I sought for love. It poured upon me like rain, but I did not know it. I read The Book. I searched the words of love’s author, but I did not understand them. I toiled for love. I thought to make myself worthy, but it would not yield to my striving. I searched within. I would find something to sell for it, but it cannot be bought.

What cannot be given unless first received yet cannot be received unless first given? What can be shared only if already held by more than one? What is infinitely complex yet childishly simple? This is the mysterious gift that we call love.

Oh Love, why do You dwell silently beyond the reach of man? His heart yearns for You even though he may not know it. He was maid by You and for You. He cannot live without You. You are here, but how can we see You? You made for us a way, but how do we find You?

I sought for love. In a desert of my own making, I looked to the sky, and allowed a single drop to pass through my parched lips. I read The Book. In a valley of despair the truth began to refresh a dying spirit. Love moved me. I could not be worthy, and yet it came to me. I searched within. I found a gift I knew not of. I knew that I could give it away and yet keep it.

What is the form of a thing without shape? How can a thing be shown that cannot be seen? Can glorious purpose be fulfilled by a mere lump of clay? Such did He decree, and such did He become.

Oh Love, You came, and lived within the reach of Man. You yearned for us, and showed Yourself that we might know it. We were made by You and for each other. You are here in these tents of flesh. Your Spirit shows the way.

Every cord that binds us together is an expression of Your love. It is in the doting father, the trusting child, the bond of friends. Some of these things I know. Some I may not know on the earth, but I have no lack. For you have given me a lover, so that I may see how I love You and how You love me.

Exquisite hands move over my skin. I am caught and I never want to get away. I melt into the embrace. Long fingers are laced with mine on the table, and I begin to see. There is no greater love than this, except that love which made it. My beloved will always be beautiful to me, for the love we share is eternal.

When Jesus was asked which of the commandments was greatest, he responded with this.

… “‘YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.’ ³⁸ This is the great and foremost commandment. ³⁹ The second is like it, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.’ ⁴⁰ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.” (Matt 22:37-40 NASU)

This is such a powerful statement. If you look back on my previous writings you’ll see a little bit of why. Today I’m taking a narrow focus. Many Christians have probably heard people quote from this passage to affirm that we should love ourselves, for how can we love our neighbor as ourselves if we do not? At minimum Jesus’ statement implies that loving oneself is the expected norm, but does that mean that it is good? It has certainly been a struggle for me. In truth, though I treat my flesh all too well, I see little to love in myself. At times it has been difficult for me to believe that God would either. To have had so many advantages have done so little with them seems to me worse than the most flagrant debauchery you can imagine by someone who has never known the truth.

I’ve always tripped over that idea drawn from this quote because I equated self love with being selfish. I think I am beginning to see how they are not the same. At least I can see how one might love himself in agreement with the God who loves him. We talk about seeing others through God’s eyes. We need to look at ourselves the same way. We can and should hate the sin we find in our lives. We should do whatever it takes to remove it. We should not hate ourselves because of it. To hate our very selves is to be in agreement with Satan who would destroy us. To love ourselves is to agree with Jesus who redeemed us.

Though I am not sure I can accept the assertions some make that it is impossible to love others if we do not love ourselves, I will concede that it seriously hampers our ability to do so. Most of us will apply a different set of standards to our own lives than we apply to others. This is not necessarily intentional, and those standards may be lower or higher depending on one’s personality and character. Any difference in standards is in fact a mark of arrogance. That may seem a strange thing to say if you are prone to apply the higher standard to yourself, but to do so implies that for some reason you believe you should be better than anyone else. To apply the lower standard to yourself suggests that you believe you have no need to live with the same discipline you expect of others.

Though this is true, there will remain a commonality of expectation of oneself and of others. Integrity requires that we live by the same standard we expect of those around us. If we lack the ability to love ourselves even when we fail to meet those standards, it is not likely that we will do a good job of loving anyone else, though we may set out to do so.

All of us will fail. That is why Jesus came. As we approach Resurrection Sunday, let us remember what His love for us accomplished. Let’s agree with Him, and learn to love our neighbor and ourselves.

The world is burning around me and I’m burning disks. This is part two of my adventure trying to get a speech enabled installation of Linux working on my old PC. I’m posting this with a lot of detail in it because I intend to share it with the author of the distribution that I ended up installing. Newbie’s like me need a little more help than the existing documentation provides and I hope he will link to this or even borrow the relevant text from it. I’ll call it open source.

I ended my last account in premature triumph that I had a console based installation of Fedora 12 up and running with Speakup. See the previous post for links if you’re interested, but I’m about to give you better ones if you want a speech enabled installation. I dove into a beginner’s book on the Linux command line and quickly learned that my installation was severely crippled. Only the most basic commands were available. The man command didn’t even work. Doubtless I could have fixed it up if I was experienced in Linux, but I’m installing it because I want to learn it. I didn’t have the skills needed to heal a broken system out of the box so to speak. Forcing the installation routine into text mode results in an extremely minimalist installation.

I decided to start over and try the GUI installation again. I muddled through with the help of a magnifier and the camera on my phone. It was very blurry at such a close range but I managed to read with it. I need the text very big. That installation did result in a working system, but not one I could use. After my last entry here I learned that most distributions of Linux do now have a screen reader. It’s called Orca, and also provides screen magnification. It’s not quite as powerful as the big name Windows screen readers, but it does provide access to the GUI Gnome environment. However, when I started Orca there was no sound. The magnification worked, but not well. Portions of the screen would not fill in correctly when magnified, making it almost impossible to do anything. I suspect the problem with the speech was easily solvable if one could use the computer without it or had the experience to troubleshoot the sound, but not me.

That’s when another Internet search turned up VINUX. VINUX takes a unique approach to the problem of a speech enabled installation. It boots a functional copy of the OS from the CD, complete with Orca speech. Icons on the screen or through the system menu accessed by pressing ALT-F1 allow you to install from the CD, or just play around with the OS to get a feel for it. It can also install to a USB drive. VINUX is a Debian distribution that is modified to run Orca and Speakup as part of the installation, so that once you’re done you have a talking OS. You don’t need an old hardware synthesizer like the serial Dectalk I needed for the Speakup modified Fedora installation.

My fancy new Fedora desktop being essentially worthless to me, I decided to try VINUX. The documentation on the site gave me just enough information to get the CD going, but I quickly ran into some minor bumps in the road. The image isn’t really aimed at beginners. You will do well to read up on basic keyboard navigation in Gnome, which I still have not done. In fact, what I think I will do before formally offering this up is to go ahead and do that, then separate this narrative into a more focused beginner’s guide. For the moment, maybe it will still be helpful if it comes up in a search by other blind users looking for a workable solution. I’m going to work mostly from memory, so I take full responsibility for any inaccuracy you may find.

VINUX comes with a slightly different look than most. Instead of the typical top and bottom strips, there is a double column of large icons at the side of the screen. According to the author this was done to make common tasks easier to find and use for people who are visually impaired. Trial and error didn’t yield up the key combination that would get me into the icon panel at the side of the screen. Directly clicking on one of the columns didn’t work either, or at least using the arrow keys didn’t result in Orca saying anything as I attempted to move around. Remembering what little I did read on using Orca, I found the setting to speak tool tips on the General tab. With that turned on, I was able to locate the icon for installing from the CD. However I found this to be unreliable, probably due to running the system off the CD and the age of the CPU I am running. I later discovered that pressing ALT-F1 brings up a menu from which you can navigate to the installation by arrowing down to System, then pressing the right arrow to go into it. Press the right arrow again to enter the Administration menu. The installation options are near the bottom of the menu. You can go up to wrap around to the bottom.

Here are some quick notes about Orca. It occasionally stopped speaking. It did not appear to have crashed, but I found in the VINUX documentation that pressing CTRL-SHIFT-O would cause it to restart. If you lose speech this should bring it back, though once I had to do it twice. You may find it helpful to use the Orca link above to get acquainted with its basic keyboard commands. I also found that when using the partitioning program that we will come to shortly it did not read the new choice in a drop-down after you selected it. If you have doubts about what you selected, do it again. Again this could be due to a combination of old PC and running off a CD. On a bit of a trivial note, American listeners may need a little adjustment time getting to understand Orca’s speech. It’s a fairly good speech engine, but it speaks with a British accent and has a more robotic sound than you will be used to with a Windows screen reader. This is something you can change once you’ve installed. I switched to Flight, which is very clear.

Once you have found and launched the installation program, you will get a warning that this is an advanced installation and not to use it unless you know what you are doing. This is a fair warning. My first attempt at installation resulted in an unbootable machine, even though I thought I had read and understood best practices for Linux partitioning. In my case I am using a spare machine so rendering it a boat anchor was just a minor setback. If you are installing to a computer that already has valuable data on it, make sure you back up and are sure of the choices you should make.

The installation program will then ask you to select the drive, which you do by use of the arrow keys and Enter. I don’t know if this would be presented if the computer has only one hard drive. Mine has two. The partitioning utility will launch and present you with a list of current partitions. You will land on a button whose use is unclear. Press Tab to move through the sections of the screen until you find the tree view and select partitions by moving with the arrow keys. What you do from here depends on what kind of installation you are planning to do. I am not experienced enough to advise you, but I will tell you what I did to get my system running.

In my case, I had a previous installation of Linux, so it appeared at first that I had little work to do. However, the installation program specifically states that you need a swap partition, and no swap partition was present. I did some reading and thought I understood what to do, but apparently I didn’t. I left the boot partition unchanged, deleted a second partition (press Delete) and established a swap partition and another for everything else. My first mistake may have been in how I arranged them. The partitions will be set up in the order they appear on the screen. I put the swap directly after the boot and then added the largest part after that. The advice I read said to put the swap at the end. Whatever the reason, the first install was a dud. It may also be that I didn’t make the boot partition large enough, though I didn’t change it much from what Fedora created. No errors appeared to be reported, but I suspect the installer was not able to create a bootable configuration the way I had it arranged. The solution was to go with the minimum configuration suggested by the documentation. I put one large partition on the drive marked as bootable and the swap at the end. To summarize what I read about the swap size, it should be at least as big as the physical RAM you have in your system but double to be safe. Servers might potentially need more. Though I plan to play with the system as a test server, the install doesn’t appear to provide enough flexibility to set up the partitions as recommended by the things I read. I think I can adjust later as I gain more experience.

Let’s get back to the process. Again, I only have experience with creating a fresh Linux only setup, so that is what I will describe. To make a fresh start, delete the existing partition(s) using the Del key. Now, create the root partition. Press CTRL-N to bring up the dialog. Orca will read the whole thing. You can sometimes stop it by use of the CTRL key, or you can interrupt it by pressing Tab to move around the screen. The first field contains the amount of free space you want to have before the new partition starts. For our purposes, leave it alone. Press Tab to move to the size field. You can type in megabytes how large you want the partition to be, or you can use the arrows and PGUP/PGDN to move by ones or by hundreds. For our purposes, leave this field at maximum and move to the next one. This tells you how much space will be free. Since we are only going to create a root partition and a swap partition, set the amount of free space to the size you want your swap partition to be. Next will be a checkbox that toggles whether or not the program should round to the nearest cylinder. Leave it checked. Next is a drop-down to choose whether the partition is Primary or Extended. Leave it Primary and go to the file system drop-down. Press space here and use the arrows to select ext3. Press Space or Enter to select. As mentioned above, Orca may not read your new choice. When you press Tab again, Orca will just say “text.” This is the field for labeling the partition. I left this blank. Tab to the OK button and Press Enter.

You will be returned to the tree view. Highlight your new partition and press ALT-P to bring down the Partition menu. Arrow to the Manage Flags option near the bottom and press Enter. You will be presented with a dialog having a series of checkable options. Make sure Boot is checked by moving to it with the arrows and pressing Space if necessary. Tab to the close button and press Enter.

You will again be in the partition list. Make sure the unallocated entry is highlighted and press CTRL-N. Everything should be just like you want it except for the file system. Tab to that and select Linux Swap. Tab to OK and press Enter. You are now ready to commit your changes. This is done from the edit menu. There may be and ALT key combination to get to it, but it isn’t ALT-E. I arrived there by pressing ALT-P again and then using the left arrow to go backwards to the Edit menu. There you will find the option to apply your changes. You will be presented with a last chance to reconsider as what you are about to do will destroy the data preexisting on the disk. Pressing Enter commits you for good.

Orca will speak progress as it goes. When completed, a small dialog will appear giving you the opportunity to review the details of what was done. If you’re as green as I am you may not find that very useful. I didn’t’ look at it. Tab to the Close button and press Enter. You’re ready now to quit the partition editor. CTRL-Q is supposed to do that and it did as I just had the program up for reference while writing this, but when I tried it from the install it didn’t. Fortunately the old Windows sequence of ALT-F4 did quit the program.

The installer will ask you a few more questions, which I may or may not be remembering in their proper order. Each is answered by highlighting a choice with the arrow keys and pressing enter. First you will be asked where the swap drive is. It will be shown as /dev/hda2 or something similar. Then you will be asked where to put the root. Choose your boot partition. It may also ask where to put /home, but I think it skipped that question the second time I ran it since I only had one place it could go. You will also be asked what to do with the boot loader. For a single OS installation like we are doing here, select the master boot record (MBR.) The installation will now commence. Orca may be rather chatty at this point. Sometimes the CTRL key will shut him up for a while, but you may hear a lot of things being read as the installation progresses. When the process is finished, you will be given the opportunity to reboot your system to test the new installation. If all is well, the next thing you hear should be what sounds like Orca asking for your login information. There is no screen review capability at this point, as Orca is not really loaded yet. The login prompt is pre-recorded. You will not get audible feedback as you type in your user name, press Enter, type your password and press Enter again. You will get a message saying that your login was accepted (assuming it was) and the desktop should come up. At this point you’re pretty much on your own, as that’s about all I know right now. I did find that on my system for some reason the right hand ALT key is not performing its assigned function from the desktop. To bring up the menus accessible from the ALT-F1 key combination, I have to use the left ALT. I do not know if this will be common to any installation or if it’s some peculiarity of mine. I also ran into a problem waking the computer up from sleep mode. The monitor did not revive and Orca did not speak. I had to power off. This probably is an issue with my particular machine and may be resolvable by finding the right hardware driver fixes.

Note that on some systems, including mine, the shutdown from the CD may freeze. If this happens, you will need to manually power off your system. Allow some time before resorting to this as the shutdown process is slow. The CD should eject, and you may want to remove the CD from the tray at this point.

Finally, I want to express my sincere appreciation to Tony Sales for putting this package together. It was very gratifying to be able to perform an installation of a new OS with no sighted assistance and not even resort to hand magnifiers that don’t’ make things big enough for me anyway. I’m so delighted that I hate to even make any suggestions for improvement, but I do have a couple. First, a more newbie friendly document would be very helpful with perhaps some links for other sources of beginner’s information. Maybe I can help with that, though being inexperienced myself I may not be the best choice. Second, even old junkers like my test PC usually have DVD drives these days. A full installation image that could be burned to a DVD would be a nice touch, thus eliminating the need to install stock programs after the fact.

Thank you once again for doing this. Maybe as I become more proficient I can be of use in making it even better. From time to time maybe I will post some more progress notes and tips from what I learn along the way.

I am not vane enough to imagine that anyone missed me, but because it has been a while since I wrote anything I thought I would explain why. My old PC that was becoming a daily test of my patience and commitment to purity of thought and speech has now become my new toy. I recently bought a new desktop, so I got two for one. I’ve been itching to get my hands on Linux for several years, but the obstacle was always that it didn’t have a screen reader. The only thing I knew of was an operating environment called Emacspeak. From the sound of it you need applications that are coded for it. I wasn’t necessarily looking for a replacement OS, though ditching Windows wouldn’t bother me in the least. I certainly wasn’t looking for one for which access to applications would be limited. I decided to wait until someone came up with a better solution.

In the last couple of years, thanks to building the web site for the church and foreseeing a need to become more expert in the most likely OS for building out servers in the future, I’ve become interested again in trying it out. I ran across Speakup, an integrated solution for making the GNU Linux console speech enabled. Fortunately I still had my old Dectalk serial speech synthesizer, since most of the installs that are speech enabled require a hardware synthesizer. That includes the one I chose. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I still don’t. The Speakup modified distribution of Fedora I chose basically because I recognized the name didn’t just start talking when I put in the DVD I had burned. Right in the middle of my effort the site where I got the image disappeared, so I couldn’t get to the documentation. It should have been a red flag when the link from the Speakup site to the documentation didn’t work the first time I tried it.

With a little trial and error and the knowledge that all the flavors have similar command sets, I was able to get the install talking. Once done and rebooted, it stopped talking. I worked that out too, but I have yet to learn how to make it boot that way every time. Now I’m ready for the adventure. I went and found a few beginner Linux books to get me started. I had hoped for a speech enabled graphical environment, but the power of Linux is in the command line anyway, so maybe being forced to learn it up front will serve me well.

So, if I remain silent, you’ll know where I am.

#

I did always want to write a song, but I’ve never taken the time to learn how to put the music in my head into notes on a page. I wrote this twelve years ago and people seemed to like it, but looking back at it now I’m almost ashamed to republish it. I used to think it was one of my best. I would call it a “poetic” testimony to God’s work in my life up to that point. It comforts me even now, reminding me that however low I feel at the moment God is not finished with me yet. So, I’ll go ahead and share it again.

I Wanted to Write a Song

I wanted to write a song.
A song of joy, peace, and security
I would sing of my Jesus.
Jesus loves me. This I know
for my daddy tells me so.

I wanted to write a song.
I sing of a time of questions.
I sing of a time of rebellion.
The song has many verses.
The song goes on and on.
A hated tune that sticks in the head and eats away like cancer:
Jesus loves me. Does He still?
Even if I shun His will?

I wanted to write a song.
A song of faith and sincere worship
I sing a song of hope.
I sing of love and duty.
I let the questions go.
Jesus loves me. This I know.
For the Bible tells me so.
Jesus loves me if I pray
And serve Him each and every day.

I wanted to write a song.
A grand symphony!
Full of confidence and pride
Yet I write between the lines, a secret melody.
I see the cracks in your facade.
Are you really serving God?
Jesus loves me. Can’t you tell?
Because I serve Him very well

I wanted to write a song.
I scream in confusion and frustration.
I weep in loneliness and despair.
I asked my love, “why did you deceive me?”
I asked my God, “Why did you leave me?”
I asked myself, “Why did you fail me?”
Rage! Bottled up and released in explosions!
Released in private places where no one would see.
Jesus loves me. Do I know?
Is the Bible true, or no?

I wanted to write a song.
A tiny seed my daddy planted
Mercy that my God has granted
Its growth is slow
The pruning painful
Repentance is the early fruit.
Hope and faith bloom once again.
His love, it is my life.
A love I know I did not earn.
Its measure I cannot return.
Without it I’ve no wish to live.
With it I’m compelled to give.

I want to write a song.
Jesus loves me. This I know.
For the Bible tells me so.
Jesus loves me. This I know.
In my heart, He tells me so.
Jesus loves you and I pray
That I will show you every day

I wanted to write a song.
I have no strength.
I wanted to write a song,
But my words were simplistic and inadequate.
I wanted to write a song
But You changed the words.
You held my hand.
You wrote upon my life.
You wanted to write the song,
And it will reach the heavens.
It will be beautiful.
It will glorify your name.
For you love me and you are God.
You love the world, and I will become an expression of yourself.
My God, do not allow me to take back the pen.
I will only write the old verses again.

I wanted to write a song…

© 1998 by Larry Thacker Jr.

It has been a couple of weeks since this happened. This is the first time I have felt like I could take the time to stop and write something down. I may miss a detail or two, but it has happened to me often enough that I will surely have pulled from some other time. Let me start by saying that I’m not making any blanket statements about the people who work for DART. In fact, for every bad experience I have had I can point to countless good experiences. Many a driver has gone out of his or her way to help me get where I needed to go. I tell this story not to beat up on DART, but in hope that my story will help everyone to stop and consider the unintended consequences of their actions when they don’t feel like following the rules.

It was Monday before last. I had been going to the office all week because I was not able to connect to the office network from home. Finally my laptop was rebuilt and I packed up to hurry home early. I was expecting my new home computer to be shipped that day and I wanted to be there to get it. I made the train on time and arrived at the Arapaho Center station where I transfer to a bus with approximately a 10 minute window before the bus was to arrive. At the bus terminal, all of the busses have marked stops. I know where mine is, and it hadn’t changed. I do have a little vision, so I opted to wait inside the enclosed shelter from where I could see the bus pull up to the designated stop. The arrival time came and went, but no bus ever stopped at that birth. A couple of times a bus pulled passed the stop and maybe slowed a little, but if anyone else had been waiting inside the shelter I don’t think they would have had time to react either. It’s likely the driver was late and didn’t want to bother stopping if there was no one waiting.

Admittedly, I’ve been a DART rider long enough that I should have known better. I should have been standing right out by the pole with the sign on it, particularly after the bus was late. I have this terrible hang-up though. I expect people to do what they are supposed to do. I will never know whether that driver even arrived that day, but past experience suggests that he or she did not stop in the correct place either because of lateness or some personal quirk. All I really know is that I was stuck waiting for another hour for the next bus to come. I missed my shipment.

In my case the consequences were no worse than a delay in getting what I wanted and a great deal of frustration at being a slave to someone else’s incompetence. Blindness offers many challenges, but at least for me the worst by far is the lack of the freedom of movement. However, I always think in these situations, what if it were something more critical? I once met a man at a bus stop who was late for a job interview because the bus did not arrive on time. Sometimes those things are unavoidable. Traffic, construction, broken equipment, etc are all part of life, but a driver simply not doing what he is supposed to do is not acceptable