Without relatives in this area I probably would have never come and upon arrival and I started attending Durham Mennonite Church with them.  For as long as I’ve been there it’s been missing a solid group of 20-somethings.   Brad and Beth Yoder moved into the area and from them I found out about this Mennonite Church Plant in Chapel Hill.  I visited but the service for me at the time was a bit much and I didn’t return until about 4 years ago.  In that time it had changed to something I found more palatable and since then I’ve been attending both churches.  Those who have sojourned there and at Durham have gotten me into a fair number of things.  From Fred and Elizabeth Bahnson I got involved in Anathoth Garden.  On Tuesday nights I try and get out to to the work session in the garden, It’s a bit of a haul but there’s a potluck after the garden work is done and a Mexican lady makes these fresh tortilla’s that are to die for.  Jonathan and Leah Wilson-Hartgrove were part of the same Christian Peace Maker Team as Shane Claiborne and I got to know some of the folks from Rutba house as that formed and gotten to know something about the New Monastic Movement.  I led the youth group at Durham such as it was until everybody graduated from High School about two years ago.   We did a few things with Raleigh Mennonite and I got to know folks from there.   So I feel like I’ve formed a life here, but it’s spread out, everything requires driving 20 minutes to get there and I move from event to event, group to group without a lot of connection.

… Cue Ramble On - Led Zeppelin …

So when the Jesus for President tour comes to Raleigh I’m only mildly interested, I think I know a bit about this Shane Claiborne character.  I figure I know the community he’s writing from and his story, but even still it’d be fun to see the pageantry.   He and Chris Haw didn’t disappoint as it was more than I expected.  Their dialogue interspersed with fragments of song from the Psalters was raucous, awesome in the classical sense and I love that sort of thing.  But I feel like I’m in the choir.  I’m not really sure we’re the crowd who should have been there.  I’d have loved to see how a bunch of Southern Baptists or Presbyterians would have reacted.  I thing that most us of attending probably agreed with him going in, so for us it’s nice hear another voice speaking counter to the market.  It’s refreshing to hear a prophet who isn’t shilling for the man.  It allows us to tune out the messages in the media a little while longer.  So although the audience might have been the wrong one, to me it was the audience was the most significant part of the evening.  Amidst this motley crew of 700ish people that showed up, there were those I know from the Mennonite Churches in the area(Greensboro, Graham, Raleigh Durham and Chapel Hill), people I know from playing Ultimate Frisbee on Sunday afternoons, people I know from Habitat from Humanity, from Anathoth and from Rutba house.  It made me really happy to feel like all these fragmented pieces that seem so disconnected are part of a larger community, if only for one night.

I put up some photos from my trip to Europe on Flickr. Berlin -> Geneva -> Milan -> Italian Lake District -> Lyon -> Taize -> Paris. All in all quite a nice trip.

Finished, originally uploaded by Nathan.Charles.

The Bamboo Bike is finally ridable. I won’t say done because I think there is still some more work I want to do, but I rode it today. It rides really nice. I don’t know if that’s surprising or not. I’ve learned a lot during the process and I think I should build another one just to fix all the little things I could have done differently.

Jason from Back Alley Bikes gave me a hand by building it up. I put some pictures up on flickr

Scruff, originally uploaded by Nathan.Charles.

David, Mark, Pat and myself went backing at Linville Gorge over the weekend. It was the first time I’ve been out in a while so it felt really good. It was rainy and cold but we were fortunate that it only rained when when the tent was set up. I stayed warm and dry the whole time. Hiking out we saw Rhododendron leaves covered in Ice. When we drove out the thermometer on Mark’s jeep said it was 31 degrees. I put some pictures up on flickr, check them out!

Bamboo Bike Frame, originally uploaded by Nathan.Charles.

I’ve been working on this frame off and on since August. I finally got it ready to build up a few days ago. It’s not the prettiest frame in the world. But I made it, it’s bamboo, and that’s cool. This afternoon I went down the bike shop and ordered parts so I could build it. up. I’m planning on building it up as fixed gear bike. It should be lots of fun.

So what is the moral of the story? Well the moral of the story is that nothing is new under the sun, and the more things change the more they stay the same.

Code Follows…

#!/usr/bin/perl
#Program: twitterd
#Author: Nathan Charles ncharles at gmail dot com
#Version: 0.1
#This program watches .plan file in your home directory and updates
#your twitter account with the contents of that file when it changes
#
# This program has no warranty to the full extent of the law

use File::Monitor;
use Getopt::Long;
use Net::Twitter;
use POSIX ’setsid’;

#CONSTANTS
use constant TWUSER => “twitterusername”;
use constant TWPASS => “twitterpassword”;
use constant TWPLANINT => 60;

sub usage {
print “usage: twitterd [-d]\n”;
print ” -d, –daemon run in background”;
exit 1;
}
sub daemonize {
open STDIN, “/dev/null”;
open STDOUT,”>/dev/null”;
open STDERR,”>/dev/null”;
exit if fork > 0;
setsid;
exec(”twitterd”);
}

sub twitterplan {
my $twit = Net::Twitter->new(username=>TWUSER, password=>TWPASS );
open(PLAN, $file);
@lines = <PLAN>;
close(PLAN);
print @lines;
$result = $twit->update(@lines);
print $result;
}

sub watchloop {

my $loopy = 1;

my $monitor = File::Monitor->new();
$home = $ENV{’HOME’};

$file = “$home/.plan”;
$monitor->watch($file, \&twitterplan);

$monitor->scan;

my @changes = $monitor->scan;
while ($loopy )
{
@changes = $monitor->scan();
sleep TWPLANINT
}
}

MAIN:
{
my $daemon = ”;
GetOptions (’d|daemon’ => \$daemon);

if ($daemon) {
daemonize();
} else {
watchloop();
}
}

Things have been built up significantly in the last 10 years and the American Tobacco trail which is to be a part of the eventual East Coast Greenway crosses Woodcroft Parkway just a few blocks from where I live. Sometimes websites want to correct my address and say that I live on West Woodcroft, but technically there is no West Woodcroft Parkway, The roadsigns are just Woodcroft and East Woodcroft, however certain institutions add the West for “Clarification” which is just the tip of the oddities in the road name issues with my neighborhood.

Woodcroft is somewhat of a maze for the uninitiated and giving directions is a bit of a trick. If you go to maps.google.com and search for 44B Tingen Ct., Durham, NC, the result will show you an arrow on a cul-de-sac off of St. Giles Drive. However were you to get in your car and try and follow the directions to that address you would never get there. The road signs for these roads don’t exist. I wish they did because 44B Tingen Ct. shows up exactly where my house is. I assume what happened was at some point the roads were made private and the names changed because on some of my tax forms I see Tingen Ct. I’m not sure of the rational but it would be nice if would revert so I could get an address people could actually find.

#!/usr/bin/perl
#Author: Nathan Charles <ncharles at gmail dot com>
#
#This is a quick and dirty DropCopy server for linux written in perl.
#It dumps the file into the directory the sever is run from.
#It works for me. Your mileage may vary.
#

use IO::Socket;
print “Starting Server\n”;

my $SERVER_RUNNING = TRUE;

while($SERVER_RUNNING) {
my $sock = new IO::Socket::INET (
LocalHost => ‘localhost’,
LocalPort => ‘5052′,
Proto => ‘tcp’,
Reuse => 1,
);
die “Could not create socket: $!\n” unless $sock;

$sock->listen();
$sock->autoflush(1);
my $new_sock = $sock->accept();
my $HEADER_FLAG = “1″;
my $header;
my $filename;
my $filesize;
@metadata;
$metacounter=0;
$filesize=0;
my $trans=0;

while(<$new_sock>) {
if ($HEADER_FLAG) {
$HEADER_FLAG=0;
$headerlen= length($_);
$header = substr($_,0,$headerlen-1);
print $header . “\n”;
$headerlen= length($_);
@metadata = split(/\|/,$header);
$filename = @metadata[1];
$filesize = @metadata[2];
print “1=”.@metadata[1].” 2=”.@metadata[2].”\n”;
$_ = substr($_,$headerlen);
open(FILEOUT, “>”.$filename);
}
$trans +=length($_);
print FILEOUT $_;
if ($trans==$filesize) {
print $trans.” Bytes of “.$filesize.” transfered.\n”;
close(FILEOUT);
break;
}
}
close(FILEOUT);
close($sock);
}