Baggas' Blog

I’m still not a huge Twitter devotee and if forced to choose between it and facebook I would pick the latter, but I do still cross-post to it and follow my feed every day or two on my iPhone.

If, like me, you’ve dabbled in Twitter you may not understand some of the bewildering abbreviations they use. This article gives a great run down on some of the features of Twitter, and there are plenty of other twitter related resources on his site as well : Twitter FAQ

I continue to not be too active here in this blog due to study/family/ministry/work/facebook etc, although have been a little more involved in our worship team’s blog here : http://wccworship.wordpress.com/

In the process I’ve recently discovered a few brilliant worship guitar blogs that have really got me inspired. Here’s a few of them :

• Guitar for Worship
• Guitar Praise
• Worship Guitar Guy
• Les Paul Player Doctor

They are all now fixtures in my newsreader and all are excellent, but I’d recommend the first one especially. This dude has a mountain of good material, loves U2, and is pretty damn funny too. So if you’re into that sort of thing, check it out. In the meantime I’ll be off hiding out in facebook as usual.

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.

• The Exigent City – this is a fascinating in-depth article from the New York Times on the history, sociology and architecture of refugee camps around the world. They also have a good article on the groth of new cities.
• Ben Witherington writes an excellent post on God’s freedom, love, and human free-will. I’ve been pondering some of these issues lately so this is very timely.
• On the US election, this article compares the online presence of Obama and McCain, and this article looks at McCain’s strategy in searching for a Vice President – Google!
• Apple News from the WWDC conference. A better, cheaper iPhone with 3G and GPS, coming to Australia soon (wonder how long I will be able to resist?). An upgraded .Mac service (no trouble resisting that) and a new Mac OSX ‘Snow Leopard’ next year. Read a summary of some of the buzz here. My only disappointment is that I was hoping to see an upgraded version of the MacBook Air with more storage and RAM – guess I’ll keep waiting for that one… until the next Stevenote..

A bittersweet look at ten years of MP3s

Excellent article here looking back on ten years since the first MP3 players were produced. The author mentions some of the good things about digital music, but also some of the things he misses such as borrowing and lending music, shopping for used music, album liner notes and artwork, and (my favourite) music as furniture.

I can relate to many of his points. I jumped on the MP3 bandwagon fairly early, using my dialup connection in the heyday of Napster to download hundreds of tracks. It was slow but fun in a way, and challenging -like trying to find that elusive final song you were missing from an album, or the rare album that few people had. And although it was anonymous there was still the pleasure of finding a user with similar music tastes and a huge collection of songs – even better if they had a fast internet connection to leech from. And there was the built in chat box that added at least a little bit of human interaction into the process. None of the P2P software I’ve used since has been quite the same, although I did use one called DC++ a few years back that came close. But by then we had broadband, which took some of that challenge out of the whole thing and gave us the ability to flood our hard drives with vast quantities of files that we were unlikely to ever seriously listen to. And after a while the whole downloading thing just lost it’s shine. Now we have bit-torrent which is easy and fast, but no fun.

Going back to the points in the article above I guess I’ve come the full circle as well. I now purchase more CDs than I ever have before. Admittedly it’s partly because I have more income than before, but it’s also because I like to have the CDs in my hand, reading the notes, looking to see what track is coming up next, and sitting on my shelf as a reminder of what I have and what I like, instead of being tucked away on a hard drive. I totally get the whole “music as furniture” appeal – a bit chunk of the wall in the room I’m sitting in is full of CDs (as you can see in the photo, taken from the couch I’m sitting on with my iSight camera). A related concept is the “books as furniture” one – few things make a room or house more inviting and appealing than shelves and shelves of books. If you’ve been to my house you’ll know I’m definitely a big adherent to this.

I love my iPod and having a collection of digital music at my fingertips, but it’s still just not the same as having something physical to hold, to collect, and to enjoy as part of the overall experience of the music. I’ve bought a few albums over iTunes but probably at least half of those I’ve then gone on to purchase the physical CD. Nowadays I don’t bother as much with the iTunes store unless I’m in a real hurry to get something or if I just want an individual track for some reason (like this Reindeer song I sang at our Christmas carols event last year). I did get one album on iTunes last month – Luka Bloom’s Before Sleep Comes (which is a brilliant mellow acoustic album) but I liked it so much I’ll definitely be getting the CD. I rarely acquire music now by less legitimate means, but even then it will usually now lead to a purchase. For example I’ve had the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack languishing on my hard drive for years (I think I actually got it when I traded some MP3 CDs with a friend rather than downloading it myself) – never listened to it until a month or so ago, and when I finally did I immediately went out and bought the CD at the next opportunity.

So from my perspective at least the music industry need not fear the death of the CD just yet. For all it’s benefits digital music is still just not quite the same.

I’ve discussed this site before, but on the occasion of passing 800 books catalogued I thought I’d give another mention to what is perhaps my favourite website – LibraryThing. This is a simply brilliant site with which you can keep track of your book collection, as well as interact with other book lovers in a number of ways. You can get book recommendations, write or read book reviews, and interface with online stores such as amazon, and even local bookshops if you live in the USA. But it’s not completely American focussed – you can search for your books in the catalogues of a huge number of libraries internationally (including several in Australia) and in a variety of languages.

I especially like the way you can use your LibraryThing data to interface with other websites, like I do with this blog. They also offer widgets and plugins for a variety of other web spaces, although as yet I haven’t found a really good one for Facebook.

Anyway if you have a book collection, take a look at LibraryThing. And if you want to see my profile, as an example of what it looks like then go here.

I love Wikipedia and I love guitars, so this is the perfect site for me : Wikipedia Guitar Portal.

Links to all the Wikipedia articles about the guitar, a guitar related article of the day (today’s is George Harrison), pictures, trivia, annniversaries and much more. Totally excellent!

Just been playing around with one of the most handy websites I’ve found in recent months, especially useful for travellers or for those wanting to communicate with people overseas – TimeandDate.com.

This site gives you accurate and detailed information about the time and weather for just about any point on the globe. You can customise it to reflect your own preferred cities and formats (eg I changed the temperatures from farenheit to Celsius so I can understand them) and you can make a custom World clock page that you can share with others. The one I made is here – it has the current time for all the stops we’ll be making on our big trip in July. Clicking on the name of each of the cities brings up a whole wealth of current information about the conditions there.

A very simple looking site, but incredibly useful. I love these clock applications for some reason. In addition to this site I have 3 cities in the toolbar on my Vista computers (one of the cool new features of Vista allowing multiple clocks) and at least 2 world time programs on my Palm Treo with little maps and multiple times listed. Very handy indeed.

Ok now this is cool, well at least in a nerdy sort of way. I’m sure everyone has heard of Wikipedia by now, the incredibly useful internet encyclopaedia. Well now the StarWars Universe has it’s own version, the aptly titled Wookieepedia – the Star Wars Wiki. The depth of information here is surprising, going far beyond the six movies and deep into the vast realm of other Star Wars related fiction. A person could get lost in this world, and it seems to me some devoted fans probably have…

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…

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.

If you’re looking for something to while away a few hundred hours of your time, and are interested in checking out some Christianity related websites – here’s a page you can check out – Sites Unseen. This is an absolutely humungous list of Christian sites in a large variety of categories, including blogs – these guys sure have done a lot of work compiling it. Plenty of interesting stuff to check out.