joedonahue.org

These past couple of weeks have been quite eventful, and I have put off writing a post for so long that nothing will receive very much attention, but it will be fun to recap anyway.

Julie and I had the joy of attending the Toby Mac concert in Raytown last week. It has been since Switchfoot in St. Louis that we have seen a live show (with the exception of For Good or For Awesome live @ the Heritage Center w/ special guest Esteban!) and this was an absolutely amazing concert.  I was pretty excited about the opening bands Thousand Foot Krutch, Building 429, and Family Force 5, although I had never heard of Family Force before (with a name like that, I would certainly remember).  I have always enjoyed listening to the TFK and 429, and it was good music but I wasn’t all too excited about it.  Family Force 5 was more like a circus, with people jumping around in bear costumes as they rocked as hard as they possible could for the sole purpose of rocking as hard as they could.  Not impressed.  But then Toby Mac came out… and immediately redeemed the entire show.  Words cannot describe how, even 20 years after DC Talk’s self-titled CD was released, how amazing his music and performance is.

I bought his latest CD Portable Sounds on iTunes a few days before the show, and enjoyed it, despite that it sounded like a sequel to Diverse City rather than a stand-alone project.  The concert kind of promoted that feeling as well, as they would weave between similar-sounding songs from the two albums.  It also reminded my how much I love his debut solo release, Momentum, with an extremely memorable rendition of Love is in the House. The end of the show was slightly ho-hum, as they dimmed the lights and walked off stage without playing his current hit single from Portable Sounds.  Everyone was chanting “Toby! Toby!” and I’m thinking, I wonder what will happen next.  I wish he had just come out and played Made to Love and then called it quits, but instead they followed it up with a extended play version of Extreme Days, at maximum volume.  Despite these things, it was absolutely amazing.  His background singers / dancers / musicians are all incredible.

Afterwards we went to Denny’s, since we hadn’t yet eaten dinner.  Being 11 o’clock there weren’t that many people there, which was exactly what we wanted after the 2500+ concert crowd.  Julie and I both being introverts makes these things extra-tiring!  It was great just to hang out there, let the buzzing in our ears begin to fade away, drink a few cups of coffee, and just chat without feeling any pressure of time constraints.  Good times.

Saturday brought with it another evening of dinner and games with Beth and Steve, who we haven’t gotten together with for far too long now.  With two phone calls to my Mom and an hour at Hyvee I was able to whip some Donahue-style Bogoki, a Korean stir-fry.  Having never made my own bogoki before I was really anxious, but everyone said it was really good.  I feel good about it, so I am looking forward to trying it again soon, perhaps for Andy when he returns from Korea.  I wanted to make some for Matt Banner, since he is leaving for Korea soon, but I didn’t get to it.  I’m sure he will get much better over there.

Last, but not least, a new computer!  Taking advantage of the infamous NPH computer loan, I purchased a brand-new Dell with a 20-inch flat widescreen moniter.  I set it up tonight and fiddled around with Vista for a little bit, and I don’t hate it as much as I did.  It is really similar to XP so far, with the addition of the cool 3D task switcher.  Although, out-of-the-box it says there is a driver conflict with some of the hardware, and that kind of sketches me out.  I also picked up a Canon S3 digital camera, which is really great.  Even in the indoor and low-light situations I’ve used it in have yielded great pics, which was the Achilles heel of my Nikon Coolpix 3700.

And it will be great to take this camera with us to Branson this weekend!  I have scheduled my first-ever non-Christmas vacation day, and Julie and I are going down to Branson for a three-day weekend.  My old youth pastor Damon Asbill lives down there, and we are going to be able to meet up with him.  It has been probably the better part of 7 years since I’ve seen Damon, and it came as a complete surprise to me to find out that he lives only four hours away in the same state as me!

That being said, I have a lot of work to do for school before I can warrant taking a vacation.  By the end of this week, I will have earned it (I hope).

There is nothing higher in religion; there is, in effect, nothing else;  if you look for anything but more love, you are looking wide of the mark, you are getting out of the royal way.  And when you are asking others, “Have you received this or that blessing?” if you mean anything but more love, you mean wrong; you are leading them out of the way, and putting them upon a false scent.

Reading something like this reminds me why I am in Seminary.  Reading the above quote is beginning to make me think that my concerns with our attention to “spiritual gifts” may not be completely unfounded.  To some degree, I think the idea of a “spiritual gifts checklist” kind of mechanism is simply a product of our ad nauseam specialization in the workplace.  Aside from where it really comes from, I am not convinced that it does a lot more than simply provide another label for people to cling on to in an expedition to “find themselves” (as if to imply that hidden deep down is an already-determined person and personality awaiting to be found). “Hi, my name is Joe. I am an ISFJ type B personality gifted in Service and Rocking.” (I intended for rocking in a musical sense, but I can be found swaying back and forth for no immediate reason also).

My personality type enjoys open-ended questions too much to get bogged down with such labels.

Instead, Wesley recommends we pursue love.  Thomas Aquinas – much like myself – was known to make use of Colossians 3:14 in such a matter:

And over all these virtues, put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.

Whatever your gifts are, may you deliver and develop them in perfect love.

Are you plagued by the (no network) gremlin?  Don’t let it get to you any longer!  You, too, can join networks on Facebook!  Just listen to this real feedback supplied on my wall.

I joined [a Geographical] network and found a neighborhood friend from my hometown that I hadn’t seen since 1972. Thanks for the suggestion!

Wow!  Don’t you want to be in a network, too?!  Just follow these 3 easy steps!

1) After logging into facebook, click on My Account on the left.

2) Click on the Networks tab along the top.

3) Join a network!  You have three types of networks to choose from:

College

You must have a valid college (or graduate school) email address that is also validated by facebook.  If you have already graduated, most schools will supply an alumni email address for you.  Usually you just need to email alumni at your-school-initials.edu and say “I gave you lots of money!  Give me an email address!”  That’s a tough set of logic to argue against. You can join multiple networks, but you need an email address (that you have access to) for each network.
Work

Similar to the college network, you need to have a work email that you still have access to.  It also needs to be validated with facebook.  I had to shoot an email to facebook’s support line requesting that they validated my workplace, but after doing so, between 22 and 35 people have joined (I see conflicting numbers, I think facebook has a bug when it comes to counting network membership).  You can belong to multiple work networks, but you need to be able to check an email facebook sends to confirm each network.  Unlike Alumni associations, workplaces will probably not grant you an email address retroactively.

Geographical 

This is different from other networks;  ANYONE can belong to a geography, but you may only belong to one. There are no email addresses required.

Dear Programmer,

I just bought a new Gateway laptop.  It came with Microsoft Office, and today it expired!  I didn’t realize it was a trial, and now I am in trouble.  I am a student, and need to write a paper for my class! What do I do?

~Word-less in New York

Dear Word-less in New York,

You are not alone.  Students and other new-computer-buyers across the world are slowly falling to their knees at the hands of the cripple-ware installed on their machines.  The trial version of Office is one such predator that often leaves its victims so desperate for its tools that they run out en masse and buy it off-the-shelf at Target.  Not.  Although wonderful, it is no secret here that there are some powerful, comparable, and free tools that will leave you wondering why you used that free trial in the first place.

The first is OpenOffice.  OpenOffice has long been the default Office replacement for those who don’t use Windows or don’t care to.  Even if you plan to use the second option (which I more highly recommend) you should, without delay, download and install OpenOffice on your computer.  It is something that proves invaluable to have, especially when people like to email around superfluous Word documents.  OpenOffice will allow you to view, create, and save all the same formats that Microsoft Office uses, and has much the same look-and-feel.  It has it’s own tool for each of the tools Office uses, although they come with less-flashy (and dorkier) sounding names.  Instead of “Excel” they have “Calc.”  If OO has a marketing department, they should be fired.  But they probably don’t, and since it is free, I won’t complain too loudly. Red Flag: OpenOffice is not an exact copy of Microsft Office, and often times it is only quasi-compatible with its $200 desktop-productivity-cousin.  People with MS Office who try to open your documents from Open Office will sometimes experience unexpected results.  I do not recommend preparing a slideshow presentation in OpenOffice and expecting it to work flawlessly in Powerpoint.  I keep OpenOffice on hand for (more-or-less) having the ability to open other documents that people send to me.

Since OpenOffice cannot be trusted, where then can we turn?  Google Docs.  I have written extensively on the matter before, but allow me to point out what makes it so different.

Your documents don’t live on your computer. They live on the internet.  But in a safe place where only you can get to them. If you forgot your laptop, or the battery dies and you need to access a file, just hop over to your school’s computer lab.  Google will have them ready and waiting for you.
You have the ability to share them with other people, who can (if you so allow) edit them.  This allows for collaboration.

You create, edit and maintain your files through your web browser.  If your web browser happens to be Firefox, then you will be able to have your class notes or internet references open in one tab and your document in another.  Its a good time.

You can export (save) your document in any number of formats, including DOC for people who have Microsoft Word, or directly to PDF for guaranteed cross-platform compatibility (this means that anyone who has a computer can view it, and it will look just the way you want it to).

Revisions.  Ever have Word crash and you lose your file?  I accidentally did this once in Google Docs by a combination of keystrokes which, by accident, deleted the whole file.  Not good.  So clicked on the “revisions” tab and simply opened up the file the way it looked 16 seconds earlier.  Much better.

Auto save.  I regularly hear stories of people who worked all night on a file, forgot to save it, and when then left the room for a Wendy’s run an Essay Gremlin came in a closed all open programs, including the file.  With Google Docs, it autosaves.  Years of training myself to hit Ctrl-S every 8 seconds, wasted.  But I’m not complaining.

That’s it for now, but I hope this has been some help!  Good luck, and enjoy Google Docs!