Baggas’ Blog

Subversive Influence » Doing Church the Warren Buffet Way

One of the overlooked pieces of news in the last week has been the teaming up of a couple of the world’s richest men in a massive philanthropic collaboration. Warren Buffet is donating over $30 billion of his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help with health care in Africa and research. And Bill Gates is scaling back his commitments with Microsoft so he can devote more of his time to the charity. Between them, these two guys are spending more on charity than the foreign aid budgets of all bar six countries in the world! How awesome is that!

In the blog post link above, Brother Maynard discusses this story, and relates it to the work of the Kingdom which Jesus calls us to. I don’t know if these guys are Christians at all but it sure is a very Christian way to act. However, as usual, the religious right bring their negative condemnatory carping to the table, pouring cold water on a huge source of potential benefit to millions of people. I concur with Maynard’s critique of them. Read the article, and be inspired by Gates and Buffet, and consider how we might use our “fortunes” to similarly benefit others.

The Long Tail - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Here’s an article from Wikipedia that may look pretty boring at first glance, but if you delve into it it’s actually a fascinating look at economies of scale in the internet age. It looks at the phenomenon of the “long tail” which means that the cumulative amount of less common items ends up being greater than the aggregate of the most popular/common items. The quote from an Amazon employee illustrates the concept well : “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.”

In other words, thanks to the internet, the blogosphere, and the economics of a store like Amazon, we live in a world where we not only have more choice than ever before, but where the total effect of the choices of minorities may be greater than that of the popular majority. It’s a world where minorities and niches are becoming more important and better catered for all the time. Fascinating and thought-provoking ideas indeed.

WSJ.com - Social Networking for Bookworms

You’re probably tired of me going on and on about LibraryThing by now, but if you want a good intro to the site and a bit of background about it’s creator, then have a look at the above article from the Wall Street Journal.

Time to change mobile phone providers I think.

For the last few days I have been unable to access my voicemail - everytime I call it I get a message saying “Sorry your account has no access to the system. Please contact customer service.” Well after missing a couple of messages due to this, and nearly missing a birth as a result, I decided to give customer service a call. The girl was very nice and helpful and tried all sorts of tricks to fix it but ultimately I am left with the same problem and no voicemail.

My contract expired a long long time ago, so it may be time to go hunting for a new provider. Basically what I want is :

• reliable service
• moderate price with plenty of included calls and sms
• fairly cheap rates for data/internet/GPRS
• any free gifts for signing up would be a nice bonus

Anyone got any suggestions for me?

I was painfully reminded last night just how frustrating sport can be, particularly soccer. It’s sad when the result of a game can be decided by the subjective opinion of one referee, and how one bad decision can make the difference. I think that’s why I like cricket more than most other sports. Even though we see mistakes made from time to time, it is rare that they decide the result of the match. And unlike most other sports they are not afraid to use technology (aka the “third umpire”) to try and minimise the chance of a bad call.

But anyway all credit to the Socceroos, who defied expectations just to make it this far, let alone come so close to making it to the next round. I look forward to seeing Italy go down to which ever team they come up against next. 

One of the only negative aspects of my current book cataloguing obsession is that it’s making me feel a bit old.

Specifically, this ageing feeling started after I began to enter my medical textbooks into Library Thing, only to discover that most of them are at least two or three editions behind the times. For some of them I couldn’t even find an accurate cover image anywhere online they were that old. It doesn’t seem like all that long ago I was back in medical school leafing through all these books, yet in reality most of them were purchased over 10 years ago! It’s scary how fast time passes.

Aside from that, the cataloguing itself is going great guns, proceeding at a much faster pace than I would have anticipated, thanks to the slickness of Library thing. I’ve discovered just what a wonderful thing ISBN codes are - entering them in gives me a more accurate result faster than just using author/title. And LibraryThing have quoted me on their Buzz page which is kinda cool (just look down near the bottom…)
At present I’m up to 480 books in my library, which is probably around two thirds to three quarters of the total. Should pass the big 500 later tonight. You may notice I’ve added Library thing to the right sidebar of the blog instead of the Now reading wordpress plugin, with a current reading section and also a display of random books from my collection.

Anyway I suppose I’d better get back to work. Library thing is a wonder, but it doesn’t heal the sick…

Reminder to self : must ensure guitar is clean before playing it in public.

I was most distracted in church this morning during the message by the huge white smudge on my (black) acoustic guitar. probably no-one else noticed but it was not good. Time to get myself one of these guitar cleaning cloths I think.

As you may know I’m quite an avid reader and collector of books, my shelves being full of books, many of which I haven’t had a chance to read yet. And I’m also a bit of an internet geek. Now here’s a way of combing the two - Library Thing! This is arguably the best thing I have come across on the internet .. ever. It’s basically an online catalog of the books in your library, drawing data from Amazon and a host of world libraries. Now I’ve tried similar things before but this is light years ahead. Adding and tagging books is very easy - it usually finds what I’m looking for right away. The feature that really won me over was the ability to import from your amazon order history - that way all the books I’ve bought from them in the last few years were added almost automatically (though it did take a few hours of waiting in their “queue”)

Like most of the new generation of websites, Librarything is big on tagging and using tags to connect you with other people with similar interests/book collections. It will also generate book recommendations. One cool feature is the Zeitgeist page which basically has a huge range of interesting lists of popular books, tags, authors, ratings, and users. I even crack a mention on there today as number 5 (currently) in the ‘books added in the last 24 hours’ section.

So far I’ve added 363 books which is comprised of all my amazon purchases and plenty of others, but I still have a lot of work to do to get my whole library into it. Playing with this site is already proving to be an unhealthy addiction - not only working on my own library but browsing around others. There are ways of including it in your blog through sidebar widgets and rss which I’ll look at in the next few days when I get a chance.

In the meantime, feel free to browse the beginnings of my library - be sure to try the ‘graphical shelf’ view which is pretty cool. There are plenty more books to come but this represents a sizeable portion of my collection. If you know me in real life and want to borrow something, just give me a call.  And if you’re a book lover yourself, why not sign up and start cataloguing too?

PS - here’s a challenge to you - see if you can work out which of the books in the bookpile image above I actually have in my library…. I’ll give you a clue - it’s not The Lusty Lady…

We live in a world of spam - first it was junk mail polluting your physical mail box (which has never really bothered me much), then the unabating tide of email spam, then blog spam - but now phone spam is becoming an increasingly worse problem.

Now we have an unlisted phone number to stop crazy patients calling me up and harassing me at odd hours - actually at any hour - when I’m not at work I am off limits as a doctor (aside from my obstetric work and of course for family and friends etc). But anyway, even though we have a silent number it hasn’t stopped us getting several calls a week from mass marketers, usually with an Indian accent and poor conversational skills. They usually manage to call right on dinner time, and often get very ticked off when we tell them we are not interested and not to call again.

Fortunately, there is a glimmer of hope for this problem. The government has passed a law forming a register where you can opt-out of receiving all marketing calls, with a risk of prosecution of companies that do not comply. And until that law comes into force, you can register online with the Australian Direct Marketing Association (ADMA) to stop calls from their members, which may help somewhat. Apparently it takes a few weeks for the calls to stop so we’ll have to wait and see how effective it is … don’t know how many firms in Bombay and Madras are members of ADMA?

[hat-tip to Rodney for this useful information]

Forgot to do this is the busyness of last week, also probably because I didn’t have much to mention either. This week is no different but I’ll try and do a quick round up nonetheless…

LISTENING : recently I’ve been getting into a bit of classical music at times, especially Sibelius‘ symphonies and Bach’s cello suites. On the popular side I’ve been enjoying The Whitlams latest double album, Little Cloud, which I bought a few months back but have only really had a serious listen to now. It’s that classic Whitlams sound, great to relax to, read with, or drive to. If you like The Whitlams you will not be disappointed with this. Of course I can’t seem to escape from Colin Buchanan either - I now have most of his back catalogue on my iPod and the kids insist on it whenever we are in the car, although they are also happy to listen to Father Roderick’s Daily Breakfast podcast (the quote “mmmm this is a tasty burger!” is now oft repeated in our house - if you listen to the podcast you’ll know what I mean)

EATING : none of my drug pushers showed up today with lunch, and I was quite peckish, so I ended up grabbing some Chicken Treat, much to the chagrin of the reception staff who had to endure the chicken smell wafting through. Didn’t want to let my patients catch me eating that though, so I snuck in the side door

DRINKING : still enjoying and refining my espresso making technique - achieving some pretty good results, but I think I’m yet to pull what my friend Dean terms the “god shot.”

TREATING : pregnancies, vaccinations, rasied intracranial pressure, bowel polyps, depression, colds and flus, ischaemic heart disease, back pain

[okay the next part is Friday What’s Up - didn’t get to finish on Wednesday…]
WATCHING : a bit of World Cup Soccer , although I didn’t stay up til 3am this morning to watch Australia’s exciting 2-2 draw with Croatia to get them into the next round. Fortunately Monday’s game against Italy will be at a much better time (10:30pm) so I plan to catch that one. Also on DVD I’ve just got Jimi Hendrix Live at the Isle of Wight, which is a DVD and double CD set. Now you may have heard Jimi’s version of the Star Spangled Banner, but this set features a similiar rendition of God Save the Queen (much better than the Sex Pistols’ version). Well worth getting if you are a Jimi fan like me. And we’re planning to go see the Pixar movie Cars tomorrow which should be fun.

READING : all the same stuff as the previous few weeks - this is my punishment for choosing several heavy going or textbook style books at the same time. Just to introduce something a bit lighter a couple of days ago I started reading Alister McGrath’s biography of J. I. Packer, which I picked up at Koorong a year or so ago on sale for $5 or something like that. So far it’s an interesting read, about a guy who I previously didn’t know much about. I really should read biographies more often…

Quiz time again, and it’s a good one. Found this at Scot McKnight’s blog (who got it from Hamo) For once, this is a quiz with the potential for real practical relevance. I think the question of how a person understands the ‘Kingdom of God’ will have a major influence on the way in which they approach the world especially in terms of love, mission, and service. Considering the bulk of Jesus’ teaching concentrates on the Kingdom it’s something we really should think about a lot more.

Here’s my results, which I think are a relatively true summation of my viewpoint. Take the quiz yourself - excellent probing questions yielding useful results. Definitely one of the best internet quizzes I’ve seen to date.

CNN.com - Jesus Christ Superman - Jun 14, 2006

I for one can’t wait for the upcoming release of Superman Returns. Superman has always been the ultimate superhero, even though some of the later movies from the 80s didn’t do justice to the legend (Superman IV anyone?). From the previews, the new movie looks like it’s going to be awesome - a much more worthy successor to the original Superman : The Movie, even to the extent that it features the voice of Marlon Brando as Superman’s Father, as well as the wonderful score from John Williams.

But this CNN article explores yet another aspect of the Superman legend, which apparently is given free reign in the new movie - Superman as a Christological figure. These themes have always been latent in Superman stories of the past, (even though the original creators drew more from the character of Moses) but in Superman Returns are made even more explicit. With a growing awareness of the vast American Christian market, studios are ever looking for new ways to appeal to them. Fortunately though, they aren’t marketing Superman in this way.

Interesting article to read which makes me even more keen to see this movie when it comes out.

Received a blog comment this morning from Simeon Payne who is Baptist Chaplain at the University of Western Sydney, a member of its Human Research Ethics Committee and guest lecturer in Scientific Ethics, on an old entry in which I mentioned my frustration at how some fundamentalist Christian “family groups” were opposed to the breakthrough life-saving, cancer-preventing, Australian designed Human Papilloma Virus vaccine.

Anyway, Simeon quotes from an article he wrote for the Baptist Union of NSW, giving a Christian perspective on why the vaccine is a good thing. He puts it so much better than I could have so I would encourage everyone to read what he has to say here . Thanks Simeon for sharing it with us.

So here it is, a month or so early, my incredible birthday present

It’s an Isomac Tea espresso machine, direct from Milan. I got it on Friday and within minutes was pulling shots of very tasty coffee, using some excellent Five Senses beans ground in my new grinder. As a complete novice barista I’ve got a lot to learn but I’m already producing some more than adequate cappucino, as you can see below. Makes you realise just what a delicate art espresso making is, though. Fortunately I’ve got some good websites like Five Senses and Coffee Geek to help, and a fairly good book on Espresso, but I think some professional training is definitely on the cards at some point. It’s handy having a home group full of coffee nuts as well

Why is it the blog spammers never seem to be able to speak English? Here’s a few recent examples :

• I’m love this great website. Many thanks guy
• i try to find something at google.com and take it on your site…thanks
• Best site I see. Thanks.
  Hello there! Just want to say that I find your site enough interesting for me. Usefull information and all is good arranged. Thank you for your work. I will visit your site more ofter from now and I bookmarked it.
• Nice site. Thank to work…
• Great job guys… Thank for you work…
• Hallo I absolutely adore your site. You have beautiful graphics I have ever seen.

Well if nothing else at least they’re encouraging and courteous Wouldn’t do them any harm to learn a little grammar though. Having said that I must confess I was reading some chapters on English grammar last week (as part of the Greek book I’m working through) and they put me to sleep - so maybe that’s what happened to the spammers - fell asleep during English!

Got emailed this morning to say that yet another replacement Palm Treo is on it’s way to me. If I’m lucky it’ll arrive today. Hopefully it’ll be third time lucky and this one will work properly!

Also on my way is my espresso machine which my coffee making friend tells me should have arrived from Italy. Bought myself a speccy looking coffee grinder yesterday so hopefully within days I’ll be able to start (and finish) the day with some fine espresso, cappucinos, machiatos and other more exotic beverages. Once I get the hang of using it that is.

There’s few things more demoralizing than when you go the extra mile for someone, really put in a lot of effort to help them, and then discover second hand that they are still unappreciative and unhappy with you. There’s times I’d like nothing more than to spend my days locked up in an office with a computer or microscope and not have to deal with people. Working with people is a risk - some will not appreciate you though you put in a huge effort on their behalf, while others will overflow with gratitute for something small that I wouldn’t even usually consider important or special. The trick is to not give up on the former group, and to draw strength and encouragement from the latter, while all the time remembering there’s a higher calling involved too.

Oh well I’ve procrastinated long enough - time to call the next person in and keep moving. I will be very glad come the end of today though.

A Bible for Our Times - purgatorio

As I’ve said before I don’t personally have a problem with Eugene Peterson’s The Message Bible paraphrase. However I did find this version from the eternally humorous Purgatorio pretty funny, as I’m sure will those who are less keen on The Message - check it out.

One of the few positive things about having to make do with a little old Nokia phone instead of my Palm Treo is how comfortably it sits in my pocket. I’d forgotten just how comparitively large the Treo is.

However one of the down-sides of having a small phone is that it also fits in other people’s pockets. This morning at home I heard my phone ringing, a call from the hospital, but couldn’t find it anywhere. I found Luke (who’s 3 in September) and could hear the ringing coming from near him but couldn’t see the phone … until I looked in his pocket. He’d been carrying around my phone, vibrating and ringing in his pocket and hadn’t even noticed. Probably a good thing given his phone conversational style …

“Hello ….. Lukey here”
A good start you might think, but then it quickly turns into a series of naming all the objects he can see …
“Teddy … T.V. …. Juice … Owen (pronounced Rowing) … soccer ball … ”
You get the idea. OK to talk that way to grandad, not so good when talking to a specialist obstetrician

Really enjoyed watching the big game last night : Australia v Japan. It was definitely the most enjoyable match I’ve watched thus far in the World Cup, and I don’t think it was entirely because I’m biased. There was plenty of action, plenty of shots on goal, and plenty of spirit. Ultimately, some excellent substitutions and attacking play led Australia to a great comeback for a 3-1 win, after being 0-1 down most of the match. And it should’ve been 3-0, since Japan’s goal was a result of some blatant fouls on keeper Mark Schwarzer. Interestingly, it seems the referee admitted in the end that he was wrong (see this story :Referee admitted error: Schwarzer - Germany 2006) but claimed that divine providence ensured a just result in the end :

“He just said: Sorry, I made a mistake.

“He said after the game to (Australia captain) Mark Viduka that God was on his side because the result went our way in the end and he knew that he had made a big mistake.

“He said God was on his side in the sense that it didn’t affect the result in the end, so it was big of him to admit that.”

Let’s hope that God remains on the side of the Socceroos as they now have a glimmer of hope of making it to the next round. Bring on Brazil!

One of the highpoints of the World Cup football coverage so far has been the discovery of this great little SBS program they show at 8pm (Perth time) before the main game - Nerds FC.

In this reality show they have taken a bunch of bona fide Nerds, all around university student age, and started training them to form a soccer team, with the ultimate challenge of playing a match against a professional team in a 20,000 seat stadium. Along the way they face various challenges designed to build their confidence, teamwork, and physical fitness. In last night’s episode they went and played a game against the inmates in a high security prison, including a number who were in for murder. The previous night saw them recording the team theme song, which despite some of their execrable voices, still proved to be so annoyingly catchy I’ve been unable to get it out of my head since. The show also features brief bios of each of the guys, where they demonstrate just how nerdy they really are.

It may not be everyone’s cup of tea but I found this show hilarious - check it out! Nerds that they are, the website also features a video podcast so you can subscribe for highlights of previous episodes.

To celebrate the beginning of the FIFA World Cup, here’s a photo of the Player of the week.

Owen did a great job in his soccer game this morning, really tried hard and got quite a few kicks, so his coach awarded him with the Player of the Week trophy. He was so proud of himself.

As for the FIFA world cup, I was a bit underwhelmed by the opening ceremony in Munich last night. I’m not sure if the ceremony itself was lame or just the coverage we had but there just didn’t seem to be much atmophere or excitement. I was amazed to see quite a large number of empty seats in the stadium for the ceremony, although they seemed to have filled in time for the ensuing game between Germany and Costa Rica. Guess it shows what people were more concerned about - the football was more important than the festivities.

Well I was happy yesterday to receive a replacement Treo 650 shipped from Palm in response to the problme I had with the screen. Plugged it all in and it worked fine… but onyl for the first 10 minutes or so - then it became unresponsive. Tried to reset it and the same problem again - works fine for a few minutes and then won’t do a thing. Very frustrating. So now I’ll have to wait til Monday (or Tuesday since I believe it might be a long weekend in Sydney) to be able to call them and arrange to send it back again. Which means yet another week sans PDA.

If this keeps happening I’d almost be tempted to go to the dark side and get a Pocket PC next time. Two of the things that have kept me loyal to Palm thus far have been

1. I’ve managed to find a lot more medical software for Palm
2. The amount of money I’ve invested in my Bible software. I wouldn’t want to have to re-purchase all the translations I have for a Pocket PC

Well these reasons are less compelling now that Laridian (makers of MyBible) have now changed their policy so that if you have purchased a version of the Bible or book for one format of their software, you can download for free the versions for other formats. So in order to migrate my Bible software to a Pocket PC all I would have to do would be to purchase the actual Pocket Bible software (for $10 I think) and then redownload all the books for it, which is not so painful as spending a couple of hundred dollars. (Plus Pocket Bible has the NRSV, which MyBible doesn’t - one of my few gripes with MyBible).

As for the medical software the truth is that although I keep a lot on my Palm I rarely use it. The only ones I have used with any regularity are MIMs and a program called PregPro which I use to keep track of my obstetric patients and when they are due. Getting those two programs for Pocket PC shouldn’t be a major problem I would imagine.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens with Palm customer service this time…

Now I’m sure this verse I just read doesn’t actually mean what it seems to, but I’d be surprised if some US Republican (or Australian Liberal) politician hasn’t made use of it at some point…

The heart of the wise inclines to the right,
but the heart of a fool to the left.

~ Ecclesiastes 10:2 (NRSV)

Or maybe it’s the reason why Americans drive on the wrong (right-hand) side of the road - perhaps they see it as being more biblical! Can anyone illuminate me on what this verse is really trying to say?

PS : I love the actual name of the Hebrew author of this book - Qohelet - now there’s one you could call your kids. Almost as cool as Og!

I’ve been reading a bit of Ecclesiastes recently so this quote from George Orwell I came across today was timely. It’s his transalation of Ecc 9:11 into “modern English”…

I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Now that proves that big words aren’t always best. It’s almost like a complete opposite of The Message - an anti-Message if you like. I’ve noted online, in reading, and in conversation recently quite a bit of antipathy towards The Message. While I accept the reservations about it being one person’s paraphrase, rather than an accurate translation, I still think it can be quite a useful adjunct, to help get a fresh spin on things. You wouldn’t want to use it as your sole version of the Bible though. Personally for me I’ve been combining the NLT and NRSV of late which is a nice mix.

Anyway you can read more about the Orwell quote and the writing principles it illustrates on Steve Addison’s excellent blog World Changers (yet another one to keep an eye on…)

» Orwell on writing Steve Addison’s blog » World Changers

Ok here’s the second episode of the weekly round up of what I’ve been taking an interest in this week…

LISTENING : my most recent CD acquisition is probably one of the best albums you’ve never heard of - “In the Aeroplane over the Sea” by the interestingly named band Neutral Milk Hotel. It’s a raw “indy pop” album from 1998 that actually defies categorisation, but I guess if you like Bright Eyes then you might be able to get into this also. The lyrics are often cryptic and bizarre, and the singer Jeff Magnum has a most unusual voice, best demonstrated on the second track where he wails “I loooove you Jeeeesus Cccchriiist” to unexpectedly good effect …. the other artist that has been getting big play in our household this week is Colin Buchanan - he’s an Australian guy who you may have seen as one of the hosts on the Playhouse Disney channel, who also happens to have a second career as a singer-songwriter doing Christian kids songs. Mostly they are in a rock/country style, with the occaisional German polka thrown in for good measure. The boys, especially Luke, insist on playing his CD every time we get in the car. We also discovered that the CD has the sheet music as a PDF also, so I’ve since given the boys a few renditions of the songs with my own guitar as well

WATCHING : Last weekend we got a new HD LCD projector for our home theatre - a Panasonic PT-AE900. The picture is awesome for DVDs and even better watching HDTV (just in time for the World Cup). The first movie we watched on it was Peter Jackson’s King Kong, which I actually really enjoyed (although Jenni found some bits a little too creepy) - the special effects were amazing, and I found the humour and the retro 1930’s feel of it to be quite engaging. The other program I’m looking forward to watching this is the final of the Amazing Race, which is on tomorrow. As I’ve said before I usually loathe reality shows, but this one’s got me hooked - my favourite team : B.J. and Tyler, the hippies.

READING :  new books started this week are Alister McGrath’s ‘Christian Theology‘ and the Ephesians section of N.T. Wright’s ‘Paul for Everyone’ commentary series. Still plugging through Romans, Greek, and ‘The Christian Tradition Vol 1‘ by Jaroslav Pelikan, who died last month (I discovered this the other day after coming across his obituary in The West Australian newspaper of all places!)

TREATING : nothing much of interest today - lots of pregnant patients, colds and flus, arthritis and other aches and pains

EATING : just about to head off for some Chinese food - having lunch with ob1

CELEBRATING : Owen’s birthday. He turns five tomorrow, and we’re having a big space themed party on Sunday afternoon for all his friends.

Just received two pieces of good news in the last half hour.

1. I don’t have HIV. Not that I seriously thought that I did but it’s nice to know for sure. Basically my insurance company requested I get some tests done in order to increase my insurance. So on Saturday I went down to a pathology lab in Mandurah and had the bloods taken. This was not the best of experiences. Normally I’m fine with needles and blood tests but after praising how good my veins were, the phlebotomist then proceeded to completely miss the vein in one arm and do a very botched job on the other arm. I still have an 8mm scratch at the site, 5 days later, which is inexcusable considering it’s a 1mm needle. I would have been better off taking the blood from myself! Jennifer thinks it was probably that she was nervous after realising that the name of the patient on the form and the name of the doctor were one and the same. Also she somehow missed one of the other blood tests I requested so I’ve had to ask the lab to add it on. But at least I don’t have HIV
2. My Palm is on it’s way home, or at least a replacement for it. Got an email just now to say that it has been dispatched and is now hopefully winging it’s way back across Australia. Even 6 days without a Palm is hard to take. Actually this time it’s not so much that I’ve missed the PDA, it’s more the fact that I’ve had to make do with an archaic Nokia from the early 2000’s as my phone. Hopefully tomorrow I can give the Nokia the flick again.

Backyard Missionary » Blog Archive » Where Will Your Kids Go to School?…

Hamo is weighing up the pros and cons of the various options available for where to send his daughter to school, and has written an excellent and comprehensive post on the subject. Worthwhile reading for any Christian parent.

Personally I am a product of both the public and private school systems - state school up to grade 3, private Christian school from grade 4-10, and then state high school again for years 11-12, before moving on to a public university (unlike the USA, Australia does not have a significant private/religious tertiary education sector). I think there is no right or wrong answer but Christian schooling does have some definite potential advantages. Now that Owen is in pre-primary and attending the same Christian school I went to (although it’s several times larger than back in my day) I have no doubts that we have made the right choice for him. He regularly comes back from school talking about God and the Bible, in addition to the usual numbers and alphabet and what not. The only problem is that they are stimulating him so much that he is already starting to ask me difficult questions about why God allows sin and suffering and evil in the world. He’s only 4 (5 this week) and contemplating theodicy. Bet you wouldn’t get that in a state school!

There are few phrases in our culture more blasphemous than that of the “self made man.”

Know that the LORD, He is God;
It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves;

~ Psalm 100:3 (NKJV)

Keratoconus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This condition, where the cornea becomes cone shaped, is today’s Wikipedia article of the day, and coincidentally is a condition that Jennifer has, affecting her vision and requiring her to wear these difficult hard contact lenses. It can also potentially be progressive and quite severe. Makes me glad I just have regular old boring myopia.

I’ve recently found the Wikipedia article of the day email to be a great way of coming across interesting bits of information. Usually (unlike today’s article) it’s something I’ve never or barely heard of before. If you want to sign up for the daily email just go here.

Well I’m sad to say that for the second time in 3 months my Palm Treo 650 has developed a problem. This time the touch screen has completely stopped working, rendering it unusable. Once again Palm customer service were very helpful and have asked me to send it back for a replacement. The last time I dealt with them the process was quick and painless so hopefully it will go just as well this time. Still it’s never fun being without your PDA, even if it’s only for a few days.