Lake Neuron

Well, the reason you didn’t hear much out of me last night is that I spent hours — literally — setting up my new smartphone. Here is the capsule version:

• Because I don’t have MS Office, I don’t have MS Outlook. And Windows Mobile devices are set up to synch with Outlook. Luckily, I had found a way to use the freeware program FinchSync to synch with the Mozilla Thunderbird address book and the Mozilla Sunbird calendar. I had to install and set up Sunbird, install and set up FinchSync on both the phone and my computer, and clean out my long-unused Thunderbird address book (I now channel all of my personal e-mail accounts through GMail and work with them online) so that I could import up-to-date addresses from Palm Desktop.
• I got FinchSync running, but I had some other minor problem with the phone and went to the AT&T web site to try to find the answer. The very first thing I should have checked after bringing the phone home was for a firmware upgrade. There was, in fact, a firmware upgrade, which also included an upgrade of Windows Mobile from version 5 to version 6. So I did that, which was time-consuming and which erased every modification I’d made to the handset up to that point.
• I re-installed FinchSync and the GMail Java applet, both of which had been deleted by the firmware upgrade. When I went to re-sync the phone, I discovered that the new version of Windows Mobile on the phone wanted a new version of ActiveSync on my PC, so I had to find, download and set that up.
• The export of address data from Palm Desktop into Thunderbird went relatively well, but there’s a “display name” category in Thunderbird for which there was no equivalent in Palm — and that’s the category that shows up first when the contacts appear on the phone. So I had to go in and manually create a “display name” for each of my 150 or so contacts. I also had to manually enter my upcoming calendar items into Sunbird (which I really like, BTW).
• There was also the normal stuff like warranty registration and just figuring out how to use the thing. It took me a good 15-20 minutes just to try to figure out how to change the ringer volume.

It sounds like a lot of trouble, and it was, but it was also sort of fun — and I think I’m going to be very happy with the Blackjack.

We had an ice cream social at church tonight as a kickoff for our Vacation Bible School:

Well, I answered my own question online and I have ordered my new Blackjack. Yes, I know there’s a more-advanced Blackjack II, but with the mission trip coming up I didn’t want to spend the $199 out-of-pocket cost, even though $100 of it would have been rebated eventually. The original Blackjack was free with a two-year contract extension.

They promise delivery in two business days, so I’m assuming the phone will get shipped Monday and I’ll have it Wednesday at the latest.

Between now and then, I’m going to go through the contacts on my Palm and weed out ones that I’m not sure are still accurate or where there’s little chance I’ll ever need the information again.

I’ve already downloaded the instruction manual so I can see what all it can do!

UPDATE: AT&T is now showing that the phone has been shipped, even though today is Saturday. Woo hoo!

Well, I just got back from the ER.

Ha, ha! I have fooled you, regular readers. While the above statement is, technically, true, it implies a level of crisis which is not, in this case, accurate. I’m fine.

On July 12, the patients from Bedford County Medical Center will be transferred to a sparkling new facility which will be called Heritage Medical Center. Tomorrow, there will be a community open house at the new hospital; tonight there was a VIP reception followed by tours. So I was in the ER, and the operating room, and ICU, and what have you — but as a tourist, not a patient or concerned well-wisher.

I have to say, the new hospital looks very nice, and there are a lot of well-thought aspects to the design.

If anyone reading this uses a Blackjack smartphone (not the Blackjack II), answer me this: is there a way to synch the phone (calendar, contacts, etc.) with one’s computer using a cable? Because I don’t want to pay for a $30 / month data plan. I have a $5.99 / month data plan on my current phone, which I use mostly to check GMail using its mobile app.

It has been, for reasons I obviously can’t go into, an extremely stressful and unpleasant week at work. So it was a strange time for me to have such a remarkable high point in the middle of it.

As you may recall, I am a United Methodist layspeaker, a non-ordained church member who is available to preach, for example when a church pastor is on vacation or when there are not enough ordained pastors to fill the available pulpits. The Tennessee Annual Conference, the business meeting and worship gathering for Methodists from throughout Middle Tennessee, traditionally recognizes layspeakers and layleaders during one of its evening worship services. But this year, for the first time ever, it was decided to have a layspeaker preach that night.

Earlier this year, 23 different layspeakers submitted sermons, which had to tie in with the conference theme, “Beyond The Walls: Making Disciples of Jesus Christ for the Transformation of the World.” A short list of four was chosen to deliver their sermons to the selection committee, and I was given the great honor of being the first layspeaker, as far as anyone can recall, ever to preach during an evening worship service at the Tennessee Conference.
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I bought a brand new bottle of SPF 30 sunscreen on my way to the company picnic today and applied it carefully.

For most of the picnic, we were under a shelter, but later on several of us went over to the outdoor pool at the park complex.

My sunscreen was supposed to be “very water resistant,” and I felt the lotion on my skin even when I was in the pool.

I really hadn’t felt sore, but just now when I was in the bathroom I caught a glimpse of my head and shoulders in the mirror, and I’m quite red. I don’t know whether the sunscreen had been on the store shelf too long and had lost its effectiveness (which I understand happens), or whether just enough of it came off in the pool to allow me to get some sun. Maybe a little of both.

I don’t know how long in advance tonight’s “Saturday Night Live” rerun had been scheduled, but the cold open was sort of, well, timely, in a sarcastic way. Hillary Clinton (played by Amy Poehler) delivers a cheerily condescending monologue to her Democratic rivals about the inevitability of her nomination and how maybe one of them will get to spread his wings in 2016.

I got away from work unusually early today because of some stuff I’m going to have to do tomorrow. I told my co-workers I was thinking of going to see the 4 p.m. matinee of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” in Tullahoma, down the road. (It’s also showing here in Shelbyville, but they don’t have weekday matinees.)

But when I left work, it was too early to go to Tullahoma. I came home, sprawled out on the couch, and dozed lightly off, until just a little too late to make it to the movie.

I’ll see it eventually.

By Seth Godin, pointed out to me by Chris Oakes. Here are some of the high points, but you need to read ‘em all:

Before you hit send on that next email, perhaps you should run down this list, just to be sure:

4. Did every person on the list really and truly opt in? Not like sort of, but really ask for it?

13. Am I angry? (If so, save as draft and come back to the note in one hour).

18. Is it in black type at a normal size?

32. If this is a press release, am I really sure that the recipient is going to be delighted to get it? Or am I taking advantage of the asymmetrical nature of email–free to send, expensive investment of time to read or delete?

A great, great list.

Today is one month from my Costa Rica trip.

It is also five days away from my sermon at Annual Conference. I am humbled, and a little surprised, by how many of my friends, family and fellow church members are making the effort to come and hear me that night. The church is planning a carpool. They announced it a week ago and then moved up the time this week after deciding that seating would be at a premium.

I bought a new shirt and tie today to wear that night.

The always-funny Joe Bob Briggs, writing in the Wittenburg Door, has a frank, funny and self-deprecating account of attending an atheists’ convention, including speeches from Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens et al. Here are a few choice samples:

Silverman is a smart guy, and if I had to sum up the common characteristics of the people who gathered in Crystal City, that would be it: they’re smart. Atheism is for smart people. That’s both its strength and its weakness. It’s a trait they share with the Libertarian Party, by the way, which probably has a fair number of atheists among its adherents…. There’s no sense of responsibility for making “the least of us” part of the secret.

Most of what the atheists say about religion is absolutely true. We don’t need to look any further than the Catholic sex abuse scandals–11,000 victims of 4,300 priests, and that’s only the ones we’ve been able to count–to find concrete examples of active evil done in the name of God. And it’s certainly not surprising if some of those victims leave the church and become atheists. What is surprising is what the atheists want to replace that with.

Encountering this sort of faith in human intelligence in 2008 is a little like visiting Wall Street and finding a 1920s-style industrialist who’s still investing in giant dam projects. We tried that already!

It’s a great read. I haven’t contributed to the Door in a few years. Last year, I made contact with the editor, and told him I wanted to get back involved, and he sent me a book to read, with the goal of getting an interview with the author. But things got crazy here, and I literally lost the book, and even the name of the author.

But I still subscribe, and I still love the magazine. I love their usual critique of televangelists and other religion-abusers, and I love it when they go after the other side as well.

Twitter has been down so much lately I’m trying out Plurk:

Good advice from an English professor (who happens to be my sister-in-law):

I’ll admit to having more faith in this whole language stuff these days — he will eventually learn to spell [fry] with a “y,” in the meanwhile, if he’s less hung up over spelling and right and wrong, he’s more likely to actually try to write recreationally. If I can get him to like writing first, I can get him to like correct writing later.

This was exactly my approach when I tried (clumsily) to teach creative writing at Mountain T.O.P. Summer Plus.