July 2003 Archives

First full week of 8 hour days in a while,  just complete.   

I began reading the stuff over at AKMA's Disseminary site,  as they have begun to kick into gear regarding doing theological education and theological conversation online.   I want really bad to jump in and digest and regurgitate (nice image, huh?),  but as I am starting a new Contract job on Monday,  and feel the need to do some preliminary reading on some of the technologies and tools in use on that project,  I will be content,  at least for a few days,  to point over there and acknowledge my intent to read ,  find new people for my blogroll,  and comment. 

As things at Old St. George begin rolling in the direction of a more ready and relevant Web prescence and activity,  I foresee there being some common mission there,  and a possible place for some future onsite Disseminary meetings or seminars, etc.  The goal of aggregating resources on Online Theological Discussion via forums, weblogs, smartmobbing (ala Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs studies and the relevance of that to Churches) would naturally intersect with what the plans and envisionings for Disseminary seem to be.    

I'm sitting here in the Nashville Public Library, at one of the public PCs, waiting for Janet and Kelli to get out of a puppet show. I talked to Larry on the phone just before we left the house to come up here, and he was encouaging me about the Contractor position I just landed, which will give me a paid way to learn COld Fusion and further SQLServer learnings and application of what I bring with me from an ASP/SQLServer environment.

We also talked about how I am given flexibility enough to have some weekday openings every 3-4 weeks to take a trip to Cincinnati for some meetings at OSG for projects going on there. It is also a really good thing that I will be in this environment, where significant "training" will take place , hands-on, in a production system.

The groups that I hope to be doing some things with in the not-too-distant future , who are also using Cold Fusion, will also benefit from my "immersion" in this development environment.

Over at AKMA's Blog he has a couple (so far) of posts about Call For Technologians. The main theme is captured most directly here:

The more candor you can turn loose on a congregational web site, the better people will know the congregation, for better or worse; that exercise alone may make it worth building a conversational web site. |from Technology for Congregations Part Two

Few people who join a community (a Church) that really get involved do this on the basis of what's in the bulletin, or on the schedule, or even preached (which are the things that most Churches seem satisfied to "store" on their website. It's the relationships, the conversations, the things in which the people are pasionate about. The Web seems to be the most direct route ever devised to allow people to "explore and summarize" what drives them. My theology of Church emphasizes the call/duty of the Church to enable the people to find what it is that God is calling them to. The "environment" we need in order to do that is to have some sense of the journeys of others, and perhpas through this we find common callings.

In Netscape 7, (and AKMA tells me also in Safari) , the right column is submerged under the left column. If I put these in separate table cells, how does this happen? Can anybody tell me? Is it something in the style sheet? How can the style sheet override the table cells? I have two rows, and two columns. the top row cells are merged into one, and holds the banner. the bottom two cells, left and right are 70% and 30% respectively. How can a browser show an overlap? I'm sure there's a reason, since it is happening.

update: Stylesheet fixes applied. Problem conquered.

I'm goin' back to the old style sheet, and trying a new template. We'll See what happens. (result: whoops, no sidebar to the right. I must need some stylesheet specifics. I'll check on that one.) Just noticed. All the stuff that should be in the right hand column (links and stuff) is all at the bottom under the blog entries)
Yes! I got some samples from AKMA (thanks AKMA!) because I liked his "Right aligned" link column, and thought it might solve my scrolling problem. He didn't use the calendar, so I had to do a couple of things, like add mine back in, getting some errors, and then taking it all into a table with 2 rows and 2 columns, with the top row having 1 cell spanning 2 columns, and the bottom row with 70-30 widths. It worked! I thought I tried this table before, but I guess it took me pulling apart more pieces and putting them back together, or maybe I just made a bad table before. Main thing is that it all works now. Thanks to all (AKMA, Ian, and Steve for suggestions and help.

Thanks

As I return to what I hope will be the finishing touches on a Website project,  I willpost this entry about picking up WIRED: A Romance by Gary Wolf, upon its release to the bookstores yesterday. I opened up after Seinfeld was ending last night at 10:30pm,  and have not had it down much since (except for sleep and a brief period of the aforementioned Web work, before my connection went down - about 10-  but has now returned,  about 3 hours later)

I have already written an article in appreciation of what WIRED has meant to me,  in addition to how it provides me with some sense of how I might communicate a similar sense of almost giddy excitement about the next decade of technology-that -is-here and technology-to-come and how this all affects/can-affect/should-affect the Church,  and what things the aforementioned AFFFECTS will/could/should  EFFECT.  The article: "WIRED For a Decade"

I found a template that works, but it has a couple problems:
the width of the main area beneath the banner. The right hand column disappears when I resize the width of the browser by narrowing the window past a certain width. I want to make the right bar align to the right side of the browser window, and NOT disappear at all. Can I do that?

How can I find AND INSTALL an index page template for this page that has the links on the right (all the stuff, the calendar, the Category and Archive links, everything onthe left on my index.html page) so I can see if this fixes my "overflowing/non-wrapping" text in the entries on this page. This does not happen on any of these posts on teir archive or category pages. I am trying to find a solution.

One option MIGHT be: Create a new weblog, and use the same data. Is this possible? I can then add back in my little template things like Category listings and my Blogroll. Is there a "safe" way to do this?

As I get ready to upload some OSG graphics to a web area,  I feel compelled to plop it here as a bragging piece,  as an observance of how exciting this all is for me.  Click "Continue reading A Great Good Place For me" to see larger version of the image

Another request for ideas on why Radio doesn't want to upload every morning (it takes about 4 or 5 tries each "session" --- IOW,  it's not just in the morning,  but anytime I haven't uploaded anything in x number of hours---- see this post in my section on Radio Trials. My FTP client seems to have no problem creating directories.

Pocket PC search commences.  In conjunction with my start of some new development,  I have also been charged with finding a Pocket PC that will suit me (and preferrably,  not become obsolete too quickly). 

I'm a blogger so I won't be so diplomatic about the issues in the article on Ethics Daily today.  They report on a Florida Baptist State newspaper's slamming of their (EthicsDaily's) coverage of Al Mohler's speech at the Southern Baptist Convnetion this year. 

I especially want to comment on this:

"In a chapel address in 2001, not long after that year's Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Mohler said not only is it a mistake to say Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians, but that Christians and Jews don't worship the same deity, either."

I have yet to come even close to a sloution to this problme on the main index template for MT! The text will not wrap, although it has no problem doing so on the archive pages or in the Category pages. This tells me it's not the data, since the same posts wrap fine on those pages. It's the Home page, renedered by index.html! Does somebody have a template I can try? Maybe one that reverses the one I have, so that the link column is on the right instead of the left? That might fix it.

From Smart Mobs,  and higly relevant to some of the Smart Mobs for which we hope to begin providing in the environment where we are exploring "Great Good Place Technologies",  which means we are to be part Social Software, part Smart Mob( which is also very much about social software running on social technology tools -- "scaffolding for social psychology). Anyway,  this is posted direct to radio from Smart Mobs

An article about the beginnings of WIRED magazine in Business 2.0  (July issue) have me thinking about how the Church could use a mag that calls it to explore the possibilities like WIRED did for all of us.

I have begun setting up shop in anticipation of the beginnings of some remote work to be done for Old St. George on their Web environment, Wireless network datastores,  their bookstore and its use of book data in Forum discussions, Weblogs,  and much more.  Exciting times. I have awakened each day with a sense of expectation and energy I haven't felt in quite a long time. 

The questions of exactly how much pay will be available to me how soon is still being ironed out.  The intent right now is to find some funds from various sources for the next 90 days,  such as......

Bruce Almighty and Terminator:  these last two movies I saw at the theater (Bruce on June 11 on my 20th anniversary) and Terminator 3 (yresterday).  I am always interested in different treatments of the now decades old human fear of  "machines taking over".  In fact,  the subtitle of Terminator 3 is "Rise of the Machines" (and the previous one,  T2 was "Judgment Day").  Both suggest that technology finally reached the level where Computers became "self-aware" and instigated a revolt against humans.  This is also a slight variation on the Matrix theme,  where all of what is experienced by most people as "life" is a computer generated program "life simulation",  but the question that gets re-opened in The Matrix Reloaded is "who wrote the program?"

This is where I think the Terminator theme is purely science fiction.  Their suggestion is that machines become "self-aware",  crossing the barrier from "instructed" (by the humans who build them) to "deciding agent".  The fact is,  computers are still very much tools that do our bidding,  from the machine level responding to volatge ,  to the operating system level,  to the appliaction level.  All are responding to voltage,  yes-no decisions,  translations of 0's and 1's into bits and  which represent other things, and work together to calculate and represent.  The fear that lies behind the mythological tales ,  I believe,  are the sense of being "out of control" with our decisions.  When we hand over "control" to a system of software and a network of such which is comanded to respond to situation A with response B by activating computer-controlled system C,  the range of possibilities for "malfunction" grows.  The malfunction may snowball into something unforseen.

In Bruce Almighty,  his initial decisions and acts as "God" have repurcussions on the other side of the globe (the moon incident when he arranges the moon to enhance the atmosphere for his romantic evening).  The application of computer control to such things as Missile Silos (also a theme in the 1983 movie, "War Games") gives us cause for pause when we contemplate handing over more power to the "Sytems" we have constructed.

As I talked and envisioned with Larry this past week during my visit to Cincinnati, the importance of THIRD PLACE returned as a conscious topic around which to organize my thoughts and plans and hopes. The Old St. George model of the Great Good Place for Community and Spiritual Renewal presents itself to me at a real moment of Kairos; at this pinnacle of purpose and calling where I now find myself. I brought home with me a copy of the Second Edition of The Great Good Place, and also the followup study, Celebrating The Third Place, which collects a few "incarnational examples" of the kinds of Places sought in the initial study.

Far from being the "detriment" to the creation of and renewal of Third Places, the computer networks can be utilized as "Scaffolding" that collects and highlights the things that make for Great Good Places. To provide ways to "keep conversations alive" is a good thing. The only "self-awareness" growing there is that of our own and the sense of collaboration and comradery that we expereince in the Third Place. And now, the Third Place generates "virtual places" that are extensions of the physical environment, but carry with it some pieces of the personal effects of the Third Place---- perhaps even generating a new "sense of place" that is given prestigge becuase of the connection it gives us to the "overall Third Place". In other words, Third Place grows outward and is available to us in previously "dead times", like when we are on the bus, in the car, waiting for someone at a meeting place. We are "away" from the Third Place where we long to return and relax and engage, but we can bask in some of those qualities that make for the Third Place by re-reading and perhaps posting a response or an additional thought to a previous conversation, or explore a link to something posted by another participant, or set up a meeting/get-together with another with whom we have "branched off" a sub-topic of another conversation upon finding that we share a particular passion for exploring the possibilities in a particular direction (say, Online community software, and its installation on a newly upgraded Windows 2003 Server--- what a geek I am).

The Online Community efforts I have been advocating for the past 12 years center in the belief I have that any tool which encourages "seeking out" the bodies behind the conversations that attract us is a "Third Place" building kind of thing.  There may not be an pre-existing "Physical place" which hosted the budding group,  but that comes as the group meets and decides to keep doing this as a habit and as a means to personal renewal and enjoyment.  The efforts to "build on" Third Place associations by extending some of their elements into online incarnaions is testimony to the power of the association found there.  Online spaces can then provide a "PR Piece" to extend the invitation to "join this group" and participate,  assumably also to "come around" and "meet up" ("Meetups" are popular in Weblog circles.....evidence of the tendency of these new Cyberspace-hosted communities to lean toward growing that association into the physical). 

I took my son to see Terminator 3 yesterday,  and ,  like the two before it,  the major story line centers on the "machine takeover" and systematic "extermination" of humans by the self-aware machines.  It is the classic apocalyptic warning about making our machines too powerful. 

I noticed that when I set up a new MT blog on my server last week , that the text-wrapping problem (or lack therof) is not a problem on the new blog. What might have happened to this one ? (where, if you are using IE6, which a lot of people are, the text here does not warp in the browser window, but is moving off the screen , neccessitating a horizontal scroll ---which is very irritating.) Is there something in my database, or in my template? I wish I could fix it without causing cataclysmic damage. Any ideas out there?

BTW, the problem only occurs on the main template. Any archives or Category pages work and wrap fine.

I found this link on Spirituality.com,  and thought I'd do a little brag piece on "being quoted" in print,  back in 1997. 

Holy Weblog!This looks like excellent content.  Courtesy of Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine  post here 

Link

Christian Crumlish has moved over to MT. 

He lists one of my MT posts as one in a list of "migration issues"

Link

From the BuzzMachine (by Jeff Jarvis) on AOL Blogging strategies:

Christian Crumlish points to this article by Jeff Jarvis on AOL's AolJournal,  their entry into the Blogosphere:

AOL gets blogging

Jeff Jarvis reports on a sneak preview of AOL's upcoming weblogging entrant, saying "They've done a good job."

I saw this on Radio Free Blogistan (Christian Crumlish) - at least on his RSS feed (the site seems to be down , at least the home page):

The motivation for moving RFB from Radio to MT is more complex. The primary impetus is Trackback. I use the Blogistan site primarily to discuss the weblog phenomenon, and most of the thought leaders in that space use TB to coordinate their conversations. TB has already been demoed for Manila and is coming to Radio as soon as Userland's priorities allow, but I'm impatient, especially as the not-Echo discussion rages and I feel less than a full participant in the conversation.

Sitting here at 942 am EST, in the Bookstokre of OSG, contemplating what I might say to Larry about some immediate work on the OSG Web prescence. I just took some video with my JVC DV-Video camera, from which I will extracxt some stills, and perhaps put up some short video clips.