(no title) via Musings from the Merse
Letter Writers and Bloggers. Pah!Being away in the big smoke I nearly missed this sad letter in the Berwickshire:SIR, - Can we through your newspaper attempt to clear up a situation which has been causing a great deal of confusion for people and upset for our family for many years.In Birgham there is a lady who is a regular contributor to your letters page, on often-controversial subjects, called Jean Cunningham. Also in Birgham is another Cunningham family: Alastair, Carol and Emma (also Esther who is in Lennel House Nursing Home).Because people often presumed we were related to Jean Cunningham we have endured many years of comments and strange looks – especially as we are very actively involved in the local community. Emma in particular suffered at school by people thinking her mother...
For the last few months I have been reading the blog BigBulkyAnglican by Tom Allen who worked for mission to seafarers. It was with sadness and shock that as I went to read his blog the following message was displayed: "This is Bigbulkyanglican’s daughter, am sorry to inform you that my dad, the creative and friendly giant passed away last night. We know that your thoughts and prayers will be with us; Anne, sprog 1 and sprog 2." - BigBulkyAnglican Funeral Details (next wednesday 17th Sept 08) can be found here. Maggi Dawn on Tom Allen Mission to Seafarer’s News Article on Rev Tom Allen Please be praying for his family.... 
My Google Reader is stuffed to the max with RSS Feeds and despite my many valiant efforts I seem to collect more and more subscriptions. Afraid of missing anything I only unsubscribe from those feeds which veer off the subject for which I subscribed to them (which I accept may be the most hypocritical practice of all time considering this blog seems to have little unifying theme). Others have mentioned that when subscribed to vast hordes of RSS feeds they simply read the odd blog religiously whilst marking the rest as read and saving them for archive searches, unfortunately I seem to be unable to do this, be it my inclination towards excessive procrastination or something else but I cannot leave unread feeds in my reader, therefore I have come to the conclusion that I will definitely... 
Its interesting to see some visual interpretation of the words used recently on this blog. Thanks to Wordle - A great solution when there is no time to blog. HT: TSK & JasonClark Similar Posts:None Found... 
I have been thinking about writing today and had a realization that writing is in fact a form that language that I increasingly enjoy. I am certainly not the worlds most natural writer, anyone who has met me face to face will know my primary language function is certainly verbal, but I have grown aware of the differences between the two forms of language, written and verbal.
Because I am a naturally inclined to be a talker I have the misfortune of writing in the way I would speak. Some might say this is a good thing, but I am not entirely sure. verbal communication is quite transient, you say something and immediately it is gone, it is far less exact and concrete than written words. If you go too far in one direction whilst speaking it is quite easy to balance what you have said later... 
Theres plenty to get through today, normally there is a bit of a smorgasborg of topics, so decided to divide the round up a bit more topically this week (needless to say the topic headings are hopelessly inadequate), let me know if that is useful: Theology/Church Stuff: Scot McKnight just started blogging through a book Rachel gave me for my Graduation - The Mission of God by Christopher Wright Ill be reading it along with this series.
The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative
John Stackhouse has written an excellent post for people considering a PhD, well worth a read, it certainly quelled my fantasies of Post Grad work! Jason Clark gives you a peek into his PhD research. Andy White writes a helpful post on the subject of why your visions should be... 
I was hoping to continue the 21st Century Missions series earlier this week but I have had no time to get the responses together. Thanks to everyone who has responded so far though, there are some great thoughts and it will be well worth the wait. Theologian Douglas Knight shares some interesting Barthian thoughts on Marriage from CDIII.4. Do you know of any other theological treatments of marriage? Also there is a sample chapter available from the new edition of the Church Dogmatics which will include translations of all Latin and Greek texts, presented alongside the original texts. Tom Smith at SoulGardeners writes a great reflection on how as Jesus-followers, University education should not be primarily motivated by money-making or getting the advantage but by being equipped to... 
As I mentioned the other day, I have started to use Windows Live Writer and can tentatively say that I am a convert. After spending my hard earned on a blog editor for mac some while back after hearing many endorsements for ecto you’d think Id be set up on that side of things too.
But no, ecto has, unfortunately not been the easiest blog editor, reviews on the other famous mac blog editor mars edit are mixed and so now I am trying Qumana. I can tell already that it is not as an enjoyable interface as Windows Live Writer (can you even believe those words are coming out of my preverbial mouth!) but the set up was as automated which takes most of the pain out of the equation, so watch this space, I’ll let you know how I get along with it.
UPDATE: Qumana crashed when I tried to... 
Since moving to Aberdeen I have been having some interesting conversations with my new flat mate Willy, all this resulted in me telling him, "you really need to start a blog!" so he did! Hoping he wouldn’t join the list of some of my other failed converts see here, and here, I didn’t add him to the blogroll straight off the mark, but he seems to be blogging aplenty, watch this space.We’ve also been hanging out with Rebecca Agnew from Atlanta who is here in Scotland for the summer with the Mission Society working on cataloging a missiology library (she gets free books, Im jealous). She has been blogging on her dotmac account for a while but has seen the ‘light’ as it where, and has started a wordpress blog here.Similar Posts:None Found... 
"We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million
typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare.
Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
Similar Posts:None Found... 
There has been little to no content here for a while, not because I haven’t been thinking of the things I normally do, more just because I don’t have time to process it into something readable, so please except my apologies whilst I blog about some blogging tools I’ve come across in the last few months.Browser Shots - A great website that let you check if you blog looks OK in browsers and Operating systems you can’t check them on. Check my sites example hereMySpace Cross Poster - This works as a Wordpress plugin and does what it says on the tin, it took me a few tweaks to get it working but it fixed the problem I had of trying to automate blog posts from wordpress onto my myspace blog. Hearing lots of positive rumblings about mint enthused me to take a look... 
Heres the round up for this week, but first I am finding a trend in my feed reading, I am consistantly having about 200 unread items in my feed so I may have to make some difficult decisions in terms of unsubscribing from certain blogs. Interestingly it is the blogs that are particularly volumous that I am most tempted to unsubscribe from, maybe quality instead of quantity, I wonder if this is the same for you? It may indicate an interesting message for bloggers.- Jim Martin has an excellent story about a surprise phone call which taught him that people are not easily written off.- Donovan Palmer says we can choose to have a happy heart, this was an encourgement to me yesterday.- An Island 600 miles from the north pole is getting the sun back, I felt just like this a few weeks ago,... 
My Birthday! This week has gone quickly, thought I haven’t done quite as much work as I maybe could have Ill put that down to a pre-birthday celebration (which is on sunday!)Much to Rachel’s annoyance I havent quite gotten into the birthday spirit, but we are having dinner at a nice southern mediteranean restaraunt in Aberdeen called Rustico’s tonight which should lighten things up! If you are feeling especially generous (or are a member of family contractually obliged to give a present and are currently freaking out thinking you have forgotten my birthday) Id be VERY grateful for anything on my wishlist at Amazon(UK).Book Buying Tips Which leads me onto another tip for the week which is DON’T BUY BOOKS ON AMAZON. I love amazon, its a one stop shop,... 
or how to blog (virally?) on facebook for free…this post is the "how to" I promised the other day for posting your blog posts to facebook after turning you away from the paid for (upto $30 per month) service at Facebook Blogfuse.1) Find your RSS feed, if it is someone else site you should be able to get this by right clicking the orange RSS symbol2) On the right hand bar under application click on notes (you may have to click on the more tab at the bottom as notes can get pushed to the bottom)3) On the right under "notes settings" you should be able to click "import a blog"4) Once in there, paste your rss feed address, tick the box, and click "Start Importing" and you’re done.... 
You may have noticed I have installed a couple of new plugins in the sidebar. They’re integrating my scrobbler (click here to find out more) and flickr feeds.Last.fm records plugin - ("What I am listening to" on the left) - This basically follows the last tracks listened on iTunes and shows the album cover for the last 3 albums I listened to.FlickrRSS (on the right) - This is a compromise plugin, I wanted something that was slim and just included a simple sidebar, which FlickrRSS does, the only draw back is that because it is based on the RSS feed it can only show the most recent photos. The exception or work around is defining which tags it picks up within the options. ... 
I have a few posts in the mix but this is me signing off again for the weekend, leaving you with a few commended perusable articles:1) For those of you on the look out for worship music stuff here, mercy me have started a blog, and Im glad to see there not taking themselves too seriously, I wonder if they might post some pedal board pics for us guitar geeks 2) Take your vitaminz posted an interesting quote from Erwin McManus about how western christianity can be revealed as very narcisstic and when all is stripped away there is no heart, no compassion or urgency. take a read, its short, worthwhile and motivating.3) Jason Clark loves Church and so do I, the world is admirably arranged as one person once said. In actual fact though I think Jason has hit a really important balance here... 
Its official, facebook has responded to the journalistic and uder feedback moans about the increasingly cluttered format of profile pages after opening their API or some equal source code for 3rd party developers to create apps.So finally there is away of hiding all your friends annoying funwalls/superwalls/nafwalls harah!Also I stumbled over this app which you actually PAY for which allows your blog to be sync’d onto your facebook and for others to add your blog app, this should be doomed to fail as you can simply import your blog feed to be published in your notes on facebook. It might not be pretty but who want to pay for your blog to be on facebook, not me.I think I’ll post a short howto on the very simple procedure of having your blog on facebook for free now…watch... 
I meant to post this yesterday, but it got missed,so here it is: Continuing to enjoy my firefox extension that I mentioned earlier this month (its at the bottom of the post)FlickrBlog posts LP cover portraits which look really cool I have begun reading iGod by Andrew who is a vineyard uk pastor and picked up on the latest (and very worthy) tv chef campaign to end intensive chicken farming…join in!Lifehacker highlights some more sources on online TV which I have been availing myself of.Librovox who publish free audiobooks that are in the public domain have published the book of actsJason Clark has listed some great creative ways to get stuck into the bible this year Lifehacker have featured an article on how to create light trail in digital photographySomehow my... 
In 2008 all signs point towards a continuation of the popularity of social networking sites such as facebook, twitter, myspace, bebo etc. The only problem is, as was the problem with the original mobile phone networks, different friends are on different networks. I have taken facebook up much more than any of the other sites due to the fact its cleaner (in almost all uses of that word) and the majority of the friends I dont see day to day are on that network. I have also taken to keeping my status updated on facebook, just for fun and because twitter never really kept my attention.Though my one bug about it all was how little all my online networks interacted, I knew it was possible as I saw the likes of shawn blanc include his twitter status on his blog sidebar. Yet I had resigned...