Alex Photo Bonaza
Just wanted to share with you some photos I took last week of Alex. Why? Because I’m a proud daddy!!! See the photos here or in the Photo Album
Internet Evangelism gets a push
I am still in Berlin with a bunch of men and women with a desire to use the Internet for evangelistic purposes. Its been real exciting to see all the different ways that the Internet is being used in many different countries and languages. Many of these organizations are advocating creating partnerships to better each other’s efforts as in the end, its about building the kingdom of God.
Please pray that:
- we are able to retain all the information that is being shared here. There are so many different ideas and so many different methods being shared that it is a lot to take in
- when we talk with exisitng partnerships and new partnerships, we keep in mind all the different ways that they may use the Internet for their mission’s purposes
- when we present about eLearning tomorrow, that we are able to communicate well and that it is received well.
God bless.
Getting away with it?
A young, beautiful Polish lady, an elderly Polish lady, a 20-something Polish man and a German officer are all in a train car when the train goes into a tunnel. The train car is pitch black when a huge kiss is hear and then a loud slap. When the train emerges from the tunnel, all four occupants are sitting there with strange looks on their faces.
The elderly Polish lady is sitting there thinking that was pretty bold of one of the men but at least the young lady stood up for herself.
The young Polish lady is sitting there wondering why the man choose to the older lady but at least she stood up for herself.
The German soldier is wondering why he got slapped by the young lady.
The Polish man is smug as all he had to do was kiss the back of his hand and then got to slap a German officer and no one is the wiser.
This was how one of the presenters started his presentation here at our conference in Berlin. The presenter was speaking that not everything was as it seems and then began to talk about their ministry in Turkey and how the percentage of Christians is low there but that there are great opportunities for evangelism.
We pray that God will use these opportunities to reach many more in that country and around the globe. Please pray with us
Simple Physics
The physics geek in me saw this and found humor. A simple experiment done on a larger scale at MIT (but with style). Enjoy it.
PS – you can catch more experiments by these guys at http://frogwatcher.com/doctor/
You’re the Fish, Don’t take the Hook
My Dad is a catch-n-release fisherman. He loves the sport but he is not out to hurt any of the fish. Unfortunately, there are phisherman out in the Internet world who are about hurting those online. Those of us online are the (ph)ishes. So do you think you can spot the “hooks” that are out there in cyberspace? Take this quiz to see if you can spot the “hooks” online
PS – I only got 7 out of 10
Tech Findings Blogs Begins: AVI preview on Mac really slow
I am going to start throwing out there some new types of blogs that are very different than the ones we have posted before. Because I also do some support for my fellow missionaries and have to support my own small home network, I have decided to blog problems that I have and the fixes I have found for them. Basically, if I have to search for an answer to a problem and I have a hard time finding the answer, I figure the more people who post the fix means its easier for the next person with the same problem to find the answer. (Did that even make sense?)
Sorry to most of my regular readers as you can feel free to skip them as they will be geekie and technical. So here’s the first one:
Problem: When using Front Row or Finder on Mac OS X, whenever I “preview” an AVI file, it seems to take forever to come up i.e. really long time. I was finding this especially to be true with Front Row when watching my movies and shows. Before it would be a second or two max before the show was ready to be viewed. Then something happened to make them take minutes (like 1-5 minutes depending on the size of the file).
Equipment: MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM running Mac OS X 10.4.10 (Yes, I have a Mac – No, I am not going to go on about how Mac’s are better – It seems I can crash anything, Macs and Windows alike. Even blew up a Linux install but that took some work). Using Flip4Mac to help with the AVI files within QuickTime
Solution/Fix: Aparantly, when my Apple automatic updates happened a little bit ago, it updated QuickTime to QT 7.2 . With this update, things went screwy. Now QuickTime 7.2 update on its own isn’t bad but it makes the Flip4Mac plugin now work properly so it creates the problems in bringing up the viewers. So to fix this, you need to reinstall your Flip4Mac. I understand this might also be the case with Perian and Divx. When I did this, everything started to work lightning fast again.
Hope this helps someone out there. If it does, please leave me a comment so I’ll know. Thanks.
Removing the limits we place on God
I like the people that I work with. No, I’m not kissing up (actually, I don’t think they read my blog anyways). I’m just grateful that I get to work with people who don’t put limits on God. Now, take my collegue Durand Robinson with a ministry called CreativeWorks, a ministry of GEM. CreativeWorks and eDOT work together a lot but you just gotta like they way Durand thinks. His job with CreativeWorks is to help the church in Europe think outside the box. Most churches in Europe are small with even smaller budgets. One of the things he does is help them think how they can use the small $$$ that they have for really big things.
Here is just one of his ideas (well, maybe not his exactly – but an idea that he is helping others know about) – a really cheap translation system for a church. Now, my American readers are probably wondering why you would need that as if you live in a town with more than language, then there is a different church for each language. But here in Europe, there are not that many churches to go to let alone having an option of what language it will be in. On any given day, I’ll hear German, English, Italian, and French spoken in our little town. So this idea of a cheap translation system (which can also be used for those that are hearing-impaired) is wonderful.
But to me, I get really pumped at looking at how we can assist the European churches so that they can have real vision for what God can do with their churches and then to come up with solutions (in my case, usually technical solutions) to make it happen. To me, thinking like this is about removing the limitations we place on God and instead of saying “Oh, that can’t be done because of this or that”, its about saying “Wow, that would be really impactful in our church’s community – ok God, how do you want to do this?”
This next week, I’ll be attending a conference with several other like-minded people who have a vision of using the Internet to reach non-English speaking people with the Gospel. We will be working on putting together ways that the Internet and various online technologies can be used in helping people come to understand God’s love for them.
The Internet is to be used for God’s purposes, pray with us that He will reveal how He wants to use it and that we won’t get bogged down with the “limits” we want to place on Him.