On 9 January the PPCF Youth group went to the Canadian warehouse of Ten Thousand Villages in New Hamburg to learn a little bit about what Then Thousand Villages is for and to help pack some of the items which will be sent to outlets across Canada.

Ten Thousand Villages provides vital, fair income to Third World people by marketing their handicrafts and telling their stories in North America. The people make beautiful, high quality items from jewellery to flower pots to wicker room dividers and much, much more. Single craftspeople and cooperatives earn money to support themselves, their families and quite often to contribute to their community. Here in North America Ten Thousand Villages relies a lot on volunteers to do things like repackaging into single units the lots that have been shipped from the artisans as well as filling out orders as requested by the local stores. This helps to keep costs low to the consumer yet still provide the artisans with a decent return for their work.

We were repackaging flowerpots for shipment to local stores, and in my Pix blog you can see pictures of us at work.

#1 is Stephanie, Kathy (one of the other sponsors) and Jacob. #2 is Elgin (another sponsor), Jacob, Tyler, Steven and our supervisor for the evening. #3 is Steven showing off the mess on him from the styrofoam packing peanuts, and #4 is that mess on the floor.

Since I got a digital camera for Christmas — a Kodak EasyShare CX4230 — I have decided to display my amazing photographic talents to the world. :-) In the right hand column you will see a new sub-blog called Pix which will showcase the pictures I take with my new little toy.

The honour of the first picture goes to Nathniel Walker, born 22 December 2003 to my friends Ken and Heather. Isn't he cute?

I hope to add at least one new picture every week to this blog.

This September I became one of the sponsors for the youth group at my church (Pioneer Park Christian Fellowship in Kitchener, Ontario). This past summer, I had told one of the previous sponsors, my friend David Sararus, that I would like to become involved with the youth because David and his wife, Juanita Laverty (also a friend) were going to be moving to Indiana to attend Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary and they (obviously) wouldn't be able to continue being sponsors.

I'm not sure why I volunteered to do this, just that it felt like I should. Maybe it was God calling me to do this — I don't know.

There are three other sponsors so it's not like I'm flailing around on my own, not knowing what to do. And the kids are great — I like them and I'm hoping that they like me. :-)

This past weekend was the Mennonite Church of Eastern Canada youth exchange weekend and on the drive to our host church (Living Water Community Christian Fellowship, New Hamburg, Ontario), remembering what these weekends had been like when I had been in youth group fifteen(ack!)-plus years ago, In I started to wonder just what the heck I have gotten myself in for? But you know what? It was fun! Yes, I only got 5 hours of sleep Friday night and yes, I wasn't all that thrilled about not being able to have a shower Saturday morning because we slept at the church, but all in all the experience as a sponsor was not all that different from my long ago days as a teenager. Fun games, a thought provoking speaker and (even though I am not fully comfortable with the more charismatic style) great worship with the 8 teens from PPCF, the 30+ teens from Living Waters and the 15+ teens of the second visiting youth group from East Zorra Mennonite Church in Tavistock.

I can only hope that my being a sponsor will be as meaningful for these kids as I know it will be for me, and look forward to doing this for a good long while.

And yet another letter of mine was printed in The Record's opinion pages yesterday. I wonder if I can get frequent flyer miles for all of them? :-) This one was about my experience as a deputy returning officer for a poll in the recent Ontario provincial election.

Low turnout in election is a deep concern

I'm not sure what to think of the results of the Ontario election on Oct. 2. I voted Green but I think that the Liberals are an acceptable replacement to the Tories, who I disliked.

What bothers me, however, is the lack of voter turnout. I was a deputy returning officer for a poll, and at 5 p.m. I was wondering if even 20 per cent of the voters would show up. The poll next to us had had twice as many people by that point. At 8 p.m., when the polls closed, I did my duty as a returning officer and counted all the ballots. Total turnout for my poll was 39 per cent and I went home disappointed but hoping that this was an anomaly.

As I flicked past the post-election analysis, I came across a station whose talking heads were estimating a 48 per cent turnout based on the polls so far reporting. Less than half the electorate turning out for the vote is not just terrible, it is shameful.

Bill Hurst said in his letter to the editor on Sept. 23 that he wasn't going to vote because he doesn't like the way in which we choose our elected officials. To me, a reason like that is just an excuse to deny being lazy. If Hurst truly wanted change, he should participate by either refusing or spoiling his ballot. If significant numbers of people did that, the politicians would take notice.

People who don't vote lose the right to complain about the process or the new government. After all, if they don't like it, why didn't they participate?

If you didn't vote or you didn't refuse or spoil your ballot, don't come complaining to me when something about the government bothers you. I'll just do my best to make sure that when I say "Oh, poor baby" that it is only midly condescending.

For those of you who are interested, these are what the desktops for my two machines Fenris and Bytor look like.

Fenris runs Windows .NET 2003 Standard Server RC#2 all gussied up to look like Windows XP. (Normally Win2K3 it looks like the old Windows 2000 style.) The desktop is 1152x864, and the programmes running when I took this snapshot were Netscape, News Xpress and TeraTerm SSH.

Bytor run OpenBSD-current (as of 2003/09/28). I use WindowMaker as my window manager for X11R6 in 800x600 mode. The programmes running at the time of the snapshot were WTerm and GKrellM along with iconised The GIMP, XConsole and ASClock.

The saying used to be "If you had an infinite number of monkeys banging on an infinite number of typewriters, they would eventually produce all the works of Shakespeare". Well, that's changed, thanks to the monkeys at Primate Programming™ Inc.. Now, with just a on-infinite number of apes and a bunch of computers you can outsource the production of software tailored to the needs of your organization. And who knows — maybe you'll even get something as good as all the works of the Microsoft Windows programmers.

Open source software — gotta love it. Sometimes, though, I think it's more like "gotta love to hate it". Now don't get me wrong — my other computer (Bytor) runs OpenBSD and I love it. On Bytor I have my development webserver, my mail server(s), a DNS server, a FTP server and my archive directory of almost everything I've ever downloaded, as well as all the home directories for every account on my Windows machine.

I spent this past week upgrading Bytor from version OpenBSD-3.3 to OpenBSD-current in order to take advantage of the latest patches and upgrades made to not only the OS but also any packages I have installed. Part of the reason I spent most of the week upgrading Bytor is because I am behind a normal phoneline, so downloading takes forever. But that wasn't the only reason it took me all week. The major problem with open source, IMNSHO, is documentation or lack thereof. Few programmers like writing documentation and as a result few open source programmes have the amount of documentation that commercial software has.

In my professional opinion as a freelance computer consultant, OpenBSD is simply the best, most reliable and certainly the most secure of all the free un*xes out there. If an organization wants to host their own website, whether it is for only internal use or to be shared with the 'Net, I tell them to take one of their older server or desktop machines and load OpenBSD onto it, add Caucho Resin and MySQL and it will be competitive with a new Windows machine that is twice as fast and has twice the memory, if not better. And for $0 too, compared with potentially $3000 for a new machine plus Windows. That same OpenBSD machine could also be their corporate mail server, and the firewall for their entire office network if they wanted security.

But in spite of this glowing performace report, OpenBSD has less documentation for it than un*xes like FreeBSD or the various flavours of Linux (RedHat, Debian, Mandrake, etc...). It is not really for the casual office or home user, and even for a geek like me it's much better as a server than as a desktop. After you factor ot slow download times via modem, the reason it took me a week to upgrade Bytor was because every time but one I came up against a problem I couldn't find the answer on the OpenBSD site.I had to go search the 'Net and dig through reams of archived mailing list posts to find an answer, and about half the time I had to adapt from answers to similar problems on FreeBSD or NetBSD.

A few years ago in a newsgroup, I posted my opinion that OpenBSD is destined to remain on the margins unless good documentation was produced, and Theo deRaadt (the original force behind OpenBSD) got rather annoyed at me for saying that. At the time I volunteered to produce or coordinate a comprehensive "OpenBSD HandBook" formatted like the FreeBSD Handbook, and I asked how would be the best way to go about getting significant documentation like that started and put on to the OpenBSD website. Except I got no answers, not evan a "So-and-so manages the website, talk to him". When I asked for pointers or URLs on how to go about writing device drivers for OpenBSD, all I got was "RTFM you idiot" Unfortunately there was no (f***ing) manual for OpenBSD device drivers to read, and reading the poorly commented code that was part of the OpenBSD sources helps only if you already know what you are doing. That's when I made my comment about marginalization and then Theo got mad at me (and it made me see why some people call him arrogant). While there are a few more docs on the OpenBSD website 3 years later, it still doesn't approach the level of the FreeBSD Handbook or everything available for Linux. And that's a shame, because OpenBSD is the best free un*x out there.