Compassion International is taking a bunch of bloggers to Uganda from Feb. 10-18 to experience what it is Compassion does. A couple of the bloggers are folks I read (occasionally), including Anne Jackson and Shaun Groves. Should make for some interesting reading (and watching).
Seems like Africa keeps coming up lately, from rebels invading Chad to violence in Kenya to continuing trouble in Darfur. But there’s also missionary friends traveling to Sudan and another missionary friend heading to Botswana, this group heading to Uganda–and of course our (eventual) adoption from Ethiopia. The differences between here and there are kind of staggering, but I’m grateful for anything that can help bridge the divide and bring us closer.
Lexi’s grandparents gave her a digital camera for her birthday, so we set her up with a Flickr account. She’s now a photographer. She loves to “take-ah pictures.”
I’m also trying not to think too deeply about what it means for a two-year-old to be taking pictures. It’s kind of wild. I was probably 7 or 8 when I started taking pictures using a camera with 110 film. But with the disposability of digital, why not let Lexi take a dozen pictures of the floor?
I’ve been playing with Twitter a lot the past week or so. What is Twitter? I don’t know–ask Wikipedia. Twitter is kind of like mini-blogging because you’re limited to 140 characters, but the updates are also broadcast all over the place–RSS, Facebook, blogs, cell phones, IM, etc. You follow other people’s tweets (yes, it has its own lingo–that’s how you know it’s cool) and a flow develops. It’s just another interesting medium to play around with.
So what’s the point? I don’t know.
It feels very much like every other Internet fad that comes along where nobody gets it at first but a few people dive in and love it and then those who didn’t get it start to get it and then as it starts to get big the people who loved it don’t love it so much anymore and they find something new to dive into and the whole process continues. It’s the circle of life–or tech trends anyway.
I played Wii Bowling on Christmas Eve and bowled better than I do in real life (151 vs. 126/96). Now I’m wondering about the implications of being virtually better at something.
I also gave Guitar Hero and try and learned that all my years of practice with the air guitar amount to nothing.
I like information to be easy to find and freely available. I like knowing things. When I go to a park, I like to know who created the sculpture and what it’s called. I like to know who the statue is of and why they get a statue. I like to know the history of a location and why it’s important.
Unfortunately, most of that kind of information is hard to find. And it bugs me.
So I have this crazy idea of creating a sort of encyclopedia of place.
Well, Josh, if you can’t have your own name, at least you’ve got lasermacaroni.
*I should point out that most web comics appear poorly drawn (have you seen xkcd?), but it’s actually a lot harder to draw a comic than you think it is. Trust me, I’ve tried. Of all the get-rich-quick-on-the-Internet schemes, the web comic is my favorite.
My biggest blogging pet peeve is when a blog doesn’t point you to more content. Blogs typically post entries in reverse chronological order, meaning the latest entries are first. That’s great for delivering new and timely content, which is what blogs are for.
But when you first check out a blog you may not necessarily care about the latest and greatest entries. You’re trying to get a feel for the purpose of the blog, what they cover, the breadth and depth of what they cover. It’s often hard to get a feel for that from the entries on the front page.
And sometimes you just get sucked into a blog and want to keep on reading. So what happens when you get to the end of a blog’s front page? On too many blogs, nothing happens.
I guess things can’t be all bad today–I’m typing this on my revived laptop.
You may remember that my laptop died 22 sad days ago and I set about repairing it myself, however ill-advised that may have been (let’s just say three of the screws came out with the help of Mr. Power Drill–let’s hope they weren’t important).
So there it is. My eviscerated laptop. Thanks to the incredible directions from iFixIt, I was able to disassemble my PowerBook G4 in hopes of replacing the dead hard drive.
Of course it didn’t go smoothly. Two screws were hopelessly stuck and all attempts to remove them left me with sore fingers and stripped screw heads. I ended up having to drill the two screws out, with very minimal damage sustained (can a laptop sustain minimal damage?). And now that I have it all apart I still can’t get the hard drive bracket off the hard drive. But iFixIt sells hard drive brackets, so I may not worry about that.
If all goes well I’ll have a new, slightly better hard drive for $120. Sure beats the $310 Apple would have charged. And sure beats the $1,099 for a new laptop (contrary to some reports, we didn’t just rush out and buy a new laptop within the hour). Though I still don’t have it back together and running smoothly yet, so don’t rule that out the brand new laptop. And I suppose with a three year old laptop getting a new one is going to come sooner rather than later. I’m just trying to forestall it a bit.
I feel a bit like Dr. Frankenstein. I’ll let you know how the reanimation goes.
A work-at-home dad wrestles with faith, social justice & story.
