How will you be remembered?

I am reading through the bible right now on a 90 day reading plan. I have never had so much fun reading the scriptures before. Today I was reading in 2 Chronicles, and something really struck me:

“Jehoram was thirty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eight years. He passed away, to no one’s regret, and was buried in the City of David, but not in the tombs of the kings.”
(2 Chronicles 21:20 NIV11)


Jehoram passed away, to no one's regret. 


He was king of Judah. A descendant of David.


And when he died, NOBODY was sorry to see him go.


How do you treat others? What kind of a mark are you leaving on the world? When you die, will it be good-bye or good riddance?


Joel

Multi-Campus, Multi-Cultural

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”” - Acts 1:8 ESV

This is a picture of a hitching post. Most of you reading this blog have probably never seen one. What is remarkable about this hitching post is that it is installed at our Phelan campus, and these horses were ridden here for our Sunday morning service. Phelan is rural community and is very different than Victorville, where our main campus is. 

The people of Phelan tend to be up early to feed their animals, and indeed, Phelan is the only campus where the early service is the larger service. Phelan also is horse country, and the installation of the hitching post was met with great enthusiasm by our people. It would never work at any of our other campuses, but in Phelan, it's perfect. 

Joel

Mac OSX Lion - Apple loses the story

I have been a fan of Apple for a long, long time. I have been running Mac OS X since March 24, 2001, in other words I installed it the day it was released. It ran slowly on my 400Mhz G3 (state of the art for the day) but it was worth it to be running the future, not the past. With every release, Mac OS X has gotten consistently better until 10.7. With Lion, Apple lost the story of what makes a successful OS.

Behind the hoopla there are some serious problems with Lion, and they have not been addressed and we are at version 10.7.2. The first I have written about before, and that's the ability to lose data on network volumes. It still exists. Don't believe me? Copy a photo onto a network volume. Open it with preview and crop it. Quit preview. Try to get back to the original. Note that you can't. It is lost, gone forever in the interest of making things "simpler" for new users. 

When you try to work on a document on your own system you often get a message about the document being "locked" and requiring you to either unlock it (and make permanent changes) or duplicate it. What if I don't want to duplicate it, I just want to rotate it and print? Mac OS X inserts itself in your workflow. You cannot choose to work on something and not save it. It must. be. saved. 

Ok, so what if you want to put confidential information in a temporary document and then destroy it after you are done with it. Well, it might be hidden in a version. How nice for you. 

Today I discovered that they removed "bounce" from mail. Why? Who cares! It's a feature that some people used, and they took it away. 

I didn't begrudge Apple removing Rosetta until I went on vacation and wanted to take a few old mac games with me. I have a soft spot for Starcraft, and I never did get around to finishing Warcraft III. Guess what, both of those are PowerPC apps. In fact, I don't have a single intel native game. So my laptop can no longer play games since I installed Lion.

So, I have lost the ability to work the way I want to, I've lost the ability to control when files are altered or not, I've lost the ability to bounce email, and I've lost the ability to run any games I own. 

What have I gained?

(1) A version of Address Book that was supposed to be better, but is actually worse than the one in Snow Leopard.

(2) FileVault that I don't use because what Apple calls "imperceptable" is an unacceptable performance penalty in the real world.

(3) Finder changes. I don't notice any of these.

(4) Mail. I lost bounce, haven't noticed anything better. 

(5) Mission Control - I like this, but it totally doesn't make up for what I've lost.

(6) Preview - Add your signature. Never used it. I fear preview because it permanently alters documents I don't want it to. It freaks when you run something from a CD because it can't change it. It is far worse than the old preview in almost every way.

(7) Launchpad - Pointless

In short, Lion is a complete pile of Vista.

I think I'm going to downgrade for the first time in my Apple using career, spanning all the way back to the 128k mac. Sad days, sad days indeed.

Joel

What have we done to thanksgiving?

“It is good to give thanks to the LORD, to sing praises to your name, O Most High; to declare your steadfast love in the morning, and your faithfulness by night,” - Psalms 92:1–2 ESV

In September of 1620 the pilgrims landed in Massachusetts. What followed was a brutal winter in which about half of them died. The remaining people set about making a colony, and after a successful harvest they organized a feast, starting a tradition of taking time out of the fall season to give thanks to God for His incredible provision for us. 

Nearly four hundred years later we still celebrate Thanksgiving, and taking time to stop and give thanks for all that we have is still a great idea, just like it was in 1621.

I don't remember when I first heard the term "Black Friday" but it wasn't as a kid. What was always quietly acknowledged as an important shopping day has taken on a life of its own with the era of the internet. 

Each year the frenzy of black friday has increased a little more over the last year. Stores that used to open at 5 am started trying to out-do each other until this year it finally happened. Stores were going to open at midnight, and then Wal-Mart announced that they were opening at 10pm.

It's happened subtly, but now the time of giving thanks has become a time to look at the ads and think about all the things we DON'T have, and plan to buy them. This year people were camped out in front of Best Buy for days to buy a $200 tv. 

How long before we supercede Thanksgiving altogether with a day of "early bird" sales?

When we value a great deal more than we value giving thanks for what we have, we have seriously lost focus on what matters.

Joel

Smart TV is really dumb

A friend of mine asked me to help him buy a tv this week. We went to Best Buy and to Costco to learn what we could and find the right choice in his budget. After talking with people and looking at the various choices, we settled on an LG tv from costco.

We talked with an incredibly informative guy at costco who had great information on all of the TV's, but he was partial to LG's. He made a big deal about LG Apps and how there were tons of them etc. It made absolutely zero impact on our purchase decision, but after we got it home we decided to set it up and see what these apps were all about.

My friend has more patience than I do. I wouldn't have spent any time, but he wanted to know what he had purchased so he spent time going through their app store and this is what he found:

Having Netflix on the TV is pretty cool. You can turn the tv on, select Netflix and be watching something. Netflix + a smart tv rocks for its simplicity. Vudu is a cool idea, but seems kinda expensive ($6 to watch a new release in HD?) and at those prices has little chance of unseating redbox for blu-ray rentals.

Everything else, EVERYTHING, was colossally stupid. Do you want to get on Facebook on your tv? And type things in using a remote control? Yeah, didn't think so.

App after app was poorly executed and hampered by the interface of a remote control. Some things would want a bunch of information and then say "this is not available in your region" despite the fact that you set the region with the tv. At one point we got the error shown above when he was trying something. Gotta love it when a tv can crash and throw a .NET exception...

At the end of the day, "Smart TV" is really, really dumb. I like having Netflix built in, but otherwise I wouldn't spend a single penny to get a tv with apps over a tv without them.

Joel

TV Experiment 2.0

A couple of years ago we pulled the plug on the tv for the month of November. It was a great month. I read more than I had in the six months prior, listened to more music and found that life was just better. The kids discovered other hobbies and passions, and by and large it was a good thing.

Last time we did it we wanted to see what life was like with no television at all. It was good. This time around our plan is a little different. DirecTV is gone indefinitely. Don't know when we will turn it back on, if ever. It's not that I don't like the programming, I enjoy it immensely, and that's the problem. It's too easy to spend your life in front of the tv keeping current with Falling Skies, American Restoration, Pawn Stars, Top Shot, etc. All of those are really good shows, but they make themselves more important than they should be by always being on.

So the rules this time: No TV at all Monday through Thursday. Friday we may throw a movie on if we want to do a family movie night but otherwise no TV. We haven't decided about the weekends, but Jacob is lobbying hard for a little video game time, and we might work that in.

The interesting thing about it is that our kids were excited about it this time.

Good times ahead!

Joel

Anthem vs. 1 Cor 12

I have a few friends who have been reading Atlas Shrugged and I realized that I've never read anything by Ayn Rand. I was in a used bookstore and I found a copy of Anthem for $2 and decided to pick it up to see what all of the fuss was about.

It's an earlier work and rather short, but I quite enjoyed the first 90 pages or so. Basically the story is set in a post apocalyptic society that is all about "the brotherhood" and has completely removed the notion of self from the world. Even the word "I" is forbidden (and unknown). Everyone refers to themselves as "we" and even personal relationships are forbidden, as you are not to value one person above another.

The book is a fascinating look at the communist ideals applied to a futuristic society. The last ten pages or so are where the book gets its title, as our hero discovers the word "I" and it becomes little more than a worship of the self, completely rejecting any notion of collective good or value in anyone other than one's own self. After reading this book (it took little more than 30 minutes to read) I set it aside and opened up to the passage I had planned to read before bed. It made me smile:

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.

For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? But earnestly desire the higher gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.” - (1 Corinthians 12:12–31 ESV)

The Christian faith absolutely does not diminish the value of the one, the value of the individual, but rather exalts every person as uniquely formed in the image of God. At the same time, we are not meant to be alone, and we are better when we work together. God has given us each different talents and gifts, and to function at our best we need to involve others to do what we are not able to do well.

This is directly contrary to the message at the end of Anthem, that is essentially all about the "I" with no regard at all for anyone else. When reading a book like Anthem, it's striking how distasteful it is when the worship of self is put on display. I genuinely disliked the last ten pages of the book despite enjoying it up to that point. We are called to be servants, to treat others better than ourselves. In the words of Jesus:

“For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”” - (Mark 10:45 ESV)

Joel