For some time now, I’ve been thinking about writing about life in “the cloud.”  Now, I just lost some of you.  Thankfully, Apple has been promoting their new iCloud product, or I probably would have lost more of you.  Let me explain… no, there is too much, let me sum up.  Essentially, when tech people talk about “the cloud,” they are talking about using network or online resources to accomplish tasks you would typically use desktop computer software for.  So, for example, many of us were “in the cloud” a long time ago when we started using webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo.

I sat down to write this post last night, and about 4 or 5 pages later, I realized that perhaps this needed to be a series since no one would ever get through the whole thing in one sitting.  Plus this way, I can spend some more time on each app.    My goal is to show you some of the applications that I use that make my life easier.  If you decide to try any of these (or solutions that are similar), I would really recommend you do what I do, which is use the app exclusively (as the solution it’s designed for) for at least a week to get acclimated before you judge it positively or negatively.  First impressions are often off.  We get used to doing things a certain way, and often changing software will take you more time before it starts saving you time.  Since I mentioned Hotmail and Yahoo, I might as well start with my favorite webmail client and all around communication solution, Gmail.

Gmail

About 2 years ago, my computer crashed again.  I don’t remember why the crash happened that particular time, only the frustration a week later when I went to find an email that I needed, only to remember that my computer had crashed, and I had lost all of the emails between the time I backed up my computer last and when the computer crashed.  This is the problem with manual back-ups, you only get the data from when you last backed up!  Anyway, once upon a time, I had an Excite email account (actually, I think I probably still have it…. yep, still there, unchanged from whenever Excite got bought by whoever…. wow, I’m still getting starwars.com e-newsletters amongst all of the spam) and I still have a Hotmail account, and I think I remember even signing up for a Gmail account once upon a time (I remember being lured by the promise of crazy amounts of space, but lost interest because I didn’t want to do the email address change thing).

After looking at all various webmail (cloud) solutions, Gmail seemed to be the obvious choice, so I signed up and started customizing.  The first wonderful thing I find about Gmail is the way it integrates all of my POP mail into my Gmail.  Specifically, all 4 or 5 of my email addresses all get checked within my Gmail account, neatly organized into separate folders.  I can send from any of the POP addresses, or from my Gmail account.  My contacts are all together in one place, conveniently synced with my phone and my iPad.  These days, my Sprint phone number connects in with my Google account, so when someone calls my cell, a notification pops up in a chat window and I can even answer the call on my computer (actually, the notification pops up about 5 seconds before my phone even rings).

In terms of email, I haven’t lost an email since I switched.  If I get emails from people (read companies) that I don’t want, I can mark them as Spam, and Google remembers to file all messages like that in my Spam folder so that I don’t see them.  Email conversations are put together into conversation threads, so I can always view the whole conversation without going on a hunt for that last email from so and so.  It is Google, so all of my emails are easily searchable (I didn’t know I needed that until I started using it more and more).

In short, Gmail has become my communication hub.  All emails route through Gmail, my phone calls route through Gmail, etc.. I almost have my Gmail open in a tab, which is why I am so quick to answer emails.  There are certainly other cloud solutions for email.  Lots of corporate people use Microsoft Exchange accounts.  Apple fanbois use MobileMe (now iCloud) for email, which does much that Gmail does.  I would certainly recommend that you move to a cloud solution for your email.  I know there are people paranoid about security that would have a panic attack using cloud services, but let’s be honest, there really is no completely secure solution.  Be smart with password management, not visiting risky websites, not opening fishy websites, in other words, use some sense in your online activities.  There has to be a balance between security and ease of use.  Well, off the soapbox and off to sleep!  Next time, Google Docs.

I would like to submit to you an option d.  There’s a lot of really great, theologically rich, musically interesting Christian music out there.  A lot of people have asked me for suggestions, and to be honest, I’m so musically eclectic that often I’m not sure where to begin.  I listen to a lot of music, and a lot of it is music that you have probably never heard.  The only way for you decide if you like a lot of this music is to listen to it!  You might find that a lot of it kind of grows on you.  What I’d like to do is to share with you the artists that I’m listening to.  I’ll give you some representative YouTube links perhaps, a link to purchase an album or two on Amazon, and who knows, maybe you’ll find some new music that you love to listen to that helps you in your quest to keep your mind on things above and not on earthly things.

Up first in the series of, “This music is not mainstream!” is a group that is about as not mainstream as you get, Rend Collective Experiment.  Here is how they explain what Rend Collective Experiment is on their website (which by the way has a really cool design… www.rendcollectiveexperiment.com):

The Rend Collective Experiment started in 2004 as a group of confused 20 somethings started trying to figure out life, God and community. Then in 2007 it grew into a collective of musicians and artists trying to share with the world what they were learning. All our music is grown out of an organic environment and we hope you can appreciate our bond through our music. We try to make journey music that talks from the heart and trys to follow God’s heart yet its music for all not just the religious!

The first thing that you notice about this Irish group, Rend Collective Experiment is that they are not your typical band, with a lead singer, drummer, electric guitar player, bass player, maybe a keyboard player, an acoustic guy and a singer or two.  The lead singer on one song isn’t the lead singer on the next song.  One song may have drums, the next may not.  In other words, if you are an eclectic listener like me, you get to be eclectic without having to change CDs!  I can still remember the first time I heard their album, “Organic Hymnal,” and listening to the song, You Bled and exclaiming out loud, “Brass!”  Listening to this album, I heard the song, “Love Divine” and said to Jodie, “Wow, these lyrics are great!  This sounds like a hymn.”  That’s because the song is the lyrics to Love Divine, All Loves Excelling set to new music.  Listening to this song helped me to rediscover a hymn that we sing maybe once or twice a year.  Oh, and did I mention there’s brass….

You can listen to several Rend Collective Experiment songs by visiting their YouTube page, http://www.youtube.com/user/RendCollective.  That being said, their album that’s out, “Organic Hymnal” really needs to be experienced as a complete album.  You can purchase the album on Amazon or iTunes (along with I’m sure a host of other services).  I shall leave you with a couple of YouTube videos.  The first is of their song, “Movements.”  This video shows off their quirky humor side (the album really has both serious and quirky music on it).  The second video, I saw long before I ever heard of Rend Collective Experiment, because I’m a geek, and saw it on a blog.  It wasn’t until later that I made the connection that this was the band I was listening to so much.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCYgQWLO8vY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaJ4A7mXJH8

Powers separates his book into three sections; What Larks? The Conundrum of the Connected Life, Beyond the Crowd Teachings of Seven Philosophers of Screens, and In Search of Depth Ideas in Practice.  The middle section is his focus, where he takes the teachings and musings of seven “philosophers” like Plato and Shakespeare and discusses how the issues they were having with being connected relate to our world today and how their solutions might help us.  To be honest, I thought this section was the weakest of the three sections of the book.  Plato and Thoreau were really the best chapters, but the rest I could have skipped and still gotten a lot out of the book.

Powers really shines in the opening section (the first four chapters), and really that section alone is worth the price of the book.  If nothing else, it helps you to understand what being constantly connected is doing to you.  There is another book I’m just starting that promises to go into this in more scientific detail, but Powers doesn’t need scientific detail because we can all see ourselves as he talks about the issues.  Boiling it down, since we are constantly connected, we flit from info to info.  Think about it, how many windows to you have open on your computer right now?  How about tabs?  Have you ever surfed Facebook, but then the computer dings to tell you you’ve got email, and there is a link to a blog post you click, so you start reading the post, but off to the side there is something really intriguing, so you click there, but just as you start reading, the phone rings and your spouse asks what time the store closes, so you Google the store to find the store hours, then you click back on Facebook and update your status to reflect how grateful you are that your spouse is running to the store, and then a chat window pops up and you start chatting with that friend you haven’t talked to in forever…..  Sound familiar?  What Powers suggests is missing are moments to process.

So, the last section of the book talks about ways that we might find those moments to process.  One of the suggestions I liked was the “no screens” room.  He suggested setting up a room without “screens” and deliberately spending time in that room.  Now, I would change that slightly to allow my nook or Kindle, but that’s because I don’t have either of them set up for things like email and internet browsing would be horribly slow, and because I don’t buy physical books any more and haven’t for the last two or three years.  Anyway, just the idea of disconnecting and “getting away” occasionally is valuable.  Take time to ponder.

Now let me quickly go away from the book and draw a conclusion based upon the material.  The subject I want to mention really quick is Bible study.  After I read Hamlet’s Blackberry, I was pondering how this applied to my spiritual walk and I suddenly realized just how counter to the way I process information Bible devotionals really are.  Let me explain.  I read a lot of books.  A lot!  As in, more than one a week.  I also read lots of blogs.  I use Google Reader and Flipboard on my iPad (which is synced with Google Reader) to keep up with all of those blogs.  I keep up on Drudgereport daily and read lots of emails throughout the day.  What I don’t do is repeat a lot of content.  My reading of Hamlet’s Blackberry will likely be the only reading of Hamlet’s Blackberry.  I don’t typically reread a lot of blog posts.  In other words, my intake of content is constantly new.  Bible study is quite the opposite.  Instead we are called to pour over and reread the same text as we ask the Holy Spirit to write it on our hearts.  This means reading the same material over again.  This means pondering slowly through passages of scripture.  This means training myself to slow down as I read the Bible.  Anyway, just a thought.

Let me be blunt, this is one of the best movie soundtracks I’ve ever heard (BTW, I am a movie soundtrack junkie).  I was blown away by the music here.  So much so that I just did some online research to try to figure out who composed the score with these Daft Punk guys, because the orchestration and the beauty of the music is simply astounding.  Well, the Daft Punk guys did all of the music.  They worked on the score for over two years, as you can tell as you listen to the interweaving of melodies, orchestra and techno music.  This score took time.  So much so that the movie was cut to the soundtrack!  If you understand the movie score process, you know that one of the last things that happens in the film is the soundtrack.  You can see the process in a lot of making of movies.  It usually involves the conductor standing in front of the orchestra with a screen showing the movie, and the orchestra literally plays the soundtrack to the movie.  This movie was cut listening to the soundtrack.  I can’t wait to see the results!

The music on the album is a mix of orchestral music with techno.  This mix comes off well.  Some tracks like Derezzed are almost all techno music.  This is what Daft Punk is known for, and they don’t disappoint.  The music is well sequenced and mixed with an originality that is rare in techno.  Where Legacy really shines though is in the use of the orchestra.  There are moments that sound like something from Batman Begins, moments that sound like Lord of the Rings in their scope and grandeur and moments that sound like the great composers.  No, I’m not exaggerating.  Adagio for TRON is incredible.  I actually stopped what I was doing, put the headphones on, started the track over, closed my eyes and listened.  Exquisite.

Something that is so different about this album is the interplay between the orchestra and the techno.  What you would expect would be the orchestra and the loops to be treated as separate entities, but since the Daft Punk guys created it all at the same time, the orchestra is simply another sonic tool for the layering of the music.  The result is something truly unique (at least I’ve never heard something quite like it).

What is important about this album is that I can listen to the whole thing and that I can listen to it multiple times.  It seems like movie soundtracks have really gone downhill in the last decade.  The aforementioned Batman Begins sounds much the same throughout and the new Star Trek wasn’t much better.  Listening to Legacy I can hear what is missing from so many soundtracks, melodies and counter-melodies to go along with these wonderful chord progressions.

If you enjoy classical music, techno music or movie soundtracks, you really owe it to yourself to listen to this album.

Couple of reasons for the move back to WordPress.  First of all, renewal was up for amos5worship, and I just couldn’t justify paying for the domain when I don’t use it all that often.  Jodie came to the same conclusion and moved her blog to psalm127mom.blogspot.com (I know, Blogspot Ick!)  The second reason was the time needed to tinker within my custom design on my custom install of habari really resulted in me doing nothing.  With this blog, I’ve got it set up, and WordPress worries about things like upgrades and design theming, etc.  That means that all I have to worry about is the content!  Oh, and did I mention free.  That’s a pretty solid reason.

The last reason that I transitioned away from amos5worship is that I felt a pressure on myself to keep post to subject matter of worship and justice and related matters.  Not to say I didn’t stray, but I felt weird writing a long post on Ubuntu on a worship site.  Worship Geek (a light-bulb moment that happened to be available) lets me flex the content since the title is really a description of two passions of mine, worship and all things geeky.  So, my hope is to post more often.  (I know, I’ve said that before)  I’m also planning to broaden the content a bit.

So, sorry for the change again.  I really do intend that this is going to be my permanent blog for the foreseeable future.  Thanks for being patient, and looking forward to sharing with you going forward.

I have been a faithful customer for all of those years.  Rhapsody really has been a part of my music life, especially now that I’m a worship director, listening weekly to new albums and artists.  So, why am I saying goodbye after all of these years?  Simple, something better and cheaper came along.  This week, the Chrome app store launched, and one of the reviewers commented that the Chrome version of the MOG web player was really nice.  To be blunt, it blows Rhapsody away, and it is an early beta with features missing.  Rhapsody has been slow to change (in 9 years, the player changed little), and has become in many ways bloated, including the web player and the amount of resources it uses.  In my geekiness, I have switched to Ubuntu, and the only way to play tracks is through the web player, and it’s just plain awkward, and it hasn’t changed in two years.

So, MOG it is.  Maybe someday I will return to Rhapsody, but for now I’m going with the new kid on the block.  Oh, and did I mention that MOG is half the price of Rhapsody.  Makes a big difference!  I figured out how much I have paid to Rhapsody over the last 9 years, but I will spare you the wincingly large amount.

Goodbye Rhapsody, you will always be my first music streaming love.

It’s been a long day. This Sunday, the Flack family had gone out to Tuttle Cove (if you didn’t know our Church Picnic is out at Tuttle Cove), and they came back and said that the site was pretty torn up. So, I went out this morning, and pretty torn up was a gross understatement. It is more like a grassless mud-hill. Certainly not a place where you can have 500+ people walking around, sitting, etc., much less building a stage on with sound equipment and a generator. So, the picnic is cancelled. Yes, yet another event cancelled. After trying every other possible venue in town, I ended the day frustrated. Thankfully, things like the meat had not yet come in, so the order could be cancelled, but honestly, I really look forward to these combined services.

If you look back through my blog, you will see that I often talk about my desire to see the congregation together more. It is a healthy thing for the members of the Body to occasionally see the whole Body gathered together. So, stick it on your calendars. Easter 2011 is coming up fast! Actually after all my calls, it looks like City Park might be a better venue for us for the college, so I’m starting to plan now!

That being said, I look forward to see God work Sunday. After the let down of this week, I am again reminded of God’s providence (sovereignty). Nothing is outside of God’s control or plan… even a muddy slick instead of a grassy hill! Poor example, but today I needed to be reminded. I think sometimes we get into the habit of talking about God’s providence in the big things. When things are going really good, or when we are going through tribulation, we think of how God is sovereign in the situation. We forget that God is in control in the little things too. After all, in addition to naming and counting the stars, He also numbers the hairs on our head (Matthew 10:30).

If I may, let me quote quickly from Kevin DeYoung’s book, “The Good News We Almost Forgot: Rediscovering the Gospel in a 16th Century Catechism”

“… Like most of us, … students are much more at ease using passive language about God’s permissive will or comfortable generalities about God being “in control” than they are about stating precisely and confidently to those in the midst of suffering “this has come from God’s fatherly hand…. If God is a Father, then surely He exercises His authority of His creation and creatures for the good of His beloved children. Providence is nothing more than a belief in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, brought to bear on our present blessing and troubles and buoying our hope into the future….”

The worst part about these appointments are the shots. Jodie of course will have nothing to do with holding him down, so it inevitably falls to me. Every time, he has laid there calmly, making eye contact with me. Then out of the corner of my eye I see the nurse jab, and then a split second later, I see a jump, a realization that something just hurt big time in his eyes, and then the tears well up. Then the screaming….. You get the idea. Anyway, poor kid took a really long nap this afternoon.

So, while the Gerling family worked on their naps, I headed downstairs to continue my whirlwind quest to get all of the programming projects that have been piling up done. I hunted a bit and decided on Lord of the Rings for a background movie. I can’t really say that I watched it all that closely as I was engrossed greatly in converting Jodie’s Joomla website into a Habari one. Again, I love Joomla, I’ve worked with it a lot, and it works great for sites like the church website. However, the major complaint from Jodie has been that the comments don’t work. I really have no idea why such a thing would happen, and therefore had no idea how to fix it. Habari has a nice elegant comment solution, so I spent my day learning how to create a template for Habari! You can see the result at psalm127mom.com. If you saw the site before, you actually really shouldn’t notice that much of a difference (other than the fact you can leave comments), but rest assured, the site is now actually on a blogging platform!

This leaves one final project. I need to redo the Jodie Gerling Designs & Photography page. Jodie actually has had a design done for several months now, but I just haven’t gotten around to it. I’ve spent most of the evening looking at various platforms for photo blogs with a nice gallery layout and after some consideration of PixelPost and ZenPhoto, it looks like the winner is ye old classic platform, WordPress. Anyway, that’s tomorrow’s goal, so hopefully you can see the results soon.

Now, while I was trying out various CMS platforms, I put in Karate Kid II. I just can’t believe that I always forget how much I love this movie. I know, some of you are saying that Karate Kid I is better, but I have always loved the sequel far more. Sure, the original has lines like, “Don’t forget to breathe,” and “Wax on, wax off,” but how does that relate to you in real life? Really. The second movie teaches us about things like honor and sacrifice and has a wonderfully pure love story between Daniel and Kumiko. What could this be? A love story without any make out scenes or other junk that manages to work its way into modern movies? No, just a story where two people get to know each other by spending time together, realizing that despite being from different worlds, they have a lot in common and they fall in love. Note, it isn’t till after they declare their love for each other that they even consider kissing! This is so much more like real life…. well, the way it ought to be, than what most movies portray.

Anyway, I digress. Let me just throw some quotes out there for digestion.

Mr Miyagi: “Daniel-san, never put passion before principle. Even if win, you lose.”

Mr Miyagi: “Lies only become truth if other person chooses to believe them.”

Would you not agree? So much more profound than, “Paint the fence.”