I suppose there was a time I thought staying up all night was cool...

…but right now isn’t it. After getting, by Becky’s measurement, 11 inches of rain in the past 48 hours, our basement once again began taking on water. Looks like I should’ve bumped that sump pump higher up the priority list. Once again I am thankful for neighbors on both sides who are willing to loan out their Shop Vacs. I am happy this year to have one shop vac that has a garden hose attachment so I don’t have to carry it out to dump it.

It’s currently 1:45 on Friday morning or so, and the Shop Vacs have been running continuously since around 4:20 Thursday afternoon. The water is slowing down some now, I’m only having to go down and do some sopping up of puddles about every thirty minutes. The rest of the time I can just sit here and listen to the shop vacs run. You are never so ready for silence as you are after listening to three shop vacs run continuously for nine hours. Except for maybe after ten or eleven hours. :-)

So far I’ve listened to a couple of podcasts, watched two episodes of Arrested Development on Hulu, started a book, and annoyed anyone who was on Twitter to listen to my posts. If the water gets down to where I only need to check on it every hour, I’m going to try to take some naps. Until then I guess I’ll just hang out and drink another Diet Pepsi. I had already planned to take Friday off of work; I didn’t plan to spend it this way, though. There’ll be plenty of cleanup to do tomorrow.

Getting rid of the Dish: the Philosophical Post

So a couple of weeks ago I talked about the nerd side of getting rid of the dish. I’m still playing around with the configuration some, but I think I’m getting close to having a good usable solution. Becky keeps telling me “just teach me how to use it once it’s all working”, so I guess I should try to get to that point sooner rather than later.

But the other side of this is the why - why get rid of the Dish? Was it really just the $60/month we were spending? (We bought enough new hardware it’ll take us several months to break even.) Or is there more to it?

I’ll admit I didn’t come to it in quite this direction; my push to switch things up was driven a lot by the desire to have an HD DVR option. But as I sat with my Dish remote in hand and flipped through the channels, I came to the realization that out of the 150 channels available for our viewing, we’d never watched most of them. Most of them had programming that we couldn’t care about in the least. For the most part we spent our tv-watching time tuned to one of our local network stations. The exceptions: ESPN for sports, Nick and Disney for some kids programming. Oh, and a backlog of Food Channel shows on the DVR that never really went away. So we talked about it, and we agreed there were other ways we could access the sorts of programming we really wanted to watch, and that we’d be OK with missing the rest of it. So we cut the cord.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit there are things I’m gonna miss. Monday Night Football on ESPN, for example. And the Cubs games on WGN. (OK, maybe it’s good for my mental health to miss those…) But on the whole it’s been a positive thing. What we’ve eliminated is the mindless noise at night. We had a bad habit of just turning the TV on as we headed towards bed, watching the Cubs if they were on, but often just pulling up Sportscenter on ESPN and ignoring it while we read books and such before going to sleep. Without ESPN available, we’ve either had to decide to watch something we specifically wanted to enjoy (we’re catching up on 30 Rock) - or we just leave it off. And that’s been a very good thing.

Back before we first got a Tivo, I wondered (a lot) whether the Tivo would be a good thing, or whether it would just cause us to watch more TV. It ended up being the former; the Tivo allowed us to watch the shows we wanted, when we wanted, without having to schedule our lives around the start times. (Oh, and we got 20% of our TV-watching lives back in skipped commercials.)

Before we got rid of the Dish, I wondered if we’d just hate it and miss the programming. But I’m pretty much believing now that we will make do just fine, and it will be an improvement overall in how we spend our time and allow ourselves to be entertained distracted.

Now, believe me, there are a couple of internet-based options that I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on. If MLB.tv can ever get rid of their silly blackout restrictions (there are six teams that Iowans can’t watch. most blacked-out state in the country!), I’d subscribe in a heartbeat, and that’d let me watch Cubs games again. And I’d really love to get ESPN360.com, but that’d require me to switch internet service providers… and I’m not real keen on that idea, either. Ah well. I should just take the sage advice given by Bob the Tomato after he catches Larry the Cucumber overly engrossed in a TV show: “maybe you should read a book.” Yeah.

Not being able to do it all

Kevin DeYoung just nails it in a post today. Titled “On Mission, Changing the World, and Not Being Able to Do It All”, DeYoung challenges and encourages those of us who have the inclination to try to do it all, and who end up finding themselves age 30, cynical, and burned out. A few highlights:

I understand there are lazy people out there (and believe me I can be lazy too sometimes). I understand there are lots of Christians in our churches sitting around doing nothing and they need to be challenged not to waste their life (seriously, I love that book and think Piper motivates for radical Christianity in the right way)…

…We need to be challenged, but in ways we can actually obey, not pummeled into law-induced submission until we finally feel completely rotten about most everything in life and admit we aren’t doing enough for the poor, the lost, the children, the elderly, the least of these, the…you fill in the blank. Is the goal of Christianity really to leave everyone feeling like terrible a parent, spouse, friend, or neighbor all the time?

I believe there will always be more indwelling sin in my life and I believe that I will never do a good deed perfectly. But I don’t believe God gives us impossible demands in which we should always feel like failures….

When the pastor preaches on generosity the goal should not be to make every last person feel like a miserable, miserly wretch. Because unless you live in some Godforsaken locale, there are probably people in your church who practice generosity…. Sometimes, by God grace, we do get it right. The problem with “do more” Christianity is that no one is ever allowed to get it right. And the problem, ironically enough, with never allowing anyone to get it right, is that fewer people feel like getting it right really matters.

No doubt some Christians need to be shaken out of their lethargy. I try to do that every Sunday morning and evening. But there are also a whole bunch of Christians who need to be set free from their performance-minded, law-keeping, world-changing, participate-with-God-in-recreating-the-cosmos shackles. I promise you, some of the best people in your churches are getting tired. They don’t need another rah-rah pep talk. They don’t need to hear more statistics and more stories Sunday after Sunday about how bad everything is in the world. They need to hear about Christ’s death and resurrection. They need to hear how we are justified by faith apart from works of the law. They need to hear the old, old story once more. Because the secret of the gospel is that we actually do more when we hear less about all we need to do for God and hear more about all that God has already done for us.

Go read the whole thing. It’s worth it. Really.

Taking Reproof Seriously

Nearly a week ago I wrote a piece here wrestling with some concerns I’ve had about Sunday morning worship. That post went past with relatively few comments, but this morning I had a conversation with a brother from Stonebridge who, without regard to the content of my concerns, asked why I hadn’t just come to folks at church directly with my thoughts before publishing them on my blog. Furthermore, he let me know that there were feelings hurt by what I wrote.

We had a good conversation, one with which I’ve been wrestling for the rest of the day. And while I don’t feel like this was a situation where someone had wronged me and I should’ve been following Matthew 18, in hindsight (don’t you hate that word, hindsight? just its presence indicates that something was screwed up) I can understand that there could be folks who were hurt by what came across, despite my best intentions, as public criticism of them and their service at church.

With all that in mind, I want to say just a few more things, and hope that they can settle the topic for now.

First: if my earlier post caused you hurt in any way, I apologize and ask for your forgiveness.

Second: I tried to say it in my earlier post, and I’ll try to say it again here and hope that it comes through clearly: none of the criticism I was bringing was directed at any person. I certainly have enough experiences doing unprofitable things in church on which I can look back regretfully. I am fortunate that I have had people who noted those, corrected me in a spirit of love, and then encouraged me to get out there again. I want the same for Stonebridge, but I obviously handled the lines of communication poorly.

Finally: I’ve only been at Stonebridge for less than a year, and have had precious little opportunity to get to know any of you, so I’ll say something that in better circumstances hopefully wouldn’t need said: the last thing I desire is to cause disunity within the Body. My only desire is that God be more glorified in each one of us, individually, and in all of us, corporately, with each passing day.

I earnestly yearn to chew on these topics with you in the days to come.

Getting rid of the Dish: The Nerd Post

So we’re getting rid of our Dish. We’ve had cable or satellite TV pretty much ever since we moved into town seven years ago, but now we’re cutting the cable. Now, we’re not giving up television altogether; we’re just switching to a setup that will let us record and playback over-the-air TV, and giving up the paid stuff. There are a couple of sides to this, so I’ll make it a couple of posts. This is the nerd post. You have been forewarned.

The Goal The Dish DVR we are replacing allowed us to record shows and watch them on either of our two TV locations, one downstairs in the family room, the other our little 13" standard-def TV in our bedroom. We don’t watch the upstairs one that much, but it is very handy to keep around for times when the girls want to watch a show, and for in the mornings when they’re awake but we want to sleep in some. :-) We didn’t have HD through Dish Network; I really wanted HD. Oh, and I’d really like to still be able to watch some Cubs games. That’s about it.

What We Ended Up With: Downstairs

To go with the 42" Vizio LCD TV downstairs we invested in a relatively-inexpensive tower PC. It’s got a dual-core Pentium processor, 4GB of RAM (I know, I know, the 32-bit OS won’t use all 4, but that was the stock configuration), a 1TB hard drive, and lots of room to expand. It came with Windows Vista Basic (ick); I upgraded it to Windows 7 RC, and have preordered a regular Win 7 license for it. Add a Windows Media Center remote, and it works pretty smoothly. A little noisier than I’d like, but tolerable. This machine is our primary recording unit.

For an OTA tuner, I got a HDHomeRun networked tuner. If there’s one piece of this system that I’m most happy with, it’s the HDHomeRun. It’s got dual tuners in it. Basically, you plug in your OTA antenna and your ethernet to the back of the tuner, and you’re done. There’s a small piece of software to install, but then Windows Media Center (and EyeTV on the Mac) pick it up with no trouble whatsoever. (Supposedly XBMC in Windows will handle the HDHomeRun, too, but I haven’t been able to get it to work.)

The final component downstairs is an old tower (I forget the specs) running Ubuntu. I mostly use it as a place to save backups; there is just north of 1TB of disk space in it. I’ve also got some recorded TV stored on it which gets served up to the other computers on the network.

What We Ended Up With: Upstairs

Our little friend the Mac Mini moved upstairs. To go with it, I found a Dell 22" 1920x1080 LCD display on sale cheap. While we do have EyeTV installed, and could record from upstairs, the limited HDD space on the Mini (100GB) has me recording downstairs instead. (Yeah, I could do some fun AppleScripting to move files to a different machine once they are done recording… but that’s more work than I wanted right now.) The Mini is running XBMC for playback, and in the event we want to watch something live upstairs, we switch over to EyeTV. Not as elegant as I’d like, but it works pretty well.

What We Ended Up With: The Headaches

The biggest challenge in this setup is that I’m the idiot who’s running three different OSs among my three computers. Oh, and also running a beta OS on the Windows box. So Windows 7 Media Center records OTA TV into a new file format (.wtv). WTV files aren’t yet supported by the FFmpeg codec, which means XBMC won’t play them. Fortunately, W7 provides a WTV-to-DVRMS converter, and FFmpeg does support DVRMS. So, I’ve got a little nightly batch file that runs to convert all of the day’s WTV recordings to DVRMS and file them off in appropriate directories in the shared library area.

Sooner or later the available toolset will catch up with the Windows 7 WTV format, at which point things like commercial skipping and direct playback in XBMC will be available, smoothing things out a bit. For now, though, we’ve got a workable solution that records the shows we want to watch and lets us watch them in either of our two desired locations, and the ability to get rid of a monthly bill from Dish for a bunch of channels we never watch.

Taking Worship Seriously

OK, so it’s entirely possible that at the ripe age of 32 I’ve just become an old curmudgeon, but in the past few weeks I’ve had a couple of experiences at church that cause me to wonder just how seriously we take this thing we call Sunday morning worship.

Now, I’ll put some caveats at the front. Yes, I’m going to be talking about Stonebridge. Yes, I expect that there are people from Stonebridge who will read this. Yes, I’m going to ask some questions that will sound critical. So up front let me say this isn’t about any one person, or any one service, or any one topic, but rather it’s about the things I’ve seen, and about the mindset I think it reveals.

Experience #1: two weeks ago we ended the service with a great sermon from James, and started it with a good set of worship songs that were full of the Gospel - solid stuff. But the worship team had barely time to get off the stage, and the music had barely faded, before we were treated to one of the church staff dressed up in a superhero costume - complete with mask and cape and theme music! - to give us an announcement about an upcoming event. Hope you didn’t want time to reflect on what you’d just sung about. You weren’t going to get it.

Experience #2: this morning at church was “Family Sunday”, which means that there was no Sunday School for the kids - the whole family got to sit in church together. Then, after three worship songs, the children’s pastor was tasked with giving the message. First came a pseudo-introduction with a scripted “interruption” to give an announcement about a women’s event. Then came the actual sermon from James, and it felt more like a gimmick than a sermon. There was a very distracting, ever-louder ticking clock in the background (for effect!) and at the end of three short points, during what seemed like a conclusion, the ticking finally stopped, and the pastor cut off the sermon mid-sentence and walked off the stage. And just like that, we were done.

Now yes, I know this morning was an attempt to be dramatic and illustrate the sermon point. But I’m afraid that what people are left remembering this afternoon isn’t the point from James 4, but rather the awkward way everyone sat and looked at each other as the pastor walked off, as my daughter asked “is church over?”. She was confused, too. And yes, Laura, church was over. We ended up spending more time driving to and from church than we did actually in the service this morning.

I fear that experiences like these reveal that we don’t value enough the experience of Sunday worship. Yes, we show value to the Gospel in the songs we sing - but we don’t value them enough to give folks time to meditate on the great riches of God’s grace after singing. Instead, we distract them with superheroes in tights. Yes, we value and encourage the Sunday morning gathering, but then we allow gimmickry to replace Gospel proclamation, and send people home early, wondering “what was that?”.

I remarked to my wife on the way home that, on a spectrum with stodgy and boring but solid on one end, and flashy, cool, and vapid on the other, our current church home is one or two ticks further toward the flashy end than I’m quite comfortable with. Don’t get me wrong - I have great respect for a lot of people there, and have regularly heard the Gospel from the pulpit. But times like these past few weeks leave me wondering if our lip service to the Gospel isn’t quite being backed up with the sort of Sunday morning gravity that it deserves.

Adventures in Home Ownership, Part 17

As my Twitter stream revealed over the weekend, it turned out to be a busy weekend, but not quite in the ways we had anticipated.

Becky has been wishing for a new refrigerator for a while now - something newer, bigger, and, well, if it had ice and water in the door, that’d be awesome. So Friday afternoon someone at work posted a fridge for sale that seemed to fit the bill. Lightly used, newer, 40% bigger than our current one, and yeah, ice and water in the door. At a good price.

So Saturday morning we drove down to take a look at it. The fridge was in great shape, a good deal, but there was one minor issue: the thing was one inch too tall to fit underneath the cabinet in the kitchen. We thought on it for a while, looked at some other refrigerators at Lowe’s and Sears, and realized that anything we ended up getting that was much bigger than our existing fridge would be too tall. So, after looking a bit at the small cabinet over the fridge, we decided to rip it out.

For not being the carpenter/handyman in the family, it came out pretty quickly and easily. I did manage to poke one small hole in the plaster, but it can be patched. I saved all the trim for reuse, and in the end we don’t lose much usable storage space. That was step one.

Step two was to figure out how to move the new-to-use fridge up from Swisher to our place in Hiawatha. I put a plea out on Twitter and Facebook and got a response from a friend who could borrow a truck (thanks, Bridget!). It took checking three places before I found a utility dolly to rent, but finally it all came together and Sunday afternoon we moved in our new refrigerator.

Steps three and four can be given a little more time. Step three is to get the water line hooked up. Hopefully I can get that done today. Step four means we need to get the plaster patched, get the trim put back up, and get things painted. I’ll post a few pictures when I get a chance.

So it wasn’t the way I expected to spend my weekend, but I was able to put some tasks off and it worked out well. Now I just have to get the lawn mowed before we start losing small children in that jungle.

Bullet Points for a Friday #2

  • Slow-ish week turns into busy weekend. Lots of family in town, softball tournament, leading worship. Fun, but busy.
  • Oh, the occasion for all the family visiting: Laura turns 5 on Monday. Hard to believe I’ve been a parent for five years now.
  • No matter how cool the gong is on “The Great Gate of Kiev”, the solo piano version of Pictures at an Exhibition is far and away superior to the orchestrated version.
  • Just when I think my homebrew DVR is all working and I’m ready to blog about it, something else isn’t working quite right. I’ll be installing the Windows 7 Release Candidate tonight.
  • I’ve been flexing my web design muscles again a bit this week and it’s kinda fun.
  • I’m down 7 or so pounds in the #20lbchallenge this month. This weekend’s meal plans will be a challenge to that accomplishment. (Two months to go!)
  • Looks like I’ll have a quick trip to Ottawa, Ontario for business in a few weeks. Wish it were Toronto instead so I could meet up with Dan & Laura.
  • I haven’t had the heart or inspiration to blog about politics lately.
  • All the things that are on my mind re: God and church are things that need to be worked through first in our lives before they’re worked out on this blog.
  • I reactivated the IntenseDebate commenting plugin - they’ve improved it a lot since last time I tried it. Now with Facebook and Twitter authentication! Leave a comment below and let me know what you’d like to have me blog about.

A Rant on Amazon's Super Saver Shipping

Mostly to save my Tweeps from a half-dozen tweets venting my frustration.

I ordered a HDHomeRun networked tuner and a chunk of ethernet cable from Amazon on Friday morning, June 12. The tuner was ordered from Amazon proper; the cable from whichever of their providers had it the cheapest. I opted for Amazon’s super-saver free shipping, both to save the $6 and because I didn’t have enough $$$ on the gift card I was using to pay for shipping.

Additionally, I ordered a RAM upgrade for my Mac Mini from newegg.com on Tuesday evening, June 16. It came with free shipping.

Now, as to arrival times.

The network cable shipped the same day I ordered it, and arrived in the mail on the 16th. Snappy response, well done to the Amazon retailer.

The RAM shipped from Newegg on Wednesday June 17th, and arrived this morning via USPS. 5 days, including the weekend. Not bad.

Amazon finally got around to announcing that my tuner had shipped on the evening of Tuesday the 16th. So it took them three full business days to even get around to shipping it. And the USPS tracking number they gave me says that yes, they entered the tracking number into the system on the evening of the 16th. However, the arrival scan for the package doesn’t show up until the afternoon of June 19th. So between the time they boxed it up and the time they actually got it to USPS was another three business days.

Now they’re telling me that the anticipated delivery date to my home in Iowa (from, per the tracking info, someplace in Kentucky) is not until Thursday, June 25th - a full two weeks after I ordered it, and a full nine days after they told me it shipped. I know the USPS isn’t the fastest carrier, but hey, that’s just awful.

I have had better shipping service from Amazon in the past - maybe this is just a fluke. Or maybe it’s part of a strategy to dissuade customers from actually choosing their free shipping option. Either way, it’s pretty awful.

End rant. Carry on.

Fever° Version 1.01

This morning Shaun Inman pushed out (with notice via Twitter) version 1.01 of the Fever° feed reader. First of all, major kudos to Shaun for the auto-updater built in to Fever°. (Yes, I’ll go ahead and conform to the official naming of this tool, adding the little degree symbol to the end.) Once Shaun pushes the update out, Fever° will auto-update within 24 hours. Or, you can do an instant update from the menu. Very cool, very very simple. (Here’s the changelog for V1.01.)

I’m not sure exactly what all kicked loose, because it seemed like some feeds started working even before I pulled down the 1.01 update, but since updating Fever° is kicking butt. The scrolling issues I reported in V1.0 are all fixed, and the feeds appear to all be pulling in nicely. I’m gonna run it side-by-side with Google Reader for the day to make sure they seem like they’re catching the same stuff, and if Fever° passes that test, I’ll be saying adios to GR for the foreseeable future.

Now if I could just get him to set up some sort of referral bonuses…