Archives for August, 2003
Lakeland this morning, Freehouse tonight
Nice day today. Not a lot of people in Spiritwood today but we had a great time together. That was cool. Worship was good. I was so into it, when it was time for me to preach, I was suprised by it. Drove home today through Glaslyn, North Battleford, and then home. Added about half an hour to the trip but it was a nice distraction and the most important part of the trip was a stop at Cochin Lake for some ice cream. Tonight we are hanging out with the Worship Freehouse folks.
The blood of Willi Plett covers all
Leighton has some nice things to say about me on his blog. I thought I would point out that I am reading a lot of Yoder and I do have a a great deal of respect for Anabaptists. That being said, for all of our differences, we have the one thing that can unify humanity. Willi Plett and the Calgary Flames.
Plans for Labour Day Weekend
Finish covering in the bottom of our deck
Touching up some spots on the top of the deck
Sitting on the deck
Drinking cool glasses of water on the deckListening to Play by Great Big Sea and Moby (two separate albums)done
Taking Mark to the Park onSaturday(done), Sunday, and Monday
Finish reading Erwin McManus’ new book, UprisingFiguring out how to add a recommended book section to the site that doesn’t feel cheesy(done) and code it
Play Frisbee with Wendy
Hang out at the Black Duck
See Mars
Time Machine Spam
Wired magazine tracks down the guy who is sending out the spam looking for the time machine. I remember reading it and laughing at it because I thought some spammer was just being a smart aleck. Sadly he is someone who is struggling with reality
“I expected him to tell me at that point that it was all a joke, and he’d give me the punch line,” said Hill. Instead, Hill began to worry that White was “a person challenged by reality and as such deserves our sympathy and support.”Hill’s hunch, it turns out, was correct. An investigation has revealed that the time-travel spammer is dead serious about his quest for technology that can rewind time.
A trail of Internet clues has fingered Robert “Robby” Todino as the source of the time-travel messages. In a telephone interview last week, the 22-year-old Woburn, Massachusetts, resident admitted that he has sent nearly 100 million of the bizarre messages since November 2001.
“It almost feels worthless now because the people who are monitoring my every move always seem to win. But it’s the only form of communication I have right now,” Todino said.
His father, Robert Todino Sr., worries that malicious users have preyed on Robby’s “psychological problems” and bilked him out of money.
“What bothers me is that some people are trying to sell him equipment and take advantage of him,” said Todino Sr. “He’s invested a lot of money into it and has been hurt by it.”
But Robby insists that he is “perfectly mentally stable,” and that the time-travel technology he seeks is out there somewhere.
“A lot of people will say the stuff I talk about is crazy and out of this world. But I know for a fact that it is true and does exist. Untrained minds may disagree with me, but they don’t have access to the sources that I do,” he said.
Yeah it is kind of sad.
Soularize 2003
The new site for Soularize 2003 is now online. October 8-10 in Boston, Mass. In case you missed it. The site is a PrairieFusion design.
TheOoze Blogdirectory
TheOoze.com has launched it’s own blog directory. If you think your blog would be a good fit for TheOoze’s readers, head on over today and submit your blog.
Why are the Spammers sending out SoBig.F virus?
Lockergnome has a theory and it isn’t good.
I observed back on Tuesday that my Symantec SMTP gateway was stopping SoBig.F subject lines coming from spammers (i.e., blocked via DNSBL) at over 3 times the rate that I was seeing them from Joe user types. Further, I noticed that they were sending even more SoBig.F emails than they were spam. So, why would spammers who make their living be generating emails allow their servers to be compromised? They didn’t. They are doing this on purpose and I have a theory for this. I call it my echo theory.Say that, as a spammer, you know one or more of the addresses in your database is to a spam trap - but you don’t know which one. You generate LOTS of SoBig.F emails on purpose, using your database for the forged-from addresses. Now, JoeUser has his server or client antivirus filter setup to send a reply when it encounters a virus (which is a very BAD thing, after Klez taught us about the virtues of forged addresses).
Dutifully, JoeUser’s email server or client automatically sends a helpful note off to “SpamTrap,” informing them that they are infected. Often these replies even extol how much smarter they are than “SpamTrap” because they caught it, but “SpamTrap” did not. Heck, let’s even send an email to the postmaster at SpamBait’s ISP, telling him / her how much better the BrandX filter is that JoeUser is using… but I digress.
The email server at SpamBait’s ISP sees an email to SpamTrap and says “Ah hah, JoeUser’s ISP must obviously be a spammer, so load his IP address into our DNSBL servers.”
JoeUser now sends a legitimate email to me SmartUser at IuseDNSBL.com and it, of course, bounces. JoeUser now calls me and asks why he was blacklisted. After some diligent effort on my part, I find that DNSBL.SpamBait.com is saying half of my customers and suppliers are spammers. I have a business to run, so I turn off DNSBL on my gateway and - lo and behold - all of the spammers emails that were being blocked due to DNSBL are no allowed to come though. That is my echo theory. That is why spammers are using half their bandwidth to send SoBig.F
I don’t even like to think about this. Spammers are the scum of the matrix.
Auntie’s digital revelation
More on the Beeb’s decision to release their programming archives
The BBC doesn’t have the rights to all of its material. Some of the BBC’s broadcasts have copyrights owned by others, who’d be rather less keen to see their intellectual property spread around the net. Actors have contracts that specify residuals - payments that kick in each time a programme is shown. But there is a stash of material that currently does not earn the BBC a penny, and for which it owns exclusive rights. What’s more, it’s been listed in every Royal Charter that it has a requirement to present this material to the world.Last Sunday, Greg Dyke changed that. He revealed that the BBC is planning to digitise and offer for download, for free, as much of its back catalogue of programmes that it can legally do, from the earliest radio reels to nature documentaries to educational programmes. Anyone will be allowed to re-use, re-edit and mix this material with their own, provided it’s for non-commercial use.
The project is called the BBC Creative Archive. It draws some of its inspiration from Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons project, a US legal project that provides artists with boilerplate contracts that allow their works to be shared more easily on the net, rather than tied up in copyright restrictions that make copying their work illegal.
To fulfill Dyke’s vision - where, as he describes, children can download BBC material to include in their own presentations for free - the BBC’s work will have to be largely free from copyright controls.
And if the BBC takes this route, it will have the biggest, most responsive file-distribution on the planet to help shift this treasure trove of material: the file-sharing networks.
Presenting its archive material without restrictions would allow the BBC to occupy a niche that no other commercial company would dare to assume. It would allow them to tap a vast distribution system that no other company feels confident enough to use. It would serve a public good, in refilling the public domain diminished by companies attempting to restrict their customers’ use of their works.
And it would be the BBC as it was always supposed to be. BBC material is supposed to be free to use and download. After all, you’ve already paid for it. It belongs to you, to do with as you wish.
The Road Test
Andrew Jones has posted a review in Christianity Today regarding a couple of contemporary worship guides
To be honest, I don’t expect a great deal of success. Redman’s book appears to be about singing in church. It is written with papal nicety, in seminary prose, possibly too delicate to handle the demands of post-charismatic, post-Reformation worship. And yet it promises to be a “travel guide that points out the issues to encounter along the journey.” But can it appreciate the intricacies of a nonlinear worship journey that avoids a pre-determined outcome? Let’s wait and see.Wuthnow’s book takes a more scholarly approach, leaning on its backbone of research, a 400-strong choir of statistic-singing voices, each one a compelling argument that creativity is a significant part of American spirituality. Yet on first impression, it appears old school, snobbish and hierarchical, a book for high church people who drive Oldsmobiles. The churches used as examples tend to be large, at least 30 years old, and nothing at all like the organic churches being started by the starving artists and 20-something church planters in some of our road-tests. Still, I have an open mind. And a heavy suitcase.
After taking the books around the world, here were his finding
The Sabitage event was the ultimate trial. Unfair, perhaps, since these books deal more with fixed-space worship than worship-on-the-move (labyrinths, stations, etc.), and stage-led rather than hands-on experiences. Very few books would speak intelligently here. Alternative Worship (Jonny Baker and Doug Gay) comes the closest. Or perhaps The Prodigal Project (Mark Pierson et al.).Redman’s book fared surprisingly well with the new media. He restates the postmodern discussion, synthesizing the usual suspects, though in a manner more predictable than prophetic. He also tackles the “rave mass,” the bricolage of video technology, and assures us that the new does not supersede the old but “new media often transform older forms and lead to new forms and hybrids.” Well said!
Wuthnow’s book, as I feared, was frowning at the wild antics of these new-media artists. They had broken all hierarchies of “high” and “low,” art for galleries and crafts for the studio, house for living and church for worshipping. Concepts of layering, threading, mixing, and looping were hinted at by Redman but ignored by Wuthnow, who treats new media as old media with electricity. No DJS here.
Still, Wuthnow’s book was not dumbfounded. It addressed the potential of the imagination, the use of body movement, and gender involvement, and acknowledged installation artist Meredith Monk, whose legacy is felt strongly at this event. Wuthnow’s account of a woman using art as a healing language to plum the depths of her own mysterious spirituality, and as a means of expressing that to the world, was highly descriptive of what Sabitage was about.
This is the big surprise of All in Sync. It is a wealth of information, born of modern research, hemmed in by a traditional framework, and yet it is also a book of passion, opening the heart of creativity, releasing worship out of its small ecclesial bowl and into the ocean of creative possibilities. And it has the numbers to prove it.
Flying along
Here are some real examples that have been heard or reported:
On landing, the stewardess said, “Please be sure to take all of your belongings. If you’re going to leave anything, please make sure it’s something we’d like to have.”
“Thank you for flying Delta Business Express. We hope you enjoyed giving us the business as much as we enjoyed taking you for a ride.”
As the plane landed and was coming to a stop at Ronald Reagan, a lone voice came over the loudspeaker: “Whoa, big fella.WHOA!”
From a Southwest Airlines employee: “Welcome aboard Southwest Flight 245 to Tampa. To operate your seat belt, insert the metal tab into the buckle, and pull tight. It works just like every other seat belt; and, if you don’t know how to operate one, you probably shouldn’t be out in public unsupervised.
In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure,masks will descend from the ceiling. Stop screaming, grab the mask, and pull it over your face. If you have a small child traveling with you, secure your mask before assisting with theirs. If you are traveling with more than one small child, pick your favorite.
Weather at our destination is 50 degrees with some broken clouds, but we’ll try to have them fixed before we arrive. Thank you,and remember, nobody loves you, or your money, more than Southwest Airlines.”
“Your seat cushions can be used for flotation; and, in the event of an emergency water landing, please paddle to shore and take them with our compliments.”
“Should the cabin lose pressure, oxygen masks are in the overhead area. Please place The bag over your own mouth and nose before assisting children… or other adults acting like children.”
“As you exit the plane, make sure to gather all of your belongings. Anything left behind will be distributed evenly among the flight attendants. Please do not leave children or spouses.”
And from the pilot during his welcome message:”Delta airlines is pleased to have some of the best flight attendants in the industry. Unfortunately, none of them are on this flight!”
Heard on Southwest Airlines just after a very hard landing in Salt Lake City: The flight attendant came on the intercom and said, “That was quite a bump, and I know what y’all are thinking. I’m here to tell you it wasn’t the airline’s fault, it wasn’t the pilot’s fault, it wasn’t the flight attendant’s fault … it was the asphalt.”
Overheard on an American Airlines flight into Amarillo, Texas, on a particularly windy and bumpy day: During the final approach, the Captain was really having to fight it. After an extremely hard landing, the Flight Attendant said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Amarillo. Please remain in your seats with your seat belts fastened while the Captain taxis what’s left of our airplane to the gate!”
Another flight attendant’s comment on a less than perfect landing: “We ask you to please remain seated as Captain Kangaroo bounces us to the terminal.”
An airline pilot wrote that on this particular flight he had hammered his ship into the runway really hard. The airline had a policy which required the first officer to stand at the door while the Passengers exited, smile, and give them a “Thanks for flying our airline.” He said that, in light of his bad landing, he had a hard time looking the passengers in the eye, thinking that someone would have a smart comment. Finally everyone had gotten off except for a little old lady walking with a cane.She said, “Sir, do you mind if I ask you a question?” “Why, no, Ma’am,” said the pilot. “What is it?” The little old lady said, “Did we land, or were we shot down?”
After a real crusher of a landing in Phoenix, the Flight Attendant came on with, “Ladies and Gentlemen, please remain in your seats until Capt. Crash and the Crew have brought the aircraft to a screeching halt against the gate. And, once the tire smoke has cleared and the warning bells are silenced, we’ll open the door and you can pick your way through the wreckage to the terminal.”
Part of a flight attendant’s arrival announcement:”We’d like to thank you folks for flying with us today. And, the next time you get the insane urge to go blasting through the skies in a pressurized metal tube, we hope you’ll think of US Airways.”
Doh!
I missed my chance to see Mars tonight. I am fascinated with astronomy but can’t pic anything out of the sky to save my life. I had the chance to join Bob Johnson at a friends place to check out the red planet but Wendy is working (double doh!). I don’t have a telescope but I think I would enjoy one. I should join the astonomy club this year. I think I would enjoy some star gazing.
Joe Myers on community
Joe Myers is coming out this fall with a book called “The Language of Belonging”. I haven’t read it yet (it isn’t out) but I am going to take some time to read it as soon as I get it. I have talked to Joe before and he really knows what he is talking about. Here is a post from his blog on small groups.
Today, I learned of a friend who was asked to leave their post at a church. He was called to lead the small group ministry. My friend has wonderful pastoral competencies but, he is definitely not an “A” type personality.Unfortunately, when he accepted this post he agreed to develop a plan where “people would be in intentional community through small groups” and “60-80% of the congregation would be involved.”
This kind of brainwashing propaganda from the small group movement makes me ill! Okay, now that I’ve got that out of my system…
I have found from extensive observations, interviews, and research that these statements are fine except for…
1. Community is not experienced mostly through intentionality. Community spontaneously emerges from environmental influences
2. Small groups are not the way a majority of belonging and community is experienced in a person’s life. Most of these experiences are in public and social environments.
3. It is unrealistic and unhealthy to expect 60-80% involvement in your congregation’s small group program. This usually results in a dependant-codependent relationship with your congregation. Anything over 30-35% is a little suspect.
4. Who are we to assume we need this much “intentional” control over someone’s life? Most do well to find significant community and belonging in their life outside of your congregation. Why invite them into an incestuous relationship where they are not in contact with others on a journey to find God?
People are desperately longing to belong. However, they want to belong to a healthy community in a healthy way. People are looking for real friends and family not the romanticized version of what those family and friends look like and act like. They are looking for a real home not a congregations 1950’s view of what this means.
It is time we put away our narrow definitions of belonging and community and seek to see how people want to connect and find ways to help them there.
Don’t Try This At Home
A little known fact is that one time I broke an entire package of Exlax up into a big bowl of Rocky Road Ice Cream and gave it to my dad. It didn’t kill him but it gave him some time to think over his philosophy of parenting.
Really Stupid Exposes of Christian Music
I am not a great fan of the Christian music scene but I never knew these folks still existed. It is quite funny. I never could take these kind of people seriously. They attack everyone, even Billy Graham is exposed. A lot of hatred on these sights. I wonder what drives it.
Fighting back
I HATE SPAM has a built in feature that allows you to send a complaint to the spammers ISP (heh, heh, heh) and to the SEC and some other agencies that deal with fraud (like the FDA). I am liking the program more each day. It is now catching about 95% of my spam. It needs to get to about 98% before I will buy it but it is getting there.
Our Cabin Weblog- Recently listened to music
- David Gray – Be Mine October 19, 2008
- David Gray – December October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Knowhere October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Real Love October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Last Boat To America October 19, 2008
- Recently additions to my library
- Messy Faith: Daring to Live by Grace by A. J. Gregory October 28, 2008
- Rediscovering Church: The Story and Vision of Willow Creek Community Church by Lynne Hybels October 26, 2008
- The Teeth of the Tiger, A Novel by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
- The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell October 26, 2008
- The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
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