Vision

I discovered the PicLens Firefox Plugin today and was impressed with its abilities to pull photos from a Picasa

Web Album or Flickr collection and on the fly create a fully 3D photo browser.

From the website:

PicLens provides an immersive full-screen experience for viewing photos on the supported sites listed below and on sites that support Media RSS.

Sites that support the PicLens Firefox Plugin

Apparently there is a plugin that will enable its use with Wordpress as well, but it requires PHP 5 which I don’t have on my hosting platform right now. I may give it a spin at a later date.

I upgraded the Wordpress installation on this blog to version 2.5 today.  There are more changes in this update than in any previous one that I’ve encountered.  My favorite is the media browser that allows you to view all your uploaded audio/images/video in a very elegant way.  Of course the entire admin section has been re-designed.  It is much cleaner and loads faster, though it took me a few minutes to find some of the common features, since I didn’t know where to look.

Overall very impressed.  For its simple elegance, Wordpress remains my favorite Content Management System to work with.

I’ve been using some new Bible study software called Bible Desktop. It is written in Java, which for you non-techies simply means it can run on Windows, Mac, and Linux with a few minor differences in the way it works on each. For Bibles, dictionaries, commentaries, glossaries, etc., it uses modules from the Sword project, which means you have a whole library of books to choose from and which download and install easily from within the interface.

Some of the features I really like:

1. The user interface consists of one pane with fluidly resizeable  internal panes that contain the Bible on the left with a right sidebar containing a list of study helps that you’ve downloaded, an index of whatever resource you’ve selected, and of course the text of that resource.
2. The search feature, once the resource has been indexed is lightning fast.
3. In the English KJV version of the Bible, there are multiple “layers” you can turn on and off, such as linked Strong’s numbers, so while you are studying, you can just click on the number beside a word and the full text from Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance shows up in the sidebar. I was never one to, out of curiosity, go look up a word in that behemoth of a book in our family library. This allows me to do just that in a fraction of a second. I have been amazed at the different meanings behind identical English words that in Greek or Hebrew have very different meanings. In English I have often had to stare at the text numbly for a second, scratching my head, and finally figuring out the meaning, by looking at the context around that particular difficult word. Needless to say, I love this feature!
4. There are many other features that are great too such as changing the font and size of the text, determining whether you want to line break on verses or paragraphs, tabbed view of open Bibles, a daily reading schedule and more.
5. The best one is the fact that this resource is free!

And you’ve gotta love the logo:

My sister recently purchased the album Find Us Faithful (AP860) from Altar of Praise. The recording mentioned contains some excellent work from a technical perspective… male vocals with piano, but beyond that, I found the title song speaking directly to me. Here are the words penned by Jon Mohr:

Find Us Faithful
by
Joh Mohr

We’re pilgrims on the journey of the narrow road,
And those who’ve gone before us line the way,
Cheering on the faithful, encouraging the weary—
Their lives a stirring testament to God’s sustaining grace.

Surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,
Let us run the race not only for the prize;
But, as those who’ve gone before us,
Let us leave behind us
The heritage of faithfulness,
Passed on through godly lives.

After all our hopes and dreams have come and gone,
And our children sift through all we’ve left behind,
May the clues that they discover,
And the memories they uncover
Become the light that leads them to the road
We each must find.

O, may all who come behind us find us faithful;
May the fire of our devotion light their way.
May the footprints that we leave
Lead them to believe;
And the lives we live
Inspire them to obey.

O, may all who come behind us find us faithful.

The words “the road we each must find” has been an echo in my mind. Especially the last few years sifting through the ideals, morals, and perspectives that make up my childhood and youth and claiming the principles of true, living, breathing Christianity for myself versus simply obeying the things I was taught and with childhood simplicity believed were the fabric of reality. I am truly blessed with the knowledge that God has given me and the personal experience of relationship with God and His people. I feel overwhelmed when I think of the responsibility I have to live up to that knowledge and “run the race that is set before us”.

Twenty years ago, the average American would sit down to a cup of coffee in the morning and read their favorite newspaper such as the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times or perhaps a local newspaper.  If you wanted to find out how your out of state relatives were doing, you’d sit down and write them a personal letter.  If you wanted to keep up on your favorite organization such as various Christian missions or other charitable groups, you’d subscribe to their ink on paper newsletter.

Today, all of this is changing, thanks to blogging, and the entire, difficult-to-define set of technologies dubbed “Web 2.0″.  Now you can visit the various blogs being published by the Wall Street Journal, your local paper, your distant relatives, and the various organizations that pique your interest.  But, the time required to “serf” the web (mis-spelling intentional) to all those individual websites is prohibitive.

Enter Google Reader, a web-based blog and RSS feed reader.  If you have a gmail account, you just sign in and add the rss feeds from all your favorite blogs and news sources such as http://joshchamp.wordpress.com/feed  You can even add it to your personalized homepage along with your email at www.google.com/ig.  This allows you to quickly glance at your newest emails and all the updates to your favorite blogs on one page.  I use it personally and have found it very intuitive and easy to use.

Of course, if you don’t use Gmail, there are other feed readers, also known as feed aggregators, that do the same thing:

• Blog Lines
• News Gator
• Rocket RSS

So how do you read the news?  Feel free to comment.