The Ulici Blog

Music for the heart - grupul Cadmiel

2007-07-10T09:27:00.000-07:00

I've been spending quite a bit of time trying to find out about this music band from Romania (Orade I think) that apparently did some recordings in the early 90s. The name is "grupul Cadmiel'. I've been trying hard to get to the source and find out about this group and were to buy their music but my search so far has been fruitless. My wife had a couple of copied tapes with their music and I decided to convert them to MP3 files so I can listen to them on my mp3 player, hence the need for better copies.
Anyway, I find some of their songs incredibly touching and uplifting. Call me a moron or whatever, yesterday I could barely hold back the tears as I was listening to them at work.
I wonder if I'm the only one that gets so deeply touched by this kind of music. On Sunday the church showed a movie in the evening service (Facing Your Giants). At first I thought geez, there goes the shallow american church showing movies about football instead of their Sunday evening service... Did I mention, I HATE FOOTBALL!!. Anyway, in the end I was in tears, and God really used that movie to challenge me to face some of the giants in my own life and to decide to not give up so easily. When I asked my wife what she thought... she said it's inspirational, but it's only a movie... it's not real life. Well I don't know, but I think if a movie or a song stirs up a persons emotions enough to make them think long and hard about their life and if this soulsearching results in a real, permanent change in that person's life, then that movie is no longer just a movie... it has become real in someone's life. This stage I'm going through with anger, confusion, depression, excitement and just searching for answers in my life, I hope it changes me for the good.
Anyway, last night I tried in vain to make those mp3s but it seems that my piece of crap computer probably has a fried soundcard or something. I don't have a preamp for the tape player, so the the output isn't even line level. I got so frustrated, but this morning I was able to record a couple of the songs and then I amplified them digitally, which is not the best thing, so the quality may be lacking but at least I have something.
So here are the results of my labor:
Introducing Grupul Cadmiel
The first song: http://www.cnw.com/~ulicip/Cadmiel/m-ai%20regasit.mp3
If this ain't grace, then what is?
M-ai regasit cand eu pierdut an mine / You found me again, when I was lost within myself
Ma rastigneam pe-altarele de lut / I was sacrificing myself on altars of clay
Cand prabusit zaceam in neputinta / when collapsed I lay there without strength
Cand faptele pagane m-au batut (I'm not sure I understand the lyrics here) / when the heathen deeds beat me ??? some thing like that.

Tu m-ai cules din pulbere cu harul / You picked me up from the dust with your grace
Ca sa ma-mbraci cu dragostea dintai / To clothe me with your first love
Si mi-ai soptit tu-mi esti margaritarul / And you whispered to me: "You are my precious jewel"
In dragostea-mi de-a pururi sa ramai / Remain in my love forever.

The second song: http://www.cnw.com/~ulicip/Cadmiel/miedor.mp3
Ok, this is not what most people would call "high quality music"... and it's probably not "cool" by most people's standards but listen to them... listen to the words. Tell me... am I the only one who feels this is powerful? maybe my medicine is just making me more emotional... wait a minute, I forgot to take my meds for a month now.

Watch out, I'm on steroids now!

2007-04-11T09:56:00.000-07:00

I just finished one round of treatment with steroids for my hearing and it seems to help some. Maybe I'll continue improving for a while, but I'm kinda scared about the side effects. There are lots of them and I can definitelly feel changes in my body. I've taken different kinds of medication before, but I've never taken something that affected me this much... it's almost like I'm a different person. My body feels different... even my muscles feel like they're growing without me exercising them or maybe it's water retention? or just fat? But my joints actually feel different. It is supposed to cause bone loss, and even my teeth feel like they've actually worn down since starting this. And I don't know if this is totally to blame on the medication, though I think it is, I seem to have a pretty short fuse these days. On Easter Sunday in the morning I forgot to take my medication and on the way to church I had the nastiest temper that blew up into arguing about every little thing... I felt terrible sitting up there playing the piano while in my mind I just felt like wanting to break everybody's neck. And then as I was listening to the sermon, I realized all of the sudden that I had calmed down and I didn't feel that way anymore. So it must have had to do with some kind of withdrawal symptoms caused by not taking my meds at the right time.Oh and what set me off on Sunday morning was when I walked into church at 8:30 (we go early for practice) and right there in front of the door there's this huge inflatable football that I guess was part of some display trying to promote VBS this summer. Well maybe it's not such a big deal, but to me that was very offensive at that point. I was expecting to walk into church and see easter lillies or a cross or something about the ressurection, instead this stupid footbal greets me. It just made me think "Here's Christ dying on a cross for us, and we're so shallow that we're preoccupied with a dumb football game." Now I realize my reaction was probably a bit extreme, but I still don't think the timing was right for that, and in fact I don't think I want my kids to go to a Vacation Bible School where they hear more about football than about Christ. I think this points to how shallow this generation has become, and as I'm reading through 2Chronicles, 2 Kings, Isaiah and Hoseah at the moment, I can't help but notice the similarities between the way Israel/Judah acted in those days and the way the church tries so hard to walk with one foot on the narrow path and one foot in the world.

Dad, you wouldn't believe this but: He's Alive!

2007-04-08T22:00:00.000-07:00

This is one of the funniest yet probably most meaningful things one of my kids ever said to me. On Easter Sunday, we were at home watching the Passion of Christ movie with the kids, and Aida (3 yr old) turns to me at the end and she says:
You wouln't believe this, but He's alive, alive alive!... (at this point I'm both fighting back tears and trying hard not to laugh, because I definitelly don't want her to think I'm laughing at her).
The part that really got me was the "you wouldn't believe this"... because she put her finger right on one of my most obvious character traits: I'm really the skeptic in the family when it comes to believing anything. On one hand, these days it's insane NOT to be skeptical about just about everything. There is a whole industry out there built opon figuring out ways to part naive people from their money. How does one balance staying sane these days, with being a believer?

Finally, we have a real spring day...

2007-04-06T15:03:00.000-07:00

If you live in the PNW, especially near the ocean you know that this is a BIG DEAL. A day in April with temperatures going over 70 and just beautiful balmy weather, now that is a rare thing in these parts. I remember last year even in June having some of the ugliest 40 degree, rainy, windy weather that I thought would never end. Well if this is global warming, I WANT MORE OF IT! I'm sure we will pay for these two gorgeous days... who knows in another week it might go back to rain and hail.

Well, I've been fairly faithful with keeping up with Bible reading, although I'm a little behind schedule, I have been making very good progress and taking a lot of detailed notes, and for me, doing a thorough job of this reading right now is more important than being right on schedule.

I'm now reading through Isaiah chapters 18-22... (here's the text, pick your language of choice: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+19-21)
Very fascinating, especially the prophecies about Egypt. There is a whole lot of detail about exactly what will happen, down to names of cities, and a time of peace and aliance between Assyria, Egypt and Israel.
There's so much to it so I don't have time to study all the details separatelly, I'm just making notes and will come back to them when I'm through reading the whole Bible, but this link goes a little bit into it. I don't know about its source yet, but it tries to show when and how most of these prophecies have been fulfilled:
http://www.ao.net/~fmoeller/19.htm
here's a link to what the commenaries have to say (you need to select which commentary you want to see (this particular one is Mathew Henry Concise):
http://eword.gospelcom.net/comments/isaiah/mhc/isaiah19.htm

Yup... just what I thought... it's something in the water

2006-11-07T14:33:00.000-08:00

Today I wanted to check out the weather forecast since earlier the forecast was calling for rain and wind all week, and all of the sudden today within 30 minutes the sky cleared. Not one cloud (at least as far as I could see from my window, which lets me see everything to the south, west, and north). Anyway, I go to www.weatherbug.com and type in the zipcode here at work (98221), and it looks like the forecast has changed and it includes some sun now. But then I wanted to check out the webcam at home in Oak Harbor, so I went here:
http://weather.weatherbug.com/WA/Oak-Harbor-weather/weather-cams/local-cams.html?zcode=z5548
Under the picture there's usually a little blurb about the area or town... well this one got me to bust out laughing:

More about Oak Harbor ES Camera:
Oak Harbor can receive enhanced precipitation when the “Puget Sound
Convergence Zone” sets up. The convergence zone sets up when northwest winds are blowing. These winds are diverted by the 10,000 foot peaks of the Olympic
Mountains, with part of the air flow deflected north of Seattle and part
deflected south of Seattle in the Tacoma area. These two air streams eventually
converge somewhere across the Seattle area.

Geez... Now what in the world is enhanced precipitation? and what is it enhanced with?
because if I find the answer to that question, that would answer a lot of things about why my kids act so crazy, maybe it has to do with me losing my memory or with my wife only conceiving girls or with a certain member the family racking up huge cellphone bills. Now I really need to figure this out because maybe I do need to move. I've heard this stuff we get here refered to as "liquid sunshine"... but "enhanced precipitation"... boy I gotta find out more about that.

Balak... the terrorized terrorist

2006-10-31T13:46:00.000-08:00

Who says there's no humor in the Bible?
Even though this one is rather subtle, it's there. And how fitting as today it is halloween. I know I think I want to dress up as Balak... the terrorized terrorist from Moab. Almost sounds like a scene from Veggie tales.
I was reading Numbers 24 the other day and I got to verse 14 and it struck me very funny:

14. Şi acum iată că mă duc la poporul meu. Vino, şi-ţi voi vesti ce
va face poporul acesta poporului tău în vremile cari vor urma." (VDC)

14.Now I am going back to my people, but come, let me warn you of what
this people will do to your people in days to come." (NIV)

Here's the background: Balaak is upset (my wife told me not to use the p word anymore... you know, the one that describes doing #1). He's upset because inspite of asking Balaam repeatedly and promising him all kinds of rewards, Balaam keeps blessing the people of Israel instead of cursing them as he is told. Now Balak tells him basically: See, you've forfeited all the nice stuff I was going to give you because you can't seem to follow simple directions.
Balaam replies: Even if you gave me your whole house full of gold and silver, I still couldn't do anything to hurt these people (or to help them). Basically he's saying that God put an invisible Teflon bowl over the people of Israel... neither blessings nor curses can stick to them. Only what God says sticks.
So now Balaam says as if he's inviting Balak to a fun movie: oh by the way, I'm going to go home now, but come here and let me tell you about how these people are going to anihilate your people sometime soon.
I can just imagine the horrified look on Balak's face. NOOOOO!

DAY 10 on the master cleanser

2006-10-27T15:05:00.000-07:00

Yup. The LAST day. Tomorrow I graduate to drinking Orange Juice for the next 2 days and then one more day of vegetable broth only, and maybe on Tuesday I can finally have real food.
I definitelly lost a lot of weight, not that I did it for that purpose, but it was inevitable.
I will weigh myself soon just so I can report. Unfortunatelly we don't have a decent scale.
It really wasn't all that hard to do it, but yesterday evening I got pretty annoyed with my mother in law. What possesed her to cook enough food for a feast... and not the bland kind either... really smelly kind of food. It wasn't that I had a hard time controling myself because of all that good food smells, it was just more like why make it harder? I'm fine the way I am right now and the kids won't die if they eat something more bland.
All that food goes to waste too because it would have been so much better to eat it fresh, not when it becomes a week old.
My hearing seems to have gotten worse during this fast, which I expected. I know from before that every time I am hungry, my hearing is weaker too, so maybe the "Master Cleanser" juice isn't quite as complete of a diet as they believe. I'm also wondering how much salt there is in our filtered water, since I feel like my body is still holding on to too much water. I don't know what to do when I get off the diet, whether to start back on the water pills again or not. I'm thinking I probably should, although I know for sure it won't be a pleasant experience since I won't be able to eat a lot for the first couple of days.
At least I know that this time I won't be dissapointed at how bland the food seems to taste (Last time I expected to experience what the master cleanser book says: that my tastebuds would be totally overwhelmed with the wonderful flavors... and it turned out to be a bunch of baloney. Everything tasted pretty darn bland)

BORAT..SURE IT'S FUNNY, BUT IS IT RIGHT?

2006-10-27T14:36:00.000-07:00

Well, here I am on the bus on the way home from work using my trusty 23 year old TRS-80 Model 100
laptop to type an entry for my blog. For some reason it didn't occur to me that this would be a
good use for it besides taking notes on my Bible reading and typing up the Created to be a Help
Meet book. Today I was checking out Freerepublic and one of the postings mentioned a new movie
that is supposed to come out in Nov. "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" I guess it is somewhat controversial. I checked
out a few video clips and although the content was humorous, yes, very funny, I was shocked to
see that there are so many people who totally overlook the disgusting use of sexual remarks in
this guy's repertoire. To some degree I was pleasantly surprised at how disgusted I was with it. I think that maybe my reading of God's word is having an effect on me. Not long ago I would have found that type of humor more enjoyable.

Why is it that in the US today, there seems to be this idea that a movie is not complete or funny
unless it contains sexual language or references to bizare sexual behavior?

I was especially put off by how this so called "genius of a commedian" took advantage of people
by filming them without their consent in a "Candid camera" style (minus the innocence part).
Many people point out that Baron Cohen (the name of the actor) is himself a Jew and what he is doing is a good thing: exposing the racism and bigotry still so prevalent in our society. I don't doubt that some of
that may be true, but I wonder about the legality of what he is doing. Do people that he has
filmed have a say in whether their faces end up displayed in every movie theater, especially
those who were caught in their weak moments? I honestly don't think it should be legal for him
to make millions of dollars off other people's blunders. At the least, I believe every one of
those people is entitled to having their identities protected. I think it's a good thing he
showed that racist ranch owner on the hunting trip, but the guy's identity should have been
protected. For one, this guy now has the sympathy of all the other racist antisemites out there,
and seconly he has gained the hatered of every decent person who saw that video clip. I even saw several postings on the web of people who want him dead. (Hey, count me in too you know). I'm not trying to protect the bad guy, I just don't think this should be published without his consent, and I really doubt he consented to it.

Wohoo... my English-Romanian dictionary database has 59742 entries!

2006-10-19T11:17:00.000-07:00

Well, after getting it up to somewhere around 19000 words in the database by from various sources it looked like the sources were drying up. I definitelly don't have time to type up fifty thousand words and definitions, even that isn't quite enough for it to be trully helpful as a translation tool, so I continued searching. Well, search and ye shall find. I stumbled upon Babylon on the web and lo and behold there are several romanian glossaries out there, and they're free too. Now the challenge was how do I get the entries and definitions out of the glossary since it is in binary format and there is no way I have time or resources to even try to decode or figure out how to extract the data. Well, Babylon does come with something like a 1 week free trial so I downloaded it and installed it, then I installed the glossary I wanted to access and poked around. After monkeying around with different ideas on how to scrape the data out, I found the quick and dirty solution:
Say Hello to good ole Winbatch!
Yes, that rather old clunky looking scripting language with the big owl icon. The one that "real programmers" make fun of. Well, I could either spend a week trying to figure out all the API calls and the code needed for a screen scraping program in VB, VB.net, etc... or I could spend a few minutes and have a script that is useful. Well it took me a little more than a few minutes since I had forgotten most of what I knew about Winbatch inspite of having used it at my previous job. Anyway, within half an hour I had a working program that could grab data from Babylon's screen and simulate a mouse click on the "next word" button. With a little more refinement I made it parse out the results (awesome one liner parsing command) and create a delimited file with entries and definitions. The whole program is exactly 19 lines of code.
I ran the program yesterday and over night. I had to restart it several times since I didn't bother to spend too much time adding error handling. I woke up in the morning to find that it had harvested 52355 words from the glossary, all nicelly formatted in a delimited file. SWEET!
Now I know this may not be considered "ethical" for some, but at this point I'm not looking to market the program commercially, and what it took for me to create a decent dictionary was a very very good learning experience in both VB.NET and Winbatch. Never throw out old tools. You never know when you will need them.

Day 2 starts with mini disaster.

2006-10-19T09:39:00.000-07:00

This morning I woke up early to try to do the "salt water flush" as prescribed by the Master Cleanser diet. Well, it ended up being a disaster.
First, I shouldn't have relied on my memory for the quantities. I've done this about four years ago, and had no problems, but this time I remembered wrong. For some stupid reason I thought I was supposed to add 2 tablespoons of salt to 32 oz of water instead of 2 teaspoons. Huge difference. I was wondering how come this tastes so much saltier than before, but I thought it must be because I've been on a no salt diet so even the least bit of salt now tastes very salty. Well, I couldn't drink the whole thing, and the stuff didn't stay down for more than a few minutes (which I'm glad). I still have that nauseating taste in my mouth from the salt. I hope I can do it right tomorrow, and that the amount of salt that did stay in my system won't cause any problems. Hopefully it gets flushed right out with the rest of the stuff.
I did drink about 16 oz of the smooth move tea and it hasn't made a difference yet.

Master Cleanser again

2006-10-18T14:40:00.000-07:00

Well, Georgie started the Master Cleanser fast yesterday, but I talked her into starting over again today since we had invited N. for dinner last nite to celebrate his getting his drivers license. So here I am with 10 days to go without food only lemonade. We have done it before about 4 years ago, so I'm not worried.
Right now I do feel a little hungry and it gets a little interesting that once you're not having your normal meals during the day, you don't know what to do with all the extra time.
It also happens to be a rather cloudy-rainy day and it will probably continue to be this way for quite a while. Cold weather is definitelly not a good thing when you're on this fast.
I'm curious if there will be any good effects on my hearing from it, but I remember trying the same thing about a year ago, I did it for 3 days or so, and my hearing got worse.
On the translation project, I just found something that will really help add lots more entries in my dictionary database. There's a translation software (free trial) named Babylon. I downloaded it and was dissapointed at first that it doesn't come with a romanian glossary, but after poking around on the web, I found several romanian language glossaries for it, a couple of them are pretty big (50,000+ entries). So I downloaded them and tried to figure out how to extract the data. Apparently they are in a binary format (.bgl files) and I wasn't going to try to decrypt that, so after more poking around, I resorted to good old Winbatch to create a program that continuously clicks the [next word] button and harvests one word at a time and its definition into a file. When there are no more words, it stops. So far I am very pleased with the way it runs, although it will take a while for it to extract all the data, and I have to run it when I'm not doing anything on the computer (it uses mouse movements and sendkeys so using either the mouse or the keyboard would definitelly interfere with it.) I ran it for about 15-20 minutes during my lunchtime while I took a walk around the block, and when I got back it had harvested 3182 dictionary entries. This particular dictionary I believe has around 52000 entries, so if I leave it running when I go home, it should be done by next morning. I can always check on it from home. This is really exciting, as my current dictionary only has somewhere between 10-15 thousand entries, and it really shows.
On the Bible reading front, well I'm in Leviticus 18. Since I'm reading the Romanian Bible mainly, I do compare occasionaly with the NIV version which I carry with me (I don't have a small KJV Bible) . And I was surprised that the translation differs by a LOT.
In verses 9-19, the Romanian Bible says " sa nu descoperi goliciunea" - literally "do not uncover the nakedness..." while the NIV translation says "do not have sexual relations". Well you might say, well, Cornilescu (the romanian translator) was just a prude, so he didn't want to directly bring up sex, BUT in verse 20 the DCV (Dumitru Cornilescu Version) clearly refers to sex. so obviosly he's not just shy. Anyway, I did check the KJV and it agrees perfectly with DCV, so the NIV is the one that is strays from the norm. Now if the verses 9-19 aren't necessarily talking about sexual relations, then we might have a problem when it comes to people being a caretaker for their own elderly, or siblings...etc. Obviously in taking care of an immobile person or one who is ill, there will be many instances in which one has no choice but to uncover the nakedness of the patient. Anyway, I'm just curious how the people of that day understood that passage. Maybe it does imply uncovering one's nakedness with sexual intent.

My first post

2006-10-16T14:14:00.000-07:00

Well, I created my own blog and it was a whole lot less painful than doing it myself with HTML, MySQL and PHP.
I plan to use it as kind of a journal (among other things) to track my diet and changes in my hearing. Yes you read right. My hearing changes based on my diet. I have a disease called Meniere's disease, and it is not very well understood. Anyway, I will try to see if I can find a pattern in what I eat/how much rest I get and how that affects me.
The other thing I will use it for is ranting about the latest news, my struggles (not the Jihad or the Mein Kampf kind), my software projects and things like that.
Anyway, let's see how this works:

Currently I'm using the time that I have on the bus to work and back to do two things:
1) Read the entire Bible at least once in my life (and make notes with questions and things I find that need to be explained). I want this to be a thorough reading and fairly in depth study.
2) Type up the book "Created To Be His Help Meet" by Debi Pearl so that it might be easier for my wife to translate it into romanian.

For both tasks I'm finding that my 23+ year old TRS-80 Model 100 laptop is the best tool. Both for making notes so I don't have to scribble things on paper while the bus is shaking like crazy and for typing the book. I finally succeded in connecting it to my PC to upload my work to the PC and it works great. It boots up instantly, shuts down instantly, there's no hard drive to crash, and it has enough memory to hold a day's work when it comes to typing up a chapter or two from the book. I'm glad I didn't sell it at the garage sale (actually, I'm glad nobody bought it).
On task #1 I'm currently in the book of Leviticus, ch 13. I just finished ch. 12 and unless someone can explain this properly to me without twisting things around, it looks to me like a very very sexist piece of text.
Task #2 I'm currently typing up Chapter 6. I'm far ahead enough for Georgie to have plenty of text to work with, but I would still like to finish the whole thing. Seems like my main problem is that I've got unfinish-itis. I think it would be good to actually be able to type it all up.
You might ask why are you typing up a printed book?
Because I spent part of my vacation in a quest to learn VB.Net, and as an exercise in VB.NET, I wrote several pieces of software that I hope would be very useful to translators.
#1 A translation tool that allows the user to load a source file (in the source language) to be displayed on one side of the screen, and then it allows the user to type in the translation on the other side. The most useful feature though is the fact that the user can doubleclick on any word on in the source text and the program looks up in a database the word and displays the translation along with expressions that word might be used in. The user can also modify the dictionary entries and add new words. The latest feature I added today was the ability to highlight text in a rich text box. This might sound trivial, but actually it involves creating a new rich text box control that inherits everything from the plain rich text box control and adds functionality.
#2 In order to fill the dictionary I ended up writing a piece of software that looks up words in an online dictionary. I'm not sure how legal this is, but nevertheless, I needed to have at least 10-20 thousand entries in my dictionary, so that was an interesting learning experience using the AxWebBrowser control.