Baggas' Blog

I can’t get enough of this worship band from California at the moment. Their music just takes things in a different direction compared to say Hillsong (and I’m not criticising them for a second, just emphasising the differences). There’s a lot more freedom and spontaneity in their worship, often resulting in 8-9 minute tracks! There’s a real life and energy in the vocals – I love the little “haha” laugh leader Kim Walker often does when she’s singing, like worshipping God is actually something that’s fun to do, that makes her laugh. It just seems so genuine.

I’ve posted some of their tracks before, but here’s a couple more from their second to last album “Your Love Never Fails” The first is the title track, that I just cannot stop listening to. The second features the brilliant vocals of Kim Walker – especially in the second half it is phenomenal. I love the semi-goofy stage presence she has also, like she’s just worshipping God in her own way, not trying to impress others. Listen out for her laugh in there too… I love that song but somehow the lyrics of the second verse still seem a little inappropriate but judge for yourself. Regardless, I am hooked on this band at the moment. Just wish we could introduce new songs a little faster at church – there’s just so much I would love for us to do!

For more, browse YouTube, check out their website, or even better, get hold of some of their CDs for yourself. Brilliant!

Thanks goes out to John for sending me this video. It’s a pretty funny rendition of what happens when corporate advertising mixes with Christian worship :

I’m not sure about the rest of this guy Tim Hawkin’s clips though, “Cletus Take the Reel” might appeal to fans of Carrie Underwood, but at all costs avoid the “I Don’t Drink Beer” clip – it’s just plain bad on so many levels ;P

On a similar topic, this reminded me of another great worship related “info-mercial” : Me Worship…

And to round out this triumvirate of worship related humour, how could I neglect this classic song “Jesus is a friend of mine” by Sonseed! (the thing is I still can’t decide whether this was intended as a joke or not? but it’s hilarious nonetheless)

Ok if you like the Muppets and/or you like classic rock (a la Queen), and you’re not one of the 8 million or more people who have already seen it, then check out this video.. very funny

For anyone who, like me, didn’t catch the Apple event last week with Steve Jobs et al, here’s an incredible, really nice, abbreviated version where they discuss their fantastic, great products…

Ever wished there was an easy way to save YouTube clips on your iPhone or iPod, or even to have them download automatically?

Here’s a great website I’ve discovered : http://www.rsshandler.com This site allows you to enter the details of a YouTube Feed or Playlist, and then creates a URL which you can use to subscribe to a “podcast” of the clips in that feed. That might sound a bit complicated but the instructions on the site are very easy to follow. Once you’ve generated a feed URL on the website, open iTunes – go to the ‘Advanced’ menu, then ‘Subscribe to Podcast’.. copy the URL into the box that comes up and Bob’s your uncle.

It works great. You can susbcribe to YouTube’s feeds (eg Featured, Most Popular etc) or create your own playlists (for example I’ve created a Humour, Music, and Family playlist. The only drawback is it seems not all clips can be successfully converted into iTunes format, but most can.

Give it a try! If you need any advice about it send me an email and I’ll try to help.

Cheers

I don’t know if I would want to nominate my “favourite Beatle” – they are all awesome, although I’d probably if pushed lean towards the more serious ones (or the dead ones) John and George. Similarly I wouldn’t want to have to choose my favourite Beatles song, but certainly “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” would be right up there – not only is it an awesome song written by George, but Eric Clapton played guitar on the original. Few would probably immediately nominate the artist known once again as Prince in the same category of guitar heroes as Clapton, but check out his amazing, theatrical solo in this tribute to George… this man can wield a Telecaster with style!

And while we’re on the topic, here’s another great but different version of this song, from a Ukelele maestro Jake Shimabukuro. I picked up this guy’s CD while we were in Hawaii a couple of years ago – it’s amazing. I often get tired of people mistaking my mandolin for a Ukelele (it’s got twice as many strings and looks and sounds completely different people!) but if I could play half as good as this guy I wouldn’t mind so much…

Saturday we went and hung out at the beach for a while – the kids played on the sand, played  bit of cricket, and then went and sat in a cafe for a while… very nice. Once again, another reminder of what a great place Rockingham has been to live in all these years…

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…

Here’s a video from yesterday of Mia and her cousin Seth, who is just a few weeks older than her. We have never seen her laugh as much as she does here – one of those moments I’m really glad to have captured on video…

Although I love my music, and am involved in church music, I must admit I rarely listen to any Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) – I just find in general it’s a bit lame or boring or not great quality. Even with fairly good bands like Jars of Clay or Kutless or Switchfoot I tend to find myself listening to the album once or twice and then filing it away. They often have one or two good songs but for the most part it’s fairly boring.

So I was pleasantly surprised with my first listen to the band Casting Crowns. I’ve heard their name plenty but never felt compelled to listen to their music until I picked up their CD Lifesong at Koorong recently (partly due to a recommendation in a recent book I read by Roger Olson). Well it’s a great CD. Musically very tight, melodic and interesting. The main male vocalist sounds a bit like Neil Diamond in places but that’s not necessarily a bad thing And the lyrics are honest and original and generally down to earth. Only a couple of lines in one (otherwise very cool) song I didn’t quite see eye to eye with theologically, but at least the fact that I have listened that intently shows how much the music and lyrics have otherwise got me hooked in. I keep intending to take this CD out of my car and play something different, but after at least 5 times through I’m still keen. Well worth getting hold of.

Here’s one of my favourite tracks – Praise you in the storm

Read the rest of this entry »

This movie has kinda crept up on us without a lot of buzz or hype – the new CGI Star Wars movie which will be released on August 14th in Australia (one day before America). I first saw the preview in the cinema just a couple of weeks ago but before that hadn’t heard anything about it. Apparently this will be the lead in to a new series on Cartoon Network.

Here’s the preview which I just found at Hello Internet. As Ben points out it’s a bit strange seeing Lucasfilm and Star Wars with a Warner Bros intro instead of 20th century fox

Much has been made in recent years of people filling out their religion on census forms as ‘Jedi’

Well here’s what you’ve been waiting for – a documentary examining the inside workings of a Jedi church. They seem like Calvinist Jedis though, “I wish I could tell everyone they can be saved but they can’t. If you don’t have the midichlorians God doesn’t want you – it’s that simple.”

Worth a chuckle – I especially like the bit where Darth Maul goes forward for the altar call

It’s been some time since I’ve posted any videos of Mia so here’s a quick clip of her from yesterday. Also enjoy the music, which Luke created (with a little help from me) using Apple GarageBand.

I walked into the study this morning to find our two boys Owen and Luke sitting at the computer laughing their heads off. The video below, which they had discovered themselves on YouTube, was the reason. See what you think…

SO can you accurately locate Bolivia, Ivory Coast, and Turkmenistan on a world map?

If not then you have some catching up to do. Take a look at this video of a 2 year old geographical prodigy. I would bet that the vast majority of our high school students wouldn’t come close…

Came across a video similar to this one on cnn.com today and thought I’d go on The Google and see if I could find a YouTube version to post for y’all. This is not exactly the same but it’s essentially the same basic story – classic Bushims! Ain’t the internets a wonderful thing!

Well I’m back to working slightly longer days this week after doing half days for the school holidays. For the second half of the holidays it didn’t seem all that slack though as I still had babies being born almost every day which meant early mornings and late nights and other hospital visits in between. This week has been a little quieter on the baby front although I’ve got my second one on the way today (no idea what time she will deliver though) and work here in the surgery is reasonably sedate. I do have a smallish pile of paperwork to get through but rather than doing that I’ve been putting my time to us catching up with some episodes of the Amazing vlog show on YouTube. This is an almost daily video blog produced by Mr Internet and his compadres. The episodes are well produced, funny at times, and interesting. At least I found them interesting but I know most of the guys who are doing it so maybe if you have no idea who they are you might not be so enthralled.

Anyway here’s the first episode – I’ll leave it up to you to check out the rest if you want…

Here’s the latest video of our baby Mia – now nearly eight weeks old. My how she’s grown!

As I mentioned yesterday, I had to rebuild my PC this week, which included a clean install of Vista and all my other software. So here’s my list of some essential programs for Windows. Anyone have any other suggestions they would add to this list?

• Mozilla Firefox
• Mozilla Thunderbird (email)
• Office
• Google Picasa (photos)
• Exact Audio Copy (CD ripper) with LAME (MP3 encoder)
• Tag & Rename (MP3 tagger)
• iTunes & Quicktime

This next one is not essential, but I wanted to test out a game on the new PC and ended up downloading Trackmania Nations Forever. This has to be one of the best free games in history – basically it’s a racing game with a range of extreme tracks and online racing – all for free. I enjoyed the previous version of this game but it wouldn’t run on Vista so it’s nice to have an updated version that works. If you like racing games or just want something to help you waste a few minutes then definitely download this game. Here’s a YouTube trailer for it…

Just upgraded my blog software to WordPress 2.5. I think I’ve been stuck in 2.1 for quite some time now – for some reason I never bothered to update to the versions in between. Upgrading to 2.5 was pretty quick and painless, and certainly the interface seems much nicer with more powerful editing and management features. And most of my plugins seem to work quite well.

The remainder of this post will be a bit of a test post to try and make sure some things are still working… but read on nonetheless…

To test the YouTube embedding, here’s a video clip from Nickel Creek, one of my favourite bands at the moment, and part of my ongoing journey into bluegrass…

Here’s a quote from one of the books I’m currently reading :

Our life’s dance is not painted for us in footsteps on the floor. It’s not laid out so we know where to place our next step. We simply have to judge which steps best fit the rhythms that we hear.

~ Paul Marshall Heaven is not my Home p62

And the new version has tags. I’ve never previously bothered to use tags on my blog, choosing to stick simply with categories. But since wordpress 2.5 supports it natively, and the rest of the web is going that way, I guess I’ll be tagging my blog posts from now on…