theo|digital

Well, I’m soft-launching my new blog here on Christmas Eve (of all times), although it’s not really new.  We know that I’ve been blogging for years over at http://chrisridgeway.blogspot.com.  It’s had several names (blog names always feel somewhat dispensable), including “To Have Mine Match” and most recently “Jesus Under Plastic.”  This time, it felt right to move to a whole new platform—so I’ve got my own WordPress 2.9 install all spiffed up now and my own new domain:   www.theodigital.com.

My domain www.chrisridgeway.net will direct here soon, and I still plan to keep personal news and family and friends with me.  But  because I’ve spent the last 1.5 years focused on the intersection of digital media ecology and theology, I didn’t want to stop when the degree did.  This name gives me a space to think and do theology as a digital native, and simultaneously try to do that in the missional conversation.

There’s still a lot of stuff not right on here (Feedburner isn’t working properly, tags aren’t correctly implemented, I have some introduction pages that I need to write, and I’m not too excited about the webcam pic on the left).  But this is good enough for now.

Also, Merry Christmas.  :)

A friend of mine a while ago let me have his copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking, the voice recognition software. I’ve had limited success with it (although admittedly I haven’t been able to use it a lot).

It has one feature that will take a pre-recorded audio file – i.e. MP3, and transcribe what it hears into a Word doc. Sweet! I wanted to use this a couple weeks ago when I transcribed a talk by Mark Driscoll on the emerging church. It was a one hour sermon, and doing it manually was going to take serious time. This seemed like the solution.

Uh, not so much. Here’s the Dragon transcribed file. Compare to the original I did by hand. Heheh.

But I don’t think it’s available my my Treo 700p yet… not sure why – the cute cutout in the video looks a lot like it!

ps – What am I doing? lots of studying for finals! They’re this week… ending Friday the 14th.

My laptop has returned from HP tech support as of Saturday. It seems to turn on and stay that way, so we’re collectively excited about the progress, but suspicious that fate will destroy us at the very moment we start to trust and tease our laptop like it is an old friend. (Plus we don’t relish the now required 8-12 hours anticipated in re-partitioning, re-installing, re-toilet training, etc).

Meanwhile, I used the clunky Haus desktop (MP3Dawg)to post approximately “buttloads” of new photos in the I-Life collection, and my collection. Feel free to take a look.

Also, as a sidenote… it was Darren my roommate’s birthday this weekend. We made him some poop.

Lots of stuff really happening in my life, but while we wait for me to figure out what’s important enough to post about, I’ll be glad to share this remarkable demo from a university audio-visual research group in Barcelona, Spain. Just the interface alone is fascinating.

Sad sad sad. My laptop dc-in/powerjack seems to have failed, and I’m in the arduous process of convincing HP that it is indeed within the warranty period so that they’ll fix it. Meanwhile, Los Angeles pics and further thoughts are truncated for a bit.

HP: please please hire people at level 1 support (phone and chat) who speak native English. I’m fine with a world-diverse set of technical employees, but not as the professionals who are supposed to sympathize and understand my problems on the phone. The comprehension gap is awkward and maddening. I’m fighting anger toward your company, and now I’m frustrated at myself for being getting worked up. geesh. Gotta love the spiritual implications of tech support.

Hopefully I’ll be technically on my feet soon. (looking like longer than a week at this point, though).

I’m disappointed. As much as I want to roll my eyes when the flight attendant requires me to shut off my Treo, it turns out that reputable sources are actually viewing cell phones on planes as dangerous. This article, from earlier this year, was published by the IEEE Spectrum (read: “eye-triple-eee”), the same respected electronics journal that arrives at my house monthly for my roommate working as an electrical engineer.

While they remain reserved on saying your iPod or DVD player could actually cause a crash, they used hidden on-board testing equipment to discover that 1 to 4 people a flight are ignoring the rules and making live cell phone calls while airborne – and it’s the phones they say can cause real trouble:

In March 2004, acting on a number of reports from general aviation pilots that Samsung SPH-N300 cellphones had caused their GPS receivers to lose satellite lock, NASA issued a technical memorandum that described emissions from this popular phone. It reported that there were emissions in the GPS band capable of causing interference. Disturbingly, though, they were low enough to comply with FCC emissions standards.

Our data and the NASA studies suggest to us that there is a clear and present danger: cellphones can render GPS instrument useless for landings.

read the whole article: “Unsafe At Any Airspeed?” By Bill Strauss, M. Granger Morgan, Jay Apt, and Daniel D. Stancil

This morning I woke up, grabbed my coffee, and tried to stare out the window and wake up. Instead, I thought of things I want to look up. Look up. Like, research. Internet style.

This happens to me every day. The scary part is, I’ll actually look them up. And remember.

• Why doesn’t the fan in the microwave ever seem to get going until 5 seconds into the cooking time (you can hear it), and does that initial time do any good? Would doing just five seconds of cooking time make anything warmer? Maybe the fan has no related effect to the magnetron. I dunno.

• Is there a way to learn snowboarding that doesn’t make the first day as hard as everyone says it is? Or maybe I can just learn it via internet diagrams? Like with a pivot foot or something?

• How true-to-fact were the news clips I watched last night in Good Night, and Good Luck?

• Does rain and lightning inherently move with a kind of weather front that raises the temperature? It’s probably not just a matter of randomly the temperature choosing not to drop below freezing and give us pretty snow instead of pouring rain…

• Who gets paid if you purchase Vince Guaraldi’s Charlie Brown Christmas off iTunes? If he’s dead (heart attack in the 70s), does a portion of the earnings go to a family member? Did they fight over which one? Does the payment amount to anything?

• What cash value does CVS place on the coupons that print out on the back of the receipt when you buy something, giving you money back on the next generic CVS brand beauty product you purchase? What percentage of coupons are actually used (very low?)? What GAAP principles apply?

Yesterday Ash teased me for researching the taco bell disease-food thing. People at her apartment were convinced I shouldn’t go: reports of e coli, salmonella (really?), and probably breast cancer worldwide. Turns out it was only in 4 northeastern states (NY, PA, NJ, DE) states, and 64 people felt sick, but nobody got hurt, and the last case was on Dec 2nd, from a produce supplier that Taco Bell immediately dumped.

Good to know.

Well, between new student week on campus, and my blog suddenly melting into new templates and options: things looks a bit weird around here. I’d like to be back soon. Lots of thoughts to bat around on Greek Orthodoxy, pumpkin spice lattes, and something new and nifty (to me) called mind-mapping.

It’s not as Dr. Zhivago as it sounds.

My blogger site just got upgraded to Google’s “level 2″ new beta blogger. Let me know if you notice anything broken. I’d be all excited and want to do more with it, but I’m working hard on I-Life stuff for now.