Waiting For Sunday

This blog has moved to waitingforsunday.com.  See you there.

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1. The New Intolerance - Christianity Today article on fear-mongering atheism.
2. 65 Percent of Americans Spend More Time with Their Computer than Their Spouse.  But if they’d read our blogs…
3. Hacking the Human Life Span - from Wired. Science and wishful thinking about living longer.
4. Email, Holograms of the Dead to Haunt Your Inbox - From Crunchgear. Microsoft’s “Immortal Computing” Initiative and other plans to help you speak from beyond. A more business-like report on the same topic is here (via Gizmodo)
5. The Invisible Enemy in Iraq - Wired. Super-bacteria developing in battlefield hospitals.
6. Infuze - A site that’s new to me, about art, entertainment and faith. I immediately see several interviews I want to read.
7. A new MHCC blogger I stumbled on this week.

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Maybe you’ll never watch a ten minute video you find here, but I’m telling you, this one is interesting, worth at least skipping around to see the highlights.

In the video, Jeff Han demonstrates what may be the computer interface of the future. It’s a huge leap past typing on a keyboard or using a mouse. The idea is a touch screen in which you can use all of your fingers to expand, contract, and arrange photos and maps (reminiscent of Minority Report), and create art as if you were molding clay. Once you see it, you’ll know how to use it, which is why he calls it “the interface-free interface”. And if you need to type, you can even pop up a virtual keyboard.

This won’t replace Office or Wordpress anytime soon. But it is a bigger step forward then the one from DOS text to the Mac graphical user interface.

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Two MHCCers who have been blogging on MySpace have recently ventured out into the wider blogging community. One is Summer Hensley, whose blog “The Shelf” is on life in general and parenting in particluar, with a special focus on raising her autistic son. Summer registered more than 10,000 page views on her MySpace blog in 2006, and now she is putting her new content on the new blog. I highly recommend her work.

The other is Hannah, who is 15 so I’ll simply use her first name here. “Peace, Love and Hannah’s Blog” is well-written and thought-provoking.

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I could mess around for hours with the Museum of Modern Betas, and sometimes I do. MoMB is a very simple list of the most recently-released web applications. No reviews or recommendations, just a thumbnail screen-shot with the default brief description from the app itself. It’s amazing to see the creative business ideas people are trying (a social network for geeks?). And for anyone who does web design, browsing through these new releases shows you how Web 2.0 is supposed to look (according to these folks who are betting money on design).

Check out the top betas for 2006 and you’ll notice how quickly some services go from beta-testing to web heavyweight.

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Today I ran across one of the most helpful posts I’ve seen anywhere in a long time - this article called 30 Essential Pieces of Free (and Open) software for Windows.  I use item #1, the Firefox web browser and I highly recommend it for ease of use, extensions (optional features you can add on yourself) and standard features, like a spell-checker any time you’re typing, whether composing email or filling out an online form. Microsoft’s recently-released IE7 is playing catch-up to Firefox in many ways - tabbed browsing, for example.

I also use #5 on the list, Open Office, a replacement for MS Office which has plenty of features and decent compatibility with Office; and #13, Audacity, for editing the audio files of my sermons before I post them.

I think I want to try #22, PDF Creator, which claims to make PDF creation as easy as printing to a file and #29, GnuCash, a Quicken/Money substitute.

NOTE:  I found this link through LifeHacker’s post on it.

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HP is promoting a new slimming feature on their digital cameras. The before-after pictures are impressive, but when you watch the demo at HP’s site, you can see the distortion take place. CBS took flak in late August for slimming down Katie Couric in a publicity photo.

I learned of the HP camera feature at Church Marketing, er, Stinks, a site devoted to evaluating and improving the way we promote churches. This is a good, short article on how dumb advertising campaigns may generate buzz but they hurt more than they help.

BTW, HP has been in the tech and business news lately for an unethical and probably illegal leak probe conducted against journalists, employees and HP directors.

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In the interest of becoming more of a “world Christian” I have been spending a little time each day reading news stories from around the world at worldnews.com. This site is a nicely-built clipping service that organizes news from every continent by practically every news organization in the world. This ain’t Fox or CNN. If you’re used to reading the news through American eyes, you’re in for some shocking enlightenment as you discover what the rest of the world thinks about.

For starters, you might try this article from the UK called Requiem for Baghdad.
P.S. Don’t mistake this site for weeklyworldnews.com.

Blogged with Flock

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I try to rarely promote commercial products on this blog, but when a good FREE tool presents itself, I like to talk about it.

When I got my new computer awhile back, I really wanted to buy MS Office to go with it (so I could work at home easily) but I just couldn’t afford it. For just a few bucks, I got a basic office suite from Wordperfect included with my computer. Then I discovered Open Office, an open-source office suite that is available for free (legally, I might add). Open Office is backed by Sun Microsystems and is built by programmers all over the world who donate their time. It contains an excellent word processor along with a spreadsheet, database, etc. I basically just use the word processor, and it communicates SO much better with Word than Wordperfect does.
One qualifier: I word process all the time, but I don’t use many advanced features, and I’ve heard that people who do run into more problems with compatibility. But as a basic user, I can email my sermon or lesson to myself when I leave the office and pick it up at home and continue to work on it seamlessly, for the most part.

As for Powerpoint and Publisher, which I also use a frequently but for short periods, Bart Mayo (our church tech guru) showed me a program called LogMeIn which provides me simple remote desktop access for free, so I can sit at home and control my office computer as if I were sitting at my desk at church - and you don’t need Windows XP Professional to do it. It IS a bit slow to run a remote session, but it is definitely workable.

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John Pryor first told me about MySpace in November of last year. He got me to join in January, just a couple of days after I first blogged about it. Now MySpace has almost 94 million members, and according to TechCrunch, signs up nearly a quarter of a million new users per DAY, has 15 million unique log-ins per day, and 30 billion page views per month. MySpace accounts for 4.5% of all U. S. Internet visits.

But here’s how big it really is: Tonight at church, worship got underway while three of us in our 40s and 50s stood out in the Atrium discussing the coolest tricks for customizing our MySpace profiles.

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I found this article called “Go from Couch to 5K in Six Weeks” at one of my favorite blogs, Lifehacker. I haven’t run a 5K since 1991 (in Denver - the altitude was a killer for me, but I made it), and I don’t plan to run one just now, but I think I might try this simple training plan as I try to lose the twenty pounds I’ve gained since last summer. When I trained in 1991, I designed a plan similar to this one, except that I broke my goals down into quarter-miles (which are marked on the Kingston walking trail) rather than minutes. Most folks in reasonable health can train themselves to run a 5K (3.1 miles) in a little over 30 minutes. (When I ran in Denver, I finished behind a 77-year-old man - but he was in GREAT shape!)

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I ran across an interesting blog today written by a homeless guy, called (interestingly) The Homeless Guy. He has been blogging for more than four years, but he recently attracted enough attention to make it to the front page on Digg (apparently driven by this Wired story). His blog will frustrate you if you look for him to explain his homelessness in a quick easy way, or offer a solution to homelessness, but he will give you some insight into the world of the homeless.

He has a PayPal link on his site to accept donations, and he says that he tried Google Ads and they didn’t work (”Click here to learn how you can be homeless!”)?
Is he for real? Salon did a story about him in October, 2002. And he isn’t alone. A search on “homeless blogger” reveals several other such people including a woman profiled by NPR in January, 2004.
So why is a guy who has attracted national attention at least twice, and who is obviously intelligent and literate, perpetually homeless? Let’s just say there are reasons why it is difficult to pull people out of homelessness.

Read a few posts on his blog, and you’ll see homelessness, charity efforts, inner-city renewal and many other things from a new perspective.

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Several people pledged to start living by a budget after our recent study on escaping the debt trap. Pear Budget is an easy, free tool that can help. It works inside a spreadsheet but you don’t have to know how to use a spreadsheet to use it because the programmers have done all the work. You just fill in the blanks with your own numbers. The makers say it takes 20 minutes to set up and 10 minutes a week to maintain.

This downloadable version of Pear Budget works easily in Excel. They say that it works with “almost any spreadsheet program” but I wasn’t able to get it loaded in Quattro Pro when I tried it this morning. A web-based version is coming soon, and you can sign up to beta-test it at their site.

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I have a stack of cassette tapes sitting next to my home computer that (someday) I mean to convert to MP3 so they’ll last “forever”. I have a shelf full of video tapes languishing into obsolescence too. That’s why I enjoyed this article so much. Formats come and go so quickly now that it only takes a handful of years to expose as fruitless our efforts to preserve our work for posterity.

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My brother recently reminded me that the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive may contain some old MHCC web pages. This link will take you to the list of pages at our old domain, morrisonhill.faithweb.com, which we abandoned in late 2001 or early 2002.

MHCC had other sites before 2001, including a Roane County Christian School site. I administered those sites, but can’t remember the addresses. Since search capability on the Wayback Machine seems to be weak, I wonder if any of you old-timers could help me remember and look. They were probably hosted by AOL and Compuserve.

P. S. Shortly after I posted the above, I stumbled across the old RCCS site. You can follow a link in it to the first MHCC site. Unfortunately, Bill Gunter’s cool woodgrain design is diluted in the archive.

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Techcrunch has a post today about a soon-to-launch web service called Rapleaf, a site which plans to bring eBay-style rankings to all types of transactions, even offline. Imagine that you can give your next-door neighbor a bad ranking for that dysfunctional chainsaw he sold you, or praise a friend who sells cosmetics. I have a hard time seeing how they can pull this off. And while I can see the value of the idea, the thought of having a bad yard sale transaction following me around for decades reminds me of how grateful I am for God’s grace.

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All About GOD is a website devoted to answering lots of questions about God, Jesus Christ, and Christianity. It’s a great place for seekers or for Christians who want to review the basis of their faith.

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Back in 1993 or so, I picked up an old computer book in the used book store. The author, writing in the late 60s or so said that computers would evolve so that common people would have “terminals” in their home and they would pay for access to a central server. In ‘93, the internet was just starting to take hold among home users and the real story was the personal computer. As I looked at the book, I thought that the author was wrong in his predictions in that he didn’t take into account the power that each “terminal” or PC would possess, that we would in fact have the main computer on our desks and wouldn’t have to connect to the central server.

But thirteen years later, I have to admit that this author had the right idea. PCs have continued to evolve in power, but even more compelling than what’s on my desktop is the power and content I can connect to “out there” - not on a central server exactly, but on the millions of servers that make up the web.

With high-speed access becoming more common, possibilities about where we have to work are expanding. I used to have to sit in my office to work on my sermon, go over my list of church prospects, hospital calls, etc. For a long time I wished for a notebook, even though I find them tedious to use, just so I could take my work anywhere. But my paradigm is starting to change, and I’m realizing that it’s possible to have access to whatever I need anywhere there is a computer.

ITRedux.com recently posted a list of many applications on the web to take the place of MS Office, Wordperfect Suite or whatever you use. A lot of these are free and offer a basic feature set. Others are professional grade and require a monthly fee.

I used MS Outlook for quite awhile to pick up my Yahoo email and organize my tasks, but I have recently switched back to My Yahoo for mail and calendar (it has improved over the last few years) and I use Backpack for my to-do list. Last night I prepared my small-group Bible studies at home using Writley’s word processor and Bible Gateway’s Bible.

I’m really just getting started with this work anywhere concept, but I like it.

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For any of you who love to shop eBay, Jeffrey Young has a cautionary tale for you in an article at ZD Net. This one goes beyond getting swindled (in fact, he apparently got his money back on an obscenely-priced purse) and deals with apparently-questionable practices that eBay encourages.

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Charles Colson writes in Christianity Today a pointed critique of today’s praise music, with a special level of disgust for MHCC favorite “Draw Me Close”. Is he an old fuddy duddy who hasn’t learned to worship a loving Father from the heart, or a sharp-minded cultural critic making a needed appeal for a stronger evangelical mind? Maybe both. Every era of church music has its share of wheat and chaff. “In the Garden” was the feel-good hymn of a couple of generations ago. I still don’t know what it means (do you?). The fact is that “Draw Me Close” expresses emotions you’ll find in the Psalms.

Colson is also disgusted that his radio talk segments are being pulled by Christian stations in favor of an “all music all the time” format. Colson sees this as a case of trading intellectual growth for emotional cotton candy. I haven’t heard Colson in years, so I don’t know if the reason could be that he has lost some of his appeal. His writing is still good, but he has used a co-writer for many years. In any case, he’s probably right about Christian stations going “Christian-lite”. Radio in general has been plain vanilla for years, and the Christian stations are among the last to have both music and talk in significant amounts on the same station.

Anyway, Colson sees in all this a sign of the dumbing-down of evangelicalism, which may be too convenient a scapegoat. If the level of discourse on the MHCC discussion board is any indication, he may be wrong. What do you think?

Read a good counterpoint to Colson’s take on praise music here.

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I recently heard of two web services that seem to represent a giant leap forward for internet technology. The first is Podzinger, which uses sophisticated speech-recognition to read spoken-word content and make it searchable. Let’s say you were driving home last week and you remember hearing Samuel L. Jackson talking about his upcoming movie Snakes on a Plane. You’d like to find that interview, so you head over to Podzinger and type:

NPR samuel jackson snakes on a plane

That search takes you here, where the NPR story is the second one on the page (NPR Movies), and if you look at the text (which isn’t 100 percent accurate) you can easily see that the relevant conversation begins at 25:48. You can click the icon next to it and begin listening at that very point.

Podzinger does for audio and video what Google does for text (and if it does well, I’m confident that Podzinger will soon be part of Google or Yahoo).

If you’re interested in the technical aspects of Podzinger, you can listen to that here.

The other groundbreaking service is Riya, a place to store your photos. That’s been done before, but get this: Once you upload enough of your pictures and train Riya, it uses facial recognition technology to identify the people in your photos and make them searchable. If you have a couple thousand pictures on Riya, it can find the 25 of Uncle Fred. It can also read text within photos too (on signs, etc.)

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Rather than coming up with my own April Fool’s joke, I thought I’d refer you to Wired’s top ten internet spoofs. You’ll recognize some of these as email legends that date back to the mid-90s. A few of them I’d never heard of.

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NPR recently broadcast a heart-wrenching and honest look at death by the dying man himself. Stewart Selman knew he was dying of a brain tumor when he began recording his thoughts on the process. The 22-minute NPR segment takes you through some of the key moments and features insight from Selman’s wife. It’s worth your time.

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I’ve been playing around with a web interface called Goowy. I didn’t think I liked it at first, but now I really do. Goowy is a feedreader (among other things) that is very easy to customize. I keep it open on my desktop and use it to monitor CNN, FoxSports, Relevant, TechCrunch and 6-7 other feeds, which I have lined up like post-it notes across the screen. With so many sites finally starting to offer RSS feeds, Goowy becomes more useful all the time.

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This week, two senators introduced legislation to create a xxx domain for porn sites (i.e., smut.xxx instead of smut.com). The idea isn’t to promote porn, but to ghetto-ize it or label it and make it easier to filter out. It might be a good idea, except that (as I understand it) pornographers won’t be required to surrender their .com domains. Also, legislation in the U. S. applies only to U. S. companies, not overseas pornographers, which is a substantial weakness since the Internet is international.

It isn’t the issue itself I’m interested in as much as the acrimonious debate about it between two parties that are on the same side. John C. Dvorak (a PC Magazine Columnist and one of my favorite tech gurus) and Concerned Women for America (an evangelical Christian activist group) both want to make it harder for kids to see porn, yet they have made themselves enemies of one another with lots of name-calling and mud-slinging in their respective columns. Dvorak likes the idea of a xxx domain (in fact, he may have been the first to suggest it, way back in the ’90s). CWA hates it, and doesn’t think much of Dvorak for liking it.

Too bad. As an evangelical myself, I wish I could call CWA to a higher standard of discourse. The bickering keeps US ghetto-ized.

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