Good things in March 2011

06 - dinner with the family at Casa las Glorias and the kids were all well-behaved! 07 - resolved to start keeping this list 08 - pancakes. lots of pancakes. 09 - folks at church volunteered to keep K for an hour so Becky and I could go out by ourselves 10 - got dates set for our trip to St. Thomas / St. John 11 - left work early to hang out family, temps > 50! 12 - great WT practice, new monitor headphones work great 13 - Addie’s birthday, had friends over for dinner 14 - my birthday 15 - 16 - 17 - Chinese food with the family and a spring afternoon at the park 18 - Babysitter and date with Becky 19 - Worship practice can’t be beat 20 - KP turns 2! 21 - Kickboxing class w/ Becky kicked my butt 22 - 23 - 24 - People starting to get well 25 - KP puked at the mall, but Steve & Meg were working CFA and so helpful 26 - Gotta love the NCAA tournament 27 - Awesome sermon from Pastor Randy 28 - Managed to only have to support a half-day of audits 29 - Haircuts and Sonic drive-thru with L and A 30 - First yard work of the season 31 - Mid-year performance review went well

A first look at Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

Amazon is offering two new services this morning: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player. Time to take a quick look at what they’re offering. The front page on Amazon.com gives the basic details:

Cloud Player comes in two varieties: Web and Android. All you need is a computer with a web browser and you can listen to your music with Cloud Player for Web - no software to install - just a web browser. The Android version is an app that lets you do the same thing from your Android phone or tablet.

First, about the pricing: Amazon Cloud Drive is a freemium service - free for the first 5 GB of storage, with paid plans above that. The pricing structure is straightforward: $1 / GB / year, with plans at 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, and 1000 GB. The pricing chart tells us that each plan “holds up to” not only X number of songs but also X number of photos or X minutes of HD video, so Amazon is pitching this service as a real Cloud Drive (backup service?), good for storing more than just music. In addition, any purchases from AmazonMP3 don’t count against your storage space, and if you purchase from the AmazonMP3 store in any time in 2011 they’ll give you the 20GB plan for free for one year.

Setting up the Cloud Drive couldn’t be easier; I purchased a $5 album from the MP3 store (Eisley’s The Valley) and then I had the option to either download via the Amazon MP3 downloader or to store to the cloud drive. With one click it had kicked my tracks over into the Cloud Drive and opened up the player.

Cloud Player (web version) is a fairly basic music player design; there’s an Album view where you can select a full album to play; you can also create playlists, download, or delete the tracks. Playback starts quickly and there’s a QR code right on the player that you can scan with your phone to download the Android app.

OK, so next you want to upload some music from your existing collection. Click on the “Upload to your Cloud Drive” button and a prompt comes up telling you that you need to download the Amazon MP3 Uploader application (why include MP3 in the title?), which is a (platform neutral) Adobe Air app. Install the app and point it to your music library and it will scan for all the supported types that you could upload.

Yes, there are some unsupported music types. At the moment, it’ll only support MP3 and M4A files, and (obviously) won’t support anything you bought from iTMS that’s wrapped with DRM. It defaults to assuming you want to upload everything in your library, and it gives you an estimated time to upload. (For my 74 GB of music library, it estimates 42 hours and change.)

Minor gripe with the uploader: rather than just showing you the entire directory tree and allowing you to select the pieces you want to upload, it flattens it and shows you an alphabetized list of lowest-level folders. This is a major pain. Now if I want to upload my entire, say, Sufjan Stevens collection, I can’t just click on the Sufjan top-level folder; I have to scroll through the list and select The Age of Adz, The BQE, Illinois, Seven Swans, etc. Amazon, fix this in the next version, please?

Otherwise, the uploader seems to do its thing well enough. It tells you how much storage you’re going to use with your uploads, how much you have left available on your Cloud Drive, and there’s the ever-present link to Buy Additional Storage.

Once the upload was going I fired up my Samsung Galaxy phone, scanned that QR code, and downloaded the Amazon Cloud Player app. No big surprise here: Amazon is going for integration. The Android Cloud Player app is an update to the existing Amazon MP3 store app. This brings it awfully close to being to Android what the iTunes Music Store is to the iPhone; you can browse the store, make a purchase, start listening immediately. But Amazon does one better and lets you access your stuff in the cloud.

I’m looking forward to playing with the Amazon Cloud Player some more; it looks pretty slick at first glance. The first screen gives you the option of browsing the Amazon MP3 store, browsing/playing on-device music, or browsing/playing/downloading music from your Cloud Drive. It recognized all of the music I already had loaded on my phone just fine. You’re able to browse the stuff that you have on the Cloud Drive and either stream it for immediate play or download it to your phone for playback later. The download will run in the background while you do other things. (Wonder when they’re gonna have the Amazon App Store do that? It can’t be long now.) There are settings so you can restrict downloads to wifi-only if you want to conserve your phone’s data plan.

Actual music playback is pretty straightforward, and the player part of the app looks nice and is easy to use. (Dang, I wish there was an easy way to take screenshots on my Android phone. The “hold down back and press home” thing that Google turns up doesn’t seem to work for me.) Don’t know if the player will replace DoubleTwist as my go-to music player; guess we’ll have to see.

It’ll take some time to see if the cloud storage thing is a big enough deal for me to want to pay to store my entire collection, but for now, at first look, it’s clear that Amazon got a lot of things right on the first try.

Playing Games

So I have this sudden inclination to find some new games to play as a family. I don’t have a long history as a gamer or anything; I played a little bit of Risk and Axis and Allies as a high-schooler, but that’s about it. Becky and I play chess every once in a long while, but she’s established a history of being able to beat me in chess at will, so it’s less entertaining (for me, at least) than it could be. There are a few games at which we’re more or less even; Boggle and cribbage come to mind.

So there it is. We’re boring when it comes to games. Our kids aren’t quite old enough to be included in the games yet, so that makes things a bit more of a challenge. But it still seems like we should expand our horizons a little.

I’ve perused the shelves at Walmart and Target, and frankly there’s not much there that interests me. Most of them are either re-releases of Milton Bradley staples (yet another version of Monopoly!) or games that require or encourage vast amounts of pop culture knowledge. Even a game like Apples To Apples (which I’ve played before and enjoyed) requires a level of pop culture knowledge that escapes most kids and some adults.

I’ve heard some of my nerdy friends about other games that might qualify as good strategy games that pique my interest. Settlers of Catan seems to be the archetype; I’ve also heard good things about Carcassonne and Dominion. I’ve got two basic parameters for selecting a new game: it needs to be something that can be played two-player, and it needs to be something that a bright child of 7 or 8 could conceivably learn and enjoy.

So, friends and gamers, what say you? Can you make any game recommendations for a family that needs to move out of the Milton Bradley era?

Introverts in the Church

I’ve been doing a slow-and-steady re-read of Adam McHugh’s Introverts in the Church, and words don’t well express how much I resonate with what he is saying. Just as I read Dilbert and think that Scott Adams must’ve worked where I work to get it that right, I read McHugh and think he must’ve served in the same churches I’ve served in. Amazing.

Last night I got to chapter 5, “Introverted Community and Relationships”, and found a few paragraphs that were so apt that I couldn’t resist sharing them.

As introverts seek to enter into and participate in particular communities, their trajectory of commitment may take a different shape than that of their extroverted counterparts. extroverts, who want to increase their level of involvement, may proceed roughly in a straight line as they move from the periphery into the nucleus of the community. … The journey of introverts into a community, however, is better conceptualized as a spiral. They take steps into a community, but then spiral out of it in order to regain energy, to reflect on their experiences and to determine if they are comfortable in that community. They move between entry, retreat and reentry, gradually moving deeper into the community on each loop.

The introverted path into community, much to the confusion of many extroverts, never reaches a point in which the spiraling form is shed.

You know how it feels when someone puts words to something that you’ve always felt and experienced but haven’t been able to describe? That’s how I feel when reading that passage. That’s what my pattern has been, or has needed to be, for the past 10 years.

Some more:

An introverted college student I worked with…encountered several reactions when he chose to step outside of his community after two years of consistent participation. Extroverted leaders chided him for his lack of commitment and were convinced that his pulling back was indicative of a larger spiritual problem infecting his heart. The pastor of the community arranged meetings with him to understand what was happening and what was the source of his dissatisfaction with the group. These efforts, as well intentioned as they were, only pushed him further away instead of drawing him back into his previous level of commitment.

And yes, I’ve been there. And I’m thankful to be in a place now where that isn’t happening.

Christ Liveth In Me

As lives the flower within the seed, As in the cone the tree, So, praise the God of truth and grace, His Spirit dwelleth in me.

Christ liveth in me, Christ liveth in me, Oh! what a salvation this, That Christ liveth in me.

-- Christ Liveth in Me, Daniel Webster Whittle, 1891

I’d never heard this hymn before this weekend, but it’s a good one. Such a beautiful picture of what God does in the life of a believer.

Slowing Down

I’ve read a lot of books the past few years. As my Goodreads account will attest, I’ve averaged a book every 5 - 6 days for the past four years, and to date in 2011 I’m still on that pace. The book pile next to my bed waxes and wanes with library visits and Amazon shipments. I’ve always been a quick reader. This can be a beneficial thing at times, but it also means that sometimes I’m still picking up detail on my second and third times through a book. I’m coming to the conclusion now, though, that I need to slow down.

I’ve read a number of books over the last few years that have, at the time, stuck out to me as being particularly insightful and helpful to me thinking. (Wright’s Surprised by Hope, Capon’s Between Noon and Three, and McHugh’s Introverts in the Church quickly come to mind in this category.) But with the exception of Surprised by Hope (which I read through multiple times, underlined extensively, and attempted to blog), the other books I read quickly, went “wow, that’s good stuff”, and then put them down.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to me, but it holds more impact when written down in black and white: the value I get from reading the book is in direct proportion to the amount of time I’m willing to devote to digging in to it.

So, I want to slow down. I want to cut down on the number of frivolous novels I read, and focus in on the valuable stuff. I want to take books a chapter or two at a time, chew on the thoughts, and fill up a Moleskine making notes on them afterwards. I want to use this blog as a place to wrestle with and promote the good stuff I find in those books. I want this exercise to sharpen my thinking, hone my writing, and draw me closer to Christ. By His grace may it be so.

I’ll keep you posted on what I’m doing.

Evaluating Restaurant Catch-Phrases

We took the family to Texas Roadhouse this week for my birthday, and I was quickly annoyed by the overblown descriptions that the restaurant apparently requires their servers to use when describing the food. After the third time our waitress asked what we’d like for a “hand-made side”, I was tempted to ask her if I could have a machine-made, out-of-a-box side instead. After hearing several other servers use the same line, though, I was glad I bit my tongue. It’s not their fault that their employer forces them to use silly scripts.

In the spirit of fairness, though, I wanted to provide my evaluation and accuracy rating on the four primary annoying phrases I heard throughout the night. Your mileage may vary.

1. “Fresh-baked rolls”

OK, this one is really hard to argue with. The rolls really are fresh-baked there in the restaurant. At busy times we’ve occasionally had to wait for a fresh batch to come out of the oven. And they’re yummy. So while it gets annoying to hear “fresh-baked rolls” multiple times a night when just “rolls” would do, I can’t ding them on the correctness of their description.

Accuracy Rating: Four Stars.

2. “Hand-made sides”

They’ve given themselves some wiggle room on this one, because you can define “hand-made” pretty loosely. Take the prepared lettuce mix out of the plastic bag with your hand, sprinkle some pre-grated cheese and some out-of-a-box croutons on top and voila! a hand-made salad. And I’m guessing they didn’t hand-cut the potatoes to make my steak fries. I guess if they want to define “hand-made” that way, fine… but I’m not buying it. (Well, I did buy it. And eat it. But I’d balk at calling them hand-made… OH, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.)

Accuracy Rating: 2 stars.

3. “Ice-cold beer”

To be fair, I’ve never had a beer at Texas Roadhouse, so I don’t have first-hand knowledge of the beer temperature. However, I consulted RateBeer.com’s helpful article about the correct temperature at which to serve beer, and they gave this advice:

Very cold (0-4C/32-39F): Any beer you don’t actually want to taste.
Cold (4-7C/39-45F): Hefeweizen, Premium Lager, Pilsner…
Cool (8-12C/45-54F): American Pale Ale, Amber Ale…

Per those standards, if Texas Roadhouse beer is actually ice-cold, apparently it’s a beer that you don’t want to taste. Eesh. So, either their descriptive phrase is highly inaccurate or their beer is rubbish.

Accuracy Rating: 1 star.

4. “Legendary margaritas”

Dictionary.com defines legend as “a nonhistorical or unverifiable story handed down by tradition from earlier times and popularly accepted as historical.” So, if Texas Roadhouse’s margaritas’ quality is “legendary”, apparently the message is that the quality of said margaritas is either “nonhistorical” (i.e. untrue) or “unverifiable” (perhaps that means you can’t actually order one?). However, apparently people have passed down stories about them which have been accepted as fact.

The thing is, in my many visits to Texas Roadhouse, I cannot recall ever seeing anybody actually drink a margarita. Maybe this lines up with the idea that the quality of the margaritas is “unverifiable”? I primarily see margaritas consumed at the local Mexican restaurant, but at Texas Roadhouse if people are drinking alcohol they’re usually drinking beer.

Accuracy rating: 3 stars, primarily because I’m starting to buy into that “unverifiable” bit of legendary.

Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions

Have you ever read a book that turned everything you had been taught about a subject upside down? That’s where I feel I’m at on the topic of cross-gender friendships after reading Dan Brennan’s Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions.

Growing up in the evangelical church, what I’ve been taught about friendships between men and women goes something like this: be careful. Stay away (mostly). Male-female relationships mostly just lead to sex. Once you’re old enough to marry, find that right person. That person then needs to be your best, closest friend, and only cross-gender close friend for the rest of your life. Beware of spending time with people of the opposite sex for fear of damaging your reputation. (Because after all, if a man and a woman develop any sort of a relationship, it’s going to lead to sex.) Take a step even further back and make sure you don’t even do much serious communicating with those of the opposite sex because you might venture into “emotional infidelity” to your spouse.

But wait, you say, there is truth in these things. Marital unfaithfulness is, sadly, not too uncommon in the church. And when it happens, it’s devastating to men, women, children, families. I know this. As a church leader I’ve seen first-hand the damage that can be caused. But I resonate with Dan Brennan when he says that the evangelical church has gone the (sadly) usual route of putting up legalistic barriers “for protection” rather than taking down the walls and allowing for the possibility that good things could run wild. This idea that male-female relationships inevitably end in sex is something we’ve gotten from Sigmund Freud, not from God. Why can’t we wait to let Galatians 3:28 soak in (“here is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”) before immediately saying “Yes, but…”?

Brennan persuasively argues that, pre-Freud, it was not uncommon for the language of friendship (both in same-gender and cross-gender friendships) to be personal and intimate in ways that make our modern minds squirm with Freud-inferred sexual tension. Yet, Brennan says, these friendships often chastely existed, and indeed co-existed alongside the healthy marriages of one or both of the friends. He quotes liberally from the early and medieval church, and cites three Biblical examples: David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, and Jesus and Mary Magdalene. In each case these relationships were intense, deep, intimate friendships; and yet in each case, no matter what Freud would tell us, these friendships were good and right and appropriate. While Brennan is arguing at times based on what he (reasonably) infers from the text, I believe the burden of proof is on those who would say “no” to this type of relationships rather than on he who is saying “yes”.

If I had one gripe with Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions while reading, it was that I wanted more practical advice or examples of what these friendships would look like when worked out in real life. Brennan provides some examples from his own cross-gender friendships; he touches briefly on things like prayer and conversation, recreation, and physical affection. But as I reflect on it, I realize I’m thinking wrongly about it. I don’t really need a book to tell me what friendships should look like. But though I agreed with Brennan that we’ve set legalistic fences in the wrong places, in expecting more concrete examples what I was really asking was “OK, where do we move the fences to?”. And if that’s all I’m asking, I’ve missed Brennan’s point. He’s saying, instead, “take down the fences.”

I’m not sure that the church is really ready to deal with Dan Brennan’s book. His ideas require buy-in from a lot of people if they are going to work. And yet, if the church were to truly buy into it, we would be a powerful example to the world of how God’s redemptive work truly makes all things new… even relationships between men and women.

Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions is worth reading and chewing on for a while. You can get it from Amazon.

The hazards of church music...

…aren’t necessarily what you think. My left ankle and leg has been very sore for the last two days. Why? Because I had an hour of music practice on Saturday, followed by an hour of practice and then two church services on Sunday morning. And because I play the keyboard while standing up, and I pedal with the right foot, which means I end up doing a lot of standing and flexing on my left leg.

Do they have special workouts so I can prepare better for this type of strain? This is not the way I thought a commitment to playing in the worship band would wear me down.

Books in my reading queue

My reading queue has been backed up for a while now, and I’ll admit that I only make things worse by buying books and regularly hitting the library. I’ve been entertaining myself with some light popular spy thrillers lately, but it’s time to put those down and work through some better stuff. Here are a few that are in my pile:

Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions: Engaging the Mystery of Friendship Between Men and Women by Dan Brennan.

I had this one on my Amazon wishlist for a while after John Armstrong wrote about it. Becky bought it for me for Valentine’s Day and it’s been sitting in the pile ever since. The author’s premise is that there is a meaningful place in the Christian life for close friendships between members of the opposite sex who are not married to each other. Typically this has been something that Christians have advised against, usually on the basis of wanting to protect marriage… but I’m interested in what the author has to say.

Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace by Robert Farrar Capon

I got this one for Christmas and have already read it once, but it really merits a re-read and perhaps a blog post or two or three. This is a fascinating little book on grace, and there were two or three particular places in it that caught me square on and have gripped my thinking ever since. Definitely time for a re-read.

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi.

I don’t even remember what blog I was reading that recommended this sci-fi novel, but the review was good, and the summary looked good, and the library had it… so it’s in my queue. I do love me some sci-fi.

Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture by Adam McHugh.

This goes into the re-read category as well. I read things too quickly sometimes, and this was one that I buzzed through on the way to some other book. It deserves a more thoughtful re-read; there’s a lot in it that could be very helpful to me and other introverts out there.

Well, enough for now. Any recommendations on other books I should add to the queue?