End of a blogging slump…

A lot has happened in the last three and one half months, a whole lot. For one, I got married to a wonderful girl, Heather. (Look on her website to see the pretty pictures.) The whole experience of dating, getting engaged, planning the wedding, the wedding, the honeymoon and moving in together is great blogging fodder but, alas, I never took advantage of it. We went to Victoria, BC for the honeymoon, and man let me tell you, it was the best. Check out Einer’s, it was the B&B that we stayed at and it cannot be topped.

One of the other things that happened to me in the last month is that I got laid off from my job. It was the grace of God that they gave me over two months notice so I was able to mobilize and find a new gig within a couple of weeks. It is a real blow to one’s confidence to be laid off even if it is just a financial thing, I was bummed for a week. But, I got three interviews right away and from those three I got two offers and a call back! Now that was a great confidence boost that more then offsets the previous blow.

So I am pretty happy right now. I have an awesome home life, a great new job and prospects for going back to school next fall to get me some continuing education. I want to work on being more active at my church, bluer, lose some weight and learn guitar but things are good over all.

If you think about it, pray for my mom. She has been fighting breast cancer for a year and a half now. It’s a real bummer but I am hopeful for the future. God can do anything so I am still praying for the miraculous and would ask you to also.

Quote of the day.

from back in the day…

“Art is innate in the artist, like an instinct that seizes and makes a tool out of the human being. The thing in the final analysis that wills something in him is not he, the personal man, but the aim of the art.” Carl Jung

A new category, called “daddy likes”

It has been brought to my attention that I may have materialist tendencies. Now, I shall neither confirm nor deny the allegation, rather, I will let you in on some of the more tasty items that I would purchase if finances were unlimited.

In this new series that I will call ‘daddy likes’, I offer up for your consideration the Numark NuVJ.

This MIDI controller would allow me to VJ more like a DJ using it in conjunction with a Apple iMac and the ArKaos VJ 3.5 DMX software… of course, I do not have either of these items so they both fit into the ‘daddy likes’ list too.

I see a bank of old tv’s setup, stacked high in the corners of a concert or worship space to which I could project the images that this system can create, moving through those images in rhythm to the music… ahh, what a pleasure that would be.

So, does this make me a materialist? I don’t know, you decide.

Ripping CD’s

So far I am about halfway through ripping my CD collection to Apple Lossless files. Here’s the stats as they stand:

99.1GB or 106,435MB

311 Albums

-=Averages=-

342MB/Album

29MB/Song

I cannot stand the idea of compressing my music and excepting the following loss in audio quality, that’s why I chose the lossless compression route. Larger files? Yes. Much greater audio jam satisfaction? Most definitely, yes!

Quote of the day.

Today’s quote comes from Mark Stephenson over at ‘The First Epistle of Mark’ called ‘Exposure and Contamination’:

I think many young Christians, many emergent, think they are strong enough to be in the world and not be contaminated by it. They think too highly of themselves. Our pride comes before our fall. We have rejected “churchianity” and “christianese” in favor of diving headlong into the world. And maybe this is where Jesus calls us to be. But many of us are not ready to be there. We are over-exposed to the world and under-exposed to the voice, presence and power of God. And so, right and left, we are being contaminated. And instead of spreading the gospel, we are infecting the next generation of disciples with eight parts world, one part God.

Do we understand how much we allow culture, absent of God, to influence us verses how much we allow God’s influence in our lives? It is a question I often ponder.