a broken mold

Just a note about Christian Contemporary music. I personally am disgusted by the vast majority of music in this category. As Mr. Tollefson has often told us students at Providence, the medium must fit the message. So often Christian contemporary is just Godified paganism. They hear the secular music of the day and set out to mimic it, only with Jesus lyrics so the Christian kids can feel cool too. What they end up with is a dumbed down, lamer version of secular music with cheesy words intended to convey a warm, fuzzy feeling, but instead give out nauseous, luke-warm vibes. Not good.

Is this what we want the world to think of our Christianity? Do we want people to see us as a cheesy, fuzzy, group of people “keeping it real with Jesus?” Should our music portray a sappy, over-baked “Jesus is my boyfriend” style or shouldn’t we rather portray what Christianity really is, the blood of Christ, the raging struggle of spirit against flesh, flesh against spirit, the persecution, the wrath of God, the (not sappy, not cheesy, but overpowering) love of Jesus when we were unlovable, wallowing in blood, sin and misery, the burden lifted from our shoulders by His sacrifice, the battle that He calls us to join, our victory against the power of Satan forever…now there’s something to sing about.

A lot of Christians would argue with me and say that using that kind of language doesn’t win people to Christ. If they hear about the bloody, gory, humiliating, overwhelming and rather harsh story of the Bible they will be repulsed. Therefore we should give them a mushy, half-hearted depiction of Jesus as a meek, Bambi-eyed, white-robed figure, trying to relate to people, begging them to just hold hands with Him, sway back and forth a little, throw a pine-cone in the fire, slip up their hand…? I think not.

People are desperate. People are miserable. People are wallowing in blood and tears waiting, searching for someone brave enough to make war on the misery of the world, someone strong enough to turn the world right side up, someone they can admire, love and fear. Someone awesome. They’re not ready to put the world in the hands of plastic, hippie-Jesus, but perhaps they would place the universe in the hands of the bloody but triumphant Son of God, one who has faced death and spat in it’s face, one who has crushed the head of sin and misery and sent it howling with it’s tail between it’s legs, one who is so beautiful, so holy, so awesome, so glorious we cannot look at Him without falling on our faces, one who loves us in our dirt and invites us in to eat at His table. This is what the world is looking for. Perhaps it’s time to start portraying our story in our music.  If we’re going to make “Christian” songs, let’s at least do it right.

A basic outline of what wireless means in relation to an internet connection.

It could really refer to one of three things:

Mobile broadband – broadband service delivered over a cellular network

Service from a WISP (wireless internet service provider) – the ISP delivers internet usually via some line of sight wireless technology. Somewhat more common in rural, elsewise underserved areas.

A wireless router providing an internet connection to devices – probably all types of broadband can be used via a wireless router. (Well, except gigabit service. There’s no wireless router with enough bandwidth for that.) The router allows devices (laptops, desktops, an iPod Touch, etc.) to connection wirelessly to the LAN and also provides internet if the router is connected. Wireless routers also usually have several wired Ethernet ports.

Some confusion may be had getting service from a WISP and running a wireless router. You have wireless (from the WISP) and wireless (a router running). But remember, you can also run a wireless router with other types of service: DSL, cable, FTTH, etc. In fact, you don’t even need an internet connection to run a wireless router. Once again, it forms a LAN (Local Area Network: a network of local devices, local being ones connected to this router) and provides an internet connection to these devices if there is one.

There are also wired (only) routers that perform much the same function, but may only be connected to with an Ethernet cable. Wireless is probably more common, at least in homes, because of it’s convenience (wiring a house is often much more difficult).

So that’s pretty much what wireless means.

This is the first in a planned series of tech posts directed at laymen, non-geeks, etc. Basically a lot of my friends and family. Subscribe and enjoy.

Illustration built with images from OpenClipArt.

I received in the mail today a ridiculously large box, considering the size of the item it contained, which was a Nite Ize AA Mini Maglite 1 Watt LED Upgrade II from Cyberguys.com! There have been a few different models floating around, but this is the alpha male, so to speak. It’s got a Luxeon LED that puts out 55 lumens, lasts 15 hours, and throws a 50 meter beam. There was an older (now defunct) 1-watt model and a really old model with three generic LEDs (I broke a couple before giving up on them, but these Luxeons are where it’s at.) There’s also a lower-output model with longer battery life at 30 lumens and 25 hours—good for extending battery life, but an IQ Switch would also do the job.

Having weighed the earlier Nite Ize LED modules in the durability balance and found them wanting, I had heretofore purchased an official Mini Maglite LED AA, which also uses a Luxeon. But it flickers, and is longer than my regular Mini Mags, and generally sucks horribly. And flickers. Their LED module must be poorly wired or something. Maybe (hopefully) mine was just defective. One thing I do like about it—due to the longer reflector cone (I think), it is more focusable, as you’ll see in the picture below. This produces a more concentrated beam at greater distances.

But because that was such a fail, I picked up a Streamlight 3N. Pretty rugged piece of gear, it seemed. Used by firefighters and such. Molded polymer case, scratch-resistant lens, up to 30-lumen output, and it even has an “Intrinsic Safety for Hazardous Locations” rating. All this notwithstanding, the contact point on the bottom of the LED module is worthless. Although I’ve bolstered it with solder a few times, it always wears down, makes infrequent contact with the battery, and flickers. It gets worse in cold weather.

Enter the Nite Ize 1 Watt LED Upgrade II. It fit snugly into my old beater Mini Mag, already survived a shoulder-height fall onto tiles without even flickering, and summarily rocks. Here’s a picture I took with all three shining side-by-side at a dark wall. They all had fresh batteries.

Why is the Streamlight so blue?

*Note the Maglite is more focused than the others, since it is actually capable of being focused. That’s why the beam is smaller.

I think I’ve refrained from saying anything because I didn’t have anything clever to say. That was wrong; I’m sorry.

So simply thank you. Thank you for being brave, thank you for sacrificing, thank you for keeping on keeping on keepin’ on. You’re doing good work. We owe you a lot.

I’m ashamed to say I haven’t been praying for you. I will.

So, if I right a bazillion good posts but nobody ever sees them, I’ve certainly wasted something, right? Maybe it did have it’s purposes, but I’ve realized that I really need to think about audience¹.

Who is my audience right now? My friends and family.
How will that audience change? Word of mouth.
Why will people talk? Because I’m writing good things for my audience (or will).

Sure, it’s not bad to write about stuff because you like it and nobody cares. It just doesn’t do that much (except maybe make you happy). I personally would like to have some other people reading what I write and caring about it.

So I must write for the audience I have. That’s the only way to change and grow our audience it seems to me.

Leeann has this in her sidebar and it made me feel a little sick.

That’s a helpless person murdered nearly all the time. Those who can support abortion knowing that suppress the truth they know at some level or another. It’s sick, okay? Sick.

So, technically, I wrote this post last night and right now I’m whizzing along the highway at 55 MPH, but that doesn’t really matter in the scope of the thing.

I don’t have much to say here, but what little there is, I present. DRM is not intrinsically evil but historically it has been harmful to the public. Of course, this is not to say that companies or individuals attempting to protect their intellectual property are wrong, only that DRM as a method of accomplishing this has been maddening (I got burned), often futile, and sometimes scary (i.e. Amazon yanking 1984 from Kindles). It’s tried but not true, if that’s the right turn of phrase. Companies have used it for a couple decades; it hasn’t worked.

Why I’m writing about this is because today is Day against DRM. So I thought I’d let you know some stuff about it. That is all from me; I leave you with the Free Software Foundation’s history of The Decade in DRM (click through to read more).

Since the late 1990s, a handful of media and technology companies has waged war against the public, imposing digital restrictions on the technology we use.. Here is Defective by Design’s look at some of the most significant events in the past 10 years fighting against DRM. If there are important moments missing (which there may be), please send them to us! Despite a number of victories over DRM in specific areas, DRM is far from dead. Whether companies will control and restrict us through our technology remains to be decided, and the battle is now.