myblog -october '07

ok, so i finally had a day off today, which i took to rest.. yaaay!! so, in honor of this, i will post up something that i was going to post some time ago.

so, at my church, i am in charge of leading the prayer vigil on fridays at 9pm which goes till roughly 11pm.. so, since this is one of the two most dangerous neighborhoods of the city, and of the 4 or so most dangerous neighborhoods in the country, we get shootings all the time. noo, not at my church, but just around here.. so, there are murders every so often around here, and whenever there are, we go and pray at that location. yes, at close to midnight, after the vigil. so for example, two weeks ago, we went to pray to a house in what could possibly be the most run down area of this neighborhood, we walked into this townhouse complex, where on the tuesday or wednesday some lady just relaxing with some friends outside her home was killed when some gangstas just started shooting at each other and she was caught in the cross fire. i know.. its just ridiculous..
so we went into the complex at around midnight, and it was a bit cold just by the way, and i was of course in my shorts. so we go a group of 9 of us, and we find the house where the shootings had occurred and we stood there and started praying. now, its late, and its cold, and we hadnt seen but a single lady when we were walking in. so we stand there and start praying. im shaking cuz im so cold.. i think everyone else was really cold too. so we are praying, and while we're praying, doors start slamming in a house nearby. just like i guess someone was opening it, and then instead of just closing it, they threw it closed. very often. and we heard a couple of people walking past us a few times.. but i didnt really look to see who it was. but it was crazy.. cuz it was just soo cold. and in any case, we prayed for the Lord to reign in this neighborhood, for there to be peace and love amongst neighbors, and for all violence to be removed. so then everyone prays for a bit and then we leave. after we had almost at the car to leave, will, one of the people with us there praying, said "did you see the bullet hole in the window?" thats just crazy. (good job at letting us know while we were still there so we can all see it, by the way.. haha) but that was just crazy.

so that was a couple of weeks ago. now, a month or two ago, there was another place we went to pray at. this one was a bit scarier. some people at our church had had problems with their next door neighbors, where they had been doing pot and just generally being a nuisance, so she got tired of it, and went to confront them (actually, she went to take pictures of them to report them). so when shes out there, they took her camera and pushed her into a pool. we later found out it was at that house that they arrested the two people involved in the shooting death of an 11-year old kid over the summer, who just happened to be at a cousins birthday party in the back yard and got caught, again, in the crossfire of two gangs shooting at each other. (that kid, by the way, was the cousin of yet another 15-year old who was shot and killed in his own school just weeks before that.. we went to pray to that school too). so yeah, now you see what i mean by this neighborhood being nuts. so we heard about this lady from our church having these problems, so we decided to go there to pray on that friday. knowing all these things. ie, that thats where they arrested the people that shot that kid.
so we are on the way over, a total of 5 of us, two of which are grandparents, and suddenly i get a bit nervous.. didnt know why. we get there, park the car.. and start walking over to the place. and thats when we notice that outside the house were a group of people in lawn chairs, with the main lights covered, so it was hard to see, but i calculate at least 5 people there (where im guessing at least 3 were guys), which was next door to the house where that lady from our church lives. now i knew why i had been nervous. so we stand in front of her house.. just a few meters away from those people, who were listening to some rap music and tokin' on some fatties (thats "doing drugs", for those of you who dont speak "gangsta") so i was a bit nervous and suggest standing near a tree (as opposed to some place closer to those people) so we start praying.. and this time, i was shaking cuz i was friggin scared. so we were praying for the Lord to reign over this neighborhood, to remove all violence, and to bring in peace.. etc..
and thats where it got nuts.
they obviously heard us, and started rapping at us!! (not very well, mind you, but still!) and at one point i heard one of them get up, and start getting louder and louder.. and hooley, my back was to them, so i was fearing they were coming to stab me or something!! but we just kept praying.. and they kept rapping. this is what they were rapping. now you tell me if it makes sense to you:

you come here and you pray for me
i dont believe in freemasonry

you come here and you pray for me
i dont need you to pray for me-- i can pray for myself..
motherf***ers come here and you pray for me
f*** you motherf***ers, and you pray for me

and the rest was just repetition of the f-word intermixed with "pray for me".. yeah.. what i dont get was the freemasonry part.. haha.. like, what the crap? freemasonry?? i mean, i get it, it rhymes with "pray for me".. but, how obscure is that? so we prayed for a bit, the lady from our church came out some time later.. we prayed a bit more.. and then we left.
we went back once more the week after.. but there were no problems. no people.. and they told us there had been some shots fired that week, police came, and those guys had apparently uprooted a tree.. no clue why, i guess a bullet was lodged in there or something that mightve led cops to them, pinned some crime on them or something. in any case, after that week, we were told they never bothered them again. so thats awesome.

quoth me:

"when you hear ducks quacking, you know the turtle is on its way" -insaner

uh oh... over the weekend i went nuts on ebay!! ahh!! ive been bidding on old playstation 1 games like crazy.. hahah.. ive won a few too!! yaaay! the wantlist will be updated once again soon.. haha.. my list is almost complete.. muohahahah!!

i almost cried watching this vid (link)


now tell me if this isnt your story.. no matter what point of the vid you happen to be at..

wow... awesome.. just pure awesome.. 10 Linux commands you've never used

1. pgrep, instead of:

# ps -ef | egrep '^root ' | awk '{print $2}'
...

You can do this:

# pgrep -u root

2. pstree, list the processes in a tree format. This can be VERY useful when working with WebSphere or other heavy duty applications.

[...]

4. split, have a large file that you need to split into smaller chucks? A mysqldump maybe? split is your command.

[...]

6. mkfifo is the coolest one. Sure you know how to create a pipeline piping the output of grep to less or maybe even perl. But do you know how to make two commands communicate through a named pipe?
7. ldd, want to know which Linux thread library java is linked to?

holey wow!! The Gun Bazaar of Pakistan.. where they make guns for $50, 1000 per day..

FREE HUGS!! (banned???)