December 20, 2007
Christmas Trees Unsafe - Faith Inconvenient
(Tim Jones)
Hey, Tim Jones here again. This is from my blog Old World Swine;
I link THIS STORY (Reuters) - about the removal of Christmas trees due to the risk of fire - only because it reminded me of an incident that took place when I was a newly minted Catholic and Parish Council member.
During one council meeting I noted that some parishioners had asked me to ask if we couldn't have some votive candles in the church. The priest made some remarks about the fire hazard, and said he wasn't sure about insurance and liability, and stuff. He suggested electric candles. The meeting moved on, as I silently resolved not to press the issue lest we actually wind up with prayer candles that turned on and off and reminded me of a tacky chandelier at my aunt's house.
Father then read a letter from our Bishop, directing all parishes to begin working toward perpetual Eucharistic Adoration as soon as possible.
If there is a word the opposite of "enthusiasm", it was written all over our priest's face. Once again, he noted all the problems that would have to be overcome... security, scheduling... well, that was about it, but the upshot was that it was going to be a pain in the tush and the Bishop's letter was going to be ignored. That was it.
I must have made some sort of grunt of perplexitude, because I remember Father explaining to me again what a gigantic logistical headache perpetual Adoration would be, and ending with the clincher that "This parish is just not that devotionally-minded".
Had I been older, and a more grizzled and seasoned Catholic, I might have asked the question that popped into my head, "...and you are okay with that? As the spiritual father of the parish, the complete lack of interest in classic Catholic devotions doesn't bother you just a teensy bit?". I guess I didn't ask because I knew the answer.
This also got me to thinking about another question that has bothered me from time to time, about why we don't hear from the ambo more encouragement for Catholics to make use of the sacrament of Confession. It seems like it is always scheduled at dawn-thirty on Saturday mornings, and I can count on one hand the number of times I have heard even the mildest endorsement of it in a homily. Forgive me if I have entertained the idea that some priests might not push Confession because they really don't want to make more work for themselves.
It must be a dreary job, in a sense, listening to the same old sins week in and week out, and some that must grieve any sensible person. There is no one else in the parish who can do it. My Dad was a cop for a number of years, and I think the constant exposure to the underbelly of the human family took its toll on him over the years, though he never talked about it. Cops are basically the guys who follow after the parade with a shovel.
I would like to have some input from priests or others who might be able to answer the question. Are some priests, perhaps, partly motivated to keep mum on the dearth of confessing Catholics by a desire not to further clutter their already busy schedules? Just asking.
Posted by Tim Jones in Sacraments, Technology | Permalink | Comments (71)
September 25, 2007
iTunes, You Just Got Some Serious Competition
(Jimmy Akin)
Amazon.com has just launched its new mp3 download service, which offers DRM-free music for download.
EXCERPTS:
Web retailer Amazon.com Inc. launched its much-anticipated digital music store Tuesday with nearly 2.3 million songs, none of them protected against copying.
The store, Amazon MP3, lets shoppers buy and download individual songs or entire albums. The tracks can be copied to multiple computers, burned onto CDs and played on most types of PCs and portable devices, including Apple Inc.'s iPod and Microsoft Corp.'s Zune.
Songs cost 89 cents to 99 cents each and albums sell for $5.99 to $9.99.
Major music labels Universal Music Group and EMI Music have signed on to sell their tracks on Amazon, as have thousands of independent labels. The company said several smaller labels are selling their music without copy protection for the first time on the Amazon store, including Rounder Records and Trojan Records.
The thing that is different about this venture, compared to other similar ones, is that Amazon has the corporate muscle ot give iTunes a run for its money--or rather, a run for our money. Even if it doesn't have as big a catalog as iTunes right now, it more than its competitors has the potential to get there and even surpass the selection on iTunes.
So naturally Amazon's stock went up.
Shares of Amazon rose 89 cents to $93.48 Tuesday.
In other words, the price of a song.
This is, of course, good news for all of us, as it is likely to lead to lead to more DRM-free media in the future.
Now they just need to let me put mp3 songs and albums with previews in my aStore.
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Technology | Permalink | Comments (18)
September 21, 2007
One More Step into the Future of TV
(Jimmy Akin)
NBC to begin free downloads of programs.
As you'd expect for this kind of thing, there are commercials that can't be easily skipped and (somewhat less expectedly) the files expire after a week.
Nevertheless, the industry continues to experiment with online delivery.
Paid, non-commercial, non-expiring is where it's at as far as I'm concerned, but I understand free and commercial as one avenue to be explored.
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Technology | Permalink | Comments (16)
September 04, 2007
iPhone Adventures #Somethingorother
(Jimmy Akin)
So how cool is this?
Saturday night I'm on my way to square dancing, but I'm going to a place I don't normally go, and I'm having trouble finding it.
Turns out I want to be at the United Methodist church hall in La Mesa, but I'm headed toward the United Methodist church in Lemon Grove. (Easy to get confused. You just turn left on Spring Street instead of right.)
But I don't know that at the time!
So I get there and I realize I'm at the wrong place. It's all dark. So I pull over and pull out my iPhone and start Googling where I'm supposed to be.
I find a web page for the (round dance) club that normally dances at the Lemon Grove church, and it has a contact name and phone number for a member of the club.
NOW HERE COMES THE COOL PART!
I notice that the contact person's phone number is hyperlinked in the browser window, so I tap the hyperlink to see what happens (tapping is the equivalent of clicking a hyperlink on the iPhone's touchscreen).
A dialog box pops up and asks me if I want to call the number I just tapped.
I tap "Yes" (or whatever), and a couple of seconds later I'm talking to a member of the Lemon Grove club, who explains where I really want to be, and I'm on my way. (Back to Spring Street; turn right this time.)
So how cool is that?
The phone number was not specially coded with html. It was the phone that recognized it as a phone number on a web page and gave me corresponding tap-to-call functionality.
WOO-HOO!
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Technology | Permalink | Comments (18)
July 16, 2007
An Itch For Information (A Cure For The Curious)
(Jimmy Akin)
Things change when you have a live Internet connection in your pocket.
Most smart phones access a crippled version of the Internet, but the iPhone accesses the real deal--and it changes things when you've got an Internet connection as close as your cell phone.
I began to experience this the first night I had my iPhone. I had done a blog post from the phone itself and then gone square dancing, and at a couple of points in the evening we were between tips (a tip is a pair of square dance songs--usually one done as a patter call and one as a singing call) and I didn't happen to be talking to anybody at the moment and I thought, "I'll check the blog and see if anybody has commented," so I did.
I haven't done that since, but I have used the phone to clean up nasty comment spam when I wasn't at my laptop.
Yesterday I was in church and a spot on my back started itching, and I thought, "I bet Wikipedia has an article on itching and what function it plays for us. I mean, I know it involves the chemical histamine--and for some time I've wanted to know what useful function histamine plays, anyway, since I'm always having to take anti-histamines for allergies and such. What good is histamine anyway?" But, well, I was at Mass, and I didn't want to pull up Wikipedia and start reading it during Mass, so I didn't.
Afterwards I went to Wal-Mart to get some keys duplicated, and then I had to stand in the ultra-long Sunday afternoon line to check out, and I thought, "Hey! It wouldn't be sacreligious to check Wikipedia here, while I'm killing time in an otherwise boring checkout line!" So I pulled out the iPhone and spent the rest of my time in line reading about itching and what it does for us (encourages us to scratch off parasites that might be clinging to us).
Then while square dancing on Sunday night my partner liked one particular song and wanted to know who did it (the song "I'm Gonna Be [500 Miles]), so I looked it up on the Internet to see who did it (the Proclaimers).
So . . . it's just kinda different when you've got a live Internet connection in your pocket.
BTW, I've got requests from folks to give periodic updates on what the iPhone is like, so that's what this is.
Oh, and . . .
HERE'S THE ARTICLE ON ITCHING THAT I WAS READING.
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Technology | Permalink | Comments (58)
July 10, 2007
New Phone
(Jimmy Akin)
I've been needing a new phone for a while. My old phone had been dying on me for some time and behaving more and more erratically. I've spent the last few months trying to just get by until my renewal date came up and also a couple of new phone models that I was interested in came out.
Last time when I bought a phone (a cell phone, that is--I only have a landline in case of emergencies, so I use my cell as my primary phone), I decided to get one that would play mp3s so I could listen to them, for example, while waiting in the chiropractor's office. I got one that Verizon said would do this--as well as browse the web and other cool things--but BOY was I disappointed!
It turned out that the phone had minimal mp3 capability--none of which was even documented. I mean, it was so primitive that it had no way whatsoever to pause the mp3. If you had to stop for any reason then you just had to start the mp3 over again (NOT good with audio books!). I also never used its web features because Verizon wanted to charge me an arm and a leg for them (their rate is twice their competitors'), and the connection would have been really slow and the encoding would have prevented me from viewing many sites--including my own blog!
I really felt like Verizon had sold me a bill of goods, but I decided to bide my time and wait for the technology to mature and get a full-featured smart phone the next time. The question was: What phone to get? Globe-trotter Steve Ray has a Treo that he swears by, and I know others who really like their Treos, and for a time I was planning on getting one of those. However, I decided to also investigate something else: an iPhone.
I researched them thoroughly, waited for them to come out, read the reviews,and carefully weighed the pros and cons. In the end, I decided to take the risk, and today I got one. I'm pleased to say that so far I am extraordinarily happy with it.
Other smart phones may have features it doesn't (yet) have, but the user interface (the main feature I bought it for) is extremely intuitive, and the overall package is wicked awsome. The potential problems I was concerned about also have been non-issues. The virtual keyboard works well, and AT&T has ramped up the speed of its EDGE network so that it's comparable to other 3G networks, and I haven't noticed any problem with pages loading too slow.
So--at least as of this moment--I'm pleased as punch.
I'm also blogging from it--right now. That's how easy to use it is. I've only had the thing activated and usable for an hour or so, I haven't read its instruction manual, and I'm using it to compose sizable blog posts.
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Technology | Permalink | Comments (21)
May 31, 2007
This Looks Fun
(Jimmy Akin)
ALTERNATE LINK IN CASE OF VIDEO PROBLEMS.
Of course, I'm not sure how practial it will be for many of the computer tasks I perform (e.g., text creation & manipulation). And I don't want to spend all day hunching over a horizontal surface to do research, but I'm sure that this interface will be useful for some things. And it looks fun to play with.
CHT to the reader who e-mailed!
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Technology | Permalink | Comments (19)
February 22, 2007
Excel Bleg
(Jimmy Akin)
I do a lot of text manipulation in Microsot Word, and I'm really familiar with how to use Word to massage text into the form I want. I can really make MS Word sing and dance.
But I'm not as good with MS Excel. I can only make Excel skip and hum.
So I've got a couple of questions for any Excel Experts out there:
1) I'm constantly having to re-set the default cell alignments for every spreadsheet I touch. Invariably, I want the text in cells aligned to the top, with shrink to fit and word wrap turned ON. What I want to do is LOCK THE DEFAULTS to my preferred settings so that I don't have to re-set the alignment every single time. There's gotta be a way to do this, even if it means monkeying with a dll. Anybody know how?THIS PROBLEM SOLVED IN THE COMBOX. WOO-HOO!
2) I also need to find a way to insert carriage returns/paragraph marks/blank lines within text cells. Yet, as you know, hitting Enter does not produce the desired effect. Further, pasting multiple paragraphs from another app (like Word) results in the text being put into different cells. How can this be overcome? THIS PROBLEM PARTLY SOLVED IN THE COMBOX (THANKS!), SO HERE'S A CLARIFICATION: I also need to be able to paste text into Excel from Word that will go into several cells some of which contain line breaks within the cell (e.g., Cell 1, Cell 2 which has a line break in it, Cell 3 which doesn't, etc.). I imagine that I need one kind of code to use as a cell break and another to use as a line break. Any ideas? Thanks!
¡Muchas gracias, mis amigos!
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Technology | Permalink | Comments (53)
January 31, 2007
Flight Of The PhoenixBumblebee
(Jimmy Akin)
When 9/11 happened, I wanted our forces to release thousands of tiny, bird- or bumblebee-sized aircraft to swarm over the landscape in Afghanistan to search of Usama bin Laden.
But we didn't have them yet.
Now we're closer.
Good.
What amazes me is that it took us this long to figure out something rather basic about the way such aircraft need to work: They need to have wings that are less flexible on the front and more flexible on the back.
Duh! you can tell that by looking at a bumblebee's wing!
Just look at all that structure on the front that ain't there on the back! (Above.) That translates to more rigidity on the front and more flexibility aft. You don't need to re-invent the wheel on this one. God already did it for us. We just need to miniaturize to the point that we've got countless "drones" waiting to swarm out in search of terrorist masterminds.
Oh, and we're close to having
Good on that also.
The second link covers things like the panic-inducing Active Denial System (which was announced some time ago) as well as other systems that are still a bit down the road.
These systems, which are non-lethal, will change the face of warfare and result in it producing even less casualties than it does now, which is far smaller than in the past. Ironically, as our ability to make war has grown, a smaller and smaller chunk of the population has ended up dying due to warfare. These types of systems hold the promise of helping us get to the next level in non-lethalness.
How Catholic moral doctrine absorbs the impact of these new, non-lethal systems remains to be seen.
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Technology | Permalink | Comments (22)
August 21, 2006
iPod Audiobook Problem Solved!
(Jimmy Akin)
I use my iPod more than most gadgets. It's kind of surprising to realize it, but I listen to my iPod more than I watch TV these days. With my bad eyes, the iPod has allowed me to read a lot more books than I was able to get through previously, and audiobook-listening has supplanted TV-watching for me.
Long-time blog readers know that I even use the TextAloud program to make my own mp3 audiobooks, such as from texts available online at Project Gutenberg.
I also download audiobooks from Audible.Com.
But there's been a problem.
For a long time my iPod seemed to behave erratically with regard to whether it would pick up where I left off in the middle of an audiobook. Sometimes it would, and sometimes it wouldn't.
I could always get it to pick up at my stopping point if I didn't do anything else with the iPod. For example, if I was listening to Bram Stoker's Dracula and I hit "Pause" then I could come back and hit "Play" and it would resume where I'd stopped listening.
But Dracula is 14 hours long, and I didn't want to commit to using my iPod for nothing but Dracula-listening until I'd worked my way through the whole book. I'd want to use it to read Dracula a bit at a time over a few days, while listening to other things in the interim--you know, the way you'd put down dead tree book of Dracula and read something else for a while. I'd want to listen to music, or shift to a different audiobook, or go from fiction to non-fiction for a while. I didn't want to have to devote my iPod exclusively to Dracula for the few days it'd take me to get in 14 hours of listening.
Yet if I migrated away and listened to something else, I'd lose my place in Dracula! Upon going back to it, I'd have to use the clickwheel to navigate back to where I thought I was in the book (and then re-listen to at least the last few minutes).
But I wouldn't lose my place with other audiobooks. They'd pick up right where I left off, no trouble at all.
So I had a puzzle: Why would I lose my place with some audiobooks and not others?
I thought it was something I was doing: Hitting the wrong button or something (e.g., the center wheel button instead of "Play"), but I researched it and found that my actions were not the problem. It has to do with the way the iPod handles different file types, and--best of all--there is an EASY FIX.
Basically, there are certain file formats that iTunes/an iPod recognizes as audiobooks and treats accordingly. It therefore remembers where you were in these file types. But mp3 (the format I use for my homemade audiobooks) is NOT one of those file formats. Because people use mp3 for songs--which are usually short and not the kind of thing people want to pick up in the middle of--the software automatically thinks "song" rather than "audiobook" and doesn't bother remembering where one was--even if the "song" is 14 hours long!
That's why I'd lose my place in SOME audiobooks (ones in mp3 format) but not OTHERS (like the ones from Audible, which are in a proprietary format that iTunes recognizes as an audiobook).
The first research I did on the Web indicated that the solution to this would be to laboriously convert all of my mp3 audiobooks into another format and then change the file extensions so that iTunes would recognize them as audiobooks, and I really was not looking forward to that, given how many of these things I have, but I discovered that there is a MUCH EASIER SOLUTION.
Basically--at least in the current version of iTunes (version 6.0)--all you have to do is this:
1. Click on the file you want to have treated as an audiobook (it doesn't matter what the format is).
2. Right-click and select "Get Info"
3. Go to the "Options" tab.
4. Select "Remember playback position."
5. Click "Okay."
And you're done! iTunes will then start putting an electronic bookmark at the place you left off and resume there when you go back to the book.
Here's a picture of what the relevant dialog box looks like (click to enlarge):
Now, you'll note that at the bottom of the dialog box there are buttons labelled "Previous" and "Next."
These are EXTREMELY handy, because they allow you to quickly go through an entire playlist of files (or chunk of your library) you want to do this to. Thus if you have a whole bunch of mp3s in a row that you want to audiobook, all you have to do is select "Next" and then "Remember playback position" and then "Next" again until you're done, at which point you hit "Okay." It only takes a few minutes to whip through a long playlist that way, since you don't have to go to the hassle of selecting the file and then doing "Get Info" and "Options" each time.
You can also select "Skip when suffling" so that you don't have audiobooks turning up in the random rotation when you're listening to randomized songs, but I use the shuffle feature so seldomly that I haven't bothered to do that yet.
One nice thing about the bookmark is that it transfers between iTunes and the iPod. This means you can start listening to the book in iTunes (say, as soon as you've created it) and then when you transfer it to the iPod the bookmark will go with it, so dialing it up on the iPod will result in you picking up where you left off in iTunes.
Cool!
And thus is solved one of my major headaches.
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Technology | Permalink | Comments (21)
