.”  This terminological mismatch leads protestants to think there is some confusion about the doctrine of justification on our end.  Yet the confusion exists on the other end.  St. Paul clearly teaches that we are justified and sanctified through baptism and faith, which is precisely what we proclaim.

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My good friend Ben wonders about dispassion.  By dispassion we do not refer to sloth (acedia; lack of caring about the world due to laziness) which is one of Aquinas’ seven deadly sins (rightfully so), but we speak of apatheia.  However, before we talk about dispassion, we must first talk about an Orthodox understanding of passion itself.

While there is some disagreement within the Fathers (John Climacus especially), the majority of Orthodox theologians hold that the passions were actually created by God.  For instance, God created:

1. Love so that we may love Him and others
2. Hatred so that we would hate evil
3. Hunger so that we would hunger after the Bread of Life
4. etc…

Yet, the very nature of Satan’s temptation in the garden was to take these passions and corrupt them:

1. True love becomes love of myself
2. True hatred becomes hatred of God and others
3. True hunger becomes a quest to fulfil my own desires

This is not just a problem of a singular fall event but, as Orthodox believe, the events in the garden were the catalyst for a continual denigration of humanity.  St. Athanasius echoes this well in “On The Incarnation” and further ties it to the passions:

When this happened, men began to die, and corruption ran riot among them and held sway over them to an even more than natural degree… Indeed, they had in their sinning surpassed all limits; for, having invented wickedness in the beginning and so involved themselves in death and corruption, they had gone on gradually from bad to worse, not stopping at any one kind of evil, but continually, as with insatiable appetite, devising new kinds of sins.

Thus, the problem of our passions is not that they are evil but that we use them for evil, even “devising new kinds of sins.”  Further, the passions have become so noisy that they drown out our ability to hear God.  St. Irenaeus says that, because of our passions, we could behold nothing apart from our own flesh, necessitating the incarnation: that we might behold God in our own flesh. Christ then, through the Holy Mysteries, invites us to partake of His flesh (Eucharist) and of His death (Baptism), that our own flesh might be renewed.

We have now come to the heart of the matter: in Christ, dispassion is the “renewing of our minds” so that the passions would be silent before God and in beholding God (in His divine energies) we would once again become the image in which we were created: Christ Himself.  Thus, Orthodox prayer services are hard as one often finds the mind wandering.  Their purpose is not to “stir us up,” as in a football game or Icthus, but to “quiet us down.” Before communion we pray:

Let us who mystically represent the Cherubim and sing the thrice holy hymn to life-creating Trinity, now lay aside all earthly cares that we may receive the King of All who comes mystically upborne by the angelic hosts. Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.

In the Greek (which is unfortunately not rendered well in English), the statement “lay aside all earthly cares” is literally “apatheia” or dispassion.  The call is to quiet the passions so that we may receive the King of All.  If we do not quiet the passions, we may miss Him!  What a frightful thought!  But this is the nature of the passions: they blind us to God.  This is why Fr. Seraphim Rose warns us, in “The Religion of the Future,” his great polemic against modern religion:

The  life of self-centeredness and self-satisfaction lived by most of today’s “Christians” is so all-pervading that it effectively seals them off from any understanding at all of spiritual life; and when such people do undertake “spiritual life,” it is only as another form of self-satisfaction. This can be seen quite clearly in the totally false religious ideal both of the “charismatic” movement and the various forms of “Christian meditation”: all of them promise (and give very quickly) an experience of “contentment” and “peace.” But this is not the Christian ideal at all, which if anything may be summed up as a fierce battle and struggle. The  “contentment” and “peace” described in these contemporary “spiritual” movements  are quite manifestly the product of spiritual deception, of spiritual self-satisfaction - which is the absolute death of the God-oriented spiritual life. All these forms of “Christian meditation” operate solely on the psychic level and have nothing whatever in common with Christian spirituality. Christian spirituality is formed in the arduous struggle to acquire the eternal Kingdom of Heaven, which fully begins only with the dissolution of this temporal world…

The difficulty that Orthodox have with something like Icthus is that when our passions run wild through our flesh, how can Christ reorient them to Himself without stillness in our heart?  For truely the goal of our regeneration in Christ is to once again set our hearts aflame with love for Him: this is the healing of our passions.  Yet how do we do this without fasting, prayer, stillness, service and obedience?

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Fr. Gregory Hogg has a great post comparing Sts. Augustine and Gregory on the ability and expressability of knowing God’s substance.  Go read the excerpts from Augustine and Gregory on his post, otherwise the following won’t make much sense…

There are a few things to note in further comparing these two passages:
1. Both Gregory and Augustine agree that it is impossible to express God’s substance (”inexpressibly seen”).  This seems to be pretty well supported by earlier writing and appears to be an ancient assumption of the church.
2. Gregory says BOTH that it is “difficult” and “impossible” to know God’s substance.  He also prefaces the “impossible” statement as opinion.  Further, Gregory’s reference to Plato is clearly an apology for his thesis of “impossibility”.
3. “Impossible” is a more developed theology than “difficult.”  The move here is from the empiric to the ontological.
4. Augustine is NOT talking about the Beatific Vision.  For Augustine, lack of purity of mind is the impediment to seeing the “inexpressible reality.”  For Beatific Vision, our current ontological state is the impediment.
5. As western theology develops, “difficult” becomes “impossible in this life.”  This is again a move from empiric to ontological.  Further, death as ontological agent (gloficiation/purgatory) also becomes a major theme in western theology.  This is to effect the ontological shift from this life where we cannot see God’s substance to the next life where we are able to see His substance.  This is the meaning of Aquinas’ Beatific Vision.
6. Barlaam’s doctrines are representative of a much later (thomistic) school of western thought, primarily that of Beatific Vision.

We must, therefore, be careful in our analysis.  Augustine is far closer to Gregory than he is to Barlaam and probably represents an older school of theology than both Gregory and Barlaam (at least in this regard). The development of theology appears to be from “difficult” to “impossible” (East) and “impossible in this life” (West). Further complicating the matter, is that the “impossibility” thesis (as far as I am aware) first appears in gnostic thought: “the Propator … was known only to Monogenes, who sprang from him … while to all the others he was invisible and incomprehensible.” - Against Heresies 1.2.1

To make things clear, I am a proponent of the Nazianzen/Palamite terminology.  This is primarily because it solves the “seeing God without becoming God” problem.  I suspect that Gregory, like the Nicenes (ousias), critically appropriated a gnostic terminology where it made sense without accepting their errors.

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With the intoning of our first Bridegroom Matins, Holy Week has begun. It has always astounded me how fickle the crowds in Jerusalem appear. One week they proclaim their King with shouts of “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” Yet only days later, this same crowd exclaims “Crucify Him!” If I am, however, honest with myself, I am no less fickle than this crowd (and in all probability, more so).

The contrast between the joy of Palm Sunday and the sobriety of Bridegroom matins is no less striking. We have come through the resurrection of Lazarus and the waving of palm branches. But just, seemingly, moments later, the call for our souls to awaken rings slowly and meditatively. This is what makes Bridegroom matins a truly frightful and awful service: it lays before us a plain view of ourselves. Eschewing all pretext, through haunting melodies and vivid imagery, it brings us to our own hearts so that we might (if only this once) see what truly lies there. First, we are reminded to, like the wise virgins, be prepared for the bridegroom who comes at midnight. We are then warned to produce fruit, unlike the fig tree which wasted its talents by burying them in the ground. However, the depth of Bridegroom matins, and its placement in Holy Week, is most clearly seen in the juxtaposition of some seemingly unlikely hymns: that which speaks of the voluntary passion of Christ and that of the bridal chamber. We sing:

Thy bridal chamber, O my Savior, I see adorned,
and I have no raiment with which to enter therein.
Enlighten the garment of my soul, O Giver of Light, and save me.

What does the passion of Christ have to do with the bridal chamber? The bridal chamber is no less the tomb of Christ. The hymns of Pascha make this clear: “It was fitting for the Lord to come forth from the grave as from a bridal chamber!” This is the call of Bridegroom matins, that we too might take up our cross and follow after Christ, that dying with Him we might also be raised with Him. Yet can I honestly say that I desire nothing but Christ, to lay down my life so that I might find it? This is why Bridegroom matins seeks to stir us from sleep like the foolish virgins:

Why art thou slothful, O my wretched soul? Why do useless cares occupy thy thoughts amiss? Why dost thou busy thyself with things that pass away?

Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight, And blessed is that servant whom He shall find watching, And again, unworthy is the servant whom He shall find heedless. Beware, therefore, O my soul, do not be weighed down with sleep, Lest you be given up to death, and lest you be shut out of the Kingdom. But rouse yourself crying: Holy, Holy, Holy, art Thou, O our God, Through the Theotokos have mercy on us.

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Click here for more Zenoss Tips and Tricks.

Introduction

Zenoss is built using Zope.  Zope contains plugins for all aspects of authentication and authorization.  We will install two plugins (LDAPUserFolder and LDAPMultiPlugins) which will enable this functionality and then we will configure the Zenoss Zope instance to use these plugins.

Note that this HowTo does not touch upon storing Zenoss data in an LDAP server (that requires some Zenoss hacking). The purpose of this HowTo is to address authentication and authorization (via roles) only.

Further note that this HowTo assumes that you are using RHEL/CentOS 5 or greater and that you have installed Zenoss via the available RPMs.

Theory

Before we get started, it will help to get a little theory out of the way.  What is authentication?  What is authorization?  How are the different?

• Authentication is the process that identifies the user and verifies this identity.
• Authorization is the process which takes the identity and determines what a user has permission to do

For the default Zenoss setup, authorization is handled by Roles.

In this tutorial we will first discuss how to setup authentication against LDAP and then you can optionally map certain users in your LDAP server to particular Roles in Zenoss.  This allows some of your LDAP users to have different privileges than others.

Backup

Before making any changes, we will back up our current zope database (as root):

# service zenoss stop

# cp /opt/zenoss/var/Data.fs /opt/zenoss/var/Data.fs.bak

# service zenoss start

Installation

As root perform the following:

# yum install python-ldap

# wget http://www.dataflake.org/software/ldapuserfolder/ldapuserfolder_2.9-beta/LDAPUserFolder-2.9-beta.tgz/download

# wget http://www.dataflake.org/software/ldapmultiplugins/ldapmultiplugins_1.5/LDAPMultiPlugins-1.5.tgz/download

# tar xvzf LDAPUserFolder-2.9-beta.tgz -C /opt/zenoss/lib/python/Products/

# tar xvzf LDAPMultiPlugins-1.5.tgz -C /opt/zenoss/lib/python/Products/

# service zenoss restart

Configuration

Everything should be installed at this point, so we just need to configure it.  We will do this in several steps:

Login to http://zenoss_srv:8080/zport/manage as an administrator.  Here you will notice two frames (called “left frame” and “right frame” from here on). First, click “acl_users” in the left frame. This will load acl_users into the right frame.  In the right frame, choose “Import/Export” and follow the instructions to perform an export.  This will backup your current authentication/authorization scheme.

After exporting acl_users, you will be back at the acl_users object.  In the upper right corner, next to “Add”, select one of the Multi Plugins.  If you are using ActiveDirectory, choose “ActiveDirectory Multi Plugin”.  Otherwise, choose “LDAP Multi Plugin”.

This will open up the first configuration screen we will look at.  If you are using ActiveDirectory, fill in the values like this:

ID: ActiveDirectory

Title: ActiveDirectory Authentication

LDAP Server: dc.domain.local (or just domain.local to use AD's round-robin DNS)

Use SSL: yes (or no if your setup doesn't support SSL)

Read-only: yes

Login Name Attribute: sAMAccountName

User ID Attribute: sAMAccountName

RDN Attribute: sAMAccountName

Users Base DN: OU=Users,DC=domain,DC=local

User password encryption: SHA

Manager DN:

Password:

User password encryption: SHA

Otherwise, do this for a normal LDAP setup:

ID: LDAP

Title: LDAP Authentication

LDAP Server[:port]: ldap.domain.local

Use SSL: yes (or no if your setup doesn't support SSL)

Read-only: yes

Login Name Attribute: uid

User ID Attribute: uid

RDN Attribute: uid

Users Base DN: OU=People,DC=domain,DC=local

Manager DN:

Password:

User password encryption: SHA

Now you have two choices to make.  The first one is this: What role(s) should ALL LDAP/ActiveDirectory users have?  This takes a bit of knowledge about Zenoss.  However there are three common scenarios:

• LDAP users should have no privileges, unless explicitly granted otherwise:

Default User Roles:

• LDAP users should have read-only permission, unless explicitly granted otherwise:

Default User Roles: ZenUser

• LDAP users should have full permissions:

Default User Roles: Manager

The second choice you need to make is this: will you be using LDAP/ActiveDirectory to indicate what Roles a user has?  If so, also set the following:

Group storage: Groups stored on LDAP server

Groups Base DN: OU=Groups,DC=domain,DC=local

Otherwise, do this:

Group storage: Groups not stored on LDAP server

Groups Base DN:

Finally, click Add.  You will be taken back to the acl_users screen.  We will now enable this plugin.  Click on the plugin instance (named “LDAP” or “ActiveDirectory”) and check Authentication and User_Enumeration, then click “Update”.

If you didn’t enable Groups stored in the LDAP server above, you are done!

If you enabled Groups stored on LDAP server above, first, enable Roles on this screen.  Next, we will setup our Group/Role mappings.  Click on the “Contents” tab at the top of the right frame.  Select “acl_users” in the right frame.  Make sure that “Group mapping” says “Manually map LDAP groups to Zope roles” (apply changes if necessary).  Then, click on the “Groups” tab at the top.  It should now list all the groups from your LDAP server.  Go down to the section “LDAP group to Zope role mappings”.  This is where you add the configuration that says “If a user is in a certain group, add them to this role.”  I can’t give more details here, because this is custom to your setup.  Once you’ve done this, you should be done!

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My good friend Ben has some interesting observations about Lent in the Orthodox tradition and in the Catholic/Protestant traditions.  He describes the Eastern view of sin very well: it is a cancer that, once we let it into our person, devours us from the inside out.  However, I too have been thinking about Lent East and West a bit.  Here are my observations:

First, meatfare and cheesefare weeks are kind of like Mardi Gras, in the sense that we do enjoy things like meat and cheese more than normal as we prepare for Lent (at least I do).  However, there is a markedly different feel to this time of year.Our scripture readings for this period are pretty heavy: the Publican and the Pharisee, the Prodigal Son, the Last Judgement and the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden.They serve to, for four weeks, remind us that we are the pharisee, the prodigal, the goats and Adam.  There isn’t really anything to party about here.  All of this leads up to Forgiveness Vespers.  After we have focused on our “missing the mark” for four weeks, we admit that the path of healing begins with repentance.  Thus, each person repents to and begs for forgiveness from each other member of the parish.

Second, Lent in the Western context often focuses on what is being “given up.” The Orthodox tradition speaks much differently, we talk about what we get: healing, joy, prayer, mended relationships.  These are the byproducts of our fasting because we know the goal: Pascha!  One may ask, how do you get mended relationships from fasting?  Well, several ways.  First, our limited eating should focus also on saving money.  This money should then be spent for alms so that we can help the poor around us.  But more than just money, we should donate our time as well.  When we do these things, we begin heal the dysfunctional social relationships that have created things like poverty and, hopefully, we make a new friend in the process.  Second, we are reminded that food is made for the body, not the body for food.  In realizing this, we begin to heal from our enslavement to our passions which drive us to sin.  What relationship is mended from this you ask?  Why our relationship to God!  Our passions are given to us to love God, yet we choose to love ourselves instead and fill ourselves to the brim as though God would not provide the next meal for us.  To restrain the passions is to free them so that they might find fulfillment in Him who is the source of all things.  This is why Lent is such a great joy (though a difficult joy to be sure)!

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For those that haven’t noticed, Fr. Joseph has decided to go a little controversial. :)  This reminds me of something that I have been wondering for a while.  I think the Orthodox Study Bible is a good thing and I will buy one as soon as it comes out. Though, I have wondered what effect it will have on the Church. Before I explain, let me critique Fr. Joseph’s reader a bit.

First, he argues that Study Bibles tend to have poor scholarship.  Scholarship is not an either/or but a range from poor to excellent.  I suspect any massive work like OSB will have scholarship all over the spectrum.  However, scholarship is not necessarily what makes a good Study Bible.  In my opinion, Study Bibles are very useful when they serve as a bibliography of references to other writings.  Many people want to read the Fathers, but don’t know where to start.  OSB should be helpful in this regard.

Second, Fr. Joseph’s reader argues that the OSB will systematize Orthodoxy. I disagree. The samples I have seen have avoided this systematization quite well.  I am far more worried that it will overemphasize Eastern Fathers over pre-Schism Western Fathers (from whom there is an abundance of good commentary).

I do think there is something, however, to the “how will people use this text?” question.  I’m basing my argument on the thesis of Marshall McLuhan.  He is famous for the phrases “global village” (which he means as something different than its contemporary usage) and, particularly relevant, “the medium is the message.” His thesis is that the channel which a message is delivered in impacts us more than the message itself.  For instance, he says: “[Printing] created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in isolation from others… The private, fixed point of view became possible and literacy confirmed the power of detachment, non-involvement.” (McLuhan, 1967, p. 50)  This, for McLuhan, is the catalyst for Sola Scriptura, not a particular theological argument: before the printing press, Sola Scriptura could have never existed because there was no Scriptura to be had in a Sola fashion (as Into The Light points out, there never was a Bible in the Orthodox Church).

This brings us back to the “how will people use it?” question.  I would argue that Protestants using Study Bibles in poor ways is much more a result of the change of medium than poor scholarship.  Before Study Bibles, if you wanted to know more about the text, it forced you to read a wide variety of materials and go hear commentary at your local parish.  This in turn had the effect, generally speaking, of making the person more sociable and well read.  The shift in medium to Study Bibles made all this extra reading and socialization obsolete.  This was good because it made it possible for those with limited time and skill able to read great materials.  Unfortunately, the lack of reading and socialization also made the reader unable to handle the texts responsibly.

I think the biggest disadvantage in the Study Bible change in medium is this: it emphasizes that the best commentary on the scriptures are found outside of the life of the Church.  For the Orthodox (and others), this is a great travesty!  For us, the very context of the Scriptures is the life of the Church and to read them outside of this context is to misunderstand them.

All that said, I can’t wait to have a real translation of the LXX.

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I just read a great interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In the interview he says something I’ve always had a hard time putting my finger on:

I have grown used to the fact that, throughout the world, public repentance is the most unacceptable option for the modern politician.

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As you may have noticed, I upgraded my site and in the process removed all my old posts.  This is intentional: I thought I might try to get a fresh start on things.

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