Fleeing the Porpoise

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From Michael Spencer, A Contrarian Manifesto for the Church Growth Debate: “Don’t haul a video screen into my church and tell me that if I don’t show clips from The Matrix, I’m not communicating.”

Just add Last of the Mohicans, Shrek, and Braveheart to the list of movies, plus a couple of U2 songs about following, and a slew of Easter Season Purpose-Driven sermons, and you get the “high-energy contemporary postmodern worship” atmosphere I experienced at a certain PCUSA church in Baltimore two years ago, which had me fleeing for shelter to the brick walls and traditional liturgy of Old Otterbein UMC.

Contemporary worship is not evil, wrong, or necessarily shallow, but beware tapping too deeply into a pop culture which is fleeting, materialistic, and ephemeral by design, lest those aspects of the culture be transferred to the church’s sharing of the Gospel.

Tiger Cubs and Lollardy

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I woke up early this morning to hop over to the National Zoo and look at the new Sumatran tiger cubs. Cute little felines, jumping around the habitat and pawing at each other, fearful of the water yet trying to ride on Mama’s back while she swam. In the neighboring habitat, the local male lion was sprawled over a ledge, sleeping through the morning despite the efforts of a little Indian girl to wake him up with mock roars from the viewing deck.

Daniel came over in the afternoon to pick up a bed frame, and after a spicy Thai lunch, we spent the afternoon walking around DC: starting with the WW2 Memorial, we went around the Tidal Basin to Jefferson and FDR, then through the trees to the DC WW1 Memorial, and down the Reflecting Pool to Lincoln. Dan’s an interesting, richly informed man with a rich and colorful history, and one can talk to him for hours on end on just about any topic under the sun. Which is what we did. Under the hot, burning sun. ‘Twas a fun day; I never get tired of walking the monuments.

Paths, Paper, Inflection, Drawer

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A few notes to self:

  • When installing Apache on Windows, select the parent directory as target installation directory, because the installer makes the Apache directory and puts it in the folder you specify, and you don’t want it installed in d:program filesapache groupapacheapache or some such silliness.
  • When in doubt while requesting a print quote, you probably want 80 lb. white uncoated stock, no bleed.
  • That habit I picked up? Of talking like everything’s a question? I need to get rid of it?
  • The best word to test for a Northeastern accent is not “dodgeball,” but “drawer.”

Currently

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Currently working on AteneoDC.com, website of the Ateneo Alumni Association in Washington. I’m fiddling with various content management systems, trying to find a portal with good community features, but simple enough for non-web-savvy users. Right now PHPWebSite is what’s been working. It’ll be difficult wrenching the tables out of its template and making it output some standards-compliant code, though.

Currently reading The Barbarian Conversion, by Peter Fletcher. Great detailed look into medieval history as read through the quirks of hagiographic literature. So far I’ve learned about topos and the origins of the name “Ludwig” in the name of the 5th Century Frankish king, Clovis — among other things.

Currently listening to Songs of the Sephardim — medieval music of the exiled Spanish Jews. The arrangements are minimal, mostly sung by a single alto, Alice Kosloski, accompanied by strings, winds, and percussion. The songs, though simple, are haunting, plaintive, and rhythmic all at once, richly evocative of Sephardic culture, while echoing the melodic counterpoints of the Renaissance.

Currently quite annoyed at my inline skates. The brake pad has fallen out, thanks to a loose screw that I can no longer find, so I’ll to have to head down to the hardware store with my skates and a screwdriver, and hope they have extra screws of the right size. Screw that.

YSearchBlog

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Taking a PR cue from GoogleBlog, Yahoo launches YSearchBlog. Their sidebar links the GoogleBlog, too, although the YSearchBlog itself runs on Movable Type 2.661.

I remain fairly annoyed at Yahoo for allowing their search engine to be overrun with links to machine-generated prank pages, most of which have disappeared, though a stray “wasarrested” or “isshitty” URL seems to float to the top every now and then for some reason.

Guess who’s doing it even worse now: Ask Jeeves and Teoma.

Update: Emailed Zawodny about a security oversight, and dropped in a link to my problems with Yahoo for him to pass along to the search team. As I told him, a lesser mortal might have posted goatse all over the blog by now. ;) But I’ll be satisified with these screenshot snippets instead:

Screenshots of YSearchBlog MT

Canon A300 for $99

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Update: Sorry, it looks like the Canon A300 is back up to about $120. Still an okay price, but I’m going for the new Canon A400 instead.

Amazon is was selling the Canon A300 3.2MP camera for just $99. I almost threw one in my shopping cart right then and there, till I saw this Canon press release linked on Engadget. Looks like Amazon is clearing out their A300 stock for the arrival of the A400 next month.

Now I’m going to wait for the A400, since it uses SD cards, but if you’re not an early-adopter type, this is a prime opportunity to get yourself a cheap Canon A300 right now — and if you buy via this affiliate link, you help pay some of my bills, too. ;)