Byrnesys Blabberings

One of my favourite finds are when blogs post links as an aside to other articles (here are some examples, Challies and Geek and Mild) they have been reading, I haven’t worked out how to publish these into my main feed, although I do attempt the weekly round up, but for a while I’ve been publishing a Shared Items feed from Google Reader for a while, if you think it might be of interest you can subscribe to it here, or by email here.

• Reasons I unsubscribed from your blog feed - explained
• You wont be seeing much of me
• Google stuff and battling with PHP

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us,—some of them,—and are eager to give us a sign and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them, like battalions of infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination,—not a choice out of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets, all alike.

- Ralph Emerson HT: FlickrBlog

• Thanks to the Internet
• We live because God lives
• Engage

You have to be impressed with my self control in the title , I could have gone the cheesy route, but I resisted (at least the extent where I am now only mentioning it in the opening lines of this post).

Despite hearing not so great things in review, the Blackberry Storm is selling well. I suspect this may be due to the fact that there is major appreciation for the iPhone in the business sector whilst most of the IT infrastructure is set up for Blackberry Enterprise Servers. Being that we are a smaller organisation I am attempting to migrate a few users onto iPhone’s to see if there might be more interest in them for the other blackberry users.

Ironically I think techno-phobes desiring as little change as possible will pass on the option for the more ‘intuitive’ interface of the iPhone for the comfort blanket of their blackberries.

• Blackberry Touch
• iPhone 3G - WWDC (W for WOW)
• Airbus A380

A year in review, I couldn’t think of a 10th album so I you’re left with 9.

9.Radiohead - In Rainbows

8.John Mayer - Where the Light is

7.Delta Spirit - Ode to Sunshine

6.Alphabeat - This Is Alphabeat

5.MGMT - Oracular Spectacular

4.Coldplay - Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends

3.Arcade Fire  - Neon Bible

2.Yeasayer - All Hour Cymbals

1.Kings of Leon - Only by the Night

• Electric Guitar Series: The Arcade Fire
• Radiohead’s New Year Gift
• Radiohead fans are Cheap

Being as this will most likely be my last round up before I close up shop for the new year, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone who reads this blog, I enjoy interacting with a few of you in the comments, for anyone who is around often but never gets as far in the comment box, how about introducing yourself in the comments of this post, it would be nice to hear from you.

I think I enjoy the American Office more than the UK Version (which lets not forget was the original), here is a hilarious quote:

“Presents are the best way to show someone how much you care. It’s like a tangible thing that you can point to and say, “Hey man, I love you…this many dollars”
Michael Scott from “The Office” HT: Los Greigo

The Superb BBC iPlayer is now available for mac. HT: Brett Jordon

SimCity for the iPhone, Im tempted, but seem to remember being a bit fustrated with it back in the days of Windows 3.11

Despite hearing not so great things in review, the Blackberry Storm is selling well.

After Existentialism, Light offers an appeal to read ‘quality’ dogmatics, and offers some prescribed reading alone those lines. I was particularly amused by the comment “The first few times someone quoted Wayne Grudem in an essay for me, I wrote, please do not quote someone called Wayne in an essay.”. Interestingly enough it was by ‘Francesca’ which lead to wondering whether or not it might be Aberdeen’s Francesca Murphy who made the equally blunt comment on my essay once: ‘Please re-write in English’. That being said She was right, and was good enough to let me re-write and submit it.

Trevin Wax Ponders…

If you’ve got a spare minute or on Christmas Day Amazon are offering a £3 album for free. Theres plenty worth getting at that price.

Flying Farther mentions an Italian Priest who told the Kids Santa isn’t real and links to some interesting articles.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

• Hopefully making it easier for you
• End of Week Round up - update
• Start of the week round up

All Starbucks lovers enjoy the novelty of a seasonal blend, and I’ve just picked a bag of Starbucks Christmas Blend up for the last week in work before Christmas. Starbucks beans are a tad overpriced in my opinion but in the UK it certainly is one of the only places to be assured of a decent cup of coffee. Whilst I enjoy Starbucks generally I find the ‘Starbucks Roast’ a little over done, dare I say a little on the burnt side, and I know I’m not alone in that evaluation.

Starbucks describes the Christmas blend as:

“Our festive blend of bold Asia/Pacific coffees and crisp and lively Latin American beans is back to spread holiday cheer all season long. We give this coffee a joyful, spicy warmth with a very special and rare ingredient: aged Indonesian beans.”

Since the excellent Macbeans Gourmet Blend I blogged about, I have also enjoyed Edinburgh Tea Company’s Java Roast which I don’t seem to be able to find any info on, apart from the obvious origin of the bean.

I have been drinking Edinburgh Tea Company coffees for ages but it comes in a non descript metallic coffee bag from the local deli, so if anyone has any useful descriptive comments about it, please let me know.

• The Kettles on…Gourmet Blend
• The Kettles on…Continental Blend
• The Kettles on…

I didn’t get a chance to post this at the end of last week but there are some links worth checking out here.

I’m wondering if any of you mac users out there have played around with quicksilver and if so what you think of it?

I was amazed to see Venice underwater a few weeks past, there are some good photos on flickr.

A few bloggers have been offering tips for more effective, and broader reading - Challies, and Trevin Wax.

Donovan Palmer has a great looking new theme, and continues to write some excellent stuff over at his blog.

We started sorting through some of our wedding photos, if anyone is interested  to see a small number of them (more to be added).

This is a cool concept, classic books in cigarette packets.

Brett Jordan recommends the movie Kung fu Panda!

Apple releases the top selling apps for iPhone/iPod Touch for 2008.

Olive Drane on Mission and Worship with some other interesting thoughts on the subject on their blog too.

• Pure Mission Minds - Knowing why
• Start of the week from the End of Week Round up
• Songs for the Christmas Period 2

I’ve decided to try and make a clean break with my work email. For person email I’ve used Gmail for the last 4 or 5 years since it was in alpha and the search system makes it very usable and I’ve never looked for any other email service.

At work I use outlook like the rest of the corporate world is hopelessly tied to. As far as Microsoft products go outlook is actually not a bad piece of software.

Unlike my personal email account, about which I am quite relaxed, my inbox at work seems more like a never ending to-do list, so Ive decided to start a GTD-Inspired inbox system so that there is never any email in my inbox!

I’ve used inspiration from the system from a couple of sites but essentially I have placed all mail (6000-odd items) into an archive folder, created a hold folder which I will use to store info that I will need in the next couple of days eg. flight reservation, shipping tracking numbers, that kind of thing. Finally there is a respond folder which are emails which require a response but the responses require me to complete a few actions before I respond such as a phone call.

Other than that all email that I don’t think I will need I delete, info I may need goes in the archive and anything which requires a short response I am aiming to reply immediate, hopefully killing it off as a to-do item.

A good warning which I am trying to heed from the lifehacker article I referenced is to mark the response emails as unread so that your empty inbox doesn’t give you the false illusion that you have nothing to do.

Do you manage your inbox in an alternative manner than just letting everything pile up? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

• Gmail
• An idea to make life simpler for the New Year
• Google stuff and battling with PHP

I heard hot of the press from my local starbucks manager that Starbucks will be rolling out free wifi to all starbucks stores in the new year!

Good News for everyone who has begrudged paying the extortionate prices for T-Mobile wifi, if this goes global I would expect it to be a serious move towards what (in my opinion) should be the general trend of free wifi anyway.

Look out for it in a Starbucks near you.

• Free t-mobile Wifi - Dont get too excited though
• Wi-Fi in Mountain View
• Radiohead fans are Cheap

In the absence of my tradition of doing an end of the week round up for the last few weeks due to various technical faults (a case of the bad workman blaming his tools a bit there) I thought I’d send you in the direction of a few things I picked up on today:

Andy Goodliff features new offerings by SCM this year, a couple of theology of disability offerings from my ex-profs at Aberdeen John Swinton and Brian Brock.

Ben Myers writes ten theological theses on art which helped me think about art in ways I never have before! UPDATE: poserorprophet makes an equally interesting counter-post.

I’ve tried to begin a habit of reading book reviews, whilst not a substitute for reading the books themselves it is a helpful way to cover ground and stay informed on the currents within literature, both Christian and otherwise, Discerning Reader is one of the sites that I have used, they have just released their review schedule for next year here.

Ray Fowler offers some theories about the Bethlehem Star which I have never hears, or to be honest, ever thought of before, they are interesting and engaging at this time of year when we begin to revisit Jesus birth narrative.

More than one Reason for the Season, Fernando Gros asks for some humility whilst holding on to our convictions about what Christmas means for Christians.

South Africa is to gain a new political party, this move has the potential to be a defining  point in South Africa’s young political history.

A new service kick youtube follows suit of a few other pieces of software in letting you download videos and mp3’s from youtube clips, what sets kick youtube apart from the rest is the ability to insert the word “kick” between the www. and the youtube.com section of the URL of a video: http://www.kickyoutube.com/watch?v=uOgHE5nEq04 you can then select the following formats FLV, MPG, MP3, and even HD MP4. HT: Lifehacker

How to turn cheap steak into good steak. I’m going to have to try this to believe it, as we love steak and can rarely afford it. Incidentally I heard from someone ‘in the know’ the other day that game meats are especially cheap at the moment, eg. Duck, Venison etc.

Thomas Smith, who writes his superb blog from SA, is struggling to reconcile thoughts about healing. He is certainly not alone there…he is asking for encrouagement and resources.

Top Post this week here at Byrnesys Blabberings: Win Top Ten Books of 2008

• Win Top Ten books of 2008 for Christmas
• Has photography lost its art?
• End of Week Round up - update