Holy Saturday
This morning I read a section of a really old sermon (it's part of the daily office reading for the day) that reminded me of my favorite icon (both the quote and the icon are below). I love the theological reflection through creative narrative in this piece, and I love how the icon focuses that reflection into a kinetic center around Christ. From an ancient homily for Holy Saturday The Lord's descent into the underworld Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The ...
Trip to the Monastery and Fixed Hour Prayer Resources
Each year I take a group of six students up to the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood to spend time in fixed hour prayer, silence, retreat, and service. The monastic community at Holy Cross is always extremely gracious to us and I enjoy the opportunity to expose students to spiritual formation traditions that they probably have only read about and not experienced first hand. Fixed hour prayer (often called The Divine Office or The Liturgy of the Hours) is one of those traditions that the monastic community does extremely well - especially this unique community at Holy ...
Praying Twice Presentation
I had the opportunity to talk to the music ministry volunteers at Eastview this Friday. Below is the manuscript and slides from my talk about the multi-layered worship experience of music. CS Lewis in an Essay called “Meditation in a Toolshed” talks about two different ways to look at things. He tells the story of walking into his toolshed, and the place is pitch-black except for this beam of light that cuts through the darkness of the shed.
I love loved Firefox before it became a third-party extensions nagware experience made possible by a bloated system footprint. If you visit sites that need Firefox to operate properly (I have a few work sites), Camino is a satisfying alternative. It’s built off the same engine as Firefox, but leaves the bloat behind in favor of a more Mac OS X standard interface design. Camino gives you all the standard functionality of Firefox in a streamlined app that’s lightweight and nimble.
Even though I use Fluid for most of my web-apps and Safari for most of my general web browsing, Camino is my go-to browser when Safari gets a little finicky.
If you use a lot of web-apps like I do (Gmail, GoogleDocs, Facebook, GoogleReader, etc.), it’s nice to have those websites function more like a stand-alone application that dwells in your dock rather than inside your browser. Those using Leopard can run a fun little app called Fluid to create stand-alone applications that connect to your favorite web-apps and treat them like local apps. Here’s why I like handling web apps like local apps:
- you can use the command+tab fast switching technique to quickly get to the app when it’s running
- you can hide the app using command+h
- you can assign the app to a space in spaces (which I don’t use, but I know lots of folks enjoy it)
- you can launch the app from the dock
- you can quit the app with a keyboard shortcut (command-q)
- you can have the app automatically launch at startup
I’ve always messed around with web-apps prior to Fluid, but always shied away from using them as local app replacements because of typical web browser clutter. Now I no longer use a local email client, I simply use a Fluid version of Gmail – same goes for GoogleDocs, Facebook, GoogleReader, and Twitter.
Since I’ve been using the Mac OS now for around 20 years (started in Junior High), and since a lot of students and colleagues I know are just now jumping into the Mac pool, I tend to get a lot of questions about what “bells and whistles” they should install on their freshly opened Mac. I’ve been keeping a scrap list over the last few months, so over the next few days I’ll highlight the Mac bells and whistles I just can’t live without.
A nice description of what Campus Chapel in Ann Arbor, MI is doing with Advent appears here. So often, we do Christmas in reverse – we don’t acknowledge our need for the world to be renewed by a divine interruption (both then and now).
From Campus Chapel’s site:
Why Lament in Advent?
In order for us to anticipate with longing the coming of Christ, we must recognize why it is we need him to come. That is what laments are– opportunities for us to speak honestly of our need for a Savior. As long as we pretend everything is just fine we will never appreciate why, for instance, hosts of angels burst into song at his birth.
I love the entire-service-framework approach to their Advent Celebration. Stop on over and read for yourselves.
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On our way across Nebraska, we stopped at Krista’s grandparents for a few days. We counted no less than 12 nativity sets on the main floor! The sets range in diversity from Eskimo to Native American to Precious Moments to Blue Man Group (see for yourself with the link below).
A camera phone, Flickr, and a slow afternoon; you can see them all with commentary here.
I enjoy listening to short podcasts (and long ones too) and one of my favorites is The Writer’s Almanac. A few weeks ago Keillor read a poem that (I think) describes the old me (some would say the current me). You can find it here.
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They look so happy, don’t they?
After ordering one stand-alone DSL line and getting confirmations for two DSL lines, I spent 40 minutes on the phone with 5 different people (including one who was so quiet I thought I was listening to someone doing an imitation of me on the phone). The next to last person sent me all the way back to the first number I dialed! In the end, it worked out, but not without much frustration – and I can’t afford to lose any more hair.
This week’s This American Life eerily prefigured my experience; check out Act 2.
I’ve been on the road 4 out of the last 6 weeks. I have a laptop, but hooking that up to family member’s persnickety broadband connections can sometimes be more trouble than it’s worth. Enter Google. For some time now, they’ve been touting a web app version of most of the things I use for office-y type communications. So, I decided to give it a try. All in all, a good experience. Set up was fast and easy (I even set up a new Gmail account) and all services are tied to one login. Here’s the list of apps I used on the road (and now at home):
- Gmail – Web and Pop email with a ton of storage
- iGoogle – Web desktop with handy widgets and notifiers
- Google Reader – and RSS fees reader that streams in updates from frequently visited websites
- Google Docs – a web based Word Processor and Spreadsheet for viewing and editing MS Office documents.
What I liked about the Google App stuff:
- I’ve played with Gmail for a few years and I finally like it. Wonderful interface for traveling (especially if you have to use someone else’s computer) and it has a better than average mobile phone client. Actually, the phone client was great (mine was a java version running on a Sony Ericsson z520a – which the waters have now claimed), although I’ve heard some people have problems with caching (as I do in Google Reader).
- The iGoogle homepage is just fun. I’m not into homepages, but this one’s nice. I enjoy the little things like the changing theme based on your local weather.
- It took me a bit, but I do like the Reader app. I especially like it’s integration with the iGoogle homepage as well as the auto “mark as read” feature when you scroll past an article. They also have a nice iPhone specific version (I’ll talk about that later).
- The ability to open Office documents and edit them in a browser (through Google Docs) is great on the road. When you’re tied to a different person’s machine from stop to stop, this makes working with office attachments especially helpful.
A few things that drive me crazy:
- Even though they’ve tried to integrate all these services through some kind of menu at the top, it’s not consistent. For example, if I’m at my page in iGoogle and click on the Reader app in the menu, it takes me to Reader, but the bar goes away and I have to use a browser back button to get back.
- Similarly, Gmail tends to want to open new windows all the time when working with the Google menu, but that’s not consistent across all the Google Apps.
- In Safari (a Mac web browser), Gmail doesn’t give me the option to open attachments strait in Google Docs. It works fine in Firefox (or other Gecko based browsers) and Google Docs functions perfectly in every other way in Safari (v. 3 beta).
Perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t think the opportunity to get rid of JUNK around your house suddenly turns you into the next Antiques Road Show or Christie’s Auction House. We had a neighborhood garage sale this Saturday and unlike many of our fellow merchants, both here and across town, we priced things to move. Was this chair worth $50? Who cares! Price it at $10 and get rid of it!
The phrase “we originally paid blah blah for this” does not apply at a garage sale. Nobody cares. Here’s a snapshot of a conversation that Krista had with a gentleman who wanted to buy a rug that we wanted to get rid of:
Guy: How much for that rug?
Krista: $10
Guy: How about $5?
Krista: I’ll give it to you for $7.50.
Guy: I’ll take it, here’s $7.50.
This all took place in less than 10 seconds. He got a rug. We got rid of a rug and get to have a cheap lunch sometime in the near future. Everybody wins. I don’t have to haul a heavy rug to the trash or a donation site. But most importantly, I avoid the “people pretending to understand and participate in a free market society” drama.