Old Entries and New Photos

Old Entries
Tonight I was reading through some older blog entries. I recently imported some of the very old ones from back in late 2002 and early 2003. I was emotionally going through quite a bit at the time, and I was never proud of how I responded through my blog at times. But it is there again. A part of who I was is a part of who I am.

I was talking to a friend tonight about this blog, and I had forgotten a bit of why I write in it. After I took my first break from blogging, I did a lot of thinking about why I should be writing. I found this entry that said:

This is my life, and at times I will be illogical, misinformed, and just plain wrong (among worse things). But it is who I am, and it will be ugly at times. I believe that God has a story to tell in my life. It is when I am at my worst, my most selfish, and my most self-gratifying, that I am shown weak. When I choose to look directly into my weakness, to meditate on it, to see the root, I can only come to one conclusion: I can do very little on my own, and I desperately need the One that is strong to pick me up, and be my source of Strength. I hope that you may come to know more of this Strength because of what you read here.

Another favorite is the entry on Texhoma, Oklahoma. For a while, the text of the entry had been lost due to a bug in the blog commenting system (silly blog spammers). But I remembered the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. I was able to look up my blog from over a year ago, and I found the original text. Very sentimental. My sister commented with some of her memories as well.

Fidelity Cubicle Album
 
 

Today was my last day at Fidelity, so I took a few photos. I have been there two and a half years, so it was pretty odd to be leaving. When you first start to live in a cubicle farm, you don't like it. Then you get used to it. Then it grows on you. I'll miss that office chair.

Grace Street Candlelight Slideshow
 
 
 

The Grace Street Candlelight album is really intended to be viewed as a slideshow, just as it was presented in the background of the service this past Sunday night. If you use Internet Explorder on a Windows machine, you'll get best results, since it allows for the images to fade together.

Christmas
I leave in three hours to jump on a plane (inside, really) to spend Christmas in Los Angeles with my mom, dad, sister, brother-in-law, and all my friends in LA not gone for the holidays. I should be packing. :)

Entry posted by byscuits at 12:52 AM | Comments (3)

Emotion, Intellect, and Will

My post a couple of days ago on boy-girl relationships has generated a nice little discussion.

One of the concepts mentioned is an idea that there are three parts that make up who we are. There are some differing opinions as to what those three are, but I have become rather fond of the grouping of emotion, intellect, and will. These three are what we use to make our choices, no matter how important or trivial those choices might be. What we decide to do with our choices is the essence of what makes up our "character."

I think we all made certain decisions using just one of these three. When I make choices based solely on my emotion, I tend to be very apprehensive about the outcome and am a bit of a basket case. I also get a bit strung out when I try to use cold logic to make a choice. I keep wondering if I have enough information to choose the best thing, which I never do. And then there is my will. Trying to brute force do something I think is right. And I can never drum up enough brute force.

Making good choices
It would seem, then, that making a good choice would be to combine all three, our emotion, intellect and will, to make our decision. That when we have a balance between them, we can make a balanced decision. But I believe this, in fact, to be an erroneous conclusion.

There is a component of our lives that is not one of these three. That piece is the spiritual. But still I do not believe this is merely what is needed to make a proper decision. Doing what you believe to be spiritually right is a good thing, but I believe there is something even better.

Instead of making the decision based on spiritual beliefs, you instead allow your relationship with Christ to be what changes each of your emotion, intellect, and will. It is a process of being changed by Christ, a continual process, that allows you to then make a good decision balancing each of your emotion, intellect, and will. And when your life is rooted in Christ, you no longer need to worry about these decisions, because they are not the most important thing in your life. Serving Christ is.

Solaris
All of this reminds me of the movie Solaris. It is a movie with a very disjoint plot, and if you try to make sense of it in that way, it is unsatisfying. It just doesn't make any sense. But if you listen to the main characters, they say that what makes us who we are is the choices we make. If you look at the choices made in the movie, it becomes quite interesting. If you enjoy paced movies, I highly recommend the new version of Solaris.

Entry posted by byscuits at 11:28 AM | Comments (4)

Two and a half years

Tomorrow is officially my past day at Fidelity Investments. I've been here for two and a half years now, and it's hard to believe what's happened in that amount of time.

I spent a good portion of today cleaning out my cubicle. Lot's of things have collected over the years. I found printed emails I poured over long ago. I found receipts for flowers sent. I found photos I forgot were ever taken. Mix CD's. Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans.

I brought my camera in to take a couple of shots of my cubicle and ended up spending quite a bit of time taking photos. I'll upload them to the photo albums hopefully tonight and send another update.

Back to MIT
I'm heading back to MIT in early February, and I'm getting really excited. I've been doing quite a bit of planning my senior thesis (required for Mechanical Engineering Undergrad) and spoke to my great friend Fred S. Lee (a good man), a genius of Analog Circuitry and PhD student at MIT. After thinking for about 10 seconds, he had the circuitry all mapped out. He liked the idea enough to suggest I swing by the MIT patent office.

I still need to get a thesis advisor. Bleh.

Entry posted by byscuits at 04:37 PM | Comments (1)

BGR

You know, I don't write on the subject of BGR (that's boy-girl relationships to the layperson) much at all these days, which is a good thing. But today I will venture into that subject which is all too conspicuous to those of us that remain single.

Impossible to read
This brings me to a truth I have recently discovered: women are impossible to read. The exact same action or conversation can have very different intentions or meanings to two women. Because women are so very different, there is really no way to determine from sensory data a single thing whatsoever, unless explicitly stated (and even that at times cannot be relied upon). And even if you're really good at reading people, you can't necessarily trust your intuition. Just the way it is, because women are impossible to read.

Brain attraction
A couple of days ago over at Fred's place, I had a conversation with one of his roommates. He introduced me to the concept of brain attraction, a term I believe he coined. It is the idea that sometimes women enjoy spending lots of time and having deep conversations with a guy yet have absolutely no romantic intentions whatsoever. This is because they are merely attracted to the male's brain.

I see wisdom in this concept.

Help a brother out
Ladies, if you are dating someone and find yourself in long and meaningful conversations with another guy, at some point bring up the fact that you are indeed dating. It's really pretty simple, and doesn't have to be tremendously awkward. You can say something like, "My boyfriend and I whatever," where whatever is... whatever. Now, try to make the statement flow in conversation and be relevant. Try to make it natural. Because it should be. If you're dating someone you really do like, I would expect that you would want to mention them at some point in a conversation. It's just natural. So help a brother out.

No singleness books written by marrieds
Or at least it seems like it. All we get is Joshua Harris with books like I Kissed Kissing Goodbye, and the follow-up bestseller I Was Wrong: Kissing Rocks. The boy has written books after getting married, but not on being single anymore. Why? Because most married people want to forget that they were ever single.

Of course, I don't know for sure. I can only strongly suspect, as I have never been, nor am currently, married. :)

P.S.
Oh, and anywhere in this post you see the words "guy," "male," or "brother," you can just replace it with "Dave."

Entry posted by byscuits at 10:58 AM | Comments (13)

Back to byscuits

Well, the temporary relocation to davegandy.com has now ended, and we are back to more byscuits.com goodness. The DNS servers finally updated and so things are back to smooth sailing.

Now that those changes have gone through, I also give you a new photo album, taken Sunday night at the Grace Street Compassion Service. Here is the description for the album:

Grace Street Compassion Service
This year Grace Street adopted eleven families from Jamacia Plain to sponsor for Christmas. We all brought gifts for different members of the families and wrapped them at the service.

We also made Christmas cards for the Vernon Hall nursing home. On the 13th, a group is going to pass out the cards and sing Christmas carols. This is hopefully the first of many visits to Vernon Hall.

Throughout the past months, we have also been collecting change for an orphanage in Bolivia. At the Compassion Service, we sorted, counted, and rolled the change so we didn't have to pay someone to do it for us. The money goes to a Christmas dinner and new uniforms for all the children.

Photos from the evening are inside. You can print them directly at Shutterfly or Photoaccess to keep things easy. If you would like higher res versions of the photos, just let me know.

Planned additions in January
I'm planning on putting up a movie recommendations site at some point in January with a couple hundred reviews I've written (mostly all of movies I own).

Problems with the Photo Gallery
A few of you have mentioned some odd formatting problems in the Photo Gallery. I tracked the problem down a bit, and think I have fixed it. Let me know if there are still any problems.

Upgrades to byscuits.com
I have migrated to a new server with the same hosting company, and am now up to 4 gigs of online space with unlimited domains. If any of you are looking for a decent place for hosting an ad-less blog or some other type of site, let me know.

Entry posted by byscuits at 12:37 AM | Comments (0)

As promised...

As promised, here is a clearer photo of me without much hair, just a week's worth. This photo of Heidi and I was taken last Wednesday when the guys of the Wilson House took all the girls out to the Nutcracker Ballet at the Old Colonial Theater in Boston.

There, are you all now satisfied?

And here are some other random photos I took of Aaron and Liz. They got a bit crazy after the Real Life Boston Christmas Party this last Friday.

Hick Couple
 
 

I love living with such crazy, creative people. :)

Entry posted by byscuits at 01:26 AM | Comments (4)

Donald Trump - Christian?

I had an odd dream last night. One of those ones that seem so very real at the time. I dreamt I got to share the Gospel with Donald Trump. It wasn't in person, but over the phone. Since he is such a busy man, I had a phone appointment with him. I've been watching a good deal of The Apprentice lately, so I believe the conversation started out as a sort of a phone interview. As he started asking more and more about my life, he asked me why being a Christian was so important to me. I tried to share with him the scope of how it affects your life, and how it changes you from the inside. I shared with him the fact that he could become a Christian right then.

The entire time I was speaking, he was very quiet. On the phone, if someone isn't giving you verbal feedback that they are listening, it is hard to know if they are even there. But when I finished speaking, he acknowledged that he had heard what I said, and was very sincere in thanking me for what I had shared.

But I left out the most important part. The only part that really matters in the Gospel. The most important thing is not that your life is changed or that you become a good person. It is who the person Jesus Christ was and is. It is why He came to this earth, lived, died, and was resurrected. I forgot to share with him the power that is in the life of this Man. I forgot about Jesus.

This dream was a good reminder for the trip I will soon be taking to Central Asia.

Entry posted by byscuits at 01:08 AM | Comments (0)

UnGoogleable Brain Teaser

I would like to keep the trivia thing going, but I think I shall have to come up with questions that are unGoogleable. Joel saw the trivia question yesterday, but didn't quite get to the part about not using Google. :) So I shall have to switch to brain teasers, which should make the use of Google less valuable. Once again, the first to post the correct answer wins a free print of their choice from my photo albums.

Today's brain teaser
In a certain building there is an elevator. It only has two buttons, up and down. When you push the "up" button, it goes up exactly 8 floors (the button doesn't function if there aren't that many floors). The "down" button goes down 11 floors (the button doesn't function if there aren't that many floors). You can go to and from any floor in the building. If the building was one floor shorter, this scenario wouldn't be possible. How tall is the building? Why?

Wow. That took a while. Do you know how hard it is to make something nearly unGoogleable?

The Nutcracker Ballet
Last night the guys of the Wilson House took the girls to the Nutcracker Ballet in the Colonial Theater. It was a very nice semi-formal evening, and everyone was looking their best. Even Andy's white sneakers somehow seemed magical.

A few photos were taken last night, one with my very short hair, so I'll post it soon.

Entry posted by byscuits at 02:02 PM | Comments (5)

Okay, okay, okay...

Baldie Me
You asked for it, here it is. A photo of me without hair. Well, at least only a week's worth of stubble:

Hey, I never promised good quality. If your computer has a dark monitor, you might not be able to see much. :) It's all I have at the moment, so if someone takes another, I'll post it too.

Central Asia update
Did you know it's really hard to find addresses for people? I know I can just call and ask, but what's the fun in that? I'll go ahead and post the generic text of my Central Asia support letter in case any of you don't end up receiving a letter from me.

At the end of this month, I have the opportunity to travel to Central Asia on a two week mission trip. We will be sharing the Gospel on a college campus, trusting the Lord to lead us to those that are ready to Hear how they can lose the world and gain their soul.

There is a distinct shortage of men in their ministry, so the men of our team have a call to encourage the few. This is the part of the trip that most excites me - to seek to build up the men of Student Life.

I've been blessed twice before to travel to Asia on mission. On those travels, I've taught English, ran a Vacation Bible School in an orphanage, and have seen college students come to know Christ as their Lord. As I am paying for my upcoming last semester at MIT (yep, I'm really finishing!), I need to ask for financial support for this trip to Central Asia. The total for the trip is $2000, and I am hoping that you'll be able to partner with me on this mission with any amount, possibly $50, $100, or even more if you feel called.

As the Lord leads you, please make your check payable to Campus Crusade for Christ. Of course, all checks are tax-deductible.

More than anything, I'll need your prayers on this trip.

In Christ,
Dave Gandy
1626 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, MA 02138

I got my first support check yesterday in the mail, which was very exciting. I was even motivated to write the first thank you as well.

The great thing about getting these addresses together is that I'll have a Christmas card database now. If any of you want a Christmas card this year, just let me know. Looks like this will be the first year I've ever sent Christmas cards. :)

Quiz Time
And you can't use the internet for this one. I'll have no way of knowing, but don't you want to do the right thing?

Which state capitals begin with the same letter as their state?

Free print of your choice to the person that posts the correct answers first.

Entry posted by byscuits at 10:40 AM | Comments (6)

More WH Photos

And here are a few more.

The Wilson House
 
 

I'm really starting to dig the square format for photos. Composition is very different. Hopefully in January, I'll take the time to put up my commerical photography site, davegandy.com. I'll have my own shop set up at Cafe Press eventually.

Entry posted by byscuits at 11:32 AM | Comments (0)

Wilson House Photos

For the past couple of years for the Wilson House Christmas party, I've been taking photos that go on mini-biographies that sit outside our doors so people know who we are. I finished two new ones tonight, so here they are.

The Wilson House
 

If any of the other photos turn out okay, I'll post them too. If you want to see the photos from last year, check out The Wilson House album. And I think you guys know by now that I always love feedback. :)

Entry posted by byscuits at 12:46 AM | Comments (0)