This Guy Falls Down

Anybody out there still Jabez-ing it?

Remember the Prayer of Jabez?  What ever happened to that? 

See, these are the kinds of things I think about in a given day...

World food crisis: the silent tsunami

The big media outlets continue to sound the drumbeat about the elections.  They may take a break to talk about rising oil prices or tensions in the Persian Gulf, but that's pretty much the story.  Meanwhile, there is a heartbreaking crisis going on which has received little or no coverage.  There is a real food shortage in many areas of the world as prices have skyrocketed over the last several months.  It is reaching catastrophic proportions - the head of the UN Food Program has called it a silent tsunami. The saddest part of the story is that relief organizations have had to cut back on some of their activities as a result.

Please get involved. 

Let your inner geek out

Three years ago, it went without saying.  If you had a blog, you were a geek.  No questions.  Now cool people have blogs, too.  I'm totally OK with that, don't get me wrong.  It's like when R.E.M. had that "Stand" song back in '88 and everybody started liking them.  Of course I still liked them, but I had to distance myself a little bit, and show my true colors.  It only stands to reason that I do that in blogdom.  Here goes:

I love Doctor Who.  Yeah, the new hip ones, but the old geeky ones with Tom Baker, too.  I used to read Doctor Who books.  And I was into other old school British sci fi shows as well.  Blakes 7?  All about it.  The Tomorrow People?  You bet your jaunting belt.  And the Tripods.  Oh yes, the Tripods.

There was a show that came on Nickelodeon in the US called The Third Eye that I also loved.  Children of the Stones, Into the Labyrinth, and other campy and creepy films were featured on the show.

In fact, I would love to see about getting a multi-zone DVD player so I can collect and watch all those shows again. 

Just throwing down a 360 tomahawk power slam so you'll know who's boss...

Who's with me?  Geeks, stand up and be accounted for!  Use the comments section below...

Video commenting?

So the resident maven in this little corner of the blogosphere would be one Carlos. Today he has introduced a new video commenting feature on his blog. It's a fun way to break up the "look at me! look at me!" text of blog comments with some "look at me! look at me!" video. Finally we can be exposed for the ridiculous geeks we are...

GOALS!

I took my daughter to the library yesterday. I must confess - I'm a sucker for those self help books with snappy titles. I rarely actually READ them, so it's better to check them out from the library rather than buy them from a store and give money to some undeserving author and have them collect dust. Yesterday, in addition to the usual little girl books with pink sparkly covers, I got books with titles like How to Get Whatever You Want, Even If You Don't Know What it Is! and Create Your Future!

I'm actually reading Create Your Future! right now, and I'm really liking it. I have a few weeks before my touring schedule gets heavy again, and it would be great to actually use that time to do something meaningful besides surf the internet or sabotage all my wife's housecleaning strategies. Also my birthday's in a few weeks and that would make a good milestone for some goalsetting to commence.

So I'm working on getting some real goals together. What about you? Do you think about the future at all? Do you have any goals for yourself? It would be a lot cooler if you did. Do tell...

Random randomness

Can I just say that it's just more fun to go to Facebook to update my blog than to weed through a bunch of Typepad mess? 

I get an email every day about my blog stats.  I know I'm supposed to care about those things, but I really kind of don't.  Wnat I do find fascinating are the "referring links" where people are coming from when they visit my blog.  Today, other than the usual Google/wikipedia fare, I got these:

The wife's blog:  Check it out.  She's really proud of it, and I'm really proud of her, so of course I'm proud of her blog.  I also take great pride in the fact that a few years ago she made fun of me for blogging and now she reads WAY more blogs than I do.  I usually find out about blog news from her!  Plus she does a great job keeping folks up to speed on our family, whereas I'm usually rambling on about Twitter and biodiesel...

Whittaker Woman:  I have a hard time navigating my personal blogosphere because I constantly forget how to spell things like "whittaker" and "ragamuffin" and "jarnagin".  I know you're dying to lecture me about RSS and feeds and whatnot.  I know.  I just don't DO.  Oh yeah.  Whittaker Woman.  She's this really cool gal - me and Steph hang out with her and her husband.  I think they're throwing some kind of mean kids' party manana.  (How do I make that little curly thing over the 'n'?  It looks like I just misspelled "banana"). 

Joel Stapleton:  I met Joel at GMA the other day - he plays in a band called Four Days Late.  Nice dude, cool blog.  Check it out.

The Fairfax:  You've heard me talk about Alice Bass on here before.  She's written a cool book about creativity and also runs a blog.  She does a great job of weaving her faith into her musings about life.

WhitTalk:  I had never heard of WhitTalk until I saw it on my stats email.  Apparently he lives in Atlanta.  I probably would know him if I saw him.  Anyway, you need to check out his blog.  It rocks.  Literally.  As in, you open the page and it plays music...

Spence Smith:  I recently said that I've known Doug Van Pelt longer than any other blogger besides the wife.  I was wrong.  I've actually known Spence since he saw a disastrous Third Day show in Memphis back in 1995...

Chad Jarnagin, aka the Blogstar:  Chad is one of the best singers I know.  He can flat out belt it.  Plus he wrote "Bless the Lord", one of my favorite worship songs ever.  He shares my love for baseball and cool music and often writes about both.

OK that was fun, even though I'm not sure exactly what it was...

I'll tumbl for you

"Tumblelog?  Are you kidding?  You can do so much more with a regular blog.  Why would you limit yourself like that?"

Let me put it this way.  For my live rig, I've got 7 guitars, 3 amps, 4 speaker cabinets, a Bradshaw switching system, 4 overdrive pedals, 2 rack delays, a compressor, 2 phasers, a chorus/echo, and a tap tremolo.

I also have a 44 year old acoustic guitar.

Sometimes I just want to play my acoustic.

(check out my tumblr site here)

Blog it: oh. my. gosh.

If you're like me and you are trying to do web updates in several places at once, it might behoove you to check out Blog it, a new facebook application from the folks at TypePad.

Typepad, Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, Tumblr, LiveJournal, and a bunch of other 2.0 apps (with cute little logos!) are all supported.

I just found out about it, but I'll give you a full review in the coming days.

The 140 character web

I wish I could find them now, but the first couple of times I heard about Twitter about 18 months ago, it was in a couple of disparaging reviews of the application.  They went somewhere along the lines of "why in the world would anyone want to know what you're doing ALL THE TIME?  How self-absorbed."   Well anyone who has a blog is already struggling with self-absorption anyway, so cross that one off the list.  But I get that first response every time I try to explain Twitter.  My answer is that everybody has a few people, i.e. a circle of friends , that do want to know what each other is doing, maybe not ALL the time, but a lot of the time.

As far as my outgoing Twitter posts go, I've pretty much got it down to a science.  I twit, you see it here and here and here, and soon perhaps here as well.  Blogging about going to the bathroom is boring (unless you're Carlos and Heather), but using twitter to fill in the gaps between blog posts is pretty cool. 

Incoming tweets?  That's another story.  I get an unsettling feeling every time I get a text notification, and that happens way too much with Twitter.  Plus the cell phone bill the last two months has been a little ridiculous.  So I mostly check them online, and turn it on from my cell phone when I'm bored.

Carlos posted recently about his love/hate relationship with Twitter.  I concur.  But if you can work it into your life, there's enough to love about it that makes it worth checking out.

Go ahead.  Sign up.  You know you want to.  And look me up.  My profile is marklee3d...

A "little" experiment: my tumblelog

Ever since Carlos turned me on to the Twitter, the  idea of thesideblog/microblog has really taken off for me.  It's a great way to share what's going on in your life with others without having to stop and jump through all the hoops to do a traditional blog post. 

And now there's the tumblelog.  Tumblr (and other services like it) give you just enough functionality to do a blog-ish type thing either on your computer or on the go.  It's quite spartan - no sidebar links, no comments - and that's the beauty of it.  Here's what wikipedia has to say about it:

A tumblelog (or tlog) is a variation of a blog that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, tumblelogs are frequently used to share the author's creations, discoveries, or experiences while providing little or no commentary.

I can't quite explain it, but getting online and looking at this big white box makes me feel like I have to fill it.  If the box is smaller (or not there at all!), it is somehow freeing.  I probably get online with the iPhone more now, and smaller seems to be the way to go.

It's just a "little" experiment.  Check out my tumblelog to see how it's coming along!