If it’s Thursday, I must be procrastinating. (Also, eating lunch.)
And playing with Flickr, and the upload tool I mentioned before. And Hugin, a photo-stitcher for Mac OS X. Here’s the result:
Yucca Valley
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Category Archives: Life
Excuses for slacking off
I’ve been reading a lot (the better to write inspiring sermons, my dear). I always read as much I can to prolong the exegesis phase and avoid working on the sermon. I always read Calvin and Matthew Henry, plus whatever dead-tree commentaries I have for the passage I’m working on.
Beside that, I read Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, about the (mis-)transmission of the Bible (mainly the NT) from Elder Days to the present. I really enjoyed the first half of it, which explains how Scripture came to be corrupted and how scholars try to reconstruct the original. The second half wasn’t as much fun. I often agreed with the author’s evaluation of the “correct” reading, while disliking how he arrived there. It’s difficult enough to attribute motives to someone we know first hand (sometimes, even ourself!). Doing it for some anonymous monk 1500 years ago is ridiculous.
I’ve also been reading Warren’s The Purpose Driven Church and realized that mine doesn’t have one. Or, if it does, they haven’t told me yet.
And lately I’ve been reading Ortberg’s God is Closer Than You Think. It’s pretty good. I’ve never been a Brother Lawrence type, so I can use all the help I can get in this department.
Also I discovered how much more fun Flickr is when you have a program to do your uploads for you. Here’s a picture of my neighborhood:
New Blogging Tool.
It’s Thursday, which means I’m procrastinating on my sermon.
Also, even though I ordered my new NIC on — what, Saturday? — it still hasn’t arrived so I don’t have many opportunities to blog. Anyhoo, I’m at work and thinking I might blog during my lunch hours. Especially if I ought to be writing a sermon.
So the way I’m procrastinating (by blogging) is by using Marsedit. It’s pretty slick, and it supports both Markdown and Smartypants, which I use a lot. (In fact, I write my sermons using gvim and then pretty ’em up with these same tools.) I’ve been thinking I should convert my blog to use one of those Markdown plug-ins, but maybe what I should do is use something like this to create HTML from Markdown and not use a plug-in.
Hmm. It doesn’t do a lot. But it doesn’t cost a lot either. I’ll think about it.
Not blogging enough?
It’s been busy, what with the usual administrative work at church, plus two funerals and Holy Week. (Four services, three sermons in 8 days.) So I haven’t been blogging, it’s true. But I’m about tired of WordPress upgrades. They are pushing out changes about as often as I add a blog entry. And it’s such a pain in the butt to do the upgrade. It’s never just a file or two. It’s always 6932 lines of changes in 83 files. Sigh.
learning the iApps
I recently put together a project that requires me to learn iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. (To be honest, what the project really required was Powerpoint and a computer-plus-projector setup. But I didn’t have that, and I did have a DVD player and TV setup.)
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Break’s Over! Back to Work!
I just had my first vacation since becoming a pastor: a week off, starting last Monday and concluding today. We went to the beach and chilled. I met some people from seminary at the church I attended there, and I got to see the sun set over Santa Cataline island:
(Click on the photo for a larger version.) The amazing thing about these is that they are straight out of the camera and resized for the web. Period. No punching up the colors, nothing. Whoa.
Desert Birds
In lieu of words, another photo-blog entry. I saw these birds when I went for a walk around the nabe a couple of days ago. Pretty.
As of an hour or two ago, I am all caught-up with the great renaming and organizing of my backlog of digital camera pictures. Since we left seminary I’ve taken 2,215 pictures. I took about a zillion photos when we drove across country to move here. Then, I was without a computer for about a month, so there was no way I could organize or categorize them. Then I had this big backlog and it was easier to just dump them than sort & organize them. But now I’m all caught up again.
Remnants of Seminary…
“You’re Empty.” “So are you.”
Today when I was doing some research about clerical vestments, I ran across this picture:
(Original found here.)
Something about that photo…
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WP 2.1 upgrade
Another upgrade to WP. Getting 1500 comment spams convinced me that I really needed to stay up-to-date with the software. “Piece of pie.” “Easy as cake.”