Here are interesting and tragic stats on internet pornography. I found the one about Utah’s online porn subscription rate to be especially interesting.
Via: Online MBA
HT: Gizmodo
July 14 2010 | Blog | 1 Comment »
As a huge supporter of Microsoft, I found this to be absolutely hilarious!!!
June 11 2010 | Blog | No Comments »
Here’s a great suggestion for connected families. It’s called a “technology basket"” and I’m going to start using one right away.
These parents created a special family basket and asked everyone put their most tempting electronic devices in for a few hours each evening. Dad put his work laptop in, mom put in her Kindle, and the kids dropped off their cell phones. Instead of just mandating rules, the parents decided to model how they wanted their family to operate. And instead of focusing on how to limit technology, they focused on opening up a space for conversation, games, and meals.
At any time, the parents and kids can look over at the basket and see what’s there and what’s not and hold family members accountable to it. As a bonus, the basket serves as a powerful physical reminder that the entire Internet and all its wonder can be relegated to a few inanimate devices in a trash can.
You can read the rest of the article here.
June 09 2010 | Blog | No Comments »
This is kind of a random post since it doesn’t really have anything to do with the church, or shepherding or anything specifically spiritual at all. Rather, I’d like to point out a tool that I’ve been using a lot lately that has simplified my life and helped to keep me more organized. The tool is Evernote.
Evernote’s CEO Phil Libin describes Evernote as your “external brain.” It’s essentially a place where you can store all of the random information that you find tucked away in your normal brain, or on the internet, or on a restaurant napkin, or wherever. If you’re like me, you probably have a lot of things going on in your life and a lot of information to manage in relation to those things. What evernote does is gives you a way to catalog that information in a searchable format so that you can access it quickly, rather than having it take up space in your brain. Here are a few examples of how I use evernote.
One of the best things about Evernote is that it’s completely free! Anyone can signup for a free account and start using it right away. If you have a mobile device, like a Blackberry or iPhone it becomes even more useful because you can take all of your notes with you to go.
Here are a few more web resources that I’ve used for increasing my skill with Evernote.
Finally, here’s a video extolling the wonders of Evernote:
HT: @tohuvabohu for turning me onto Evernote.
May 03 2010 | Blog | 1 Comment »
These were some sobering (although intended to be funny) words from TechCrunch on the religious aspects of iPad.
In these times we have little opportunity for mystical religious experience. By “religious” I mean the feeling that something exciting is about to happen – whether after death or immediately, through the intercession of a divine being, a miracle in life. The neophilic mind has craved magic, craved the new and spectacular, since prehistory. Man deified thunder, worshiped the cave bear. Over time we have refined the impulse; we have learned to associate it with places and things of our own creation, which provoke the mystical feeling in themselves and in what they represent. Cathedrals were at once a site for worship and a site for awe, and our better natures were expressed in them for centuries.
These days a small minority of us, mostly situated in the developed world, have replaced the awe of religious experience with the awe of technological advancement. To further that line of thinking, the fanboy is, it can be argued, a new form of religious supplicant and the fanboy’s most prominent church is the Church of Apple.
You can read the rest of the review here.
April 07 2010 | Blog | 1 Comment »
Something strange happened the other day as I was counseling a young person. As I was sharing a strange buzzing noise came from her purse. She proceeded to pick up her phone, answer the text as I continued to talk with her. Call me crazy, but I don’t remember that kind of thing happening when I was in High School. In fact, texting didn”t really gain much popularity ’til just a few years ago.
Today, we live in a digital nation that is becoming increasingly more difficult to understand. I recently found a documentary from Frontline titled digital_nation life on a virtual frontier. The documentary is recent, so it’s relevant to current technology and it is well researched. As a Youth Pastor and as someone who’s very interested in technology this was eye opening and very helpful. I especially recommend it for parents. You can find the whole video here.
March 18 2010 | Blog | 2 Comments »
This is a funny clip from David Letterman on twitter.
HT: Vitamin Z
July 31 2009 | Blog | No Comments »
Apple recently wrote a letter to Microsoft requesting that they stop running the Laptop Hunter adds, because they make it look like Macs are too expensive (you can find the article here), thus ensuring Microsoft’s continued ad campaign. For full disclosure I need to admit that I do love my new iphone, so I guess when it comes to very simplistic tasks like making calls and checking facebook Apple is doing a good job 
, but for serious work at a reasonable price you can’t go wrong with a PC.
HT: Todd’s Thoughts
July 24 2009 | Blog | No Comments »
One of the most prevalent aspects of the modern youth culture is the presence of “noise”. Young people are constantly surrounded by noise, whether it be from their iPod, their Xbox, their cell phone, or their facebook page. Noise is such a prevalent aspect of our society that we almost assume that life has always been filled with noise. In a recent post Al Mohler speaks to our desperate need turn down the noise.
One of the most lamentable aspects of modern life is the disappearance of silence. Throughout most of human history, silence has been a part of life. Many individuals lived a significant portion of their lives in silence, working in solitude and untroubled by the intrusion of constant noise…
Writing in the June issue of Standpoint, Susan Hill argues that our children are being impoverished by being deprived of silence. We have betrayed children, she asserts, by “confiscating their silence.” As she explains:
But so difficult has it become to find such oases of silence, that many children never experience it. In adapting to constant noise, we seem to have become afraid of silence. Why? Are we afraid of what we will discover when we come face to face with ourselves there? Perhaps there will be nothing but a great void, nothing within us, and nothing outside of us either. Terrifying. Let’s drown our fears out with some noise, quickly.
Most of us will quickly realize the truth contained in her assessment. It seems that many of us are, to a greater or lesser degree, almost afraid of silence. Our children quickly inherit the same fear.
Read the whole thing here.
June 26 2009 | Blog | No Comments »
One of the coolest things about digital photography is the fact that you can take tons of pictures and save them to your hard drive instead of storing them in dusty photo albums. However, one of the dangers of this system is the frequent failure of hard drives and thus the loss of precious pictures of weddings, births, graduations, etc. I have a couple of different systems for backing up my pictures. I have one external hard drive at my house that I backup to every month, as well as another external hard drive that I keep at the office and bring home once a month to do a backup with. This way, even if the house burns down I won’t lose more than a month’s worth of pictures. But, what to do in the event of an earth quake or volcanic eruption which could potentially take out both of my hard drives??? Enter in SkyDrive.
SkyDrive is an online storage solution from Microsoft and best of all, it’s free!!! SkyDrive offers 25 GB of online storage where you can upload pictures, documents, small videos, etc. The only catch is that you can not upload files that are bigger than 50 MB, so large video files are pretty much out. One of the neat features of Sky Drive is that it allows you to upload files to a private folder (only for you) or a public folder (i.e. I have some of my sermons in a public folder that I link to and can be opened from anywhere).
Another great application that I was recently referred to is Drop Box. Drop Box works a lot like SkyDrive, but it actually installs a small folder on your computer that syncs with your online folder automatically. One of the best applications of this software is to install Drop Box on your work computer, as well as your home computer. This allows you to change files at work, save them and then open them up on your home computer seamlessly. There doesn’t appear to be any limit to the size of the files that you can upload to Drop Box, but it only offers 2 GB of free online storage, so it is best suited to document backups, etc.
Whatever you do, whether it be SkyDrive, Drop Box, or some ridiculously complicated system with multiple hard drives, be sure to backup your files somewhere.
June 10 2009 | Blog | 2 Comments »