Monthly Archive for July, 2006Page 3 of 12

ccmpatrol

Published
by
michael lee
on 28 July 2006
in art and culture, audio and church
. 9 Comments

I have a new favorite site. Chad, fasten your seatbelt. CCMPatrol. They review Contemporary Christian Music. Oh man, do they ever review it. The thing is, they actually like music, and they really do think that it’s possible to do good music in the CCM world. That’s what makes them so bitter (and funny) when bands do it poorly.

Part of their theory of CCM is that most songs today are written by an animatronic robot computer, which follows a strict formula for lyric writing:

The [violent weather metaphor] crashes to the [Psalmy landscape metaphor]
Sometimes I wish I could [Biblical miracle metaphor]
Just like [Biblical patriarch name ]
But I can’t because I’m only a [ man / woman / sinner ]

Chorus:
[ Praying / crying / calling out ] for [ sunshine / silver lining image ]
I want to see the [ positive weather metaphor ]
I want to see beyond the [ negative weather metaphor ]
[ First line of chorus ] + [ song title ]

Oh man, that’s good eats. Enjoy.

(ht: OpenSwitch)

Pick a direction, any direction.

Published
by
aly hawkins
on 27 July 2006
in life
. 11 Comments

I’ve been struggling the last couple of years to figure out what I want to do with my life. I realize that most people deal with this in college, or wait until they’re 45 and switch careers and/or buy a yellow sports car…so I guess that makes me a late bloomer suffering from early-onset mid-life crisis.

I didn’t graduate from college. It’s hard to regret this sometimes, since I think I spent my college years doing important growing up on the inside (rendering me incapable of going to class, obviously). Other times (such as now, in the middle of a pretty debilitating depression), I wallow in recrimination, whipping myself — mostly metaphorically — for the time and money I wasted on figuring out that I’m not a tortured artist or God’s gift to biblical studies or The Best Singer Ever, but instead just me: sorta smart, okay-looking, sometimes funny, likes music and Anne Lamott and Jesus and ponies and Buffy. (And Ash…which, granted, took a lot of time and energy and tears and tequila to figure out.) I beat myself up for not having been a better multi-tasker. Coudn’t I have gone on a journey of self-discovery and inner growth while simultaneously showing up for class? A lot of people do it, so I guess that makes me A Bad Person. And Evil. (That’s when I pull out the cat o’ nine and the hair shirt.)

After a good session of self-flaggelation, I try to remind myself that I’ve progressed somewhat since then. At that time, I was paralyzed with indecision because I didn’t want to narrow down my options. (This is an issue for people who are good — but not great — at a few things and don’t want to give anything up to become great at just one of those things.) I know now that I want to write, but my current paralysis stems from not knowing quite how to go about this pursuit…other than obvious, which is to sit in front of the computer and hug myself and rock like a large autistic child until I can string words together into a coherent sentence. I’m terrified of making the wrong choice: Should I go to school for an English degree? Should I quit my job and go freelance as a writer/editor? Should I rent a cabin in Montana for six months and finish my Great American Novel? Should I continue on in my job/life and hope that a bigger opportunity falls in my lap? Should I try quaaludes?

I think you can see my pentlemma. (See how there are five options, and how pente is the Greek word for five? This is why I should be a writer.)

I’m not good at making Ultimate Decisions. This is somewhat a function of my personality, but I know that at some point every person has to choose something, or they writhe on the bed hugging a pillow and moaning in a weird Grudge-like monotone because they’re so overwhelmed by the myriad of choices that their brains take a cigarette break and may or may not come back to work and they never, ever do anything they wanted to do because they’re too busy writhing on the bed moaning in a weird Grudge-like monotone. (I’m just guessing here.)

All this to say: How do people make these kinds of decisions? Seriously, I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who can choose one option over another. How do you do it? It’s not necessarily the fact that you can choose something, it’s that you can not choose a whole bunch of other things in favor of that something. It’s amazing! Tell me your secret. I don’t think I can move forward in any direction until I’ve figured this out.

And also: Does anyone else have this problem, or am I the only crazy person?

icon 2.0

Published
by
michael lee
on 27 July 2006
in The Intra-Web-O-Sphere!, art and culture, asides and technology
. 0 Comments

so, a group of people got together to “Web 2.0-ify” some standard logos. You can see the results at flickr, tagged with the word yay2dot0logoparody. Enjoy.

Welcome to the New Media

Published
by
michael lee
on 27 July 2006
in The Intra-Web-O-Sphere!, art and culture, audio and technology
. 3 Comments

So, I’ve been mulling over the results from the blog survey, and thinking about how many people come here who don’t normally travel in the circles of the blogosphere. I thought about writing a thesis sized overview of what the New Media is all about, and how participation in content creation and remix is irreversibly changing the roles of media producers and consumers. After all, I have to do something while I procrastinate on writing that sermon and designing that new APU course. But, I got bored with that almost as soon as I finished writing that introductory sentence.

I don’t want to explain it. I think you should just jump in and experience it for yourself. Let me give you some tools to get started.

Feed Me!

First, let’s get you something that will let you grab information more quickly, without having to go to a million pages first thing in the morning. We’re going to use two pieces of software to do this: one for text (blogs), and one for media (podcasts, vidcasts). Again, I’m just going to ignore the fact that some of you use Windows, because I don’t want to encourage that kind of behavior. I think most new media stuff works on PC’s, I just don’t know how. And, also, the content creators can see what system you logged on with, and they kind of laugh at you behind your back.

NewsGator / NetNewsWire

It’s a website and a piece of software. The website is free, and you can use it without the software. It works like this: you type in the address of a website you like …

newsgator input

and it goes there every morning to check for new content. Then, instead of you going to all 50 websites you like, you go instead to the NewsGator site, and all the updated stuff is there waiting for you.

newsgator agg

The software option lets you sync to the website, repost your own blog, and do a bunch of other cool stuff. It looks like this:

nnw

Show Me the Content!

So, now that you have that all dialed in, what should you feed into it? Here are a few suggestions to get you started. The sites are linked, and the feed address is in parenthesis. This is the thing you should copy into your aggregator.

jesuscreed.org (http://www.jesuscreed.org/wp-rss2_full.php) - the blog of Scot McKnight. Great writing, great ideas, great links out to other blogs. Pretty much daily updates of serious content.

Dilbert (http://www.tapestrycomics.com/dilbert.xml) I like the comic Dilbert. I don’t like buying a newspaper. Instead, I use this link to have the daily comic strip delivered to my feed aggregator. Actually, there are a ton of comic strips that I like, so I’ve grabbed a lot of feeds from this site: tapestrycomics.com. Enjoy!

Free in LA (http://freeinla.blogspot.com/atom.xml). I like Los Angeles. There’s like, culture and stuff. This blog lists free things happening in this beautiful city, daily.

Google News custom search. Ok, this one is a bit tweaky, and a bit cool. You all know about the site Google News. You probably also know that you can do a custom search at Google News. What you might not know is that you can get an RSS feed of that custom search, and load it into your aggregator. After you’ve done your seach, check the left sidebar, where is says “RSS Feed”. Grab that link, add it to your aggregator, and you’re off to go!

googlenews

With my custom search RSS feed, I can follow the news of how my LA Angels are crushing the rest of the league. Hoozah!

Podcasts

Text is great, but what if we want sound, or even moving pictures? Let me recommend to you the fabulous iTunes. Yes, you can use it to rip and download a lifetimes worth of music, but it’s also a very simple-to-use feed aggregator for podcasts. Since it’s Apple, it’s pretty intuitively obvious how to subscribe to podcasts that they have in their directory, but you can also use it to grab feeds that may not be in their vast library. All you need to do is go to the “Advanced” menu, hit “Subscribe to podcast”, and put in that fancy RSS feed we’ve been so hot on lately.

Picture 8.png

So … what should you subscribe to? Here are some of my favorites. If you have itunes installed, the links should open the podcast in itunes for you.

TEDTalks. These are pretty much all amazing. You especially need to watch Majora Carter. These are video, so you’ll need a fat pipe before you start to download them. If you want some background on what TED is all about, here’s the site.

The Bible Podcast. Almost 1,000 daily subscribers. Get a little bit o’ word with your daily intake.

Ask a Ninja. There are no words for how funny this is. It’s the New Jersey Jewish accent that kills me. I love this kind of “Theatre of the Absurd”, and the Ninja is the master of it. I AM NINJA!

Center for Internet and Society. Got a long commute? These shows range from 45 minutes to an hour, and are produced by Stanford Law School. This is the kind of thing that you would normally pay $5,000 per unit to be a part of, but you get to listen in for free because of the internets.

rocketboom. Do you like your news delivered with poor production, awkward pauses, and unfathomable nonsequiters? You’ll love Joanne Colan and Rocketboom.

And now …

So, those are some things to get you started. Jump in … the water’s warm, mainly because Chad keeps letting his kids pee in the pool. I know several of our regular readers have their favorites, sites that they keep up with on a daily basis. Feel free to list them in the comments. Don’t just dump your list on us, but give us two or three that you think are gems, and make the case for us.

Up the Revolution!

Joss Whedon for Equality Now

Published
by
aly hawkins
on 26 July 2006
in art and culture, asides and life
. 2 Comments

Why I adore, adore, adore Joss Whedon.