Brad Bird on Innovation

I saw this article this past summer while researching interpersonal communication issues in the workplace. I've found myself referring folks to it ever since. I'm a big fan of Pixar (in fact, my wife just bought me WALL-E today).

Innovation lessons from Pixar: An interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird

This is an excellent little window into how he approaches management of creative groups in the workplace. Brad Bird directed "The Incredibles" (possibly my favorite Pixar movie) and "Ratatouille".

Two UCG pastors interviewed on the radio

Yesterday I learned that BBC Radio interviewed Peter Hawkins on Monday, December 22, as part of a feature on Christmas. Mr. Hawkins is UCG's pastor in London.

Later that day, Victor Kubik was interviewed by KXLY in Spokane, Washington, on the topic of "Today's Toys". Mr. Kubik is UCG's pastor for Lafayette, Indiana, as well as for Eastern and Northern Europe.

Today I received a call from radio station KXLY 920 in Spokane, Washington. They wanted to interview me later in the day on a popular local talk show called Newscope hosted by Mike Fitzsimmons. It was during 3-6 PM drive time and I would be on right after Sean Hannity.

Mike Fitzsimmons had Googled “Today’s Toys.” I wrote an article eleven years ago for the Good News entitled “Today’s Toys: Child’s Play or Something Else?” It came to the top of the Google heap and he wanted to interview the author. His secretary called the Home Office who gave them my phone number. They said that they wanted to do two 15 minute segments at 3:00 PM Pacific time.
....
Mike Fitzsimmons was most complimentary about the content of the article and the Good News magazine. He advised readers to get their own copy by Googling “Today’s Toys” which will get them the article and the magazine.

This story illustrates the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO) on the internet today. Last week Mr. Kubik was here in Cincinnati for the Council of Elders meetings which included an update on Aaron Booth's SEO efforts.

I Googled "Today's Toys" and the first two hits were links to Mr. Kubik's article. But what if that hadn't been true? What if it had been the fifth or sixth link? This opportunity may have been lost.

Then a surprise. My brother Eugene who did not know I was going to be on was listening to the program in his car and called in! He somewhat flabbergasted me and I had to ask him to repeat part of his question.

Mike Fitzsimmons commented how the article is even more applicable today than when I wrote it.

After half an hour he asked if I’d be willing to go another segment. This made my interview time 45 minutes. This was an enjoyable experience and hopefully this will bring positive exposure to the Good News and the United Church of God.

Here is the entire story from Vic Kubik. You can read his GN article here.

I could not find the interview on the internet, but Mike Fitzsimmons of KLXY blogged about the topic on Tuesday.

Samuele Bacchiocchi dies

I just noticed this story on Worldnetdaily announcing yesterday's passing of Dr. Samuele Bacchiocchi.

Biblical scholar Dr. Samuele Bacchiocchi, best known for his teachings on how Sabbath observance shifted toward Sunday worship in much of Christendom, died yesterday at his Michigan home at the age of 70 after a two-year battle with fourth-stage liver cancer.
....
A Seventh-Day Adventist, Bacchiocchi believed there was no Scriptural mandate to change or eliminate Sabbath-keeping, and he singled out the Catholic Church for its role in changing the day.
....
Bacchiocchi also explained the influence of pagan sun worship provides a "plausible explanation for the Christian choice of Sunday" over the day of Saturn. Its effect wasn't just limited to Sunday. It apparently led to the placement of Jesus' birth in late December.

"The adoption of the 25th of December for the celebration of Christmas is perhaps the most explicit example of sun worship's influence on the Christian liturgical calendar," Bacchiocchi writes. "It is a known fact that the pagan feast of the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti – the birthday of the Invincible Sun, was held on that date."

Dr. Bacchiocchi was probably one of the top 5 or 10 most influential advocates for the Sabbath Day in the 20th century. He is probably best known for his book "From Sabbath to Sunday: A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Early Christianity."

100th Beyond Today recorded

This week we recorded our 100th Beyond Today program, and the UCG.org site received a gentle facelift.

On Wednesday Mr. Kilough recorded an About Our Father's Business with Steve Myers, Darris McNeely, and Gary Petty, which is now online on the UCG members' site. It was nice chance for each of them to share some of their own personal reflections on getting to participate in this effort to preach the gospel.

The presenters enjoyed getting see a few GN commentaries recorded, and Mr. Myers and Mr. McNeely recorded a couple as well.

I'm glad it's the Sabbath and I'm looking forward to hearing the reports from next week's council meetings.

A Day Without a Gay

I noticed that gay activists have organized today as a national “Day Without a Gay”, a day when gays should skip work and should instead volunteer for community service.

Their goal is to demonstrate the positive impact gays and lesbians make in the workplace, and to show how much the country relies on them everyday.

One particular aspect of this event caught my eye. Many gays wrongly perceive all opposition to gay-rights as a personal indictment of themselves, and not their lifestyle choice alone. “Day Without a Gay”, for example, doesn’t even address gays' lifestyle – it instead addresses their basic worth as human beings and employees. Apparently gays (and most social liberals) believe that gay-rights opponents truly do hate them, and only use religion to mask their own deep-seated fears and prejudices.

And who could blame them? You could only observe so many brutal attacks against homosexuals periodically grabbing the headlines before you would begin to sense an omnipresence of hate. That, of course, is the essence of terrorism.

But while some are driven by hate, others are driven by love.

Gays may wonder how many people would risk death to save a gay person. Christians worship Someone who did.

God calls homosexuality sin. But God has already proven He loves all of His children unconditionally, because Christ died for all of us even while we were still sinners! God did not require us to do anything in order for Him to demonstrate His love. You can hate Christ, but He still died for you, knowing that you were yet going to hate him. This is so that you may have the confidence of first knowing where He stands.

And God desires to see all His children brought to glory. But because He loves us, He cannot allow behavior that He knows will be destructive, and He requires us to change, as difficult as it may be. His purpose is to perfect us.

If He didn’t love us, He wouldn’t care.

This change will be the most difficult for those who have built their entire personal identity on a false concept. I don't envy the unique challenges of those dealing with same sex attraction, but at whatever point God calls you, in Him you can find the strength you need. Through Him you can do all things.

Here's a nice source produced by my Church: http://breakingfree.ucg.org/samesexattraction/

Thanks for the buzz

...from Brian Lee, a blogger and fellow Christian in El Paso, Texas.

Hopefully I'll live up to it!

Youtube Compression Test: 2008 Feast Video

I've been tinkering around with Youtube compression lately in hopes of establishing a nice high-quality workflow, and I thought I would share some of my results. I have posted the 2008 UCG Feast Video in 7 parts here. You can choose between normal and high quality (via a link below the video). Contrast both quality levels with the official October 30 posting of the Feast Video on Youtube.

We probably won't update the Feast video, but I'm excited about us using the improved settings for future productions.

You can also embed a playlist, which is arguably better than one long video because it gives you an experience similar to a DVD with chapter markers. I've included a low-quality example below. (I haven't yet found a way to embed a playlist on a web site using the "high quality" mode.)

Example of an embedded playlist (low quality):

Christianity in Motion (Blogging Jordan)

I'd like to call attention to this blog, published by five United Youth Corps members who are volunteering in a variety of social and research functions in Jordan this year.

It brings tears to my eyes thinking of it even now. These small kids, ranging from 5 to 15 were staring, teasing, taunting, and ridiculing our students as they sat on the bus, or when they walked between the bus and the store. I would chase them off, and they would be replaced by more kids doing the same thing. Although our students are mentally handicapped, they understood what was going on. Seeing the hurt in their eyes made it all the worse. I wanted to take each and every one of those kids and introduce them to the human beings that they were treating so cruelly, to show them that my students, my friends are people; wonderful, kind, and loving people. People that, sadly, live in a culture that hasn't yet learned to treat them with the respect that they deserve. We long for the day that this reality will be no more. Honestly we long for the day when they will be healed of their infirmities, but until that day comes, we have schools like the Bunyat that are striving to make this world a better place. They give skills and dignity to the students that they teach and bring understanding to the culture around them. I'm proud, for the short time I will be here, to be a part of something so wonderful.

I met Lena when she lived here in Cincinnati for several years before marrying Lewis VanAusdle. Lewis (and Emily Troyer, now Smith) came here for ABC in 2007, and Zach Smith was at ABC in 2006. I've never met Tine Banda, who grew up in Zambia, and studied in South Africa and in New York.

I hope you find their personal reflections on their experiences and their mission as inspiring as I have!

Matthew and Mary Ann Bates served at the International Baccalaureate School of Amman over this past academic year. They blogged about their experiences as well, and they also spoke to Mr. Kilough and showed some pictures on the August 7 edition of About Our Father's Business (available here).

The Black Friday Stampede

We went to Toys R Us and bought some diapers today... it was pretty crazy!

The lady behind us said she went to Wal-Mart's 5:00 sale for the $199 X-Box + Guitar Hero III. She got there early, but was out of luck because at 4:00AM people had broken into the boxes and taken them all. She had a five-year-old girl with her, and she said the atmosphere was rather frightening. She went to a second Wal-Mart which was much more controlled thanks to the presence of the local police.

I thought this was a fantastic commentary on the American Black Friday hysteria...

Let Me Google That For You

I just discovered a terrific site on the web! This is going to come in sooo handy...

This is for all those people that find it more convenient to bother you with their question rather than google it for themselves.

www.letmegooglethatforyou.com

A 50-Year Fix for the Once-in-a-100-Year Problem

I've been excited about posting this video ever since I saw Mr. McNeely present this seminar at the Feast of Tabernacles a few weeks ago. Unfortunately I've been busy with other work, but I finally got it edited this week and Aaron posted it to YouTube.

Alan Greenspan said in September that this financial crisis "is a once-in-a-hundred-year problem."

This is interesting, because ... the jubilee system is based on a 50-year cycle.

I personally believe God has given us a blueprint for how he is going to restore all things.

He explains that the source of the credit freeze-up was the fact that banks could no longer determine the value of their assets, and he shows how God's jubilee system is designed to prevent this from happening.

He shows how God revealed proactive ways to prevent many of the issues we are wrestling with today, including racism, socioeconomic inequality and environmentally destructive practices.

He paints a picture of an economic system radically different from our American capitalism today, and in doing so he reveals an astonishing love, wisdom, and long-term vision in the law.

Interview with Jed Sy

I came across this documentary on Youtube, which includes segments of an interview with Jed Sy.

The documentary looks at the renovations to the Davao City Jail which have been sponsored by Gawad Kalinga, a religious outreach program in the Philippines.

Many in the United Church of God have been following the story of Jed, who is currently in prison in the Davao City Jail. Her story can be found in the October 30 video edition of About Our Father's Business.

Actually getting to see and listen to her speak definitely had an impact on me. I already knew her age, but I was still struck by how young she appears. We often pray for people we know and don't know, but I've always personally found it easier to pray for people I know, of whose situation I've had a first-hand glimpse. Most of us will not meet Jed in the near future, but this is probably the next best thing.

Jed has written two articles for United News Asia:

"Joy Behind Prison Bars" (May-June 2007)
"Reflections From Behind Bars" (July-August 2007)

She is reportedly writing another article which will probably also appear in the United News Asia.

First Snow and Climate Change

Yesterday our first significant snow flurries arrived! We had almost an inch on our patio table when I came home.

When I was a teenager in the '90s, most religious folks (as well as many in the Church of God, including myself) seemed to be riding an anti-anti-global warming bandwagon. I wish I could remember why. I have my own theories.

I've since taken a much more moderate view. I don't believe God would have given us instructions for caring for the earth if we couldn't make any impact on it. Nevertheless, an article like this gives me some pause.

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

So according to NASA, August was the hottest October on record. At least we can all agree that this crisis is man-made!

Welcome

So I finally have a blog! I hope that this becomes a venture that I can maintain. Those of you who try to correspond with me via email probably don't have high hopes, but I will try anyway.

United Church of God 2008 Feast Video

Our Heritage of Faith on Vimeo.