Today I’m grateful for my “stuff.” My things. The house I live in. The clothes I wear. My furniture. My toys, my television. This computer that I’m typing on. The Internet that connects us as if we were sitting together in the same room, reading Psalm 112 together. All of our “stuff.”...
I realize that we are often scolded for our materialism and “affluenza.” That is no doubt rightly so. It isn’t right that such a small percentage of the population of the world should control such a large percentage of the world’s resources. That can’t go on forever and it won’t. At the same time, we would do well to remember two things about our “stuff.”
First, on the other end of everything we have are the people who thought of it, built it, marketed it, sold it, and shipped it. And behind all of that is God who was working in, with and under the entire enterprise from beginning to end. Our “stuff” is a reminder of the cooperation of the human community.
And second, it isn’t only what we HAVE that matters but what we DO with what we have. There is nothing wrong with possessions unless they begin to possess us. The twin remedies for that are gratitude and generosity. So today I’m thankful for our “stuff.”
E.B. White (1899 -- 1985), essayist for The New Yorker, author of "Stuart Little," "Charlotte's Web" and "The Elements of Style," was a defining voice of American writing this century. According to one reviewer, "he is the master of an idiom at once exact and suggestive, distinguished yet familiar. He says wise things gracefully."
."'He sent me the book and I read my piece in it. At the end there were a lot of questions: 'Why did Mr. White use repetition here?' was one question. And 'Explain the author's purpose in inserting this phrase.'E.B. White's work has stood the test of time and will continue to delight young and old people for years to come. As a writer, he was a hard worker, who mercilessly edited his own material and had a singular ability to write clearly and concisely, while capturing the essence - all while making it appear to the reader as quite easy, as if he was talking to you - often with a twinkle in his eye.
'Gosh, those questions aren't easy. I tried to answer them and flunked cold. I admit there was repetition there, but I hadn't realized it. Anyway, I couldn't think of a good sound reason why I'd used it. . . .'"
on Pencilrevolution.com."If I could save time in a bottle,
The first thing that I'd like to do
Is to save every day till eternity passes away,
Just to spend them with you"
"DANDELION WINE is first and foremost the story of a 12 year old boy discovering that he is alive. I was lucky enough to read this gorgeous, perfect novel, wrapped in a library's dandelion yellow hardcover, the summer of my 12th year, in the small town of New Haven, Indiana, probably wearing my own pair of Red Ball Jets or Keds, lying in my living room as usual, curled up in a chair with the screen door open to let in the blustery summer wind and sun, with the lush green Indiana grass blowing in waves just outside.I understood what Bradbury was saying at age 12, an incredible thing in itself, since the themes here are fairly grown-up. Essentially, this book is about a boy flooded with the sudden realization of his own "aliveness", and never has a child's experience of innocent living been so perfectly, passionately illustrated. Douglas Spaulding lying in the grass, or feeling the keen pleasure and pain of carrying heavy laden buckets of self-picked berries out of the woods while the handles crease the insides of his hands. Douglas Spaulding discovering the wonder of a Number Two pencil, and the joy of rising early in the morning to watch his town come to life with the sunrise. Douglas Spaulding discovering that nothing makes a boy fly weightless through his summer vacation better than slipping his feet into the cool, cloudwrapped heaven of a new pair of tennis shoes.
I found this book, at age 12 and several times since, to be an experience ranking with the most important books about human life that I have ever read. Bradbury sees so much, and conveys the experiences so clearly that one knows what Douglas and Ray know by the end. This is a book about passion and joy and being fully alive from moment to moment. It is a sonnet to and affirmation of childhood and innocence of such persuasive power that it has become a key volume of my core library. I don't expect everyone to have such a trascendent experience in the reading, and not everyone is fortunate enough to read this book at as perfect a moment as I did. But it is undeniable in its power and equal to the greatest work Ray Bradbury has produced, in my opinion. I was fortunate enough to meet him and thank him for it while at college. But this book has meant more to me than I could tell him.
Give this to a boy you care about, or read it to evoke, soothe and elevate the child in you. It is pure poetry, Bradbury at the height of his powers, written with genius, on the vital topic of the nature of life. I can only say Douglas Spaulding has never left me. You may find him equally provocative."
| -MS Word (DOC) | -MS Publisher (PUB) | JPG, PNG |
-MS Word (RTF) | -MS Excel (XLS) | BMP, TIFF |
| -MS PowerPoint (PPT) | -HTML (MHT) | WMF, EMF |
| -MS PowerPoint (PPS) | -Text (TXT) | GIF |
"Apparently, most people are willing to touch an object they've never seen before and this invoked a worm script that was designed to multiply and spread across the 2,700+ servers run by Linden Labs in California, the game's owner. Many of the six hundred thousand active users experienced serious lag and lost connectivity to the servers, making it one of the largest known denial-of-service attacks in an online game."The Wired blog entry is pretty funny - particularly the picture of the little kid who has been spreading the goo that is getting these netizens riled up, but the amazing thing about this story is the amount of real money people make and spend in this online virtual world.
Take someone and deprive them of any sort of "real" social contact.He says when he wrote the article, Second Lifers had spent $494,196 in the last 24 hours on virtual goods that have no tangible worth outside of Linden Labs, and that a prominent Second Life landlord named Anshe Chung makes over six figures a year just buying and selling virtual land.
Give them the ability to script any program, animate any action, or build any object through intuitive processes.
Allow them to own their creations, and to sell them to the highest bidder.
"The “people” there make friends, build homes and run businesses. They also play sports, watch movies and do a lot of other familiar things. They even have their own currency, convertible into American dollars.
But residents also fly around, walk underwater and make themselves look beautiful, or like furry animals, dragons, or practically anything — or anyone — they wish.
This parallel universe, an online service called Second Life that allows computer users to create a new and improved digital version of themselves, began in 1999 as a kind of online video game.
But now, the budding fake world is not only attracting a lot more people, it is taking on a real world twist: big business interests are intruding on digital utopia. The Second Life online service is fast becoming a three-dimensional test bed for corporate marketers, including Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Sun Microsystems, Nissan, Adidas/Reebok, Toyota and Starwood Hotels."
"When you wave around the new Nintendo controller, two tiny, flat pieces of silicon inside it, each weighing about a millionth of a gram, flex against silicon springs that hold them in place.
The movements are minute, or to put it another way, they're on the scale of 10 to 100 hydrogen atoms stacked side by side.
But these tiny movements can be measured with incredible accuracy. A charge is applied between the moving pieces of silicon and two nearby sensors. Faint fluctuations in that charge, as small as that of 10 electrons, are picked up by a chip that translates it into an understanding of how the controller is moving.
The two moving weights, which fit together on an area less than a millimeter square, have different roles. One has two sets of springs, which allow it to move from side to side and back and forth. The other weight is a flat piece anchored almost like trampoline. It senses vertical movement. This way, the chip can distinguish motion in all three dimensions of space.
The Nintendo Wii Remote one-ups the Sony controller by including an infrared camera. It picks up signals from a sensor bar the owner attaches to the television set. This enables the remote to ''know'' where it is in relation to the screen, so the player can use the controller to point to things on the screen -- a useful feature in shooting games (and a lot of games are shooting games).So where has this technology been until now?
Accelerometers have been used to guide missiles and aircraft, said Richard Marks, who worked on an underwater robot before his job as head of special projects at Sony Computer Entertainment America.
''We had a $25,000 inertial system that was probably comparable,'' to the one in the Sony controller, he said. ''These things have become so much less expensive.''
In the past, accelerometers were large mechanical devices, with springs or liquids that sensed orientation and movement. The reason they can go into game devices now is that they're made not by assembling mechanical components, but with the same techniques used to make computer chips."
"Harry Truman said, "Give Americans the facts and they'll do the right thing." In the real world 850 million people go to sleep hungry every night, but the problem isn't a lack of food. We have more than enough to go around. The problem is the distribution, something we, with other countries around the world, can be the first generation to fix. As you give thanks next week, consider sharing the idea of an Oxfam Hunger Banquet with your family and friends -
If 20 people sit down at your table, representing the world’s population:
3 would be served a gourmet, multi-course meal, while sitting at decorated table and a cushioned chair.
5 would eat rice and beans with a fork and sit on a simple cushion
12 would wait in line to receive a small portion of rice that they would eat with their hands while sitting on the floor.
The true power of an Oxfam Hunger Banquet is that as you eat your meal, unlike the real world, you see what’s on everyone else’s plate."
or the cookbook from Amazon
.
"Consciously, we have thoughts throughout the day. The songs that come and go through our minds. The decisions we make and anxieties and worries we carry. And we also have the “background noise” of our minds – the thoughts and connections and day dreams that drift in and out. The radio playing in the office that we ignore. The drone of the TV in the other room. We live our lives immersed in this white noise…not realizing that it is all getting in, running through our filters of understanding, and finding a home back in the recesses somewhere.......
Let us pray; Dear Lord, every day we find ourselves inundated with a constant barrage of information and suggestions about the way life is or ought to be or could be. It is hard for us to sort through it all, to filter out the unhelpful, to even know how we are being affected. So we pray that your Spirit bring a new measure of mindfulness into our lives. Help us to see the deeper realities of life rather than skimming the superficial surface. In Jesus’ name. Amen."
"The "Lowe's Katrina Cottage" offerings range from a two-bedroom, 544-square-foot model to a three-bedroom, 936-square-foot house. The cottages will cost $45 to $55 per square foot to build, Lowe's estimates, meaning the smallest would run about $27,200 and the largest $46,800. Estimates do not include the cost of the foundation, heating and cooling, and labor."These cottages are designed by Cusato Cottages.
"Unbelievable oasis in the mist of the historic Pike Place Market with Majestic Puget Sound and Olympic Mountain Views. Truly a beauty in one of the most coveted condo Addresses in town. Extremely sophisticated with major updated interiors.Interior features include:double sided marble gas fireplace,marble/granite bathroom with 2 shower heads,granite kitchen counters with double ovens. This is a definite MUST SEE!!!"
