Quick Blogs for 2008-08-31
- Watched an evangelistic Jesus video at church this morning, but it had the unintended effect of making us want to move to Tasmania - lol #
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Yesterday evening we decided on the spur of the moment to have dinner down by the beach. Was a beautiful calm night and it was great just hanging out as a family. Been reminded a lot lately of what a cool place we live in and the need not to take it for granted. Definitely need to get down there with the kids more often.


Categories : Personal | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Always a sucker for a good quiz, Christianity Today have put up a Church & Politics Quiz. Many of the questions are very specifically geared at the USA and are fortunately issues we don’t seem to ever encounter here in Australia (like having national flags in the sanctuary and the notion of our nation as being somehow “chosen by God”) but it’s still very interesting and worth doing.
For the record my scores were :
This all puts me close to the centre of their grid, but within the “Quiet Critic” quadrant, which I suppose is fair enough. Not the most precise quiz of this sort I’ve ever seen but still worth a look. The Out of Ur blog is hosting a discussion of people’s results but there’s not much there as yet.
Tags : Church, Politics, quiz
Categories : Church, Politics, Quizzes | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Imagine I was a member of a local church of some variety, for example Baptist. And let’s say that some thing happened in that church that I was not too pleased with - maybe they changed the style of music, changed the carpet to a colour I didn’t like - or something a little more weighty like not electing my preferred elder, or employing a new pastor different to the one I wanted. And now imagine my response to such a decision - I kick up a big fuss in the church, complain and disrupt proceedings… and then walk down the road and sign up as a member of the local mosque! Doesn’t make sense does it? For a Christian, no matter how cheesed off I may be, I should remain within the Christian church - not go and join the Muslims.
This is how I see these Hilary Clinton supporters who are threatening to vote for McCain because she got defeated by Obama (and now also was not selected as his VP choice). I’m no expert in US politics but surely policies and party loyalties should come before personality? Obama and Clinton are not too distant from each other in terms of policies and would probably take the USA in similar directions as President, but both are miles away from Republican John McCain. So why would any person who previously supported Hilary give their vote to McCain instead of Obama? It just seems so incredibly childish and petulant to me. If they are opposed to President Bush, how could they risk 4 or more years of the same by voting republican purely on the basis of sour grapes?
Hopefully these fruitcakes are just a vocal minority (see the CNN forums if you want to sample some of their idiotic ramblings) and the majority of Clinton voters will get in line behind Obama. Will be interesting to watch the events unfolding in Denver over the next few days…
Tags : clinton, mccain, obama, us politics
Categories : Politics | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
It’s great watching Mia get to know and love her brothers more as she gets older. She thinks they are hilarious, as you can see in this video…
Tags : luke, Mia, Owen, Video, youtube
Categories : Family, Mia, Video | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Social networking - it’s the big buzzword at the moment. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and many others are the latest extension of the blogosphere, and are reaching a much greater crowd for whom maintaining a proper blog would not be considered. Politicians such as Barack Obama and many other well known personalities are using these sites to their advantage. Even my wife now has her own facebook!
The two main sites I’ve used are facebook and twitter, which have different, but sometimes overlapping, uses. Facebook has been good for connecting with current friends and family, old friends from school and Uni and elsewhere, and even allowed me to maintain some contact with some Canadian friends I met in Uganda last year. The applications of facebook are myriad - from messages and chat (as Jen discovered for herself last night), photo and video sharing, through to a vast range of mini apps, ranging from the useful to the completely stupid.
Twitter is much simpler - you just post a short, SMS length message which goes onto a timeline of messages from you and your twitter friends. It’s hard to explain the appeal of this but it can be good for just posting quick status updates or having extended (though sometimes difficult to follow) conversations. A primary use of twitter for me (as for ob1 and others) is to feed twitter posts into my blog so as to maintain a level of activity here when I am to busy to create full blog updates.
And these are just two examples - there are plenty more other overlapping and different social networking sites.
The problem for some of us then becomes that if we are signed up to 2 or more of these sites it becomes :
I know there are some apps which attempt to solve problem 2 but I am yet to investigate them. However I have found an excellent solution to the first issue - http://ping.fm
Using this site you can type in your twitter style update (or a longer blog for sites which support that) and it will be instantly sent to as many of these different networking sites as you are registered for. As I said my 2 main sites are twitter and facebook, however along the way I have signed up with plurk, livejournal, myspace and several others - so this stops them from lying completely idle. It also has the advantage that I can update ping.fm (and hence everything else) not only from a web interface but also by IM and a range of other mini-apps, which is useful for mobile updating. Definitely worth checking out if you use any of these sites. Currently it’s still in Beta (though works perfectly) and you need a code to register. The current code is “pingitlikeitshot” but if you find that doesn’t work let me know and I’ll try and get you a newer one.
EDIT (Aug 16) : new code for ping.fm is “vivalaping”
Tags : facebook, Internet, ping.fm, social networking, Twitter
Categories : Blogs, Internet | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
The focus of the world is on sport over the next fortnight, and the best international sport not being featured in Beijing would have to be cricket. I’m not a huge sports fan but I have always been a lover of cricket. Cricket is huge in Australia, and heroes like the great Don Bradman are honoured like saints… but perhaps cricket is even more saintly than we imagined…
According to an ancient Armenian manuscript, Jesus may have played a form of cricket as a child on the shores of the sea of Galilee. Check out this fascinating story from The Age. It seems Jesus had an unfair advantage in this form of beach cricket though, with his ability to walk on water! Cool.
Tags : cricket, jesus, Sport
Categories : Christianity, News, Religion, Sport, Sports | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
The Global Ambition of Rick Warren
this is a great article from Time about Saddleback megachurch pastor Rick Warren, author of the Purpose Driven Life. Warren cops a bit of flack on the Christian web, both from conservative dogmatic types and from some emerging types, for being a bit of a lightweight, too compromising, not conservative enough, not liberal enough etc etc - but perhaps this is part of his success. He has managed to present the gospel message in a way that connects with the average person in a real and meaningful way. Although a very smart guy, he keeps his message simple and direct so as not to overwhelm people.
So I’ve always kinda liked Warren, but his story gets better. Not content with having a massive church and being a best selling writer (who gives away most of his earnings though), Warren is now moving more into the political sphere. Fortunately he’s not just becoming yet another of the divisive, condemnatory Religious Right - rather he seeks a more conciliatory, unifying approach to Christian involvement in politics. He seems to see the role of the church as being a force for good, making positive changes in the world, rather than just a defense against bad.
He says he is more interested in questions that he feels are “uniting,” such as “poverty, HIV/AIDS, climate change and human rights”
Interesting article about Warren, his global PEACE plan for Christian mobilization, and his upcoming political forum where he will have both Obama and McCain together for one of the first times this campaign.
Tags : Church, Politics
Categories : Church, Links, Politics | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Ok time for me to knuckle down and get started studying, before I get too far behind. This is challenging for me in a number of ways :

Tags : Mac, study, University
Categories : Computers, Mac, Personal, Technology, University | 0 Comments
Categories : Twitter | 0 Comments
Very wet day here in Rockingham. I got soaked between the car and the café. You can’t see it in the photo but there is actually an island a couple of kilometres across the bay, Garden Island. It is barely visible today. Just waiting for my oceanside lunch of fish & chips to arrive, hoping my patient doesn’t have her baby just yet…
Tags : flickr, Local, photos
Categories : Local, Personal, photos | 0 Comments
Doing this as a bit of a test post to make sure all is still working properly.
My domain was hit by a bit of a spam attack over the last 2 days and we were without email and any that were sent to us during that period have been lost. It’s a terrible feeling to be without email, not knowing if I am missing out on something important. Almost as if the postman was in an accident and his motorbike exploded - we may never know what letters we may have missed, burned up in the accident.
Anyway, if you have sent me or Jennifer any important emails or the last 2 days please send them again. It seems like the email system is all back to normal again but I keep sending myself emails to double check. Fortunately I now have my uni email address which has been a useful backup during this time. If anyone wants this address it is paul . baggaley at jcu . edu . au
Anyway patients to see and babies on the way….
Categories : Housekeeping | 0 Comments
Posting tweet...