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

Emerging church is the kitchen

I stumbled on googlism.com, a website that:

was created as a fun tool to see what Google “thinks” of certain topics and people.

You can search who, what, when, or where. I tried searching my full name first with no results, so then I just tried “Jake” and I had a good laugh. My next impulse was to search “emerging church” and the results were pretty good. Since it searches all websites with the phrase “emerging church” it brings up those opposed to the emerging church as well (e.g., “emerging church is a bunch of whiners and complainers”). I thought many of the responses, however, were dead on. Here are a few I thought were particularly authentic:

emerging church is still in the process of being born
emerging church is about the spirit producing missional kingdom
emerging church is along the lines of orthodoxy/heterodoxy
emerging church is a return to [no direct object here is effective, huh?]
emerging church is bottom up/grassroots and not hierarchical

Of course, there are several pretty funny ones (which makes me wonder from which pages they were drawn):

emerging church is just three things
emerging church is true—somewhere
emerging church is billed directly
emerging church is a bunch of whiners and complainers
emerging church is dog
emerging church is the kitchen

Heck, with this new tool doing all the work, writing my new senior paper will be a snap!

Senior paper shift

In order to graduate from Luther College, one must either (a) write an extended (20+ page) academic paper in his/her major or (b) organize a creative senior project such as an art show, etc. Because my major, Religion, is an academic one, I must write a paper. The senior paper is a one credit hour “course” which is a faculty-guided independent project. I optimistically enrolled in the senior paper course for this fall, hoping to get it out of the way so that I might have an easy spring semester. I submitted a proposal with the title of The Function of Music and Dance in Communal Utopian Societies in the Early Nineteenth Century.

Now, I know that gets you going, but not so much me. I emailed a professor in the department and asked if I could write my paper next semester instead, and on the topic of the emerging church. Now this gets me going. I also asked if he’d be my academic sponsor for my grant proposal to attend Mainline Emergent/s: Conversations in Theology, Hope and Practice at Columbia Theological Seminary in January 2007. I received an enthusiastic response to both questions. I can’t wait to write this paper (I’m not sure I ever thought I’d say that).

If you’ve no idea what the emerging church is, here is a full transcript (.pdf) of Dr. Scot McKnight’s address “What is the Emerging Church?” at a conference called An Eternal Word in an ‘Emerging World’? at Westminster Theological Seminary.

Three highly questionable food purchases at Wal-Mart

The following are actual purchases I made at the Decorah Wal-Mart in the last four years.

1. A very large, tupperware-like container of Banana chips.

2. A twelve pack of Pepsi-Cola Holiday Spice, without having previously tried the (disgusting) product.

3. Totino’s Chicken & Cheese Quesadilla Mexican Style Rolls and taco sauce.

Honorable mention: Coke Blāk.

What is your most questionable food purchase?

• I cannot possibly buy Girl Scout cookies from your daughter at this time. “The fact that she has employed you, her mother, in the execution of her sales reflects a lazy, manipulative approach to what could have been a valuable learning experience and community-building exercise.” 10/27/2006
• Favcol is a website whose background is “flickr’s favourite colour”. They analyze each photo tagged with “favcol” to work out the average color and then use that color for the background. Maybe I’ll start tagging my flickr photos with “favcol”. 10/24/2006
• 50 interesting science facts. “#3: 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.” 10/24/2006
• Will Braun writes about high efficiency worship for Geez Magazine. “Imagine, instead of the usual Sunday service, let’s have a fun funeral for the church air conditioner, or a blessing service for the new high-efficiency furnace, or an anointing of the caulking to be used around those old windows.” I wouldn’t mind a subscription (wink, wink). 10/24/2006

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