Archive for July, 2008

Many of you have noticed the icon to the right at the bottom of all my posts. It’s a referral tool, and there are dozens of them out there. When you click on the button, it gives you an option to refer – or “Digg!, stumble, spurl, etc. – the entry you have just enjoyed reading to the attention of thousands. It’s just that simple. A button click.

Here’s why it is important:

• Recommending an entry that has informed, inspired, helped or given you insight and direction will obviously do so for others as well.
• Recommending an entry will bring more traffic to the author’s site (and if they have linked to yours, it will produce indirect benefits for you as well).
• It helps promote content that you enjoy to the attention of others.
• It helps you keep a record of interesting entries, articles, and news items in one place. (Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Spurl, Magnolia and others all track the entries you’ve referred.)
• If more than one person recommends the same site or article, that article will gain popularity across the net quickly.

You might be wondering if it really works? Earlier this week, I “stumbled” the article that Mandy had written for our church website. The graph to the right shows you the hits on the site for that week. Guess when I stumbled it?

More traffic means more influence. If you own a business, are self-employed or are a Christian, this should be important to you. You want more influence, right? 

That’s why you want to practice social referring. With any of these services, you’ll have to create an account. That’s a real pain, I know, but after the account is created, you’re ready to go. Find one service you like and stick with it. I’ve been experimenting with Digg and Stumbleupon, and there are many articles recommending the latter over the former:

• Why Digg is destined for failure.. (December 2006)
• Why Digg is still the best … (November 2007)
• Why Digg’s recommendation engine is a step backward … (July 2008)
• Digg vs. Stumbleupon …
• Stumbleupon vs. Digg: Voyeurs vs Sheep … (April 2007)
• Forget about Digg; use Stumbleupon (July 2008)
• Digg vs. Stumbleupon (July 2008) *Probably the best article of them all…

Why does anyone care about traffic or social referral sites? Well, think of the blog/website world like you do about a local dentist, for example. You’re trying to find out which dentist to use after moving to a new town, and you begin to ask around right? It’s pretty much the same concept with social referral sites. You’re simply telling others what sites, articles and blogs that you consider trustworthy, interesting or good.

If you link your Digg or Stumbleupon account to your lifestream (the list of web activity you can see in my right column), then folks can see at a glance what you’re recommending and reading. 

History

What we’re really talking about is referred to as “social bookmarking.” The granddaddy of them all is del.icio.us. I’ve never gotten into it, though I have an account there. 

Here’s a decent summary of the social bookmarking timeline from Wikipedia:

Founded in 2003, del.icio.us pioneered tagging and coined the term social bookmarking. In 2004, as del.icio.us began to take off, Furl and Simpy were released, along with Citeulike and Connotea (sometimes called social citation services), and the related recommendation system Stumbleupon. In 2006, Ma.gnolia, Blue Dot, and Diigo entered the bookmarking field, and Connectbeam included a social bookmarking and tagging service aimed at businesses and enterprises. In 2007 IBM released its Lotus Connections product. Sites such as Digg, reddit, and Newsvine offer a similar system for organization of “social news”.

Faster than leaving a comment

One other thing… social bookmarking provides a much faster way to indicate that you appreciate an author’s content when you don’t want to think up a comment. Just click on the button under the article, and the feedback is registered through your referral!

The unthinkable and ridiculous happened this past Saturday night – Sunday morning. Another scooter was stolen from our carport. 

Yup.

This time, it was Sam’s electric scooter that he had received for Christmas. Adelyn’s identical pink scooter was parked right next to it (and has since been moved from the carport). 

I can’t even begin to tell you how aggravated I am about this. We’ve lived in this house for almost seven years, and this is the first time we’ve had to address the issue of security and locks and cameras. Monticello has always been the kind of town that you can leave your doors open and your car unlocked. No more, apparently.

In the past few months, we’ve had good friends who go to Journey (and live next door to one another) have push mowers taken from their carports. The crime wave (and I would have thought it ludicrous before these events to call it that) that has settled in on our community seems to have crashed into a shore of disbelief and inaction.

Daily, we are seeing stories reported in local media about drug busts. Recently, we lost a teenager to a stabbing at a family event over the July 4th weekend due to senseless and uncontrolled rage. Some local youth were caught stealing electronic equipment from businesses and churches. Another man was arrested for sexual indecency with a child. Another group of young adults was arrested for stealing prescription drugs from a local pharmacy. In a town of 10,000. 

In response to the stabbing (and probably the collective feeling of fear and loss of security), some members of the community have organized a “Stop the Hate” rally where there will be singing, a candle-light vigil, and speeches from local pastors and community leaders. I applaud their intent. Hopefully, it will be the first salvo fired in our community’s fight to reclaim its moral center.

However, a rally cannot replace our responsibility to be involved. Involved in our community’s welfare. Involved in people’s lives. We must be intentionally involved in life. For some of us, that may mean running for office in the future. For some of us, it may mean holding our existing political leaders accountable for proactive, visionary leadership. For some of us, it may mean confronting dead-beat dads. For casting a personal vision for kids and teens that is greater than what they see on TV, in the sports world or through fashion.

This loss of security we are all feeling in our community should provoke acts of heroism. For many, it simply means speaking up. Whether in confrontation, encouragement, suggestion, or contribution, your voice, vote, and values can only count and make a difference if you speak up and follow through.

Now… if anyone wants to contribute to the scooter fund… ;)

This is the audio of John Piper’s sermon from July 13, 2008. Piper examines the importance and biblical foundation of church membership. His points are powerful refutes of the “I don’t need to belong to a local church” attitude that has ebbed and flowed throughout history. 

He details “5 strands of evidence” which include:

1. The church is to discipline its members. (How can you discipline someone if they do not consider themselves under the authority of spiritual leaders or an understood gathering of believers that has “membership?”)
2. Excommunication exists. (Why does the New Testament prescribe and describe this practice if church membership is meaningless?)
3. Christians are required and commanded to submit to their spiritual leaders.
4. Shepherds are required and commanded to care for their flock.
5. The metaphor of the body.

Poor Al Gore. What cause will he have to resort to for publicity and limelight if hanging chads and global warming are no longer in vogue?

I have always had a niggling doubt in the back of my mind about the veracity of global warming. How could the tiny machinations of man impact the massiveness of our planet in such a dramatic way in so short a time? I wrote a little about my thoughts on the whole issue back when I reviewed Michael Crichton’s thriller, State of Fear. (You can read an ABC News article on it here.) By the way, the title is an apropos description of what the global warming crowd would like to create.  

Now it seems that another leading scientific think tank is taking the offense by opening up dialogue in its journal Physics & Society. The American Physical Society had initially been sucked into supporting the politically-charged agenda of global warming but now is backing away from it, it seems.

One of the early contributions to the journal is Victor Monckton, the science advisor to Margaret Thatcher’s administration in Britain. He says:

 ”I was dismayed to discover that the IPCC’s [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] 2001 and 2007 reports did not devote chapters to the central ‘climate sensitivity’ question, and did not explain in proper, systematic detail the methods by which they evaluated it. When I began to investigate, it seemed that the IPCC was deliberately concealing and obscuring its method.” (italics mine)

In a summary article on this, Powerline says:

According to Monckton, there is substantial support for his results, “in the peer-reviewed literature, most articles on climate sensitivity conclude, as I have done, that climate sensitivity must be harmlessly low.”

Monckton… says natural variability is the cause of most of the Earth’s recent warming. “In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400st 11,400
English: World English Bible - WEB
Izbrano poglavje ne obstaja!

WP-Bible plugin years … Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth.”

This news does not bode well for liberal political activists which have tried to made global warming an issue in this election season. If the legs are knocked out from under global warming like those of traditional evolution, what will they have to stand on any longer? I guess their opinions need to evolve to become truly scientific rather than emotional interpretations of what they would like to be fact.

Is it the wrath of God?

Francis Schaeffer in Death in the City had a different interpretation in 1968 of why bad things might be happening environmentally – from tsunamis to tornadoes to floods to hurricanes to earthquakes. He suggested that the insurance companies might be more correct than we allow. Call them “acts of God,” he would say:

“Not all that occurs in space-time history is explainable on the basis of natural causes and effect, for example, economic, military, and psychological forces.”

He goes on to point to Romans 1.18-19 where the apostle Paul writes:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. (ESV)

Schaeffer prophetically declares,

“There is only one perspective we can have of the post-Christian world of our generation: an understanding that our culture and our country is under the wrath of God. Our country is under the wrath of God. Northern European culture is under the wrath of God.”

Whew. Wrath of God is not politically-correct or inspiring stuff. But it may give us insight as to why some of the things are happening that others interpreted global warming as being responsible for. Destruction, disaster and devastation. Are they being poured out from heaven as from a bowl on cultures that have turned their back on the living God after having affirmed Him as their foundation?

As I was saying in the last post, Hugh Hewitt’s book Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation was a challenge and provocation for me. The more I reflected on it after reading it, the more I realized that in many ways my blog was, well, bland. 

I hate to admit that to myself, because I feel that I’ve been pretty informative, encouraging, challenging and even edgy (heck, who else do you know that writes about butt boils?). However, I have rarely written about topics that are controversial. I have for the most part steered clear of politics (except for last year’s sales tax debacle). And I have been very vocal about my faith and love for Jesus Christ. It is the absolute foundation of all that I do.

Yet, Hewitt’s book bothered me. In a nutshell, it caused me to consider whether my writings were really influencing readers – or if they were merely informing readers. 

When I was running MonticelloLive.com, I chose to not only report news but to dig deeper beneath our community’s noise and try to see what was making things “tick” and “go bump in the night.” I learned a lot about some people’s motives, ideals and agendas. Some of those were encouraging; some were disconcerting.

The times that I wrote editorials (1, 2, 3), I got quite a bit of negative feedback from some leaders in town and even from a few Christians. The gist of their complaint was that I was a pastor, and that I shouldn’t be saying the things I was saying. It’s quite a turn of events to realize that just 100 years ago, pastors were the moral leaders and opinion influencers in their communities. Heck, 500 years ago, pastors were the primary civic leaders and engines of community life. (Can you say Martin Luther or John Calvin?!) Imagine what things would be like politically and religiously if they had listened to folks tell them that pastors should just preach and not get involved!

That brings me full circle to what I am have wrestling with. It’s been obvious over the past year that local news outlets choose simply to report news. It’s like a reflex. Something happens; someone writes about it. There is not much of an effort to dig deep and find news. Truly getting involved and seeking to contribute to community life, however, requires more than that. 

Edmund Burke said, 

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”  (Wayne Greeson has an excellent sermon on this topic here.)

It’s not just evil that triumphs when good people do nothing. Ignorance prevails. I think it’s time to do something. How about you? (to be continued)

With a nice little message of “Thanks for waiting,” the iPhone Dev Team posted the new tool that will unlock, jailbreak and activate iPhone firmware 2.0 this afternoon!

The website iphoneunlockstatus.com provided this handy-dandy overview to know what you’re getting into with the new tool:

I am downloading it as we speak…

Update (7-19-08, 9:13 p.m.): I downloaded it, and tried to run it. It spun for almost 20 minutes looking for the firmware (which was on my desktop). I was not willing to run the “Expert Mode” until they publish better instructions. There was also a note over at iClarified.com that says that Installer app does not work. That’s crazy. How would one install jailbroken apps? Think I’ll wait for the morrow.

The Morrow (7-20-08, 6:00 a.m.): iClarified has posted a tutorial for the jailbreaking method. I have still have lots of questions about it and wish there was a FAQ.

Update (4:15 p.m.): Bummer. I can’t recommend or endorse this tool for anyone yet. After much anticipation, its use is unreliable. Even after following the tutorial the Pwnage 2.0 tool won’t find the firmware (I have to select it manually) or bootloaders (It offers to search the internet for them, but I already have them in the specified folder). Too bad ziphone didn’t get in on this project. His tool is so much easier to use for the average user. Unless you’re an advanced user, I would advise you to wait for either a better tutorial, better version of this tool, or another tool altogether. At least we know that the first jailbreak salvo has been fired. 

Others will hopefully rush in and clean up what the Dev Team have worked so hard to get out.

Update (7-21-08, 9:15 p.m.): I have successfully jailbroken my iPhone using the new tool (2.01) the Dev Team released yesterday! My error, I think, was not actually putting the iPhone in DFU mode. I didn’t know there was a difference until I found this article that described what to do.

I’ve been reading Hugh Hewitt’s book called Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation. Published in 2004, it’s already old when it comes to naming the most popular blogs and opinion influencers. However, as for understanding the foundation and background of blogging as the tsunami of information influence, he is dead on.

In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever read a Hewitt book that I didn’t like. I’ve read In But Not Of, The Embarrassed Believer, and now Blog.

Hewitt’s book Blog is a feast for the writer-turned-blogger and the wannabe. It not only explains how now is the best time to start and maintain a blog but also describes the potential power, influence, and plain old fun of blogging. 

However, it’s not just informational. It’s inspirational. 

Blog header from 2005

I started this blog, Notes from the Trail, in September of 2005. It was on the 10th of that month that I opened a Typepad account and began posting stuff that I’d written in the past. I posted things I’d written in high school, college, and other essays and poems. I began to carve out a niche for myself on the net, and soon discovered that my years of journaling had prepared me to become an almost-daily blogger. 

I knew next to nothing about HTML, PHP or web design at the time. I could barely squeak by. However, when people began interacting with my writing – in comments on my blog and via email, I knew that this medium held immense promise for relational impact and skill development. I was “all in.”

I moved my blogging platform to a self-hosted WordPress format and have never looked back.

Hewitt says that the blogosphere is a place where you can “peddle your text wares.” There have been many instances in the past three years that all I’ve felt like I’ve done in blogging is “peddling.” Spinning my wheels comes to mind. It’s that uncomfortable sense that all the mind investment, creative wording, and research is simply going down a black hole. It’s the old “nobody likes me; everybody hates me; I’ll think I’ll go out back and eat some worms” routine.

Then one day, you realize that you’re emailing and conversing with people that you would never have met if you hadn’t begun blogging. Here are a few for me: Richard, Andy, Tim, Scott, Sunny, Alan, Grant, Wade, Ed, Shelley, Rosjuane, Kenny, TeamPyro, Mark, Terry, John and.. well, you get the picture (and please forgive me if you didn’t get mentioned!).

On the other hand, I can also count multiple folks that may have been influenced to begin blogging by my pitiful attempts. I don’t want to list them, because I might embarrass myself when they comment that I had nothing to do with it. (If I have helped, inspired your blogging though, I’d love to hear about it!)

Since 2005, I also began and have since sold a community website called MonticelloLive.com which is getting astounding traffic only two years after its creation – well over 2000 visitors a day (for a town of 9000) and more than 4000 pageviews per day.

All that to say.. Hewitt’s book did not convince me of the power and benefits of blogging – both personal and professional (I was already convinced). However, it has caused me to significantly rethink how I blog – and what I blog about. If you’re a frequenter of Notes from the Trail, you’ll know that I blog about the same random topics, depending on the time of the year: faith in Jesus Christ, church, Apple computers and iPhones, technology and internet, relationships, fantasy football, and home happenings.

I assign every story a “category” (forgive me for being basic if you’re a blogger extraordinaire) for filing and finding purposes. My categories were created to stick with the “trail” theme and have always been called:

• Parchments – for books I’m reading or have reviewed
• Homestead Happenings – stuff around the house with wifey and kids
• Campfire Talk – rarely used, but intended for heart-to-hearts 
• Church Chew – entries about Christianity and church
• Goin’ to Town – for technology and city-type stuff
• Shootn the Bull – for general silliness
• Spiritual Markers – for entries about faith and spirituality

All of the above have suited me well for the past three years, but as I consider some of Hewitt’s observations, I realize that… (to be continued)

Wow. I think I’m more impressed with Swurl than MobileMe right now. Of course, they’re totally unrelated, but Swurl “just works” whereas MobileMe has stumbled out of the gate and almost had me cussing this evening.

I myself stumbled over Swurl in a blog this afternoon and wondered what it was. The blogger compared it to Tumblr, which I love. When I got home, the name had stuck with me, so I looked it up. After realizing that it claimed to be able to “bring your life together,” I took about 5 minutes plugging in the various microblogging services I use – Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, Last.fm, etc. (the kitchen sink). 

Imagine my slow-spreading smile of delight as I watched Swurl swirl all my RSS streams and feeds together into an attractive and amazing blend of technology. It even pulled in the friends that I follow on various services! Check out my swurl page: journeyguy.swurl.com. With a quick Photoshopped header, I had an amazing website in less than 15 minutes!

I highly recommend you to try the same thing – especially if you use any of the social website services and microblogs mentioned above. Tell me if you’re not impressed.

One AMAZING feature is how it creates a visual archive of all your past posts – almost instantly! The view below is what mine looks like when you click on my “Timeline.”

The only thing that Swurl appears not to do is to allow you create an entry there. You can comment on everything – which is very cool! However, it is true to its description – it seeks only to bring your web-life into one location. So you can still blog, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. (By the way, if you’re not using hellotxt.com to update your various sites, you could be saving a lot of time.)

In the long run, Swurl may capture the devotion of bloggers everywhere. It surpasses many other similar services in ease of use and graphic appeal. Who needs Friendfeed when there’s Swurl? If you happen to set up a site at Swurl, let me know in the comments so I can swing by and see!

Jeremy asked me recently what study Bible I would recommend. I have used the NIV Study Bible for many years, as well as Thompson’s Chain Reference Bible (NIV). However, I have been doing most of my study, research, and teaching out of the English Standard Version for the past few years.

After doing a few minutes of online research with Jeremy hovering over my shoulder, I discovered with enthusiasm that the ESV Study Bible will be in print this October! Just a glance at its contributors and format caused me to immediately add it to my Amazon wishlist. (I hope to get the Trutone Natural Brown – it wasn’t on Amazon’s site yet.) If you’re in the market for a great study Bible, you can’t go wrong with this one, folks.

In addition, Youversion announced today that it’s made an iPhone app available for free through the Apple App Store! I went immediately and downloaded it. 

I am looking forward to have these two new tools at my disposal and hope that they (or others like them) will lead you deeper into God’s Word. The preeminence and availability of God’s Word does not transform our lives, however. Input, meditation, and obedience will.

Merely hearing God’s law is a waste of your time if you don’t do what he commands. Doing, not hearing, is what makes the difference with God. (Romans 2.13, The Message)

Loopt or Whrrl? Which will become the premier location microblog? Will one or the other trump Twitter?

Both are fascinating and dumbfounding. How in the heck do these things work? Check them both out and let me know which one you like. They can both be downloaded through Apple’s App Store.

But not this weekend, their blog says. In the meantime, watch this video of just how easy it is to jailbreak your iPhone with the pwnage tool that will soon be released. 

Many many hours have gone into this and now it should be as easy enough for your grandmother to use.

 

You can also watch the video in high quality here.

Just hours after I downloaded the iPhone 2.0 update from Apple’s site (and a day earlier than it was going to be released!), the iPhone Dev Team had already announced a jailbreak! Gizmodo was one of the first to release the news, although the truth is that just about every incremental release of the 2.0 beta has been jailbroken by them over the past several months.

Here are some questions I don’t know the answer to:

• Can those of us who updated to 2.0 hastily jailbreak our phones?
• Or does the jailbreak apply to the pwnage method prior to updating to 2.0?

After six hours with the update, I am still extremely impressed with the App Store. However, I’m growing less and less impressed with the range of free apps that are offered. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve installed some really cool ones, but I just doubt that most of them will have lasting use. There is a certain “cool” factor to some of them, but I can already tell that I won’t use them very much.

On the other hand, I had dozens of free games and other nice apps on my jailbroken iPhone that I used regularly that aren’t available on the App Store. There’s just nothing to compare with the jailbreak community and their spirit of open source. Developers for the App Store are wanting $.99 to $19.99 for programs – and there’s no way to try them out before buying. Who does that anymore? If anyone is going to spend money on software, you generally want to know if it will do what you need/want. I know it’s all about the money. It’s just that I don’t have any. ;)

This evening as I play around with the new apps and peruse the features of 2.0, I honestly don’t know which direction I’ll head in the days to come. I can say that Apple has hit a home run with this firmware. Many folks are going to LOVE it. There will be cartwheels turned all over tomorrow when folks get the official release.

For those of us who have grown to love the open source feeling of a jailbroken phone, however, I would imagine that there are many folks like me with somewhat mixed feelings. I wrote a post last October that expressed my frustration with Apple’s inability to understand what tech folks really want from them: freedom.

A good example of what was left out is the app Intelliscreen. It is one of the most powerful, helpful and innovative apps that I loved on my jailbroken iPhone. Yet, they do not develop it for the App Store. A quote from their website says:

Couldn’t Apple have had a more open mind to open source? There’s some amazing geniuses that aren’t at Apple. For Pete’s sake, a 15 year-old developed iJailbreak last year.

And maybe that’s what bums me out. I want my free Yahtzee game back on my iPhone. I can’t have it without a jailbreak. That’s just the beginning of apps that I no longer have. Others include iPhone Video Recorder, MobileScrobber, Intelliscreen, Twinkle, Solitaire, Super Nintendo and 100s of games for it… and the list goes on.

From a link over at iClarified this a.m., I was able to download the much-anticipated iPhone 2.0 firmware – one day early. I have no idea how this is possible, only that I got the download before Apple took the link down. By updating to the new iTunes 7.7, I was able to option-click on “Restore” and upgrade my iPhone to 2.0.

The experience was flawless – except for my first attempt with iTunes 7.6. You cannot update to 2.0 using older iTunes software.

Many of you know I’ve been using a jailbroken phone for months now and been extremely pleased with it. I was expecting 2.0 to blow me away. 

It didn’t.

After an initial “wow factor” with the App Store that’s now available in 2.0, (and it IS very impressive) my enthusiasm began to fade. There was no Yahtzee game, no free cards games… in fact, there were only 15 games listed and only ONE of those was FREE. After further looking, there are many more games under “Entertainment,” but the free ones are few and far between, to say the least. (Why in the world would anyone pay $1.99 for Hangman?!) The Facebook application rocks, but the mobile Facebook website is so impressive, I wonder about the need for the app? I am still exploring, but my 15-20 minute first impression leaves me waiting for a jailbreak. 

One disappointment is that with ALL THE TIME that Apple and developers had with this rollout, where are the apps that matter? The App Store is just that – a store. It’s designed to make money. There just aren’t that many freebies available, like I was led to believe there might be. And as far as sheer silly fun, programs like iFartz and iGiggle just aren’t there.

On top of that, when my phone rang a few minutes after the update, I groaned. Back to Apple’s stock ringtones. Thank goodness that iToner is ready their 1.08 update. 

Conclusion: I have a 1st gen iPhone and most likely will be holding off on getting a new iPhone – we don’t have 3G networks in our area. My jailbroken iPhone has been wonderful! I never cease to be amazed at software coming out for it.

As far as 2.0, those purists who never jailbroke their iPhones, waiting eagerly for the 2.0 update will probably be pleased. Any new icon on their screen will cause them to jump for joy. Jailbreakers will likely be disappointed and watching the Dev Team for the ensuing race to JB 2.0. I can imagine that a JB’ed 2.0 with an App Store would be the best of both worlds.

However, Zibri, the author of the amazing Ziphone utility which jailbreaks the iPhone had this to say on his blog today:

…I strongly suggest not to upgrade iTunes nor the iPhone.