Thanks for visiting my blog, Serving Bread. Here you'll read stories, insights, reflections and ramblings from a campus minister, father, husband and Jesus-follower. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
We (CSUN [tag]InterVarsity[/tag]) are off to [tag]Catalina Island[/tag]. This is our first [tag]Chapter Camp[/tag] in five years. These types of conferences are fantastic in building the community, having fun, and studying God’s word. Teaching the word of God at Catalina is one of my favorite (top 3) parts of campus ministry. Students will learn and be frustrated , and come out by the end of the week having met God in a profound way. As a teacher, there is no other way I would prefer to learn the Scriptures.
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It’s not too often that our favorite ‘evangelical’ speaks, but when [tag]Bono[/tag] does, we hip evangelicals should listen. His column in “Time Magazine” last week reiterated his commitment to the poor through calling Europe to do what it said it would do fifty years ago (I was a history major and was never really familiar with the social justice elements of the [tag]Treaty of Rome[/tag]. This should inspire most of us to believe that a just world can exist). Bono’s activism in fighting poverty (and the host of ills related to it) has turned him into a rock-star with a conscience. (Though, by his own admission, he is still just a rock star)
On a somber note that hits closer to home for those of us involved with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the post picked up from the Spanglish Gringo about the tragic death of the [tag]UNC mascot[/tag] makes me grateful for the ways that students have the capacity to love other students. Turns out the person driving the car is a prominent Armenian entertainer.
Sometimes, you have to wonder about the kind of suggestions that prominent people make. [tag]Robert Reich[/tag], who was former Labor Secretary during the Clinton Administration, wants the government to increase NASA’s budget to track [tag]killer asteroids[/tag]. NASA wants $1 billion to just track them by the year 2020. And of course, more money and creativity would then be needed to figure out how to destroy them before they hit planet earth. This is not news since people with such imagination usually reside in Hollywood and create fantasy movies about astronauts blowing up killer asteroids.
The favorite television show in this house is Signing Time on PBS. The whole [tag]baby sign[/tag] movement is becoming the popular thing to do, and it looks like there are many people who are jumping on the bandwagon to make money. The show is free on PBS, and our daughter has picked up way more [tag]sign language[/tag] (ASL) than we can keep track. And being on the CSUN campus with a large deaf and hard of hearing population, I have enjoyed building trust through the couple of dozen signs that I have picked up a long the way.
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On my family’s website, we post lots of pictures of our daughter–mostly as a way for family to see her growing up. I title the pictures with cute tags like, “Cute Layla” and “Layla Cutie”–very unique identifications. The other day, when I was looking through the logs of people who visit the website, I noticed there were many people coming from Eastern Europe. When I clicked to find out more, they arrived through a search engine. On this particular website, when you do a search for “naked girl” you get a link to a picture of my little girl who was running around without a shirt on.
I am sure (and hope) that most people who were doing that search did not intend to see a toddler. However, I quickly retitled those pictures and eventually removed them. It is concerning to me that publishing pictures of my family and my daughter could expose us to a world of people who have things in mind other than seeing how darn cute we are. I recently heard a story of someone who published a video on You Tube of their toddler son playing in the bathtub. They forgot to mark that video as private, and received several inquiries from strangers asking that they publish more of these videos online. Apart from feeling both angry and disgusted, I also feel I was too naive in handling publishing pictures on the Internet. Some tips from my experience:
- Be careful what you post on online. As cute as it might be to have a picture of your baby running around naked in the backyard, there may be people who would use that picture for exploitation and sin. Leave those pictures off the internet. If you really must show those pictures to the world, figure out a way to password protect them.
- Use ‘clean’ titles. Search engines index words and will not necessarily differentiate between a clean site and a dirty one. When you title a picture, “Playing naked in the yard” you will get people who do such a search and arrive to your site intending to find something different.
- Fight the crawlers. If you are paranoid, you can download anti-search engine scripts and code that will prevent your site from being indexed by the search engines.
- Attach a logging system. I would have never known the traffic I was getting had I not had some sort of tracking/logging system set up. Check out statcounter.
Finally, this is a word to any stranger who arrived to this post searching for “naked girl” — there is a better way. Visit www.settingcaptivesfree.com.
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“What is REAL?” asked the [Velveteen] Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”"Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
— From [tag]The Velveteen Rabbit[/tag] by [tag]Margery Williams[/tag]
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Fifth in my countdown of favorite, must-have freeware applications. Check out the previous review.
So with [tag]digital photography[/tag], most pictures probably need just a little bit of editing — maybe sharpening, removal of red-eye, or crop out that annoying person who thought sticking out his tongue while you and your significant other are capturing a moment. Whatever the case may be, you will want an easy to use program that can do just the basics. That’s why you need [tag]Picasa 2[/tag].
Picasa is a photo-editing program that is perfect for both amateur and professional. That’s right, professional! A buddy who is a up-and-coming wedding photographer swears by Picasa 2 and says many people in the field use it to do the editing they need for their pictures. I love how easy it is to use Picasa. It is very intuitive and has a very clean interface. It can find all of the pictures on your computer and will automatically organize them in albums. There are functions to upload to web albums and to even publish the pictures on your blog.
The main tools that I find myself using are the contrast, sharpening, and color correction ones (including turning a picture to a black and white picture). With this blog, I have attached my picture gallery, running [tag]Gallery 2[/tag] (another highly recommended [tag]freeware[/tag], by the way), and it is so easy to upload my pictures into my gallery and my blog. If you take digital pictures, then think of Picasa 2 as the only program you really need to make sure your pictures print or publish the exact way you intended.
Download here.
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Today, the Church celebrates [tag]Gregory the Illuminator[/tag], Bishop and Missionary of [tag]Armenia[/tag]. History says that he was responsible to convert the local pagan King, who was so excited for his newfound religion, that he made it a national religion. Thus, the Church was birthed in Armenia in 301 AD, making it the oldest Church in the world. Of course, faith existed way before Greg–Bartholomew and Thaddeus (two of Jesus’s twelve disciples-turned-apostles brought the gospel to Armenia*). Today, give thanks for the Armenian(s) in your life 
Check out Monastic Mumblings.Â
* Now I know that history will never prove what ever happened to Bart and Thad, but I say it’s brilliant for Armenians to have picked and claimed the two disciples we know the least about… Kinda hard to disprove, isn’t it!?!
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Random and not-so-random articles and posts I have come across in the past week.
For an excellent article on the origins of the war/genocide/conflict in [tag]Darfur[/tag], check out the article from the Atlantic Monthly. It shows how the climate change has affected human relations. Skip the main article on [tag]global warming[/tag] (by Gregg Easterbrook). I wish “The Atlantic” would have a better standard on the kinds of articles it publishes. All speculation with sprinklings of science doesn’t make for that great reading.
Though I’m not a fan and disagree most of the time with Charles [tag]Krauthammer[/tag], I couldn’t but agree with his column in the recent “Time Magazine” about some liberals’ hypocrisy in their convictions regarding global warming. Buying “[tag]carbon credits[/tag]” to offset their lavish lifestyle doesn’t seem to me the most radical, effective, or even honest means means of combating our growing environmental crisis.
Last night, I went to bed with more joy after having read the article about a billionaire who is giving away his homes mansions to the [tag]homeless[/tag]. If only we had more models of the rich loving the poor in such radical ways.
In the blog world, I have enjoyed the commentary on [tag]Ephesians[/tag] over at Eternal Learning, with a bent on how to bring our finances under God’s authority.
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I was raised in the Presbyterian tradition, so [tag]John Wesley[/tag]’s theology should probably irritate me (especially if I were a pure Calvinist). I like Wesley. Some of the spiritual practices and life experiences of Wesley have drawn me to him over the past several years. I have been particularly intrigued by his response to failure, his pursuit of [tag]holiness[/tag], his attention to disciplines, his generosity, his passion, and his evangelism. He has become one of my [tag]historical mentors[/tag]. (But not enough to join the local Methodist Church)
In the past couple of days at a prayer retreat, I read one of his biographies and began assembling lessons from the life of John Wesley. Here are my notes: Continue reading ‘Lessons from John Wesley’
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(Part V in an occasional series. Read Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV)
Today marks the four year anniversary of our [tag]war[/tag] in [tag]Iraq[/tag]. Four years ago, American and coalition forces launched an air strike and ground offenses to de-arm Saddam’s Iraq. Under the (false) premises that Saddam was storing [tag]weapons of mass destructions[/tag], we launched the war after “diplomacy” had failed, and Saddam and his family refused to leave Iraq.
After four years, there are nearly 4 million Iraqis displaced. The coalition is a skeleton of what it was, with Great Britain being the lone ally remaining in the coalition that has contributed a significant number of troops. There are anywhere between 60,000 and 600,000 Iraqi civilians who have been killed in the process. The government of Iraq is weak with no significant army that can fight the insurgents. Americans are split over the war, with a growing number of people who want us to just get out. Also, American influence in the world has suffered significantly, with many countries in the world having a negative view of the US. Continue reading ‘Reflections on War: Winning the peace (Part V)’
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Fourth in my countdown of favorite, must-have freeware applications. Check out the previous review.
Adobe’s Photoshop is a fantastic program that costs a lot of money. It has a lot of features that I don’t care for and I would not be surprised if you can minor in “Photoshop” at some university because of its power and complexity.
So that’s why I like [tag]Paint.NET[/tag]. This [tag]freeware[/tag] allows me to have a lot of the popular Photoshop tools (for example, creating layers), without all the pork that might come with Photoshop and without the hit on my wallet.
I don’t use Paint.NET for everything, but when I need to do some editing of a photograph that some of the ’simpler’ programs can’t do, Paint.NET is my go to program. I like the functionality of layers–though it did take me a while to figure out how they work–and some of the functionalities like the magic wand, that is a powerful tool to select elements of a photograph or image.
Saving pictures in various formats is supported but limited compared to what Photoshop offers. Is Photoshop a more powerful program? Yes. Does Paint.NET have limitations that will make you want more from your [tag]photo editing[/tag] program? Probably. But for a software that is dubbed freeware, this is a fantastic program. You can’t beat the functionality and cost of this program.
Download here.
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