Signs of Increased Spiritual Laziness

I came across an article this morning on my Google Reader about an automated prayer service that is being offered by Information Age Prayer.  This is a service that uses text-to-speech technology to "incant your prayers each day."

Are you kidding me with this???  Is praying so difficult that we have to allow technology to do it for us?  Should we be surprised when God gives us the answering machine on this one?  This is absolutely awful!  The only reason I mention it is to say, "Stay away from it!!!"  Click on the link above and check it out, but don't you dare give them any money for this absurdity.

What I find even worse about it is the fact that you can select from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Unaffliated, or Other Religions prayers.  What the heck??!?!??  It's like somebody came up with an idea to see just how dumb some religious people really are and to scam a little bit of money while they were at it.

If you ever get to the point in your spiritual life where you need a website to do your praying for you, we need to talk.

Editing Issues

So, as you can see below, I've been posting my sermons each week, but for some reason, the editing is always messed up.  All I do is cut and paste from my manuscript, and I get text that is all sorts of different sizes and colors.  I try to go in an manually change it to what it is supposed to be with no luck.  I'm out of ideas.  Suggestions?

Making the Move

Yes, you probably know that my wife and I are moving next week to a two-point charge in the Terre Haute district.  We're both getting excited, anxious, stressed, nervous, and excited (is it sad that I could think of two synonymns to describe "stressed" but nothing apart from "excited" to convey our... excitement... about the move?  Moving is tough mentally, so back off...)  Seriously though, we believe that God is really orchestrating this move, and we're really excited about it.  Moving is just a very difficult thing to do mentally, emotionally and physically... HOWEVER!!!!  This is not the move that I am referring to in my post title.

I'm talking about my slow move into the internet dominance that is Google.  Katie set me up with Google Reader yesterday, which is working so much better than Bloglines has.  So, I decided to set myself up with iGoogle this morning.  I now have a homepage that shows me a window into my Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Google News, and my Google Flamethrower.... oh wait, I've had Spaceballs on the brain lately...  Seriously though, I've also added Sports Scores, a To Do List, Quote of the Day, Free Downloads from iTunes (now if I can only get it to work...), and I just added a daily Bible verse from the English Standard Version, and the one year Bible reading plan from the ESV.  It's a one stop catch-all for the things that are important to my daily internet journey.

I am a total dork....

I've Opened the Box... Pandora's Box...

I stumbled upon something recently. It's something that I'm pretty sure other people have mentioned to me before, but I never thought too much about it until the end of last week. It's called Pandora Radio, and it's found at http://www.pandora.com/. I know, I know, original web address.

This is quite possibly the coolest thing I've ever seen, well, other than this amazing baby preacher:


Makes me wonder what type of church this kid goes to! But back to the point at hand. You simply type in an artist that you like, and it will search for artists with similar musical... whatevers... sound, style, etc. Right now, I have 5 radio stations: 12 Stones, Chris Rice, Modest Mussorgsky, Gregorian Chant and Alison Krauss.

To quote a friend of mine, "If you look at my iPod, you'd guess that I was either an old lady or an angry teenager." Well, I guess I can say something similar; except, I don't have an iPod; I have Pandora. The box is open...

First Thoughts

I downloaded Google's new web browser today.  It's pretty neat.  I certainly has been running a lot faster than Internet Explorer has to this point.  When you open up a new tab, it has a preview of your most commonly accessed websites, which is pretty cool.  There's about six of them on there.  I gotta say, I'm not much of a tech guy, but I like it so far!