tech

Until things get fixed up here, I’ve migrated this blog to http://onelife.solarcrash.com/

The feed remains the same, you can subscribe to it here.

Since I’ve joined facebook, I’ve been horrible with making the most of the connections I’ve established through it. I’m backlogged in replies, and friends I haven’t spoken to in fifteen years, well, I still haven’t connected with them, though we’re now ‘official’ as friends.

I declare this Sunday December 30th International Facebook Day. I’m going to dedicate a chunk of my time on it and see where it goes. It’s long overdue and I don’t exactly have pressing deadlines at the moment. Maybe you should do the same!

hey folks, fyi - comments appear to have been down for quite a while if you’re using internet explorer on this site.  I have no clue when it will be fixed, so if you’d like to comment here use firefox instead, it should work fine.

Otherwise you could try commenting on my other site at solarcrash, sometimes i dual post between the blogs.

and for all you lurkers out there, this might be your chance to de-lurk.

I don’t really use stumbleupon but I was procrastinating 10 minutes ago, and decided to login and checked to see if others I knew were also already registered on the website.

It cross-referenced my gmail account, and I added a few friends.  To my dismay I didn’t realize that it checked to spam everyone else who wasn’t on stumbleupon in my address book as well by default!

Now in one instant, I’ve spammed well over a thousand people in my address book with a stupid stumbleupon registration request!  This includes people I haven’t emailed in 4-5 years, and other distant acquaintances.  How awkward.

If you’re one of them, I’m so sorry.  I tried deleting my account in embarrassment, and supposedly stumbleupon can take as much as 2 weeks before the deletion can take place.  This is just ridiculous.

Again, my apologies.  What a horrible way to hear from me after all this time.

Blogrush just upgraded to v2, and I just added it to the sidebar here. I’ve been using it on my other blog, SolarCrash, and it’s had a bit of traction, though it’s still hard to gauge.  You can give it a try with my referral here.

Regarding Google adsense, it’s been almost a year I’ve had their ads on my site and I’ve made maybe sixty or so dollars. This is fantastic being not employed and all, but once I hit the $100 payout, I think I might drop the ads altogether, we’ll see.

I just noticed I was quoted on the frontpage of ricebowljournals regarding my last post, cool eh?

What’s weird, to be honest, is I love having people I don’t know from all over the world reading my blogs, but sometimes I’m a bit hesitant about sharing it with those I know right in my community. With networks like facebook, and google’s coming opensocial, it’s becoming harder and harder to hide!

On another note, I keep a running list of all the things I want to blog on, but I just can’t seem to find the time to turn them all into posts.

Thanks so much to all you readers for staying tuned!

Continuing the technology series on how I get things done… For me, Google Picasa is the only way to go in terms of photo management. I’ve got about 22,000 photos right now and Picasa handles it all with style and ease.

1. You can organize through folders or albums or search via tags and descriptions. Photos are instantly discovered and added to picasa.

2. In the tray, you can do batch editing and incredibly easy photo touch ups. My wife couldn’t care less for this geeky computer stuff, but she loves the ability to easily manipulate an image through this (ie. red eye removal, cropping, soft-focus, etc.). You can also email, blog, geotag, or send these photos easily to an online web album as well.

3. You can easily scale the albums and photos to your liking. Scrolling through photos is incredibly slick. Pictures can also be integrated easily into a slideshow or a screensaver.

Picasaweb albums is really the online counterpart to Picasa’s desktop software. It doesn’t quite have the community that Flickr offers, but it’s simple and free. ie. Check out the album for my latest trip to Boston. I like how it doesn’t scale down photos to tiny grainy shots like many other free photo sharing sites do.

What’s also fantastic that I’ve recently discovered is that there are plugins that have been developed for it, so that you can upload directly to other photo communities like flickr and facebook!

Google has also recently added additional shared storage between picasa and gmail you can purchase for a decent price. But the free space will be plenty enough for me for quite a while.

Overall, definitely one of the best free desktop applications that have helped enhance my productivity, period.

If you’re not on it, I just don’t know why… Of all the social networks - myspace is too messy, friendster’s too old-school, linked-in is a bit too business oriented, and google-sponsored socialstream is still just a dream - facebook is clean and it works well.

One in three Canadians use it, and Toronto has been reported to being the facebook capital of the world with 700,000 members (Although there are reports that London, England may be usurping the crown).

It seems like everytime I sneak a peak as I pass by laptops at the library, in coffeeshops, and at schools, people are staring at that classic facebook screen. Our provincial government recently banned facebook for all staff.

I’ve found that it’s been phenomenal for connecting with old friends, networking with peers, and being one-step closer to those who might have simply been acquaintances.

It’s also great if you’ve got question’s like…

Are the cool kids back in high school still cool?

Does this friend and that friend of mine know each other? because they should.

What are my co-workers really like outside of work? Photos posted by their friends usually tell all.

Is she still with him? Because I never thought that would last

Some call it stalker-central, others say it’s better than crack, if you’re a regular here, feel free to look me up.

My only concern is that one day it could come to this…

A fellow voxtropolitan has just informed me that comments aren’t working. I just verified, it seems to only be my site at the moment when browsing through Internet Explorer or Opera. Everything seems fine on mozilla based browsers ie. firefox, flock, seamonkey.

I’m not sure how long this has been going on or when the problem will get fixed, but now’s as good a time as any to recommend you to firefox if you’re not already on it. Especially if you want to comment on the blog.

Besides being faster and offering tabbed browsing, firefox has a wack load of extensions available to customize to your needs. My personal favorites are BetterGmail, ColorfulTabs, Customize Google, Google Browser Sync, and mouse gestures.

I’ll know whether you’ve taken my recommendation by your ability to comment here.

My wife and I were discussing last night how much of our lives we should be sharing online. Between various social networks, photo sites, and blogs in particular, a lot of our personal identity is accessible to the world.

What are you comfortable with?

In particular I’d love to hear from those of you in the public eye; those who are leaders, managing organizations, in ministry, and other public service roles.

I’ve seen some of you folks with an online presence share birthdays, phone numbers, when and where you’re doing something. Some of you have a site that goes by your full name; some of you share the names of your family members; some of you simply use initials. Then there’s photos, videos, and opinions. I’ve even seen some of you share very private confessions online.

I ask as someone who will likely be entering into a more public role. As I serve people in different capacities and speak in various places we’ve been wondering if we might be putting our family at risk in any ways by having the level information we have accessible online currently.

Are we being too paranoid? Can we ever be too safe? I love sharing about my family and our lives because it presents a more human side of all the convictions that we have and the things that we do.

I typically naively trust just about anybody, but I also know that people can often find ways to attack the ones you love the most. Are we simply increasing our chances for random crime? Can any of this be used to harm us in the future? Are there other things we should be concerned about?

Any thoughts you might want to contribute would very much appreciated…

I think I’ll start highlighting a bit of the geekier side of me and blogging some of the technology/productivity tools that I use to do what I do.

For one, traveling has never been the same since Google maps came along. It just got better.

multiple destinations, satellite images, live traffic, and now drag and drop re-routable maps!

DJChuang wrote a blog in response to a question of mine regarding having multiple blogs recently.

I figure there are multiple audiences that I’d like to connect with that all don’t necessarily converge on a single community space, hence getting the new site.  I was somewhat concerned with splitting my audience after blogging here for the last year and breaking the 100,000 ranking on technorati.  Anyhow, I feel a lot more freedom to post having multiple sites since I know I have people tuning in from a wide variety of beliefs, values, and backgrounds.  We’ll see where it goes.  Again, http://solarcrash.com for the other site.

Some other blog names I was seriously considering that are still up for grabs include…

yourlifeisbrilliant.com
imagonation.net
fuelforthemovement.com
sosuper.org
sofantastic.org
hymnprints.com
apostolicscribbles.com
holychristbatman.com

Feel free to take’em if for some odd reason you’re interested in them.  Unfortunately lon.com wasn’t going to expire till 2009 and I couldn’t wait that long.  I signed up with a domain via 1and1.com, it took maybe 12 hours to activate.  And I was too cheap to purchase webspace, so I’m currently forwarding to a space by freehostia.com which offers 500GB and no banner ads.

I’m not finding the domain forwarding to another space the most elegant solution, but I really can’t justify spending money on it at the moment.

Learning wordpress took about a day or so for my purposes and I really like the added flexibility of hosting my own site.

Something interesting I recently found out, though I have no interest in pursuing, is Darren Rowse, who runs problogger.net, and makes a living off of strictly blogging, was a former church planter.

Some random links that might feed your online addictions…

You’ve probably seen the stats on the global village (ie. what the world would look like if it were shrunken down to a hundred people), here’s a flash video of it.

Quick tool for generating rss subscription buttons like I have on my sidebar.

ziki - helps manage your onine visibility. For the first 10,000 people they will sponsor your name on google, yahoo, and msn for free.

Moby writes about those insane Christians in his journal

Mac Tablet finally coming. If only I didn’t quit my job…

At least I can watch hundreds of tv shows online for free.

Or I can start a charity for myself on Network for Good.

Remind me again why I should plant a church?

DJchuang’s set up an excellent wiki for those interested in Asian American Church Plants.

Otherwise we could just sit around and watch other people create America’s Most Innovative Churches

and twiddle our thumbs waiting for Transformer’s the movie to come out.

Here’s my latest round of sweet-links.

Video by youthwork.co.uk did an excellent video interview with Rob Bell, asking tough questions on how the church really started, emergent labels, and not becoming Ted Haggard. Hosted by premier.tv here.

Also here’s a link to the entire Mastering the Art of Living series by Rob Bell. I’m not sure how long this one will be around for. I listened through it back in 2004 I believe and thought it was absolutely phenomenal.

Mac Tablet? I’ve been waiting for this, now if only I had the money.

Someone’s daughter got a bit excited playing her nintedo Wii, check out what happened.

Article on Thom Wolf describing seminaries as being counterproductive.

A good listing of helpful church planting links

Seedstories - Appears to be a good hub /forum for church planters as well

Sketch - If you’re in Toronto, check it out. I just visited yesterday. They do some extraordinary creative arts work with at-risk youth.

Mosaic Alliance has a preview of their members only site for free currently.

** This one just in.  Monkey’s kissing on you tube.  You’ve gotta love this one!

If you’ve been using skype for free long distance this year, check out Hullo. It’s much like the Avaya, which I use to use at work. You type the number via the client, it calls you locally, then calls your other party locally, and the conferences you together, phone to phone, for free!

For those of you who followed me into the land of zooomr, a bulk uploading tool just got released for it. Check out juploadr here.

Calgoo lets you take your google calendar offline.

For those of you who are wondering how to keep site stats on voxtropolis. You can paste html code from different stat providers into the ‘text’ sidebar widget when you hit ‘look and feel’. I just started using statcounter.

And to top it all of, it looks like Jesus is back and living in Miami.

*Update. I just made my first ‘portal’ on Zooomr. It’s a neat little new feature that allows you in a sense to place a picture within a picture. Click below to see one of me getting slapped and a portal into the split second reaction afterwards.

VOXers - I posted a while back about Zooomr, a photos hosting site like flickr but considerably slickr… v2 of it just relaunched and right now bloggers can get a free pro account offering 2.5 GB of uploads per month!

Instructions are here. It just involves posting a single picture on your site like I just did below. See my zooomr site here. I’ll be flooding it with many more pictures as they release their bulk uploading tool soon.

… has been absolutely wonderful.

I’ve been reading again, growing, connecting with people, reflecting, imagining, dreaming and scheming, experimenting, sharing, and enjoying every moment.

I just started messing around with this gmail skin as a firefox extension that allows you to integrate google portal stuff like calendar, flickr, news, etc.

Up next, a post on my incredibly marvelous wife, yvz.