IVRRAC for Free - Tell Everyone.

I have decided to get as many people as I can to get a free copy of IVRRAC. Thus I have started a major push to tell everyone possible that between the 13^th and 18^th of June, Amazon is giving away Kindle Copies of IVRRAC. As it is about forgiveness and the power it has to save one’s life I honestly want to get it read by as many people as possible so more people can use forgiveness in their lives. I would really love them to realise true forgiveness comes from our Lord Jesus Christ and that through him all our sins are forgiven. We need to know our own sins are forgiven for us to really forgive others in the same manor. This is what drives Simon the main character of IVRRAC, Andrew his parole officer does not judge his past and allows Simon to be treated as though he had never sinned. This allows Simon then to see where he has not yet forgiven others and he does so, freeing his mind and stopping his addiction to murder.

Simon needed Andrew in his life, all we need to do is ask Jesus into ours and we will achieve even greater things.

Cheers and Blessings

Peter

It's Just not the Same

The English language is definitely in danger (and not just from my books and posts). After reading a post on Facebook I decided to gather proof that two acronyms that were used to mean the same thing in the post were actually very different from each other. To my horror even the Oxford dictionary (online at least) seems to have forgotten the original meanings, though it was hard to find the phrases on that site to begin with. As with all the other websites found via Google the two phrases were interchangeable even by Google itself.

The acronyms I speak of are GM and GE (And I’m not talking of General Motors and General Electric). According to the Oxford dictionary GM is “containing genetic material that has been artificially altered so as to produce a desired characteristic” and GE is “the deliberate modification of the characteristics of an organism by manipulating its genetic material.” Depending on your own opinions these two meanings could be different or could be the same as they are both very brief. It all depends on  your own take of what is “artificially altered.” Does it include selective breeding or not?

As far as my memory serves me, when the Abbreviations GM and GE were coined GE was a subset of GM. Genetic Modification was any human modification of any food whether by gene manipulation or selective breeding, whereas GE was only gene manipulation. However as the media got hold of the debate they used GM meaning only GE and after a decade or so the two meanings got so confused that now everyone thinks they are the same thing. But I still stand behind that GM is any modification whether by selective breeding or microscopic engineering and GE is specifically engineering individual genes, so watch out if you cross that line!

Why? Because what are we to call Selective Breeding and other age old techniques which is totally different to the natural state of plants and animals if we cannot isolate GE from GM? They are still human interference and modification of the gene pool. Natural Selection may not be as abrupt and clinical as GE but it is still modification, still unnatural, therefore it is still GM, but it is definitely not GE. You get what I mean? For those purists out there, how can they be assured that their foods have not been manipulated by humans if GM only refers to GE? (That is if there is any organism out there not manipulated in some way.)

Even if you can’t agree with my statement, try it on for a while and you will see why I get upset at Facebook Posts that complain about GM sweet corn.  According to my argument above, all sweet corn is GM, sweet corn was developed by selective breeding to a point where it apparently cannot breed without human intervention (the kernels do not fall off by themselves). This is major manipulation of the original corn’s genetic code, but it is not GE, it was not engineered, only modified. Therefore the post should have been about GE Sweet Corn. If the poster used this acronym, there would be no misunderstanding, everyone would know they were talking about a vegetable that has had its genetic code manipulated by physical intervention of the genes themselves.

Another point, why have two acronyms that mean the same? It makes sense that one would be different to the other in some way.

If you agree, please save the English language from a glut of redundant acronyms and point out to the media, Facebook posters, Anti GE groups, pro GE groups, whoever, there is a difference between GM and GE, use the terms correctly or suffer nasty guilt pains for destroying yet another part of the English language.

Cheers and Blessings

Peter

Justice!

Warning – This blog topic contains minor spoilers for IVRRAC.

People may feel there is a contradiction in IVRRAC that it seems to promote forgiveness, yet also puts forward a lack of punishment is detrimental to a person’s moral character. Janine explains to Simon why he became a serial killer. “…you wanted to be punished. But they didn't, the law put you in a home for wayward youth… The unpunished guilt of that murder drove you to do it six more times. Each time you secretly wanted to be caught.”

I would dare say that many people reading Janine’s monologue would agree with her sentiments and using it as a good reason why people are given the death sentence and life imprisonment. But then the book does a ninety degree turn with Simon asking for forgiveness rather than more punishment.

I know this has upset a few readers, some enough to comment on IVRRAC’s lack of continuity and erroneous psychology, however it is not contradictory or erroneous at all. (If you still think so, I welcome your post below).

Firstly Janine over simplified the issue, she is not a psychologist and thus only grabbed what she felt were the main points of Andrew’s explanation to her the day before. (Andrew does have a doctorate in Psychology). I did not put this meeting between Andrew and Janine in the book as it would interrupt the flow and most of the conversation between Janine and Andrew was absolutely boring and irrelevant to the plot.

The major point in Simon’s past was not so much the lack of punishment, but more the lack of acknowledgement that what Simon did was wrong. There was no trial, no court case. He was deemed a minor and merely shifted from one institute to another, without any real word to him why. As far as Simon was concerned the murder was a non-event.

A side note here is that with New Zealand’s justice system moving more into revenge than true justice it is increasingly rare that teenagers are getting away with being a minor on severe crime, so Simon was an exception to the rule. There were other reasons alluded to in the book why Simon was not treated as an adult in this case.

When a person is guilt ridden and yet no one acknowledges the crime it can tear that person apart. In Simon’s case it caused him to repeat the offense again and again until someone acknowledge it was wrong.

I can see this in my own children, if I ignore a misdemeanour, e.g. my son throwing his toy train across the room, he does not stop but throws it even harder a second time. Once informed that it is wrong to throw toys in an appropriate disapproving tone, he stops and plays more sedately.

I heard of a person who got away with murder. He eventually came clean and confessed, afterwards he noted that the time he spent in prison he was freer  than he was bundled with the guilt of an unacknowledged crime.

So what I am saying in IVRRAC and here is that forgiveness is king, but we still have to acknowledge wrongdoing and make certain that the perpetrator knows his/her actions are inappropriate and they have to live with the consequences, whether it be buying a replacement or spending time in rehabilitation programmes, or if they don’t acknowledge the wrongdoing themselves, time in prison to at least give them opportunity to realise they made a mistake.

But what IVRRAC is not promoting by Janine’s comments on lack of punishment is a person being incarcerated until the victim feels adequately revenged. Every time I read of victims reliving their terrible experiences at sentencing hearings or parole boards I feel deeply saddened as I see they are just being eaten alive by hatred rather than taking on board forgiveness and freeing themselves from a lifetime of emotional death.

There is a reason Jesus spoke many times on the requirement that we forgive others. Forgiving others does not do much for them as often they don’t  even know they are forgiven, but it does an amazing amount for the person who forgives.

Breath and Fences

I want to get a February posting in before March so here I am, just before bed typing away on my small net book. Last weekend I attended a church family camp, my wife was on the committee so I had a lot of work to do before and during the camp, I am now quite tired.  The camp itself was held at the Presbyterian Camp Site here known as Lindisfarne. The last time I stayed there was at the age of ten on my first school camp, the dorms have not changed one bit, however the dining and hall areas are brand new thanks to some bored individual/individuals who enjoy watching other people’s property going up in smoke.

 

The theme of the weekend was breath. God breathed life into Adam and both the Hebrew and Greek words for Spirit can be translated as breath. The idea is that to be with God we simply just have to breath. To do this well we should pause, put things out of our minds and think of God, and breathe slowly. We also watched a Nooma video on breath. The video made an interesting point that the actual Hebrew pronunciation of the name given to Moses by God sounds exactly like breathing. Do we honour God simply by breathing?

 

On another note I am about to start my next course, which is Theology – Ethics. This should be very interesting as it delves into the controversial subjects of premarital sex, homosexuality and co-habitation. My posts may become more controversial as I progress through this course over the coming months. But we will see, I naturally avoid controversy and normally play happily on the fence.

 

Well that’s my February update.

 

Cheers and Blessings

 

Peter

New Year Update 2012

I made a New Years Resolution to blog more often. Well it is already 24 days into the New Year and this is my first 2012 blog. Oh well so much for resolutions.

What I have managed to do is complete my readjustment to IVRRAC (Shhh top secret, though the 2012 publish date and the edition number beginning with 2012 may just give it away). This was released with a two day free period, now it is back to 99c on Amazon (though my RRP is $3.50 now).

I have also managed to get back into BOAS and have re-read my previous version to get an idea where I am up to so expect a few quotes on the BOAS discussion in the near future..

Other than that, not much has changed. Christchurch is still suffering earthquakes, though the local geologists are now saying that these “aftershocks” will occur for the next 30 years. That is a long time to wait for stability. Apparently, just as I surmised, there is more than one fault line in question here and as one releases tension it puts more tension on the other which then releases and places the tension back on the first. Really a game of tennis with Christchurch in the middle.

Even though we are out of the tennis court we still are questioning every shake and tremor in the house, was that a truck or an earthquake? In fact my wife just announced as I was writing this that she reckons there was another shake and she is not even looking over my shoulder. I have now got the GeoNet website open on my other monitor to see if she is correct.

We flew out of Christchurch to get to Auckland for Christmas a day after the last big shocks 5.8 followed by a 6.0 an hour or so later. I noticed that the parking layby before the parking building was being over utilised and the parking building drop off area almost empty that day. The aeroplanes were still taking off and that was the main thing for us at that particular moment of time.

When we returned we stopped off at Riccarton Mall, one of the few, if not the only, large malls in Christchurch which did not suffer some major damage due to it’s western location, and I had an argument with Diana as she wanted to avoid the parking building. But after 10 minutes of being stuck in the small outdoor carpark (parking lot) with every other potential shopper I finally managed to convince her the car would be safe in the parking building. And it was, there was not even a 2.0 tremor while we were there.

So now we are safely back in Timaru weary of the shaking ground and thinking of our fellow Kiwis two hours drive north who have a lot more to lose each time the faults play another round of tennis.

Oh and Diana was wrong, it was not an earthquake after all.

 

Cheers and Blessings

 

Peter

 

Beware the Internet Police

I am a marked man. You may remember my last Wet Sponge Report where I suggested a few options regarding Climate Change. Well those comments have made alarm bells ring at some computerised office somewhere in the world. Here some people obviously think it is worth while to spend money trawling the internet for Climate Change commentaries. Their system analyses the surrounding text and assesses the tone and whether the website is pro or anti Climate Change.

They have decided in their wisdom that my blog has a -0.80 tone with a 6.42% polarising effect. This means I am apparently against Climate Change by 0.8% with a 6.42% emotive force. i.e. a wet sponge. No surprise there.

So I thought I’d make their efforts more worthwhile by being a bit less sluggish in my opinions and go out and say Climate Change is fantastic!!! Go Go Go Climate Change! Isn’t it great that the climate can change so easily? If it didn’t where would the seasons go? I totally agree with Climate Change. Etc. etc.

I don’t wish to bore you (too late) with more of this positivity about Climate Change so I will discuss the issue really here and that is internet watchdogs. The CO2 Capture Rpt is probably just one of many organisations out there continuously trawling the internet for catch phrases that signify a possible threat or bonus to their existence. I am also guilty of this by using Google to search for IVRRAC throughout the entire web to see if there are comments or cheap offers for my book. One of the bonuses of having an Acronym title is the uniqueness of the search. BOAS, although also an acronym, will not be so easily researched when it comes out as it is also a well used word.

Apart from being asked “Did you mean ivac?” by Google I still get about 7,230 results which end up to be only 300 odd actual results. This was how I stumbled upon the report mentioned above. But from this search I find out that Sony ebookstore has it as five stars and apparently I reviewed the book for them. This was one of the reasons I have retracted IVRRAC from Smashwords as their information passed onto the internet stores is not one hundred per cent accurate. (The five stars is, of course, that I reviewed the book isn’t).

I always knew that including certain words together in one message is not a good idea, like “Bomb” and “Aeroplane” oops. I think I’m safe though as I gather in America it is spelt airplane so I won’t light up any warning lights at the CIA. But now I realise that the CIA are not the only people out there watching me. So do I now shut up and remain silent in the hope these watchful eyes never see me, or do I disappoint you and keep on blogging anyway? I think the latter as I think what I think and if some people don’t like it, they can post a comment on this blog. A good blog discussion always brings in more readers.

My only hope (okay not the only one) is that the Hollywood directors use similar trawling methods and that one day they’ll stumble upon this blog and think to themselves “Hmmm this book will make a great movie!” I mean that is why we authors write books, isn’t it?  To get us a movie deal?

 

Cheers and Blessings

 

Peter

 

 

 

 

When clouds were just fluffy things in the skies and mainframes were becoming obsolete.

My head is definitely not in the clouds, or should I say my computer is not involved in cloud computing. One thing that always intrigues me is the capability of the internet marketing people to take something that has been around for decades, re-label it with another name and sell it for thousands more than its worth. The internet is a prime example, I would imagine quite a few people would be surprised to learn that the internet was around in the late sixties. Though it wasn’t until it was repackaged as the World Wide Web with nifty domain names in the nineties that it became the popular beast it is now.

 

Just redesign a bulletin board, an electronic notice board that was downloaded onto home computers via the phone line before the internet was so popular, so each user has their own board, complete with pictures and internet links, call it Facebook and make millions.  Take IRC (Internet Relay Chat), a place for real computer geeks to spend their time, limit the amount of characters per chat, remove the chat room walls so everyone has to read everyone else’s comments no matter what the subject and call it Twitter, another way to remarket and make billions. And there are many more examples of this in our internet world. It is now, and perhaps always has been, how well you market an idea, not how original or useful that idea is.. No disrespect to the skills of the creators of Facebook or Twitter, they both saw an opportunity and took it, and that in itself is a great skill.

 

When I went to university in the mid eighties I was given a password to the “Cantran” system. It was an operating system built on a Digital PDP-11 (developed 1969). I will admit I was the last year to use the system as the next intake were trained on a Novel 1.1 IBM PC based network, the latest in technology, large personal computers made out of cast iron with approximately 1 megabyte of memory. The university saw the writing on the wall and realised that with processors and memory getting cheaper the personal computer was the future.

 

Getting back to the PDP-11, this was what was known as a “Mini-Computer.” It only took up the space of three huge filing cabinets, compared to the mainframes upstairs which took up a room the size of a large lounge each. I was introduced to the mainframes in my second year. How a mainframe or mini-computer worked was that the major processing power and all memory storage was located in the mainframe/mini-computer and the machine used to access this power was a dumb terminal (or in a few cases as Apple gave free technology to the university Apple Macs pretending to be a dumb terminal, which was not hard for them to do back then). It seemed logical to invest the capital into one central location so one could get the most power for their money. It also meant backups could be created of all information centrally as the dumb terminals were not capable of storing data.

 

As the years wore on people became increasingly weary of having to dial up to a central computer and so when powerful computers became affordable to the general public there was a move away from central storage and towards independent computers. The idea of a central storage and processing unit was lost, that is until the internet became popular. Then start up companies started hiring out online storage “We’ll back up your data for you” they said. Then when the internet became more stable people started asking “Why do I need to store locally at all?” Especially when cheap small-storage machines as net-books, phones and tablets became available.

 

This is when the marketing experts stepped in and realised that this was a marketing goldmine. But they had to make it seem new, saying to people “Why not sign up to our Mainframes?” seemed a bit archaic, even though that is exactly what they were saying, so they invented the term “Cloud Computing” and marketed that. So I have to say I used Cloud Computing in the mid eighties using a 1960s computer, and I much rather have my PC with localised storage and processing power any day. I am not scared of new technology, I’m scared of old technology proven to have issues dressed up as new technology.

 

My question here is what happens if a virus takes the internet down for an hour or so? Which has happened in the past and can happen again in the future. I remember a great quote in a Time Magazine about the “I Love You” virus, a virus that did cripple the internet for a while. (Not an exact quote as I have not yet sourced the article to quote from so it is purely from memory). “The ‘I Love You’ virus was written by a person who did not have a clue about what they were doing or programming languages, it was a mixture of various virus programme codes and was lucky to have worked at all. Imagine the damage that could be done by someone who actually knows what they are doing?” And that was before the internet was underpinning the whole world as it is now, and Cloud Computing will make the world even more reliant on the internet being stable without disruption.

 

I predicted a return to mainframe mentality in my book “BORIS” (written around 1999) which is now under the working title of “CRAIG” due to the original title being too close to “BOAS” in sound. It is an acronym so may change yet again before publish date. In the original the return to mainframe was a result of the internet being mortally wounded by a virus and a computer company took the opportunity to capture the market by offering a internet like environment on their mainframe. Now I will be looking more into a Cloud computing company buying out all other cloud computing companies to obtain a monopoly that way. (Or producing a product that is so popular everyone buys it, but it only can be used on one cloud computing system) that last one is very tempting but possibly too close to home.

 

Anyway the story follows a reporter who discovers a major flaw in trusting one’s files to the care of a large multinational company and many other nasty things on the way to clear his own name after he is wrongfully accused of several major crimes. I will be working on this one after BOAS, so you will hear more about it later. It is very similar in style to IVRRAC.

 

Cheers and Blessings

 

Peter