I found an interesting app called The Social Express via Smart Apps for Kids. The app uses interactive lessons to help children and young adults develop skills they need to build relationships and navigate social situations. It sounds like it could be of great app for my PDD-NOS daughter. It’s got some great testimonials as well. The only reason I haven’t pulled the trigger yet is that it is $89.99! Right now there is a contest to win a free copy. If we don’t win it, I’ll seriously consider paying.

This past February we went to Disneyland and stressed out the iPhones to check line lengths and text when we split up because the girls wanted to go on different rides. Typically around 2:00 PM my phone would dip below 20% and my wife’s would hit it a little later. The first day we just stayed together, but eventually a 5-year-old and 10-year-old run out of rides they can agree on. So the next day we said we’d take an afternoon break and go to the car to recharge our phones. It just so happened that we were apart and my phone was fading fast it was time for the break. We had some tense moments relaying where we were, where we were going, and I had a 5-year-old who was melting down to top it off.

So for our April trip to see The Mouse, I bought us a pair of New Trent External Batteries. Two because I figured we should have a backup even if we are split up, and to keep in each of our cars as emergency phone power. I decided on this model because it seemed to hold a good charge and the pair wouldn’t be too expensive ($45 ea.). The unit is a about the same thickness as an iPhone and a little wider. Not really small enough to fit in the same pants pocket as the phone, but easy enough in the same jacket pocket.

How did they work? Great! It was so nice to be able to not stress about the battery getting low, I just plugged in the iPhone and got a full-recharge. The device holds 2-3 phone recharges and I was even able to give a charge to someone while we were in line for Space Mountain. Since the trip, I’ve used the device several times when I’ve forgotten to charge my phone.  I’m not sure what more you could ask of a device like this.

икона за подарък

My proposed overture, which didn’t get out of my circuit but was submitted by a congregation within my circuit (thanks LCOS!), got through committee, made it to a floor vote, and was actually passed at the CNH District convention. It lost any teeth, which was expected, but I feel like it even lost the idea of striving for unity of practice completely and in fact emphasized the opposite. Oh well, hopefully I haven’t done any harm.

RE: TO APPLY CHRISTIAN FREEDOM INFORMED BY LOVE IN PREPARING DIVINE SERVICES FOR DISTRICT AND SYNODICAL GATHERINGS

WHEREAS. the Holy Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions do not prescribe the structure.form. style. or music of Christian worship; AND

WHEREAS. the basic structure of our current divine services evolved over time beginning with the early church: AND

WHEREAS. the Lutheran Confessions state that it is not necessary that human traditions or rites and ceremonies. instituted by men. should be alike everywhere (AC Vll. Apology Vll & Vlll); AND

WHEREAS. Martin Luther in his preface to the German Mass and Order ofService stated that. ”As far as possible we should observe the same rites and ceremonies” without proposing that all of Germany should uniformly follow the Wittenberg Order. and that all those who desire to follow it “not make it a rigid law to bind or entangle anyone’s conscience. but use it in Christian Liberty as long. when, where. and how you find it to be practical and useful“ (LW 53. pp. 6l-62); AND

WHEREAS. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg submitted a communion liturgy to the Ministerium of Pennsylvania in 1748 which became the basic structure ofthe divine service in the Common Service Book (1918). The Lutheran Hymnal (1941). the Service Book and Hymnal (1958). the Lutheran Book of Worship (1978). Lutheran Worship (1982). Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006). and the Lutheran Service Book (2006); AND

WHEREAS. the 2004 Synodical Convention approved the Lutheran Service Book for use in the worship services of our congregations and recognized the hard work and effort given by the Commission on Worship in developing the worship resource; AND

WHEREAS. a local congregation hosts the divine services at our district and synodical gatherings; AND

WHEREAS. St. Paul recognizes that Christian liberty is informed by love; THEREFORE BE IT

RESOLVED. that those planning the communion services for district and national synodical gatherings be mindful of and appreciate the basic structure of the Lutheran Mass; AND BE IT FURTHER

RESOLVED. that those planning such services do so in the spirit of Christian liberty informed by love recognizing the widespread use of the Lutheran Service Book in our churches: AND BE IT FINALLY

RESOLVED. that all those attending and participating in our district and national synodical gatherings be encouraged to attend divine services at those gatherings.

Sometimes I’m better at expressing myself in ways other than writing. This is one of those times. My daughter (PDD-NOS) has been having a tough time coping with setbacks, especially at school. This time has helped me to focus on who she is and not what I expect her to be and to always remember that she is a baptized child of God.

I’ve had a couple of conversations in the past week on the subject of abortion. One was with a friend telling me about the abortions he was involved in and another was with some people defending the right to choose abortion.

The friend who was involved in the abortions was regretfully of them and said he didn’t know when life began but he believes that if they were children that they are with Christ. His reasoning had to do with an age of accountability. He asked what I thought and I saw that there was a burden on him so I told him that I believe that God is a more loving and gracious father than I could ever be and I trust Him with my children more than I trust myself. I could have pointed to the Psalms to say that a child had died, but that would have been Law applied unnecessarily.

The people defending the right to choose abortion also say that they don’t know when life begins. In this case, these people needed to hear the Law. They weren’t Christians, so appeals to Scripture would be pointless, but simple scientific arguments would force them to consider that life begins at conception and taking that life is wrong. (of course “personhood” then becomes the point of contention).

These two interactions really highlighted the importance of distinguishing Law and Gospel so they can be properly applied in the course of living in ones vocations.

художници на икони

Concept: A quiz game where you compete against others. My wife loves playing “Words with Friends” (Scrabble) on her iPhone. You would select the category you want to compete in and challenge friends or random users. There would be leader boards, achievements, and the ability to post victories to Facebook and Twitter. I was going to confine the questions to theology, but it doesn’t make sense to limit myself; although I would probably start there. With the answers I planned on linking or embedding additional resources that are related such as sermons, podcasts, or videos.

Viability: The Table Talk Radio app which I wrote awhile back still gets downloaded and there are a lot of quiz applications. There might be a lot of head-to-head quiz games as well, but it will come down to the execution and I think the category idea and linking/embedding additional resources are differentiators.

Status: This one will require quite of bit of technology which I haven’t used before (a motivator for me) and also seems to have the most commercial viability of any idea that I currently have. Looks like I’ll be headed in this direction until something new distracts me

That’s a part of an excerpt from Penn Jillette’s book that’s making the rounds in the tech blogs I read (via Daring Fireball). Here’s the full excerpt:

There is no god and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

Since this is an excerpt, I’m not sure whether Mr. Jillette is arguing his case from the standpoint of all historic facts being lost or if he’s arguing from the standpoint that history itself is reset (people lauding the quote seem to take it both ways). Here’s the thing if all historic facts were lost could we prove that George Washington lived? Or if history were reset and George Washington never lived could we prove that he existed? See, Mr. Jillette’s argument is a fantasy, but it sounds so authoritative that people who want to dismiss religion gravitate toward it.

Christianity does not live outside of history. Something that is most obvious at this time of year. This is when we celebrate our savior’s entrance into time and history and His becoming incarnate to take on our sin and pay the punishment for it so we might have eternal life. Mr. Jillette’s fantasy question implies that only science is based on objective truths. Well, so is history.

Concept: An app that is like iBooks or the Kindle Reader but for sermons.

Viability: The concept has proven successful in several different context. As mentioned it works for iBooks and the Kindle Reader, additional examples would be the Marvel Comics app, DC Comics app, and even Free Books. Their revenue comes from in-app purchases of content.

Concerns: Making the content compelling enough to purchase. I don’t think simply giving the text of the sermon would be enough. I think additional features such as narration (which may or may not in itself be enough) or additional content related to the sermon would be needed to add value to the customer. Also, bundling collections of sermons might add enough value. For example, combining all or a set of Luther’s house postils as a single unit of purchase. Sermons by contemporary preachers might be of interest to some as well, but this would come with its own set of issues such as audio from those pastors that only post their text, those that preach from outlines, etc.

Status: This idea is one that I’m going to explore heavily in 2012. It doesn’t have a lot of external dependencies which is a real plus and the business model is one that is currently well accepted.

I’m constantly trying to figure out ways to make a full blown business out of developing software that teaches and proclaims the Gospel. I’m still not sure that I can create a compelling enough application to attract enough paying customers to be able to leave my “day job” and focus just on this type of software.

On this journey, however, I do come up with quite a number of ideas for applications and as has been pointed out many times, ideas are worth little without execution. What I’m going to do is start to post these ideas on this site and hopefully someone will come along and execute I the idea. Also, if you think the idea is good, feel free to leave a comment so I can get a feel for what people are interested in. Finally, if you’re interested in idea but don’t have a developer to work with, I’d be willing to talk about collaborating especially if you can bring artistic, design, or other skills that are my weak areas. Please keep in mind that I’m really interested in making commercial products because I want this to be a sustainable business.

Over the next couple days I’ll be posting the ideas I currently have and will continue to add them as they come to mind.

I’m a geek and one way that this comes through is how I manage my blogs. I use a DreamHost Virtual Private Server (VPS) account to host this blog, my wife’s blog, Wittenberg Media, The Parental Office, and Joyful Games just to name a few. I do this because I can control plugins and manage podcasts and other resources at very reasonable costs (storage and bandwidth is unlimited with a DreamHost account). If I tried to do this with a more turnkey solution, I’d either be limited with what I could do (Blogger) or have to pay a lot to host all these sites (WordPress and TypePad).

With those blessings come the curse of troubleshooting technical issues. For the past couple months I’ve been getting intermittent messages telling me that my VPS has exceeded memory usage and gone down. Luckily the VPS seems to bounce back up after about a minute so there isn’t too much downtime. This week I decided that I was going to track this down because the problem seemed to be getting worse, and I really wanted to get rid of the nagging feeling that there was something I should fix.

The first thing I did was monitor the memory usage (watch free -m) of the system and saw that if I hit more than a couple of the sites the memory usage would balloon and the server would reboot. I then went to my account and bumped up my memory allotment (+$5). I tried hitting a bunch of the sites and that seemed to do the trick. The memory usage would get near the limit, but seemed to hold at that level and didn’t tip over to where it would cause a reboot.

That lasted a couple of days, but this morning I got hit with another message that the VPS had rebooted. Since the problems definitely revolved around hitting multiple WordPress sites, I did a search for optimizing WordPress on DreamHost and found this page. It turns out that the default setting when configuring a domain is to use FastCGI. This is a memory pig and overkill for WordPress. I switched all the sites to use CGI and memory consumption plummeted without a noticeable hit to performance!

So I’m thankful that God has given me the aptitude and interest that allows me to work through these problem which are caused by the aptitude and interest I have for these problems (classic Lutheran paradox!). I am also thankful that I have these gifts that I can use to serve others through the sites I mentioned above. Hopefully some find them edifying and if not those sites, I have such a wide range of interests I hope I eventually put one up that does.

Last plug. DreamHost is pretty cool in that they will host a 501c3 for free. We use them for our church and preschool.