Humility

There are days I foolishly think I’m fairly well-read and have thought through good chunks of doctrine and theology; and then there are the days where I’m reminded that I’m a rank amateur.

I’m thankful for the folks who so patiently share their wisdom and experience. You know who you are.

In which I gripe about my home media center travails

You regular readers (all three of you) know that this blog bounces back and forth between theology and nerd stuff with frightening regularity. This is going to be a nerdy post. You have been warned.

Nearly 5 years ago we got rid of our Dish Network satellite TV service and just went to watching what we could get over the air. We’ve evolved the setup slightly over the last 5 years, primarily by adding Netflix as a video source (our kids were 4, 3, and newborn back then, and have slightly more demands as 9, 8, and 5 now) and by adding a 27" iMac in our living room that gets used as a video-watching device on a regular basis.

The Basic Setup

Basement Family Room: Big LCD TV. HTPC running Windows 7. HDHomeRun networked tuner (still the 5-year-old original version) hooked up to it. 5 TB of hard drive space in that PC for storing recorded TV and other video. Running Plex Media Server to serve files to the rest of the house. Using Windows Media Center to record TV shows and playback video down there. Works like a charm. That’s the most stable, reliable bit of the system.

My bedroom: Ancient Mac Mini running some old version of OS X hooked up to a 20" monitor, running an older version of Plex’s Mac desktop app. Great for watching recorded TV shows. Not so great for everything else; the Plex Netflix plugin broke months ago, so if we want to watch Netflix most of the time we have to get up and open a browser and watch it that way. The Plex HDHomeRun plugin broke years ago, so if we want to watch live TV we open up the HDHomeRun app and play the video through VLC. Not integrated very well, but it works.

Living room: 27" iMac running OS X Mavericks. Here’s where the real frustration begins. Playback of HDHomeRun live video streams through VLC is broken in Mavericks. It’s a reported issue between VLC and Mavericks that hasn’t gotten fixed yet. I can get HDHomeRun to work acceptably through the older Plex app if I manually tune the HDHomeRun device first and then kick up Plex to play the video stream.

However, the old Plex app is now causing serious lockups on the iMac when I ping Plex Media Server to watch recorded shows. As in the only way to recover is to do a hard reboot on the iMac. The new version of Plex’s app (Plex Home Theater, they call it) seems to work OK. Which is great, however, as far as I can tell there’s no good way to view the HDHomeRun video in Plex Home Theater. Grrrr.

So at the moment it would appear that for the iMac I’m going to need to juggle multiple versions of the Plex app depending on what I want to watch. Annoying.

At least I’m saving money

When I remember that we were previously spending something like $60/month on satellite, and now we’re paying $8/mo for Netflix, we’ve been saving around $600 a year for 5 years… maybe we should invest a little bit of that savings on improving the infrastructure. (Do you think my wife will buy that argument? Heh.) But what should I do to improve things?

Where do I go from here?

The home media server solution is working really well, and Windows 7 recording the TV shows is reliable, pretty much seamless. Gonna keep it going as long as I can.

I know the HDHomeRun hardware has been upgraded 3 or 4 times since I bought my original device. Don’t know if I’d get any significant improvements from buying a new one, but it’s hard to be motivated to drop $100 on a new one when the old one still works so well.

I think in the living room I’ve basically locked myself into the iMac solution since we don’t have the room for (or the desire for) a big real TV in the living room. If we move to a new house in the next year or two, we’ll re-evaluate.

Back in our bedroom I think the solution that would get us closest is to replace the Mac Mini and monitor with a real TV and some version of set-top box - maybe a Roku or the new Amazon FireTv. FireTV is new, but it looks like it would get us Netflix, Amazon Video, ESPN video, and even integrate with Plex. About the only thing it wouldn’t support is the HDHomeRun integration; but I suppose I could always split off a signal from the antenna in the attic and run a TV signal down to the TV and use its tuners natively.

That’s all great, but…

While a nerd can dream, in reality we’ll likely be trying to sell our current house and buy a larger one (3 daughters and only one upstairs bathroom!) in the next year or two. So in reality I suppose we’ll hang on with what we’ve got until we make a move, and then re-assess the entire setup at that point.

A little bit of perspective

Just so I don’t sound like a totally self-absorbed idiot for the entire post, let me note that I remember moving from a black-and-white TV to our first color TV back when I was a kid, and in going to a video rental store for the first time when you had to choose between VHS and Betamax versions of the videos. Compared to those days… I guess our expectations have gone up a bit in 30 years.

We need more neighbors

There’s been a lot of virtual ink spilled in the Christian blogosphere on the gay marriage topic the past couple of weeks after the World Vision U-turn. One of the benefits of not saying anything about it myself is that eventually someone comes along who says things a lot better than I would. Today that person is Jen Hatmaker. (All the emphasis in the quotes below is hers.)

First, she says,

…the reason I’ve always held this conviction [about where she stands on homosexuality] close, inviting only my real friends and family and community in, is because I am loathe to be a pawn in a hateful public war. I refuse to be a point in some win column, used for my influence and lumped into ancillary groupthink I don’t share. I’ve said before that this conversation best belongs in true relationships, around dinner tables, over coffee, in real life, and I still believe that.

And yet for the sake of those following her as a leader, she is willing to lay her cards on the table:

I want you to know that I land on the side of traditional marriage as God’s first and clear design. I believe God’s original creation is how we were crafted to thrive: in marriage, in family, and in community, which has borne out for millennia in Scripture, interpretation, practice, and society (within and without the church).

But wait, she’s not done, and her follow-up point is important.

However, I remain disturbed and pierced at how many Christians have handled the gay community publicly. It is a source of extreme grief. We may share theology, but the application of that truth remains a disconnecting point. While Scripture does command us to “speak the truth in love” (and surely Facebook is the dead worst place to exercise that practice), that is not the end of our biblical responsibility.

She then recounts Jesus’ summing up all the law and the prophets as “love God and love your neighbor”. Powerful stuff. And the man wanted to know “who is my neighbor”? What’s my out? And Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Here’s Jen’s words again:

As I lay in bed, it was instantly and perfectly clear that the gay community has been spiritually beaten, stripped of dignity, robbed of humanity, and left for dead by much of the church. You need only look at the suicide rates, prevalence of self-harm, and the devastating pleas from ostracized gay people and those who love them to see what has plainly transpired. Laying next to them, bloodied and bruised, are believers whose theology affirms homosexuality and allows them to stand alongside their gay friends. (Again, you don’t have to agree with this, but there are tens of thousands of thinking, studied people who hold this conviction.) The spiritual gutting of these brothers and sisters is nothing short of shameful. The mockery and dismissal and vitriol leveled at these folks is disgraceful. Also wounded on the side of the road are Christians who sincerely love God and people and believe homosexuality is a sin, but they’ve been lumped in with the Big Loud Mean Voices unfairly. Painted as hateful intolerants, they are actually kind and loving and are simply trying to be faithful. The paintbrush is too wide, the indictments unfounded.

And then she brings it home:

We don’t get to abandon the theology of love toward people; the end does not justify the means. That is not Christ-like and it is certainly not biblical. As a faith community, it is time we relearn what “speaking the truth in love” means. Something that actually feels like love is a start. If the beginning and end of love is simply pointing out sin, then we are doomed. … I am convinced we need no more soldiers in this war. We need more neighbors.

Thanks, Jen, for a powerful word.

Star Wars music on an amazing pipe organ

OK, this is pretty great. Organist Jelani Eddington performs a suite from the Star Wars soundtrack on a massive pipe organ. The organ was built by Wurlitzer in 1927 for a theater in Omaha, NE, and after restoration has been installed at a museum in the suburbs of Chicago.

A little more about the organ:

Mounted on the wall to the left are the 32’ Diaphone pipes, and to the right are the 32’ Bombarde pipes. A 32-note set of Deagan Tower Bells, the largest of which weighs 426 lb., hang on each side of the room. They are activated by huge solenoids from their own console, the organ console, a roll player, and even the doorbell button. To the rear of the room, the ‘Ethereal’ pipe chamber in the attic echoes softly from the skylight area, while the brass ‘Trumpet Imperial’ and copper ‘Bugle Battaglia’ speak with great authority from the back wall. …


The grand piano connected to the pipe organ is a 9’ Knabe concert grand with an Ampico ‘A’ reproducing player mechanism. To the right of the console is a rare Deagan Piano-Vibraharp, which can be played by its own keyboard or from the organ console. Toward the rear of the room is a Spanish art case Steinway model A.R. Duo-Art reproducing piano, veneered in walnut with boxwood, pear and ebony inlay. A remote Duo-Art Concertola roll changer has been adapted to play Ampico rolls on the Knabe, or Duo-Art rolls on the Steinway, at the touch of a button on its control panel.

Crazy. Anyhow, this video itself is impressive:

Bullet Points for a Tuesday Evening

Because hey, I like this format.

  • Just when you think spring was here, we get snow. The ground and roads were covered this morning. Ick. At least it’s melted off by this afternoon.
  • There’s a 60 degree day in the forecast. I’ll believe it when I see it.
  • Of course, next week I’ll be in Florida for work where the highs are supposed to be in the low 80’s every day.
  • You aren’t reading this just to get Chris’s thoughts on the weather, are you?
  • I just submitted a big proposal at work this afternoon. Praying that it is looked upon favorably.
  • I desperately need some other music to get rid of the Frozen soundtrack earworm that’s plagued me the past week. The girls have been singing “Do you want to build a snowman?” incessantly.
  • I did something this morning I haven’t done in ages - turned off my alarm w/o realizing it and overslept past something on my calendar, in this case my Tuesday morning Bible study. Oops.
  • I have fresh brownies on the stove and a chapter of The Hobbit to read to the girls, so this will be my last bullet.

On Being Allowed to Grow Up

There’s a fascinating article on The Atlantic site that’s been making the rounds recently, and it’s well worth a read. Author Hanna Rosin, in her article “The Overprotected Kid”, examines how attitudes toward children and risk have changed in the past few decades. Where in the 70s parents would’ve just turned kids loose, kids are now more frequently monitored, reined in, and protected. She tells about a playground experiment in Britain where they’ve gone the other direction - removing the rubberized, “safe” equipment in favor of lots of raw material, limited adult intervention, and very few rules. Fascinating stuff.

Now, the article is well worth considering from the sociological and parenting angles, but this bit stuck out at me from a faith angle as well:

One common concern of parents these days is that children grow up too fast. But sometimes it seems as if children don’t get the space to grow up at all; they just become adept at mimicking the habits of adulthood. As Hart’s research shows, children used to gradually take on responsibilities, year by year. They crossed the road, went to the store; eventually some of them got small neighborhood jobs. Their pride was wrapped up in competence and independence, which grew as they tried and mastered activities they hadn’t known how to do the previous year. But these days, middle-class children, at least, skip these milestones. They spend a lot of time in the company of adults, so they can talk and think like them, but they never build up the confidence to be truly independent and self-reliant.

Now I’m shooting from the hip here, so feel free to jump in and set me straight in the comments if you want, but from my experience in the evangelical church it seems that we might be treating our children in the faith the same way. Let me tease that out a bit.

Are our children in the faith, whether new adult converts or children who have been raised in the church, really given the space to grow up in the faith? Or have we simply encouraged an environment that is the spiritualized equivalent of “let me walk you to school” and “stay away from that creek, you might get wet!”?

In our desire to protect young believers, are we unhealthily protecting them from the spiritual bumps and bruises that come from healthy exploration? Rather than wrapping protective material around any potentially difficult or painful spiritual point, should we instead be encouraging exploration, learning, and growth?

In a related vein, Peter Enns notes today that

If you ask me, one reason God might have for different denominations and traditions is they they reflect different stages of the spiritual journey.

Then, quoting psychologist David G. Benner, he reminds us that

…communities exist for the support of others, not their control. Like enmeshed familes or codependent marriages and partnerships, [unhealthy] communities fail to see the other as separate from themselves and to celebrate this fact and then help people achieve this differentiation in a healthy manner.

So, allowing room for exploration and real growth (as opposed to just learning imitation) allows us to celebrate individuals as they grow into their own identity. Certainly gives me things to think on as a parent; there may be a lesson there for pastors and church leaders, too.

[photo credit: stweedy via photopin cc]

The difference a decade makes

On the left, my passport photo from 2004. On the right, my passport photo from last week.

Not everything that calls itself a church is really a church.

My friend Randy posted a nice little bit of self-observation today that resonates with me:

Q – Randy, are you a heretic or something? What is wrong with you? First, am I a heretic?
No. I hold to the commonly shared beliefs of the church universal without exception. What I am is a critic of the evangelical church in the USA in our era. This church has lost its focus on Jesus and has become some kind of leisure time entertainment/marketing organization. Not that there is anything wrong with that; but of course, there is something wrong with that. Some people fail to distinguish between a local manifestation of the idea of the church and the church itself. If you fail to distinguish those two things, you might see me as destructive rather than constructive. You’ll have to believe me when I say that I love the church. But not everything that calls itself a church is really a church. … Second, what is wrong with me? Lots and lots of stuff.

I love this guy and give him an understanding nod and smile on this Friday.

My Swedish Doppelganger

When my wife’s sister and her husband recently visited Chile, they found this picture in a museum somewhere and sent it to my wife, noting that they’d found my doppelganger. I have to admit, I do see the resemblance. (Click on it to see the big version.)

The translation of the text with the photo (thanks, Google translate!):

CARL SKOTTSBERG aboard the ANTARCTIC A student of philosophy and botany of the Nordenskjold expedition. Was 21 years and was one of the last to leave the ship when it sank in the Weddell Sea. After being rescued by the corvette Uruguay, Skottsberg continued his career as a botanist and performed numerous trips. He was the founder of the Goteborg Botanical Garden whose main street that borders bears his name.

It turns out that Carl Skottsberg was indeed a Swedish botanist and explorer. It would appear that later in life his appearance and mine diverged a bit. (However, if anybody that’s handy with Photoshop wants to mock-up what this guy would look like with a shaved head and goatee… be my guest!)

For a moment in our 20s, though, we might have been brothers.

To be a Christian is to believe that all political ideologies are suspect.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry nails it:

To be a Christian is to believe that all political ideologies are suspect. And wrong. It doesn’t mean that Christians should retreat from all political ideologies — as that would also be a political ideology, and also wrong. By all means, be a Christian liberal. Be a Christian conservative. But if you are a Christian liberal, if you are a Christian conservative, then by definition there will be tensions between your Christianity and your political ideology. It’s axiomatic. And if you are a Christian first and an ideologue second, you should confront those tensions instead of papering over them.

The whole post is worth a read.