Category: computer

okay i know that i’m a very small blogging fish in a very large internet pond but i am amazed by the power of some of the blogs in the world. one sign of this is that people of the year. who can blame them with the way dan rather was effected by blogs. for another example consider the fact that one of the chairmen of gm north america, bob lutz has his own blog. that’s pretty impressive when executives consider it important to maintain a blog.

i frequent a site called emergingminister.com that has some good ideas that i get inspired from, modify, or sometimes blatantly steal. they have a series of “bobble head” videos that i think are hilarious. so for your viewing pleasure i have placed a few of them up on the site. here they are:

• bobble head theater #1
• bobble head theater #2
• bobble head theater #3
• bobble head theater #4

i hope you like them because they crack me up. i can’t believe this guy has so many bobble heads.

you may have noticed changes happening to the blog (i.e new top design, blogroll on the right hannd side, flickr zietgeist, etc.). i’m finally beginning to understand a little bit of the coding of this css stuff. i still don’t get most of it but i do at least understand a little. i’m presently trying to figure out how to add an automated “reading list” to the blog. i’ve seen this on several other sites. unfortunately i can’t find which ones had the reading list and therefore i can’t ask them how to do it. so if you know how to put an automated reading list and feel like passing a little help my way i would appreciate it.

if you are an internet explorer user i may need to apologize for the design of the blog right now. i’ve been adding a few “side bar” items – flickr zeitgeist and a list of my bloglines subscriptions. i’ve been able to add these and they look fine on my computer but i discovered at work that apparently the flickr and bloglines stuff show up on the bottom of the page when viewed on a pc using internet explorer. i have no idea how to fix this so it might be awhile before things are back the way they should be.

if anyone nows how to fix this let me know and i’ll gladly accept your help.

november 23rd i talked about the wonderful desktop wallpaper swapping feature on the mac and the fact that i had found the incredible national geographic pictures of the year. since then i’ve started using some other pictures that i like allot. brad is a guy who used to live in baton rouge and was a part of the youth ministry. he has a site full of pictures and i really like some of them – the non-people oriented ones because it just feels odd having pictures of people i don’t know as my desktop wallpaper. here’s the link if you’re interested – www.outofstep.org

p.s. since brad moved to north carolina three years ago and has since graduated and gone to college this post is not a blatant attempt to gain favor with one of the teens in the youth ministry.

i found this today. it is national geographic’s photos of the year. i think the pictures are gorgeous and make pretty cool wallpaper. of course, this is where one of the cooler and simpler features of the powerbook shows itself off. the powerbook comes with the ability to randomly change desktop wallpapers randomly through out the day. i’m sure you can do this with windows with an additional program but the apple has it built in. it’s so cool to have another amazing picture on my desktop every thirty minutes or so.

i’ve finally discovered how to use rss. i had posted on my woeful inadequacy in geekdom on october 21st. in that post brad taught me the meaning of “rss” but unfortunately for all concerned i still didn’t have a grasp of what the meaning of “rss” meant. though i now knew what “rss” meant i had absolutely no idea what to do with “rss”.

thanks be to my.yahoo.com and the upgrade that they have recently gone through i am now able to use “rss.” my yahoo.com now allows me to use “rss” to feed the blogs i read to my home page. this way i can simply look at my home page and see if the blogs i like have any new entries. now that i’ve seen “rss” work on one page i understand it completely and can use it. i know that i can get blogging software that will check these things for me. yippee! life is good.

i’m pretty sad and pathetic when it comes to this blog – software-wise. last night i finally learned how to add a little padding around the images that i place within this thing. for those who don’t know what padding is i’ll explain. padding is the space around your image that keeps the text from being right up against the image. adding padding to the blog is real difficult. you have to add the line “img pad=’10px'” to the blog. real difficult huh? it took all of ten minutes and that’s only because i didn’t know what i was doing. if i had of known it would have taken 45 seconds.

i’ve been doing this blog for over a year now (an eternity within a world of blogs that usually last two months) and i still don’t know much else than how to type in the text. i would change this whole thing over to “movable type” if i actually knew how to transfer my old entries into it and how to set up movable type in the first place. movable type is supposed to be better and would allow me to use “blogging software” to update the blog without actually going to the blog and also allow me to use “rss” to check the other blogs i read. of course, i don’t know how to do this nor do i even know what “rss” is so it appears that i will be stuck with bblog and reading the other blogs manually.

it’s sad that i really used to be a sort of computer geek (my dad and brother have always been bigger geeks than me – and bigger computer geeks too!).

i can’t think of much to blog about write now – either this is because nothing extremely interesting has happened around me recently or because i have “blogger’s block” (the internet equivalent of writer’s block). since, i believe that GOD has made and declared this world “very good” then it has to be full of wonderful things to write about. thus, i must have “blogger’s block” and simply be looking past all the the really noteworthy stuff right now.

i’m not real sure how to get out of “blogger’s block” but i assume that i need to write myself out of it. so here goes. here are some of the things i am presently amazed by:

• everyone seems to be really passionate about either loving or hating basset hounds.
• it’s easier to merely think about updating the student ministry web page than it is to actually do it.
• blockbuster is open till midnight (or later) every night – who needs to rush out and get a movie monday night at 11:47 a.m.?
• i love the fact that pam, my wife, likes to research out anything that she gets excited about.
• i miss hero.
• adam, my oldest son, is now constantly playing the clarinet.
• the international justice mission is a very cool organization – they are actively involved in fighting for the freedom of “bonded servants.”
• one life revoltion is another very cool organization – they are actively involved in meeting the needs of those dying from AIDS in zambia.
• i’ve been praying since august about what our church can do about the landfill in managua, nicaragua. it’s a huge problem, in fact one that i think is to big to fix, but i have a really BIG GOD.
• for some reason i now possess the ability to “pop” my right ankle at will – i can turn my ankle it just the right direction and it will “pop” at command.

i guess that’s it for now.