Into the Swing of Things - by John

It’s the first week of the new year, and it feels that after Orchard Camp and the holidays, we have finally started our “real work” with the center. Chuck and Heather have gone to talk to various embassies this week, and we are in charge of things, although it should be pretty quiet. Our first group of the year has just arrived (about six hours late due to car trouble).

Mennonite Cultural Hegemony

While MCC has tried to train us to be culturally sensitive, to learn and adopt our new culture and so on, we have resisted the trend, and have tried to push our culture onto others around us. We have done this by making a big batch of Portzelchen and forcing them onto our neighbours and friends. For those of you who have not capitulated to the Mennonite culture (yet), Portelchen, or New Years Cookies, are kind of like donuts with raisins, without the hole, and covered with icing sugar. Our neighbours pronounced them good, and wanted to know more about becoming cultural Mennonites, admitting that their own New Years Cake and Pastry traditions pale in comparison. Next, we plan to win them over with Borscht.

For Geeks Only

WARNING The following is intended only for those peculiar people familiar with the Unix command line. If you are not one of these, you will be bored!

One of the fun parts of my first week of ’06 was trying to get my Mac working, and plumbing the depths of Apples OSX operating system. I inherited an old eMac at C4L that I have been using as my office computer. It has worked well for me, and I had all my documents on it, until last Tuesday when it decided to stop booting up. Much research led me to uncover the “verbose” and “single user” boot options. It turns out it was getting stuck because rc.cleanup would never exit cleanly because there was something seriously wrong with the hard drive. What to do, I wanted to rescue my files! In the end, I had to run fsck –y from single user boot a bunch of times, mount the drive, to fire up vi, go into rc.cleanup and comment out a bunch of lines where it was cleaning up /private/_tmp_ where the problem area was, and do a shutdown –h. At that point the box was able to boot multiuser, but would end up at a command prompt instead of the GUI (because something else was busted and it wouldn’t run SystemStartup). That was good enough for me, I put in my USB memory stick, did a mount_msdos so I could see the memory stick from the command line, did a cp * and copied all of my files onto the memory stick. Success! Then I reinstalled OSX, and I’m back in business, more or less. Just goes to show you, old Unix admins never die. Good thing I came all the way to Africa so I could get out my (metaphorical) screwdriver. What’s next, holding my glasses together with tape? Actually, what’s next is that I am installing a small network in the C4L offices. If you are deeply interested, send me and email and I will keep you posted. I think it might be a little too technical for the blog.

It is now safe to continue reading the blog...

We wish all our readers a happy and prosperous new year, wherever you are. It was only a year ago that the first small thoughts of doing something different entered our minds, what a difference a year can make. It should be an interesting year for us, our immediate goal is to learn all about how the center operates, and start taking responsibilities for various functions. We already know there will be a lot to do. We are also looking forward to getting into a bit of a routine once school starts, as it feels like we have had no routine at all for the last six months.