Dave’s Journey

I have started a new blog called “The Macfoto Life” where the focus will be on Macs, web design, photography and related topics.

Cheamweb has gone under a redesign. As a result of the changes previous links for the Cheamweb Gallery no longer work. To view the photography go to the Cheamweb homepage and follow the links. One new feature for the gallery is that the photos will now display as a slideshow. I still plan to do some more work on it so let me know your comments.

Christine Sine shares a prayer from the book “Blessings for the Fast Paced and Cyberspaced”. It is a prayer that technology would be a blessing and not something that just adds more stress to our lives.

I’ve added a new section to the Cheamweb Gallery with photos of wetlands areas near Chilliwack. Cheam Lake and the Great Blue Heron Nature Reserve both provide places for looking at nature here in the Fraser Valley.

Tomorrow, Wedenesday April 23, at 7pm Mustard Seed Associates will be hosting an MSA Conversation: The New Ends of the Earth: A learning party about the Kingdom and technology with Thomas Knoll. It will be held at the Mustard Seed House in Seattle. It will also be accessible online by going to http://www.msainfo.org/ for anyone to participate from wherever you may be. The evening will discuss the following:

“This is the social age of the web, where online communities, tools, and resources make it easier to extend relationships, expand influence, and invite participation. During this event, we will explore some of the latest technologies, dream about their best application in spiritual/social/justice communities, and learn practical implementation.”

I’ve just come back from another weekend at Missions Fest in Vancouver. It was a good weekend. I was running a booth again that has several computers that using a web search tool helps direct people to different organizations present at the conference. If you would like to check it out visit the Mission Opportunities Search site. I had some difficulties with the computer setup at the beginning, but it improved as the weekend went on.

During the weekend I was also able to take in a couple of the sessions and enjoyed listening to the choirs and speakers that they had. One of the interesting things was at the beginning of one session they had a video playing highlighting the fact that it was the 25th Missions Fest with the first one taking place January 1984. They also showed some pictures of what else was happening in the world at that time. One of the items mentioned was, well, the introduction of the Macintosh.

The Macintosh and Missions Fest both began at the same time. The Macintosh is known as a computer that changed the computer industry and throughout its history has had an impact beyond that industry, such as the original iMac’s colourful design that had an impact on the fashions of the day. Many of its users are also fans and passionate about the computer, what it can do and its design. Missions Fest is an event held that brings together Christians from many different churches and backgrounds to share in a vision to see people worship and go out and let others know of the good news and love of Jesus Christ.

Things here on earth don’t last. Some things like Macs come and go, such as what I experienced with computer problems with a couple Macs I was using: one that I couldn’t get started again. Missions Fest is a place where people come and are challenged to live for God in their lives, whether at home or in another part of the world in such a way that they honour God. While Missions Fest as an event may come to an end someday it draws people to have a passion and vision that looks both to the present and eternity.

What is your passion? Do you want to change the world? Have you considered that Jesus came to earth and changed things eternally and we only need to look to him. That is my desire for my life. That doesn’t mean that one can’t be passionate about other things: I still like using Mac computers as well :-).

Some websites just don’t make it easy if you aren’t using the popular web browsers. In this day of Web 2.0 where web designers make things easier in some ways they also go back to the problem of designed for browser x. The latest issue I had was trying to log into Blogger with Opera on my Mac and instead of logging in it incorrectly stated that I didn’t have cookies turned on. Searching a bit it seems that I’m not the only one who has encountered this. Blogger isn’t the only Google site that I’ve had problems with. GMail has a problem, though, not quite as serious where if I login using the GMail login page it won’t go to the inbox. However, in this case it is a matter that it isn’t redirecting properly as it works if I type in the URL and I can also access it by logging into Google Homepage.

There is a big push in the web design community that web designers use accepted (X)HTML standards. I think it is also important that other aspects of web design don’t break in web browsers. Its frustrating when one is using a program like Opera, which I now prefer for my browsing and is as advanced as IE or Firefox. If Web 2.0 turns out meaning Designed for IE or Designed for Firefox then we haven’t learned anything from the 90’s when it was Designed for Netscape.

Yesterday I had one of those days where I wish I had backed up a little more recently. I was using a program where I record my journal and other information. All of a sudden I couldn’t find most of the data. I don’t know exactly what happened. I had a backup from a couple weeks ago so I did lose some information which was disappointing. Last year my hard drive failed, fortunately I backed my important data in time. So I will say it again. Backup. Backup often.

On Saturday I attended Northern Voice. This year it is being held at that eternal construction site also known as UBC. After finding my way I went to the keynote: How to Make Change Happen With Your Blog, which was already underway. After that I went to a couple sessions Social Software for Learning Environments and Building Rich Communities with Wikis. Very often when I’ve mentioned to people before that I’m going to a blogging conference they think its going to be very technical. In fact the day is really all about online communities, what it means and how to develop them. I attended a couple sessions that were focused on online communities in education, using blogs and wikis. Questions raised about publishing and intelectual properties. In another session Nancy White also raised the question of what does it mean to have of sense of togetherness online and how does that affects collaboration? What does it mean for the person that writes, comments or reads a blog. Do you feel connected in any way to the person?

Introduced at MacWorld in January the iPhone will begin selling later this year in the US. Following the introduction Cisco sued as they held trademark rights to the name. Apple and Cisco have now settled and Apple will be able to use the name iPhone as originally planned. Personally I wouldn’t have minded if they went with something other than that. It was the expected name, but calling it the Apple Phone would have worked in the same fashion their multimedia player is called Apple TV. Pretty soon naming everything iSomething is going to get a bit dated.

Macworld: News: Apple, Cisco settle iPhone dispute