Get Your Fan On
This Sunday I spoke at church. We’ve been continuing our ReGeneration series and I did a comparison between living the ReGenerated life and being a sports fanatic. The message, Get Your Fan On, is available by clicking the link.
Advent Conspiracy
Here are a couple of great YouTube videos that a friend sent my way. These really help put the meaning of Christmas into perspective.
Click the link to watch another one.
The Club: “Guarantee”
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a real “fan” of The Club. So while perambulating Canadian Tire this past weekend it caught my attention.
While such a discovery wouldn’t normally be so enthralling, I couldn’t help but notice the packaging this fine automotive anti-theft device came in. Not only is The Club a great good mediocre falsely-reassuring, glorified bike lock; it also comes with a money guarantee. Really what can be more reassuring than knowing that if the device doesn’t do its job guarding your $10K+ investment, you’ll be richly rewarded with a whopping $250 – $500?
Click the link for pictures.
Life by the Spirit
My church is continuing its theme of Generations, which we started in the fall. For the past few weeks my pastor has been focusing on the element that followers of Christ are a new creation and, as a result, have the choice as to how they are going to live their lives.
When I shared this last Sunday morning I looked at the passage in Galatians 5 and talked about the necessity for Christians to make a continual choice to live their lives by the Spirit of God.
Click the link below for the message.
“Jesus is a friend of mine”
What can I say? (Zap.*) A friend at church e-mailed me this and it’s simply too funny.
*Check out my favourite part at 1:56 in the video.
Zune vs. iPod, Chuck-style
Given the number of times Apple’s iPhone has appeared on NBC’s Chuck, it’s not surprising that a little Zune-bashing took place during this week’s episode.
Nevertheless, the moment was a bit unexpected and quite hilarious. Click the link to watch the 47-second clip (QuickTime required).
Generations: Looking Beyond
This fall my church is focusing on Generations. I shared a message this week that looked at the value of appreciating other generations and the importance of each generation’s unique contribution.
Click the link below to listen.
BC: Check!
This week we travelled to Vancouver, BC for the CFCM national conference. It’s been a great week so far for a few reasons.
First, the conference has been fantastic. There has been a good mix of speakers, all of which shared great messages.
Second, we’ve always wanted to travel further west and have now had the opportunity. Until this point we had travelled only as far as Alberta.
Between conference meetings we toured the area and snapped a few pictures off the coastline.
Click the link below to see our photos.
Bible App for iPhone
A couple of days ago the folks at YouVersion.com updated their Bible application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
With my subscription to Laridian’s web-based Bible service expiring soon, I’ve started looking for alternatives. I like what Laridian offers: it’s full-featured, powerful, and includes previously purchased Bible translations so I’ve never had to re-purchase something I paid for while using my Palm PDA. But Laridian’s service has one caveat, it’s a web application that requires Mobile Safari. As great of a job as Laridian has done (I don’t want to make it sound like their product isn’t any good, it is), for my use I found it too slow and cumbersome. Especially considering I don’t have a data plan with my iPhone so I need to be near a wifi hot spot to use it.
The Bible app from YouVersion is available from the iTunes App Store and features a plethora of translations, including popular ones such as the NIV, NKJV, The Message, and the NLT.
Until Wednesday’s update the Bible app required an Internet connection (cellular data or wifi). The latest update removes this handicap and now features the ability to store several translation offline.
Considering the application is free, user-friendly, and fast it’s a tough product to compete with. The application does lack a couple of things that would come in handy. The ability to create bookmarks for one. Still, based on the frequency YouVersion updates this product, I have no doubt features like this will appear down the road.
The Bible app is a free download [iTunes link] for iPhone and iPod Touch users and I highly recommend it.
Block spam and save bandwidth on your blog
Here’s a quick and easy way to kill two (proverbial) birds with one stone.
I might not have the same amount of activity on my blog as other sites but the site is still a frequent target for spam bots. I alleviated much of my frustration by installing Akismet (and it does a truly fantastic job). Still, I monitored regular visits and spam posts (well, attempts anyway as Akismet caught them) from the same IP addresses.
What I did was create a .htaccess file on my web site with the following entry:
deny from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Where the X’s are the IP address of the problematic spammer, for example:
deny from 169.254.0.188
This solution works great because WordPress doesn’t have to handle anything, the web server simply forbids access whenever an attempt to visit the site is even made. This saves server resources and bandwidth.
It should be mentioned that this solution isn’t perfectly ideal. Many (most, really) Internet IP addresses are dynamically assigned–given to a computer for only a short period of time before being reassigned to another computer. Eventually these HT Access entries could block a potentially legitimate visitor. It worked for me because I noticed the addresses of the spammers had not changed for quite some time. At some point in the future I’ll comment out those lines in the file and see if the heavy spamming resumes.
So this can work to quickly stop an annoying spam bot that regularly plagues your site, but it’s not a permanent anti-spam solution. For that I strongly recommend Akismet.