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.

Here is the letter to the editor form Henry Brunsveld to which mine was a response:

Gay equation is wrong

Besides getting his facts about the Bible wrong (the Bible does condemn sexual relations between women -- read Romans 1:26), Corey Schlueter's June 21 letter stated that homosexuality cannot be equated with, among other things, pedophilia. His reason is that homosexuality is legal, whereas pedophilia is not.

In fact, there are many similarities between the two. Like pedophilia, homosexual behaviour was once illegal. Like homosexuals, pedophiles comprise a tiny percentage of the population, and are able to live otherwise normal lives, coming from all walks of life. Most people seem to think pedophiles can't change, like homosexuals.

One of the major factors in conditioning people to accept homosexual behaviour as normal was the American Psychiatric Association's 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its diagnostic manual of mental disorders. At a symposium on May 19 in San Francisco, sponsored by the APA, some psychiatrists proposed removing pedophilia from the manual.

Our courts will have no problem in changing our laws to make pedophilia legal and grant pedophiles the same rights homosexuals have.

They won't even have to change the definition of "sexual orientation," since it is nowhere defined in our laws.

If pedophilia becomes legal, will that make it right?

Henry Brunsveld, RR 2 Puslinch

Yesterday my local newspaper, The Record, printed yet another of my letters to the editor. Perhaps I should write a book? :-) Anyways, it was once more on the topic of same sex marriages. This is a majorly hot topic, because the letters to the editor have just not stopped coming in! Ot's also a hot topic in the constituency of he mennonite Churche of Canada. Last week was MC Canada's General Meeting in St. Catharines, ON there was a resolution put forward on the same-sex marriage issue. The resulution was this:

Since we believe that marriage is the joining of one man and one woman in a life-long covenant of love, and

Since the Prime Minister has indicated his intention to have the Federal Government redefine marriage in future legislation,

Be it resolved that the General Board communicate to the Federal Government Mennonite Church Canada’s understanding of marriage and our encouragement that, whatever action the Government should take to redefine marriage, all religious groups be guaranteed the freedom to practice and proclaim their understanding of what marriage is.

People got up and commented from various sides of his debate — people who were "out of the closet" wanting to vote No for this resolution and people who wanted it to be strengthened from simply advocating for religious freedom for churches to having MC Canada to explicitly lobbying against same-sex marriages. One opinion expressed was that it was already over and done with because MC Canada (and it's predecessors) had already made a statement on this issue in years past.

It was asked that this resolution be voted on by secret ballot, rather than by the usual show of hands, and I think that is a good idea. To do it publicly would have made many people feel very uncomfortable about showing what their true feelings are on this cointentious subject. But when it came time for the moderator to announce the results, he merely said that the motion was carried. I know that annoyed me, and it must have bothered otehr people as well, because he eventually announced the results. When he sauid that the count had been 131 for, 130 against and 16 spoiled ballots, the audience reacte dnoticibly with "oohs" and "oh mys" all over the place. Clearly the issue is not over and done with!

Anyways, here is my letter to the editor, with typos corrected. I will try to find the original letter to which this is a response and enter it here.

Put love in same-sex case

Henry Brunsveld, in his letter to the editor on July 7, has got it all wrong when he tries to compare homosexuality with pedophilia, and I feel that it is dishonest of him to imply that homosexuals are child molesters.

When an adult attempts to entice or coerce a child into having sex, that harms the child, no two ways about it. The child suffers from the physical abuse at the time of the sexual encounter and from mental and emotional hardships as he or she deals with the ordeal.

When two consenting adult men or adult women choose to have sex with each other, they are not harming anybody. At most, they might have the same regrets that those of [us] who are heterosexual might have.

Brunsveld is right when he says that homosexuality as a mental disorder was removed from the accepted manuals in 1973, and this was done based on overwhelming empirical evidence.

For me, the underpinning of Jesus' teachings is "Love your neighbour as yourself" from the parable of the Good Samaritan. It saddens me that I see no love in all the letters to the editor written by so many professed Christians.

Cory Albrecht, Kitchener