Since I started blogging I’ve found that TV interests me less and less. Am I alone? Please, for the love of Dr. Phil, tell me I’m not alone in this. It’s like, the whole time I’m just sitting there; craving interaction with the show I’m watching. But I can’t interact; all I can do is sit there like a zombie. I can’t contribute my thoughts, I can’t tell them they’re being stupid nor can I tell them that this Gray’s Anatomy episode is too similar to one of last season’s ER episodes to be legit. The shows I love watching, conversely, are those that I can interact with like American Idol (btw, Chris gets each one of my text message votes.) Am I alone? Is there anyone else out there in blog-o-land that can relate to my boredom with TV?
Monthly Archives: April 2006
Honk if You :Heart: Jesus
Nothing beats an ice skating trip with the ol’ youth group to give me stuff to write about. I take the youth ice skating once a year to the Alpharetta Family Skate Center a.k.a. “The Cooler” which by the way, I highly recommend to anyone in the Atlanta area who’s looking for a place to go ice skating. The trip was great. I’ll tell ya, you just never know what to expect when you put a dozen teenagers in a bus and drive for two hours. You may think you’ve seen everything but I promise, they’ll always surprise you.
We were plodding down highway 285 which is basically just a big circle that goes around Atlanta. I had the radio tuned to the local top 40 radio station, Star94, not because I particularly enjoy it but because the students do. Some bubble-gum song was on the radio, possibly by Nick Leche, which all the students were singing along with when all of a sudden they all got real quiet. Immediately my youth pastor “trouble” sensors started going off and I looked in the rearview mirror only to see each of the students holding a hand written sign up against the windows that said, “HONK IF YOU ? JESUS.”
To my amazement they got 72 honks within 4 hours of driving (yes, they kept count.) They also got other various gestures from passing motorists. Some people, evidently, don’t ? Jesus. Honking at the sign, of course, being the deciding factor as to where exactly your eternal destination lies.
Hopefully the students were able to make some good memories through doing that today. What good memories do you have of hanging out with your friends in high school?
Embrace Your Geekiness
So I was perusing the May 2006 issue of Cosmo Girl and…what? Oh, like you guys never flip through those women’s magazines. Look, my sister-in-law subscribes to Cosmo Girl, she left this issue sitting on the lamp stand, I had to make an emergency trip to the “reading room” if you catch my drift. I was in a pinch (or was it a clench?) and it was the only thing I could find on such short notice besides the Janet Evanovich books laying around. Besides, it’s more interesting to read Cosmo Girl than the back of the shampoo bottle over and over again.
A_n_y_w_a_y… I was reading flipping through this magazine and came across an article in which Jon Heder (Napolean Dynomite) gives five tips for accepting yourself for who you are. A recent post by Natalie got me thinking along the lines of geekery in the blog-oh-sphere. It seems to me (I think I read it somewhere, I can’t remember where though; if you know where I got this idea leave the link and stuff) that there are three groups of bloggers out there.
Group one is the popular group. They’re the ones that have this blogging thing down pat. Everyone knows their name.
Group two is the wannabe’s. They want to be in the popular group.
Group three is the punks. They’re not in the popular group and don’t care. They’re just doing their own thing and don’t give a rip what anyone thinks about them.
I suspect that most bloggers are in group number two. It’s with that in mind that I want to give a blogger-adapted list of Cosmo Girl’s five ways to accept the fact that you’re not one of the popular people…yet. Folks, let’s embrace our geekiness.
- Be confident in yourself. You may not be in the Technorati Top 100. Heck, you might not be in the Top 100,000. But that doesn’t mean you suck. Chances are you’re pretty good at blogging but haven’t been doing it long enough for anyone to know who you are. Keep at it, do it for the joy of doing it; not for the joy of getting noticed.
- Forget the “cool kids.” All those popular bloggers are geeks just like you and me. They all have days when they don’t know what to write about, they all wonder what other people think about them. You are fundamentally no different from them. Find encouragement in that!
- Laugh off insults. I’ve only had one troll come by my site, I’m very lucky for that. Trolls suck. But that’s not the kind of insult I’m talking about here. I’m talking about Technorati and those other blog ranking services. When you go there and see you’re number 1,000,000,000 on the list of popularity you need to laugh it off. Those numbers don’t mean anything unless you let them.
- Show off your strengths. Are you good at designing but can’t write too well? Then design yourself a killer blog and write the best you can. Do you suck at design but excel at writing? Then focus on writing, or movie reviews or horse show reports. Focus on what you do well. If you’re a math whiz, why not blog about Math? Blog about what you enjoy, it’s that simple. If you’re like me and you’re not great at anything in particular your blog just rambles on and on eventually sinking to the level of talking about Cosmo Girl.
- Stick by other geeks. That is, there’s nothing wrong with hanging out with bloggers who have like interests. I’m probably not going to go hang out at the Car blogs because that stuff bores me. I’ll go to the religious blogs, or the design blogs, or the personal blogs. There’s a great sense of belonging you feel when you find a group of other bloggers who you can relate with. There’s nothing wrong with that.
In the end it all comes down to being comfortable with who you are as a blogger. Be yourself, laugh at yourself too.
What advice would you give to other bloggers? What experiences can you share that might help someone else who’s going through the same thing?
102 Movies You Must See
It’s Wednesday, and for me that’s the busiest day of the week. So in light of my compressed time table I’m following Kottke’s lead and posting Ebert’s list of the 102 movies you must see.
they were the movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They’re the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat “movie-literate.”
So, here’s the list. Beside each movie I’ve seen there’s an asterisk.
2001: A Space Odyssey
The 400 Blows
8 1/2
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
- Alien
All About Eve
Annie Hall
Apocalypse Now
- Bambi
The Battleship Potemkin
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Big Red One
The Bicycle Thief
The Big Sleep
- Blade Runner
Blowup
Blue Velvet
Bonnie and Clyde
Breathless
Bringing Up Baby
- Carrie
- Casablanca
Un Chien Andalou
Children of Paradise / Les Enfants du Paradis
Chinatown
Citizen Kane
A Clockwork Orange
The Crying Game
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Days of Heaven
- Dirty Harry
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Do the Right Thing
La Dolce Vita
Double Indemnity
Dr. Strangelove
Duck Soup
- E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial
- Easy Rider
- The Empire Strikes Back
The Exorcist
- Fargo
Fight Club
Frankenstein
The General
The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II
- Gone With the Wind
- GoodFellas
- The Graduate
Halloween
- A Hard Day’s Night
Intolerance
It’s a Gift
- It’s a Wonderful Life
- Jaws
The Lady Eve
Lawrence of Arabia
M
- Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior
The Maltese Falcon
The Manchurian Candidate
Metropolis
Modern Times
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Nashville
The Night of the Hunter
Night of the Living Dead
- North by Northwest
Nosferatu
On the Waterfront
Once Upon a Time in the West
Out of the Past
Persona
Pink Flamingos
- Psycho
- Pulp Fiction
Rashomon
Rear Window
Rebel Without a Cause
Red River
Repulsion
The Rules of the Game
Scarface
The Scarlet Empress
Schindler’s List
The Searchers
The Seven Samurai
- Singin’ in the Rain
Some Like It Hot
A Star Is Born
A Streetcar Named Desire
Sunset Boulevard
Taxi Driver
The Third Man
Tokyo Story
Touch of Evil
- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Trouble in Paradise
- Vertigo
- West Side Story
The Wild Bunch
- The Wizard of Oz
26 out of 102 ain’t so bad. Some of those flicks I haven’t seen but probably should, like Schindler’s List, Fight Club, and A Streetcar Named Desire. Oh well. Looks like I’m a long ways off from being the movie aficionado I long to be. (By the way, that last statement was sarcasm.)
You Want to Share, Don’t You?
Lately we’ve been steadily teaching Thomas to share. After all, learning to share is arguably one of the most important social skills one can possess. Not sharing in grade school will usually result with you sitting alone on the playground, watching all the other kids play while you pick your nose. Similarly, not sharing in adulthood may result with you sitting alone at a bar, watching the other adults play while you pick your nose. Needless to say, we don’t want Thomas picking his nose. We want him to learn to share his time, his resources and his affection. Much to my delight he’s really picked up on this sharing concept; especially considering he’s about to turn two. He’ll give hugs at the drop of a hat (any hat) and he is more than willing to share a toy he’s playing with. But lately he’s developed an interesting and somewhat disturbing habit of wanting to share with the TV.
When he’s watching Elmo or Veggie Tales he badly wants to share his sippy cup with the characters on the screen. Stretching out his little arms, cup in hand, he gets this look in his eyes of “please, Elmo, pleeeeeeease have a taste. This is good stuff.” Much to his dismay Elmo never takes the cup. My first instinct as a logical male is to explain to him that it’s a fruitless endeavor to offer his sippy cup to an inanimate object. But to Thomas, Elmo is quite real, quite alive. So I try to put it in terms he’ll understand like, “Oh, Elmo’s not thirsty right now” or “Elmo has his own cup” but I don’t think his two year-old mind grasps it yet. I don’t think he understands that Elmo is in a studio somewhere with a hand stuck up his butt; that hand being attached to a man who’s cashing in on my son’s obsession with a furry red puppet that tells him over and over that he loves him.
Or perhaps Thomas is simply making a logical deduction based upon Elmo telling him he loves him: that if 1. Elmo possesses feelings of love then 2. surely he’s an organic life form and 3. as such requires water and food. Either way, I’m hoping Thomas will soon figure out that Elmo’s not real. Yeah, he’ll probably figure that out right around the time he starts believing in Santa. But at least then “Santa” will get an offering of milk and cookies and not a drool-covered, crusty sippy cup filled with 50% apple juice and 50% water.
People2Pray
Most of you have heard about the site that just went Beta called “People 2 Pray.” It’s basically a site where you can post your prayer requests and others can post theirs. Confused are we? Skeptical as to the practicality of this service? I’m here to cut through the hype and give you the low down on People 2 Pray dot com.
Summary: If you’re looking for a way to connect with friends and family to share prayer requests then P2P may be right up your ally. To me it seems like the flickr of prayer; that’s not an insult but rather an observation. Overall the site is very well put together, well designed with great web2.0 graphics and AJAX is implemented in useful ways. I found myself thoroughly enjoying my experience at People 2 Pray.
Purpose of People2Pray: The purpose of P2P is two-fold. One purpose is to allow you to post and share your prayer requests with others online. The amount of privacy you want your request to have is completely up to you. In other words you can decide exactly who you want to be able to view your request. In order of most private to least private the request settings are: “No one can see it, only I can view my request,” “Share this request with those friends and communities which I choose” and “Share this request with everyone, this will be a public request.” The other purpose is to enable you to basically keep a prayer journal for yourself online. Since you’re able to restrict public viewing of any of your prayer requests this is a great way to keep a private, personal prayer journal which is a must-have for every Christian.
How it works: Signing up for this service is a breeze, 100% free and requires only a username, a password and a valid email address. Of course there’s the ever-present Terms Of Service agreement which is fairly easy to understand and should be read before signing up for this type of site. Screenshot:
After you sign up you’re taken to a screen from which you can set up your profile, add a new prayer request or go straight to viewing different communities and browsing the prayer requests of others. Setting up your profile really should be the first thing you do. Make sure, however, that the information you enter is exactly what you want it to be because while your prayer requests can be set to “private” your profile can not. Thankfully, you may enter as much or as little information about yourself as you feel comfortable sharing; and unlike Myspace, there’s no one asking you what high school you went to or whether you’re gay or straight.
If your purpose is to use this site solely for your own private prayer journal and don’t really want to share any prayer requests via this service then this is about as much as you’ll need to do. Just start entering prayer requests and have fun with the AJAX interface.
However, there’s much more this site can be used for. You can connect with people you already know, sharing prayer requests amongst each other. You can also dive into the public arena, meeting new people and praying for each other.
When you make a prayer request you assign it a category as well as one or more tags. In this way you can search for the request later (if it’s private) or others can find it via tag or category (if it’s public.) Here’s a screenshot of what the “connect” section of P2P looks like:
When you go to “Find People” or “Find Communities” you’re taken to a page that has a tag cloud with various keywords to search by:
You can now click away to your heart’s content. When you find a prayer request that particularly hits home with you or one you want to remember and check on later you can flag it. Flagging a request is sort of like book marking it, you’re able to find it later much more easily. You’re also able to leave comments on other’s prayer requests. Comments should of course be positive and encouraging.
People 2 Pray is intelligently put together, very intuitive and has the potential to be extremely useful. I’ve only hit on the main parts of the site in this review, I encourage you to sign up and take it for a test drive yourself. I can see this site being of particular interest to Bible study groups, youth groups and leadership teams. It could also be utilized by family or friends that are separated by distance. It’s by far the best way I know for people to stay up to date on each other’s prayer requests and answers. I give it two thumbs up.
[cross-posted at Blog Ministry]
Comfort Music
Everyone’s heard of comfort food, but what about comfort music? I don’t know about any of you, but when I get down in the dumps there are certain songs and/or bands I can listen to that comfort me. It’s not that they necessarily get me out of the mood, in fact, many times when I’m down I like listening to depressing music because misery loves company. At any rate, I love lists so I thought I’d put together this list of my favorite comfort music.
1. Anything by The Eagles. Especially songs like “Take It Easy.”
2. Soul Asylum: “Misery.” Nothing beats a song called “Misery” when you need some comfort.
3. Counting Crows: “Rain King.” It’s a guy singing about how he deserves better than what’s been dealt to him. Now that’s comfort music.
4. The album “The Point” by Nilson. It brings me back to my childhood when I first heard it. It’s the musical equivalent of smelling a freshly sharpened pencil, reminding me of times gone by.
5. Paul Simon’s album, “Graceland.” Listening to this album instantly comforts me. I’m not really sure why it does that though. Odd.
6. Anything by Carol King. Don’t ask.
7. Harvey Danger’s album, “Little by Little.” Available for free download here I highly recommend you give it a listen. It’s a great album that totally comforts me.
So, that’s my list. What about you? What’s on your comfort music list?
Yankee Undercover
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois and lived there until I was 18 when I moved to Georgia. I’ve lived here since 1997 and in that time have come in full contact with Southern culture. I write a lot about Southern culture because it’s absolutely fascinating to me since I’m an “outsider.” I’ve also learned that there are some things which Yankees need to know about how to blend in to Southern culture and not stick out like a sore thumb. The South is a great place to live. I love it down here. I wouldn’t stay if I didn’t like it. But as a Yankee I’ve had to learn some basic survival techniques. Here are a few things you can do to apply a sort of “social camouflage” if you’re a Yankee living in the South:
1. Never call a carbonated beverage “pop.” At least, don’t call it that in public. If you ask a Southerner if they would like “a pop” they will become confused; they’ll think you’re asking them if they would like to explode. They will then look at you queerly and assume you’ve gone retarded before their very eyes.
2. Invest $5 in a camouflage ball-cap from Wal-Mart. Everyone wears one and it will match any apparel…any apparel that matters anyway (see #3 & #4.)
3. Overalls are called over-hauls and you’ll need at least one pair. They go great with the camouflage hat. They’re predominantly used by Southerners to prevent embarrassing plumbers crack. Well, at least that’s why I wear them. Was that an over-share?
4. Cowboy boots are a must if you want to blend in. I’ve seen these worn with all kinds of clothing. Normally you see them matched with uber-tight blue jeans and a big belt buckle, but they also go with baseball pants, cutoff shorts and three piece suits or dresses. There’s simply nothing they don’t compliment.
5. You need to love barbeque. If you don’t love barbeque you have to learn to fake a love for it. Barbeque is to the South what pasta is to Italy.
6. Choose sides. You’re either a Georgia Tech fan or a University of Georgia (UGA) fan. Also, only college sports matter; college basketball sort of matters, and college baseball too, but college football is king. So pick a team, and buy a hat which supports that team. You also must always make fun of anyone who supports the team you don’t. So if you’re a UGA fan you are required to insult anyone who likes Georgia Tech, and vice versa.
If you’re a Yankee undercover let me commend you. You’re a brave soul in a foreign culture. But with these principles in mind I believe that you can have your barbeque and eat it too.
10 Terms Every Christian Should Know
Shawn Anthony recently did a theological terms dump and it got me to thinking, what are some theological terms that every Christian should be familiar with? I’ve put together a short list that I consider to be the most important. This is all written from a Pseudo-Reformed Theologian’s perspective so you may disagree with some of my definitions. However, I think I’ll keep them vague enough that most Christians can agree on the definition. Remember too, this is a completely subjective list so if you get to the end and think I’ve left out some critical terms feel free to add them into the comment section.
Theology: Specifically, the study of God. Many people use this term to refer to anything having to do with God.
Canon: Those biblical writings which are commonly held to be the authoritative word of God. Anything written by Martha Stewart, for example, would not be considered Canon.
Sin: Generally speaking, sin refers to anything that falls short of or misses the mark of God’s perfect character. (Example: crashing a Mustang GT500 on purpose is a sin; God would never do that.)
Trinity: Refers to the fact that God is One and Three at the same time. See my post with illustration here. (Warning: take aspirin before studying the Trinity, may cause headaches.)
Revelation: The means by which God has made Himself known to His creation. Generally speaking there are two kinds of revelation: special and general. Special revelation refers to the Canon, general revelation refers to how God has made Himself evident in nature. (Example: we know God exists because there is chocolate.)
Salvation: Refers to the means by which a person can escape paying the penalty for their sins. I.E. belief in Christ. A.K.A. Justification.
Sanctification: This happens after Salvation. It refers to the lifelong journey a person takes in which he/she becomes more like Christ in character. Sanctification is made possible by the Holy Spirit.
Justice: Refers to an aspect of God’s Character that deals with payment for sin. (Example: O.J. Simpson getting acquitted was not justice.)
Inspiration: Refers to the fact that the writers of the Bible Canon were divinely inspired to write the words they did. Basically, God didn’t grab a pen and paper and start writing, He got others to do it for Him.
Inerrancy: Shawn gave a good summary, I’ll just quote him here.
Inerrancy means without error, fault, mistake, and/or blemish. Inerrancy is usually associated with divine to human transmission of the Bible?s original documents. The manuscripts we possess today are not characterized by inerrancy.
Did I forget any?
All That Hullabaloo
The past couple days have been very interesting ‘round these parts. I released my first theme, got mentioned in a 9rules blog post, and have watched as my head swelled to twice its normal size!
Here’s a screenshot of my mint stats (keeps track of how many visitors I’m getting, etc.), I only installed Mint a few days ago so that’s why Thursday has only 6 unique hits, I installed Mint Thursday night. 
Anyway, you can see from the red arrow that the day I released my theme the number of unique hits tripled. That’s enough to make anyone’s head swell. But alas, all good things must come to an end and today it looks like I’ve leveled back off on my traffic. Somewhere around 30-40 A little over 90 150 people have downloaded my theme though, enough to make any hobbyist blogger proud. I’m trying not to let it go to my head.
I just keep reminding myself that things will move on much as they always have. Water will go under bridges, bloggers will continue writing about what they had for lunch; they’ll keep looking for the next cool theme or breaking news they can rant about. I don’t know what, if any, effect my little theme and all the hullabaloo around here has had on the world. But who knows? A butterfly flaps its wings in Peking and in San Francisco there’s rain instead of sunshine. Can my unsleepable theme bring peace to the Middle East? Well, let’s not hold our breath.
Unsleepable
Unsleepable is so named because I lost a bit of sleep in its creation. It is a stand-alone theme for WordPress and is mostly K2 with some fairly significant design tweaks here and there.
I’d like to extend a huge thank you to Adam for helping me clean up the code and squash a few bugs on this theme.
This theme relies on a graphic to be used as the title. If you want to know how to make a graphic to use with this theme see the tutorial I wrote (This tutorial is for Photoshop.) If you’re using The Gimp to create your title graphic check out the tutorial here.
Screenshot of unsleepable 1.7:
Also available for download is unsleepable 2.0. Fundamentally it’s the same design as version 1.7 but it has a larger header, some drop shadows and is built on K2 v.0.9.1 which features rolling archives, etc.
Title Graphic How To
note, this tutorial is written for Photoshop. If you don’t have Photoshop, The Gimp is a great image manipulation program but you’ll have to figure out how to perform the steps yourself.
1. Create a new document. The size isn’t too terribly important; mine is 205×42 pixels. The background should be transparent, NOT WHITE.
2. Create a new layer. This is your text layer. Select a font you like, I used Arial. The size of the font may vary; I used 40pt.
3. Type in your text.
4. If you want to change the color of the text you may do so, it won’t affect anything.
5. Click file > save for web
6. The Matte color should be the exact same color of the background which this title image will be against. Mine is #333333.
7. Save as title.gif; upload to wp-content/themes/unsleepable/images, and you’re done!
