You Probably Shouldn’t Lead Worship Anymore If… - purgatorio

It’s a bit image-intensive, but it’s a hilarious post that worship leaders and really all church music types will enjoy. Click the link!

You Probably Shouldn’t Lead Worship Anymore If… - purgatorio

a good weekend to be off

Yesterday was my first Sunday of just taking a break from leading the worship team. David Green did a very respectable job in my absence. The Lord used this weekend to remind me once again that His plans are so much better than mine. He knew I would need this weekend off.

Laura was difficult all weekend. It’s not really her fault; she’s teething, which makes her cranky anyway. It was combined with a cold this time (a cold that I have too), so in addition to the drooling, her sinuses are perpetually clogged, and she’s been running a 103 degree fever. Tylenol or Motrin will bring the fever down for a few hours and turn her back into her bubbly self, but about 4 hours into the 6-hour dosage, the fever comes back and she gets owly again. She’s not sleeping well, either; she’s been in our bed the last two nights, which is a last resort for us. We don’t sleep well with her in the bed; she’s a restless sleeper and snores. However, it’s better to lose sleep to a snoring baby in your bed than to a crying baby in the other room.

Sunday I made it up in time to get to the second service at church, so I did get to hear the sermon and the worship team. Like I said, they were pretty good, David’s got a good musical sense. Mostly they were just lacking a clear leader. Somebody on the WT has to know where you’re going, when you’re going there, and then just grab everybody and take them along. That just takes practice, and time doing it. As long as people are willing, I’ll be happy to provide them opportunities to practice, and any coaching that I can do along the way.

Now it’s Monday. Becky reports that Laura is still feeling bum this morning. Please, Lord, can this teething get done with?

the next album I'll have to buy

Andy Osenga notes today that Ben Shive is going to release his own album. No word yet on when this will happen (Andy intimates maybe sometime this year), but Ben’s website announcing that fact is funny enough to make it worth the read.

Don’t know who Ben Shive is? For shame! The man is a genius, I tell you. Genius.

finally up and running

It’s taken too long, but noelridge.org is finally up and running with real pictures of our people and a color scheme that’s much more readable than the old light green. Now there’s just regular maintenance to do… but that’s fairly easy.

This task has been on my list of stuff to finish for far too long now, so it’s good to get it done.

being productive

Last night Becky was gone to a baby shower at the church, and so after I put Laura to bed around 7 I had a couple of hours to myself. As tempting as it was to sit down and watch Month Python & the Holy Grail (which Becky hates and I haven’t watched in a long time), I decided to get some useful stuff done.

Who’d believe how much you can get done in 90 minutes? I got the dishes done, got most of our income tax stuff figured out (thanks to TurboTax… now we’re just waiting for my W2 and we can file), and got stuff coordinated for worship team this weekend. And I still had time to turn on a movie that was on the Tivo that I thought I might like. It ended up being kinda boring, so I ignored it.

Tonight I have free again. I think I’ll do some playing with Photoshop and maybe we’ll watch some movie we can agree upon. Either that or we’ll start watching the American Idol auditions… that should be good for a laugh or two.

Oh, I should also add a comment about a new TV show we watched last night - it’s called Hustle and it airs on AMC. It’s produced by the BBC, and the best way to describe it is as Ocean’s 11 in a one-hour show. I’m looking forward to seeing a few more episodes… the first one was pretty good.

BookJournal: Fortunes of War

Fortunes of War is a recent title from Stephen Coonts. It is in many respects a standard military adventure novel, but it is based on an interesting premise. What if a newly militarized Japan tried to seize Siberia from a weakened Russia? How would the world respond? What might happen?

From there the action is good enough to make it a decent read. The story focuses on two fighter pilots, one American, one Japanese, who are friends but end up fighting on opposite sides. The story almost wraps up a little too quickly and neatly; I was left wishing for something a little less formulaic.

Now, maybe I’m a hard audience to please; Red Storm Rising has always been my benchmark of a good war novel. Sure, it’s long, and has a gazillion plot threads, and is (like all of Tom Clancy’s stuff) overly technical, but that’s the way I like ’em. As much as I wish Clancy and/or Bond’s writing schedule would accelerate a bit, I’ll take their epics over the consistent (but formulaic) offerings from Coonts any day.

FeedLounge!

The long-awaited FeedLounge finally opened for public signups yesterday. For those of you not familiar, FeedLounge is a web-based RSS aggregator/feed reader. As a sometime-user of Google Reader and a sometime-user of Bloglines, and never very happy with either, I was excited to hear that this product might be what I was looking for. Geof has been alpha-testing for a while and has sung its praises far and wide, so I was all primed and ready to sign up yesterday.

Having been a FeedLounge subscriber for all of twelve hours now, I can say this: I am not disappointed. FeedLounge has an amazing user interface, good enough that though it’s just a web page, it tempts you to think that you’re running a separate application. It allows for feed tagging, tagging and flagging of individual posts, and, what may be one of my favorite features already, direct links to subscribe to comments for blog posts that provide you that capability. Fantastic!

FeedLounge won’t be for everyone. If you’re only subscribing to a dozen or so blogs, just use bloglines or something similar. Also, FeedLounge is a subscription service; $5/month or $50/year. Well worth it, IMO, but that’s your judgement to make. But for people like me who are subscribed to hundreds of feeds and want to be able to get at them from anywhere, FeedLounge is a great way to go.

iTunes meme

Geof did this, and it looked like fun.

Open iTunes to answer the following:

Total number of tracks: 4,336.

Sort by song title:

  • First Song: ” ‘Round Midnight”, Miles Davis, Best of Miles Davis
  • Last Song: “Zoo Station”, U2, Achtung Baby

scary note: these are the same two songs (save for the artist on ‘Round Midnight) as Geof had…

Sort by time:

  • Shortest Song: “One Last ‘Woo-Hoo!’ for the Pullman”, 0:06, Sufjan Stevens, Illinois
  • Longest Song: “Hansel And Gretel And Ted And Alice/An opera in one unnatural act”, 24:40, P.D.Q. Bach, The Intimate P.D.Q. Bach

Sort by album:

  • First Song: “Concerto in D-Minor for Two Violins: 1 - Vivace”, Itzhak Perlman & Isaac Stern, “Double” Concerto for Two Violins
  • Last Song: “Happiness”, 1999 Broadway Revival Recording, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown

Top 10 Most Played Songs:

  1. “The Far Country”, 20 plays, Andrew Peterson, The Far Country
  2. “The Havens Grey”, 18 plays, ibid. T3. “Canaan Bound”, 17 plays, Andrew Peterson, Love and Thunder T3. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, 17 plays, Bob Dylan, The Essential Bob Dylan T3. “Say”, 17 plays, Sleeping At Last, Ghosts
  3. “Lay Me Down”, 16 plays, Andrew Peterson, The Far Country
  4. “The Queen of Iowa”, 14 plays, ibid. T8. “Fields Of Gold”, 13 plays, Eva Cassidy, Live at Blues Alley T8. “I Get a Kick out of You”, 13 plays, Jamie Cullum, Twentysomething. T8. “Lonely People”, 13 plays, Jars Of Clay, Who We Are Instead.

First five songs that come up on Party Shuffle:

This doesn’t really work since Party Shuffle doesn’t pick up the stuff on my iPod, and I don’t have much of anything left stored in my library.

Search for: “sex”, how many songs come up?: zero. “love”, how many songs come up?: 336. “you”, how many songs come up?: 564. “death”, how many songs come up?: Six. “hate”, how many songs come up?: Two. “wish” how many songs come up?: Eleven.

US Cellular outage in Eastern Iowa

I woke up this morning to find that I had very limited, analog cellular service. US Cellular has usually been reliable, so I was a bit suprised. I checked with a few coworkers and found that they had the same problem.

Digital service was restored around 10:30 this morning, but I still didn’t have any luck calling out. I walked past a US Cellular office on my way to lunch around noon, and they reported that they had some electrical problems and that most of the towers in eastern Iowa were problematic. As of that hour, apparently inbound service was working, but outbound was still disabled.

As of a few minutes ago (1:20 PM) outbound calling appears to be working again. Specialized calling (for instance, #BAL to get your minutes balance) was still kicking you off to the analog network. Hopefully they’ll have it up again soon.

too many rebates

I’ve probably sent in more rebate forms in the last two months than I had in my entire previous 28 years of life. It’s starting to drive me nuts.

It starts out innocently enough - a $10 rebate on a spindle of blank CDs. Then all of a sudden it goes nuts on you. $30 on a wireless router. $20 on a wireless network adapter. $60 on Adobe Photoshop Elements. $80 on a new hard drive for the Tivo. $60 on contact lenses. It seems like it’ll never stop.

Then we bought a new washing machine. I have 3 forms just for it! One to rebate the $50 delivery cost. One for $100 back from Alliant Energy since it’s an Energy Star washer. And then one for a $75 gift card from Home Depot for some promotion they were running. What a pain.

I understand why manufacturers offer rebates; they give an incentive to the shopper (“I pay $100 now, but it’s only $40 after the rebates!”) while at the same time they’re betting that a many folks won’t file the rebates on time or correctly (or at all), thus sticking the buyer with the full price. I’ve even fallen for it before; when I bought my Dell laptop back in the fall, it had a $100 Dell rebate that had to be filed within 28 days after the computer was shipped. I remembered it on day 29. There was much unhappiness that day.

Rebates do offer a few rays of sunshine, though; months from now when I’ve totally forgotten about the $80 hard drive rebate and my budget has absorbed the full cost, I’ll get an unexpected check in the mail. That’s always fun… and a good excuse to go out for dinner or something. See, maybe these rebates don’t save me any money at all…