Yukon Cornelius?

Are you familiar with Yukon Cornelius from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? You know, the “greatest prospector of the North” in search of silver and gold who wields an axe and a big red beard? Well, apparently I look like him:

Also, have you ever wondered why he licks his axe? (Wow, that’s a treacherous sentence.)

• Luther’s student newspaper has published an article about my a cappella group, Undeclared. “Bouma commented on why the group does what they do, ‘This is an optional thing for everyone in the group, so our drive is when we perform and when people say they love us,’ he said. ‘It’s when people look forward to us singing — It’s rewarding, and if it weren’t rewarding, we wouldn’t be doing it.’” 11/30/2006
• Becoming A Millionare God’s Way. “The Bible teaches that God blesses the work of your hand, but if your hand isn’t doing anything, there is nothing for Him to bless!” This is disgusting. 11/28/2006

Richard Dawkins, Atheism, and Christianity

Richard Dawkins is omnipresent.

His new book, The God Delusion, is currently #6 on the Amazon.com bestselling book list, and lately his name has been popping up everywhere in my life. I first saw his name on kottke.org a while back, and about a week ago I read an article that mentions him at TSK (which I posted as a digression). I have subsequently seen several stories about him on Digg, most notably one entitled Atheist Richard Dawkins Destroys Students from Jerry Falwell’s University (500+ comments!), which links to a video of a rather lenghty Q&A session with Dr. Dawkins. I probably wouldn’t have thought too much of it, but then during our student-led worship on Sunday night the speaker referenced a recent issue of Time magazine that features him in the cover story, God vs. Science. And just to top things off, I passed a professor today who was holding a book of his under her arm.¹

Here’s how I feel about the whole situation.²

Read the rest of this entry »

1. I could actually only see “ichard wkins” because her arm was covering half of the book, but who else would it be, right? ↩
2. To be fair, I haven’t read his book, and I am not very familiar with any of his arguments or agendas. At this point I just want to provide an overarching reaction to and analysis of what I think is happening. ↩

• The Abominable “O Holy Night”. “Whether the song is intentional or not: if the origins of this version are based in the Church, it may be the most glorious three minutes and thirty-nine seconds of comedy the American church has ever produced.” 11/27/2006

Titleflow, a playlist

Admittedly, this is a blatant and shameless ripoff of Ryan’s idea: “The basic premise was to make a playlist where the title of one track flowed into the title of the next track.” Simple enough. Behold:

1. You’re All I Have – Snow Patrol
2. I Could Have Danced All Night – Jamie Cullum
3. On A Night Like This – Dave Barnes
4. Stop This Train – John Mayer
5. The Train Has Left the Station – Adam Weaver & the Ghosts
6. The World Has Turned and Left – Weezer
7. When the World Ends - Dave Matthews Band
8. Loose Ends – Imogen Heap
9. Keep It Loose, Keep It Tight – Amos Lee
10. Love Keep Us Together - Martin Sexton
11. Better Together – Jack Johnson
12. Better Than One – Wideawake
13. No One Really Wins – Copeland
14. She Has No Time – Keane
15. Like the Last Time – Matt Wertz
16. It Looks Like Love – Josh Rouse
17. On Love, In Sadness – Jason Mraz
18. Split Screen Sadness - John Mayer

I am actually really pleased with the result; some of my favorite songs made the playlist. The task of creating the list is made simple by using iTunes’ search function. Why don’t you make a similar playlist and post it as a comment?

You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone

Those close to me know that I am a text messaging fiend. It’s a good thing that text messaging is a part of my cellular plan, because I send an average of 20+ texts a day, and sometimes that’s on the light side. I didn’t used to like text messaging, but then I discovered how to use the T9word¹ function and there was no looking back. Texting is just such a beautiful and convenient form of communication.

Sunday afternoon, however, my phone totally freaked out. I was at a recital and because my phone already sucks and makes noise when it’s on silent or vibrate, I decided to just turn it off and not risk the embarassment. When I turned the phone back on, the outside screen worked fine, but the inside/important screen was all blue and has been since. The good news? I can still make/receive calls and use my phone as a timepiece. The bad news? I can’t read any text messages I get, and sending them is nearly impossible. I have five just sitting in my inbox as we speak, begging to be read and responded to.

I’ll take my phone in to Verizon during Thanksgiving break. They’ve been good about these sort of things in the past, like replacing my phone for free when I fell off a trailer landed on it two and a half months ago. I don’t really care what they do, as long as I can send text messages again.

1. If you don’t know what T9 is, or you don’t use it… get on the train, and now. T9 uses an algorithm to determine the most common word corresponding to the numbers you push. Brilliant. ↩

• The Skinny on New Atheism from TallSkinnyKiwi. “[Richard] Dawkins would be struggling for a rational scientific explanation to the raising of the dead, and the supernatural healing of the sick in answer to prayer – something that is quite common in poor countries but not applicable to wealthy intellectuals who have enough medical care and enough money to never pray for a miracle. Which seems to be the the small elite demographic that embrace atheism.” 11/17/2006
• FoxyTunes is a Firefox Add-on that lets you control your media player of choice from within Firefox. For someone who both wastes inordinate amounts of time on the internet and constantly listens to music, this is a blessing. 11/17/2006

Uh, you can reach me here…

Wideawake made the music of the month post last May… and now they happen to be in Des Moines doing an acoustic show! So good.

The importance of shameless self-promotion

Since my album has been released to the iTunes music store, I have been checking every so often to see if people have added reviews. Today the second review came in, and I laughed out loud as I read it:

I was walking around with a friend during Challenge, at Purdue, trying to sell our left over pizza. We knocked on this guys door and asked him if he wanted some and he said no. But then he asked if I wanted a CD of his and im like what the heck, why not. I bought it and now im listening to it, before I saw it on iTunes. I just thought it was just a guy tring [sic] to sell his music. But now i see that he really must be somewhat good if he can get it on iTunes. If you read this Jake see you in Utah ‘08.

And it happened just like he described. I had a few CDs in my backpack and I thought I should get rid of them before we came back home. Who knows… maybe I will see him at Challenge 2008.

If you own my album, I encourage you to write a review on iTunes. It doesn’t even have to be good… the more the better!

Long lost gems

Brandon Barker is a huge proponent of iTunes’ smart playlist capability, and the more and more I mess with it, the more I love it. I have dabbled a little bit in creating smart playlists, but haven’t come up with anything too dynamic.

Recently, though, I created a new smart playlist entitled “Long lost gems”.

You can see several things. All of the songs haven’t been played in the last three months. This can be tricky because I have a habit of being impatient and pushing “next” 5-10 seconds before the song is over, especially if it has a long outro. Next, I make sure that I haven’t skipped the song in a while, assuming that if I have skipped it recently, I wouldn’t really want to hear it that badly. I make sure that the play count is greater than five, hence the denotation as a “gem”. Checking the “Live Updating” box at the bottom is nice because after I have listened to a song on the playlist, it is automatically removed and replaced with another song with the same critera.

For more suggestions regarding smart playlists, check out smartplaylists.com. If any of you have experimented with smart playlists, what are some of your better/favorite configurations?

• The DVD of Little Miss Sunshine (by far my favorite movie of the year) is now available for pre-order on Amazon with a release date of December 19, and the cover says it has four alternate endings. 11/06/2006

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