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More on Progress
I received a careful crafted reply to my short aside on Progress from my long-time friend Tom Josephson via Facebook. He said:
It’s Official
Well, I must officially be an intern, because I’ve got my name on the church staff page now. In other news, in two-ish official days of internship, I’ve put over five miles on my bicycle. Perhaps it’ll be both a growing and a slimming year for me!
Documentaries on Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If you’re interested in learning more about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the dramatized tellings of his life are of fairly uneven quality. On one hand, Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace is relatively bad. The acting is uneven, the video is only 88 minutes long and doesn’t connect the events in his life in a coherent way, and it portrays his fiance, Maria, as a ditz. It does capture the emotional turmoil Bonhoeffer felt, but often times it takes his writings (especially his Letters and Papers from Prison) and interpolates them into the story as events in his life. There are also scenes that are just plain made up – as in the opening when he is discussing returning to Germany by the seashore.
On the other hand, Bonhoeffer is an excellent film. It’s more documentary than narrative, but it does a remarkable job telling the full story of his life and its complexity. It’s filled with rarely seen pictures and film footage that do an excellent job of contextualizing his struggle with the Nazis.
I realize that dramatizations necessarily involve simplification, while documentaries can delve deeper. Even so, Bonhoeffer is a much better film, and I recommend it highly.
Morning Light
A Setting of Morning Prayer for the season of Easter
Ted Carnahan
ted@tedcarnahan.com
In the Spring semester of 2009, I was invited by Thomas Schattauer, Dean of Loehe Chapel at Wartburg Theological Seminary, to work on a setting of matins (i.e. morning prayer) for the season of Easter. The result is Morning Light.
Morning Light page posted
I finally got the page up for Morning Light, and I’ve been working on getting the downloads ready. Should be available in a week or so, but email me if you want it earlier.
Yahoo called
Apparently while I was out on an errand during our move today, Yahoo called about my blog. This is either a sign that I’ve caught someone’s attention, or much more likely, that Yahoo’s automated phone number scraping has gotten better.
There is no such thing as Progress
When I hear people talking about “progress” or being “progressive” or thinking that we can by our own cleverness advance a cause in the world if we just have the right beliefs, attitudes, or technologies, I shudder. In every one of these pictures, (warning: graphic photos) someone behind the scenes thought the exact same thing.
And since Jennifer and I have been on a Civil War kick lately, here’s another example: Andersonville Prison Camp.
I’m loving Dial2Do
So with my newly acquired cell phone, I’m finding that there are all sorts of interesting applications that I wouldn’t have been interested in before, but am now. I had heard of Jott, a service which transcribes spoken words into text and shuttles it off to different services, but apparently they went for-pay in February. So I found a free alternative: Dial2Do.
I am using Dial2Do for reminders (which are automatically emailed to me for later action) and for help managing my calendar. I have set up Google Calendar to send SMS messages when I have an appointment on my calendar, and with Dial2Do, I can call in to listen to my daily calendar or add new items. So far, the recognition accuracy has been pretty good. What’s really interesting, though, as a web developer is Dial2Do’s ability to set up new connections to web services. With the appropriate home automation gear at home, I could call Dial2Do, tell it to turn the lights on in ten minutes, and Dial2Do would HTTP POST that as text to a web server, which could schedule/execute the command to turn on the lights. It has really fired up my imagination.
So if you use online calendaring but don’t have a smartphone or the money for a fancy data plan, you should try Dial2Do.
One week to the move
One week from this moment, we’ll begin loading our truck for our move to Sterling, IL. I’ll be beginning an internship at St. John’s Lutheran Church. Here’s new contact information for Jennifer and I.
Our new address: 704 E 19th St, Sterling, IL 61081
Our new phones: Ted – 815.590.0337, Jennifer – 815.590.0338
Our email addresses remain the same. Mine is Ted -AT- TedCarnahan -DOT- Com, and Jennifer’s is Jennifer -AT- Tedifer -DOT- Com. My Wartburg email works, but it’s not very good email (Microsoft Exchange) and I much prefer my personal address if you need to get in touch.
Installing BackupPC on OpenWRT
I wanted to have a backup server for my church that would automatically take backups when computers came on to our new wireless network. BackupPC immediately sprang to mind, but it only runs on Linux. How could I get a Linux server into the church in a very low cost way? Answer: An Asus wireless router running OpenWRT.
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