Tired

It's been a heckish week.  Too much work and staying too late too often to get it done.  And while I do have some sprouting Cayenne pepper plants and a very happy dog (a few dietary supplements have pretty much cleared up her arthritis), I can't seem to find my steam anymore.   I feel like Adam - the ground is fighting me, and all it's producing are thorns and thistles.

Current Reading

While waiting for “Confessions of a Reformission Rev” to come out, I’m attempting to plow through David Wells’ tetralogy (No Place for Truth, God In the Wasteland, Losing Our Virtue, and Above All Earthly Pow’rs). I hadn’t set out at first to read the whole series; indeed, I was unaware that there even was a series until I had almost finished No Place a few weeks ago. But his case in No Place was so compelling, the problems he exposed of entangling evangelical faith, modernization, and modernity so daunting, that I couldn’t not want to follow his line of thought forward toward a viable and faithful Christian confession.

Sowing and… sowing.

My last round of seed-planting was supposed to yield a ploethera of pepper plants, banana plants, and bottle trees. Unfortunately, only three bottle tree seedlings survived our sunnier-than-expected mudroom; and while I’m thankful for them, I will be most disappointed if I don’t have some home-grown fresh peppers to use in my home-made chili this Fall. So anther batch of seeds went in about a week ago, and I’m still waiting for them to sprout - Jalapenos and Cayennes. Word is that Seattle summers aren’t right for getting a good yield (wrong light? wrong humidity?) but I’m not ready to concede that just yet.

My Sidekick (II)

Plusses of the Sidekick II in its current encarnation:

• Web browser is powerful enough to shop amazon.com and to browse and edit MediaWikis.
• Web browser is more than powerful enough to browse all of my favorite blogs.
• Camera, email, phone, text messaging, web browser, and games all in one.
• Very ussable keyboard.

Minuses:

• Web browser isn’t powerful enough to support WordPress posting (too AJAX-y).
• T-Mobile’s data coverage around Seattle isn’t yet reliable enough to count on having connectivity at any particular time.
• Music ringtones are waaaay overpriced considering they’re mostly just 5-second sound bites from the middle of the songs. I can download the whole song for half as much money from iTunes.
• The camera is weak weak weak… crummy resolution (640×480) and crummy exposures in anything but high-light settings.
• No MP3/Ogg/AAC player and no easy interface to extensible storage (flash, SD, etc).
• No open-source PIM synchronization tools (Evolution).
• No local physical synchronization media - it has to be done over the public Internet.
• Web browser apparently isn’t AJAX-ready (gmail and google maps don’t run on it).
• Closed Java platform - you can’t download apps off the web, just buy apps from Danger.

Word on the street is that there is a Sidekick III very near to release. So I have to ask myself, is it worth spilling hundreds more dollars into this, or should I spend a little more and get a nice open-platform VoIP-enabled handheld like the Nokia 770 (which also happens to run a Debian-based OS)? The choice seems clear to me…

Faithfulness

Thinking a lot the last few days about God’s faithfulness and the faithfulness He calls us to, and all of the parallels between that and our marital faithfulness. It is not real faithfulness to simply not run with idols; God calls us to love Him, completely and with all of our being. Similarly, it is not real faithfulness to simply not mess around with adultery; God calls us to love our spouse completely and with all of our being. And, as usual, the law kills (thou shalt not commit adultery, under pain of death) but cannot produce righteousness (instead of true fidelity, all it can do it stop outward expressions of our unfaithful and loveless hearts), but the Spirit brings life (husbands, love your wife as Christ loved the church and game Himself up for her) which produces true righteousness (a faithful and devoted heart, out of which flows a faithful and devoted life).

Books I Can’t Wait to Read

1. Blogging Church by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch
2. Confessions of a Reformission Rev by Mark Driscoll
3. Too Good to Be True by Michael Horton

And, in the interest of balance, books I have read recently I wish I had spent less time on:

1. The Deliberate Church by Mark Dever and Paul Alexander
2. a Generous Orthodoxy by Brian D. McLaren
3. The Present Future by Reggie McNeal

Hi.

This blog is named in honor of its impact on the blogosphere… it will no doubt get lost somewhere out on the long tail, somewhere beneath the internet noise floor.

I’m Adam. I work for a major Internet company in Seattle. I’m also a musician, theologian, ravid reader, and occasional game engine hacker. This blog will house whatever ramblings of mine don’t really belong on the various church and para-church blogs I contribute to.