Big Ben Update
July 27th, 2008 by Ben Holt
First I must apologize for not updating my faithful readers more often. It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything here! I’ll have to throw everything in at once in one huge super-blog post.
Summer is going great here at the Holt household. I just finished reading Jill “The Last of the Mohicans”. We pick blackberries from our backyard almost every day. We take hikes and bike rides. Jill is on reduced hours in the summer (around 10 per week) while making the same salary as during the year. I work about this much during the summer as well, so we have a LOT of time together. Other couples might go bonkers spending this much time together, but I love this arrangement. We are keeping “busy” in other ways as well…
We started a house church recently! Just a few friends from the area have agreed to embark upon this venture with us. I have been thinking about small churches for around two years; it was time to try it out. There are pros and cons, but so far it has been going great. We meet for a potluck dinner that we call “communion”, which is just a communal meal we share while remembering God in our conversation. Then we are presented with a short lesson or discussion or study from a different person each week. We have also done a few songs. Tonight is our third week, and we’re expecting around ten people!
One of the GREAT things about a small church is that each person has so much to offer and contribute - and we can cater to everyone! Many of us like to pray silently instead of out loud, and we can pray as a small group any way that we want! We can adopt ideas and be more flexible than a bigger church in how we “run” things.
Also, I recently got a web design job for a client in Texas. It’s quite an involved site, and I’m hoping I can deliver a professional-looking product. It’s a database-driven site that will sell real estate like hotels and restaurants. This week I’ll be brushing up my PHP and SQL skills for this big project.
I’ve been playing music with Hannah Daman and Jill. Tonight we played at an open mic in Framingham at a coffee shop. We were invited by my friend Jeff who likes to play out a lot. Jill has great rhythm skills and Hannah sings very nicely. Together we played some acoustic type covers and original songs. The audience seemed to love us and we got a lot of comments. The manager also asked us to come back next month and play a longer set!
On the geek end of things, I’ve been tweaking my backup scripts. I bought another hard drive to use as a Time Machine backup. However, I also run rsync via SSH to the very server where this website resides. These are Linux servers that happen to have rsync and SSH available to clients, which is great! Rsync is great for incremental backups rather than uploading everything each time an update is made. The only problem is that the Linux servers mess up my executables - all my applications are not usable if I download them from the server. Therefore I’ve been using disk images or tarballs to package up my applications before syncing. It’s tedious but at least it works.
Finally, tonight I learned how to use ipfw to “shape” my bandwidth. My SSH backup was eating up all my bandwidth uploading at top speed. Fortunately in OSX you can control your bandwidth for any individual protocol. I set port 22 (SSH) to 100 kb/s max, and it’s chugging away in the background leaving bandwidth for my more important stuff!
Next week is my sister’s wedding! I have to start practicing as I’m playing in it.
My band (Overshine) has also been practicing hard and recording. We recently recorded a couple of songs (which took all weekend) with this amazing engineer. He’s a solid guy who recorded most of Stryper’s albums and tours with them and other bands as a sound tech. He did our project in his home studio, and it was a good time. We’ll probably be playing at clubs and bars in the near future!
I think that will do for now so as not to bore you, dear readers. Thanks for indulging in my long update!
