much and earnest

Hehe. Wishing WordPress could handle the video HTML code, I must instead send you away from the blog. But it’s worth the trip.

Stephen Hackett (ForkBombr), a good friend of mine (he was a groomsman in our wedding), a former co-worker (haveastandard.com), my go-to guy for Mac and iPhone questions (at least the ones Google can’t solve), and the fellow who introduced me to Rooney, Johnny Cash, and Death Cab, has been interviewed for Cornfedtech.com. Check out the first installment of the interview (text, audio, and a beard-y picture).

1. Firefox. Goes without saying, I’m sure.
2. Gmail and Google Calendar. I’ve been a Gmail user since October of 2004. The first Gmail message I sent was work-related, to Stephen Hackett.
3. Adblock Plus (for ff3)
4. Dropbox. I currently have a free 2GB account, and plan to upgrade as I approach the limit.
5. foxmarks (assuming all goes well with this program, for which I signed up only recently).

Remember The Milk would be on this list, but I’m already paying for a Pro account. I’m not quite sure about WordPress, NuevaSync, and Google Reader–all of which I use daily, but aren’t quite essential.

I’d drop twitter and facebook in a heartbeat.

1. Two USB 2.0 ports

2. control, option, and command keys are extra-large.

3. F13, F14, and F15 (oh, and F16, F17, F18, and F19)

4. Delete-forward key

WordPress recently upgraded the theme I’m using for this blog (The Journalist). Happily, the right column now renders my Picasa Web Albums photos correctly. Enjoy. I’ll try to upload some newer photos soon.

This thought on the surprising instability of print culture comes from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s 2003 history, The Reformation (p. 74 in my paperback copy):

There were further consequences to basic assumptions about authority, none of which were good news for a Church hierarchy that claimed to have proprietorial rights over what to believe. Printing, which produced multiple identical copies of a text, encouraged a familiarity with uniformity, very different from the individuality of a manuscript. That in turn was liable to produce a sense of how significant it was when difference appeared: uniformity paradoxically put a premium on individuality. A culture based on manuscripts is conscious of the fragility of knowledge, and the need to preserve it. A priority must be to keep it secure simply to avoid the physical destruction of a single precious source, and that fosters an attitude that guards rather than spreads knowledge. Print culture multiplies copies, and the printer has a vested interest in as much multiplication as possible, to sell his wares. Similarly, a manuscript culture is going to believe very readily in decay, in knowledge as in everything else, because copying knowledge from one manuscript to another is a very literal source of corruption. This is much less obvious in the print medium: optimism may be the mood rather than pessimism.

For those of you who haven’t noticed, this blog is on hold. It shall continue to be on hold until I finish my oral exam in mid-April. See you then.

This is a long, long way down the road from the inscrutable, infant-damning theology of this country’s Calvinist forebears—it is, rather, a just-in-time economy’s vision of salvation, an eerily collapsible spiritual narcissism that downgrades the divine image into the job description for a lifestyle concierge.

Here.

I stopped my daily readings of many blogs (made much simpler by Google Reader) about five days ago, when we left Lexington for Memphis. As a result I have only just learned that the good German doktor has bidden us farewell.

…is revealed here. Please read it and laugh. And learn a few new vocabulary words.

Ah. This is refreshing. I’ve recently begun listening to a number of various podcasts. Audition is smart podcasting.

…at least if you visit the website described in this DownloadSquad article, which offers a virtual tour of Dante’s Inferno. You know, in the same way that you can tour an apartment or a college you’re interested in on the web.

I don’t wish to come off as a literary snob, but someone should tell the folks at DS that Dante’s Hell has nine circles, not seven. Basic mistakes like this lead college teachers to dissuade their students from relying entirely on the web (as mediated through a free search engine) for their research. You might just land on and end up using an open-source website (e.g., Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”).

Update: Someone has told the folks at Download Squad about the nine circles.

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.First, the library must be on the Internet. No physical space could be as big or as universally accessible as a public web site. The site would be like Wikipedia—a public resource that anyone in any country could access and that others could rework into different formats.

Second, it must be grandly comprehensive. It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on.

But most importantly, such a library must be fully open. Not simply “free to the people,” as the grand banner across the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh proclaims, but a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it’s more important than ever to be open.

So let us do just that: let us build the Open Library.

(Source)

The structure of the full text entries – scanned pages, simulated page turning, search bar (a simplified version of Amazon’s ‘Look Inside This Book!’ feature) – is a little too pretty for my taste, but usable. Like Google Book Search, this feature of Open Library may prove useful for those who work with books with expired copyrights, and who have qualms about the loss of ‘bibliographic codes’ in other strategies for providing full text (e.g., the text transcriptions of Project Gutenberg).

His name is Jimmy Akin. He’s sharp. He’s a regular blogger here, and he hosts a radio program I sometimes listen to.

That’s right, I typed “20th” century, and I meant it. Noelle and I are now accessing the internet with a USRobotics 56K USB Mini Faxmodem. I’m currently connected at 45.2 Kbps, which, if my math is correct, is about 30 times slower than our old 1.5 MB DSL connection. Our ISP can only do dial-up at our new apartment.

The modern innovation which has substituted journalism for history, or for that tradition that is the gossip of history, has had as least one definite effect. It has ensured that everybody should only hear the end of every story. Journalists are in the habit of printing above the very last chapters of their serial stories (when the hero and heroine are just about to embrace in the last chapter, as only an unfathomable perversity prevented them from doing in the first) the rather misleading words, ‘You can begin this story here.’ But even this is not a complete parallel; for the journals do give some sort of a summary of the story, while they never give anything remotely resembling a summary of the history. Newspapers not only deal with news, but they deal with everything as if it were entirely new. Tutankhamen, for instance, was entirely new. It is exactly in the same fashion that we read that Admiral Bangs has been shot, which is the first intimation we have that he has ever been born. [...]

Most modern history, especially in England, suffers from the same imperfection as journalism. At best it only tells half of the history of Christendom; and that the second half without the first half. Men for whom reason begins with the Revival of Learning, men for whom religion begins with the Reformation, can never give a complete account of anything, for they have to start with institutions whose origin they cannot explain, or generally even imagine. Just as we hear of the admiral being shot but have never heard of his being born, so we all heard a great deal about the dissolution of monasteries, but we heard next to nothing about the creation of monasteries.

- Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, ch. 2 (1924)

Noelle and I are back in Lexington! After we get fully settled in to our new apartment, I’ll get a chance to do tend this blog. I hope to deliver some ponderings on the following:

• the immediate prospect of fatherhood
• baptizing babies, and sacramental theology in general
• the music of Johnny Cash
• the music of Sufjan Stevens

A few pictures may also be provided.

Alan Jacobs (whose biography of CSL I recently purchased) is “waiting for Harry.” So am I.

…for my brother-in-law, Tyler. (Here’s his blog: Daily Belly Button Lint in Japan.)

His blog deserves my support not only because he sends me more hits than any other single source on the web, but also because I think he’s a really funny guy (case-in-point).

As he recently announced, Tyler is about to ship out of Japan and into Kuwait. We can’t seem to get him back to the States to see us; Noelle and I even tried getting pregnant! But we can at least expect more belly button lint: Daily Belly Button Lint in Kuwait?

In case you haven’t realized this, yet, I’m on holiday from all things school — including the maintenance of this blog. Noelle and I are visiting family and friends in Memphis, TN, and will return to Lexington around the 4th of July.

Till then, I recommend you read this blog. Or this one. Or how about this blog? This fellow just got hitched; he may have some interesting things to say.

Google’s Personalized Homepage has been renamed “iGoogle.” Why? Why add to the flurry of “i” gizmos? Leave it to Apple. They started it.

This post is a shameless plug.

Touchstone Magazine’s blog, Mere Comments, has been nominated for the “Best Religion Blog” award at the Blogger’s Choice Awards. You can vote here (free registration required).

HT: Crunchy Con

I made this image from a page in “Household Words,” the journal edited by Dickens in the 1850s. (Specifically, from page 252 of Volume III, made available by Google Book Search for free perusal and downloading here.)

UPDATE (same day): The first poem appears to be Coleridge’s, after all.

UPDATE (4/17/07): The second poem, according to Anne Lohrli, belongs to Richard H. Horne.

Food for thought. Now MS PowerPoint is not only evil (hat tip to jinxblog), but also stupefying:

“The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster,” Professor Sweller said. “It should be ditched.”

“It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.”

Here’s another interesting contention:

[The Australian researchers] have also challenged popular teaching methods, suggesting that teachers should focus more on giving students the answers, instead of asking them to solve problems on their own.

[...]

[...I]nstead of asking students to solve problems on their own, teachers helped students more if they presented already solved problems.

“Looking at an already solved problem reduces the working memory load and allows you to learn. It means the next time you come across a problem like that, you have a better chance at solving it,” Professor Sweller said.