Stuckys' Info

Ladies Bible Study

Matt & Erika — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:55:00 +0000

These are the ladies from the Bible study I attend. We decided to take a group picture since some of us are starting to leave already. Most of us who are leaving are were just short term workers and will probably never be back here in Papua New Guinea. It makes me sad to think about it. It has been a joy to gather around God's Word with these women. We have gotten to know our Savior and each other on a deeper level.

Emily's Birthday Party

Matt & Erika — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 23:02:00 +0000

Emily loves costume parties, so we had a Wizard of Oz costume party for her birthday this year. Most of us dressed up as some Wizard of Oz character, watched the Wizard of Oz movie, took a Wizard of Oz quiz and played "Pin the Heart on the Tin Man." Oh, and did I mention all the good food! Can you guess what I was?

Lapilo Orientation Retreat

Matt & Erika — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:58:00 +0000

I had the opportunity to go out to Interface for the weekend to help with the Lapilo Orientation Retreat. This is the first time that something like this has been held. In the sessions, the orientees learned about things like syncretism, cultural sensitivity, etc. One of the older NTM missionaries here in Papua New Guinea gave his testimony and talked about his experiences upon first arriving here in PNG in the one session that I got to sit in on. It was very interesting to hear the differences between how things were way back then and how they are now. The adjustments we face now don't seem nearly as huge after you hear about the adjustments they had to make back then. I guess the men used to go by themselves to live in a village with the national people while they learned language.

I helped with cooking and child care. Interface has a big fully equipped kitchen and it was fun to work with the staff there. I only had one three to four hour shift per day, so there was plenty of free time. In the mornings I spent my free time helping with child care. The rest of the day I enjoyed playing volleyball, hanging out with the orientees and playing games.

Keiya Falls

Matt & Erika — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:22:00 +0000

Over Easter weekend a group of us went hiking to Keiya Falls. It is about a two hour hike from where we live. The hike through the mountains is beautiful. I decided that since this might be the last time I made that hike I would try to enjoy it as much as possible, rather than rushing to get there and rushing to get home. Of course God's creation never disappoints. The mountains were as beautiful as ever.

The falls themselves are also beautiful. I enjoyed getting my adrenaline rush jumping off of them. The biggest shock is landing in the water. It is icy cold. After I came up out of the water it took me a couple of minutes to quit gasping. :)

We had lunch at the falls and then headed back home. The walk home was easier, since it was mostly down hill and the sun had gone behind the clouds. By the time we got home we were pretty tired, but it was a great day.

Lapilo Conference

Matt & Erika — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 03:49:00 +0000

The Lapilo Conference this year was great. I really enjoyed it. It is a time of fellowship and refreshment. There were serious moments and funny moments.

Our speaker and his wife were from a coworker's church in California. He spoke on the the book for James. That was kind of neat for me, since we are covering James in church and in the ladies' Bible study I attemd. It is always so interesting to me the way God brings up the same lessons from all corners of your life.

On a lighter note, we had ice breakers at the beginning of all of the speaking sessions that were hilarious. I ended up being "volunteered" for two different games. One of them involved playing a variant of "rock, paper, scissors." It was "bear, snake, hunter." Then there was the "humming telephone game" and the "charades telephone game." The second picture is of me playing the charades telephone game. I was relieved that it wasn't anything too difficult to act out (went fishing and caught a big fish).

A few other highlights were skit night, hiking, block parties and potlucks. The bottom picture is of the hike that we went on. It was pretty relaxed. We stopped and talked to a number of national people and saw a baby cassowary.

Baptism

Matt & Erika — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 04:33:00 +0000

Last month we had the privilege of attending a baptism service for some of the missionary kids who live here at Lapilo. It was not your traditional baptism service, either. Rather than gathering in a church, we all drove down to the river with our hats, umbrellas and sunscreen to watch the kids get baptized in the dirty, brown river. After an introduction/explanation in both English and Pidgin, twenty one kids were baptized by their dads. It was great to see so many kids demonstrating their commitment to following Christ. The fact that many of these kids were ones that we have taught or hung out with made it even more special for us.

Hockey

Matt & Erika — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:30:00 +0000

One hobby I have picked up since coming to Papua New Guinea is floor hockey. We usually play about once a week. It is a great time of fun, fellowship and exercise. It has also, like most things in life, been a good learning experience for me. It has helped me learn to do everything in a way that is honoring to the Lord. I am fairly competitive, so I tend to do things I regret when I am not winning. God has used hockey to teach me that winning is not the most important thing. Enjoying His blessings (good health, friends, etc.) and honoring Him in everything I do is more important.

Valentines Banquet

Matt & Erika — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 05:26:00 +0000

We were invited to the high school Valentines Banquet again this year. This is the closest these kids ever get to something like a prom. Everybody gets all dressed up, as much as you can in this country. Then the parents take loads of pictures and of course so did Matt, since he was the designated photographer. Finally after all that, the kids and chaperons all headed into town to one of the three restaurants in Goroka. This year we ate at a Chinese restaurant. It was a smaller place, so the whole thing had to be rented out. Everybody enjoyed the Chinese buffet. After we finished eating, the games began. We helped out with the games this year. For one game we (all of the chaperons) each had to tell two truths and a lie about ourselves and the kids had to guess which was the lie. I think the kids enjoyed hearing about some of the weird things that we had done. We also got to judge the skits that the kids made up. Each team got a list of words that they had to incorporate into a skit. The words included names of their teachers, so they enjoyed making up stories about what crazy things their teachers did. Some of them made us laugh and some of them left us puzzled. After the games one of the student council members announced the "king and queen." After that we all helped pack up the decorations before heading home.

ClarkConnect

Matt & Erika — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 03:26:00 +0000

Recently I've been helping a small non-profit organization set up a Linux fileserver/router/gateway. There are several "all-in-one" sort of small business server options, and from those we chose ClarkConnect 4.2 Community Edition, available from www.clarkconnect.com. ClarkConnect is based on standard CentOS Enterprise Linux packages, but includes tightly integrated services and a web-based graphical management interface. This is a little different than what I'm used to, most of my experience has been with full-fledged CentOS servers dedicated to a particular service or services. This is a "nutshell" overview of my experience so far with ClarkConnect.

Generally I've found CC to be easy to use, but somewhat restrictive. That's not surprising since I'm accustomed to having all configuration options available, not just those provided by CC's graphical interface. I'm sure this is a normal tradeoff; ease of use versus complete control and configuration. I tend to prefer having all options available and can get along fine without the administration interface, but in this case ease of use was more important. You can still manually configure some things that are not available in the graphical interface - we did this with their UPS monitoring software "apcupsd". My advice is to make sure all your requirements fall within the capabilities of the graphical administration interface if ease of use is your primary concern. If ease of use and the "all-in-one" nature of the server are not priorities then you may as well use a standard CentOS/RHEL server and simply avoid the restrictiveness of CC.

Cons of ClarkConnect:
1. Not quite as stable as a standard CentOS/RHEL release, particularly their default dansguardian-av content filtering package which apparently is the dansguardian 2.9 beta - not a stable release. (although they do optionally provide the stable 2.8 version)
2. Doesn't come with the full Bind DNS server, instead using dnsmasq - a caching DNS forwarder designed for small gateways using NAT.
3. Graphical management interface isn't always accurate and can be misleading. For example, when we had some problems with the squid proxy server it would report that squid was running because there was a squid PID file - even though the squid process had actually died.

Benefits of ClarkConnect:
1. Easy to use web interface for administration of services, users, groups, etc.
2. Binary compatible with RHEL packages if you need to install some extra software.
3. Easy online updates of packages/modules from within the web interface or from the command line using apt-get.

~Matt

Music Recital

Matt & Erika — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 12:46:00 +0000

Sunday afternoon Lapilo had its Christmas music recital. Erika's three piano students each performed a short Christmas piece. Erika organized the event in which nineteen students participated. Most were piano students, but there was also a violin, French horn, and flutes.

Ithie and Shelby visited

Matt & Erika — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 11:32:00 +0000

Erika's mom and sister came to visit us for a couple weeks in November. It was nice to see family again after 3 1/2 years!

Just Testing My Blog

Matt & Erika — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 10:08:00 +0000

Ok, so I'm trying to use my own domain and host with this Blogger blog...