You’re torn right. A bike. Walking. It’s so hard for the environmentally conscious fitness freak to decide how to get to work. Oh, and there’s fitting in the gym too… Here’s a solution. A treadbike. From Wired. 
There’s a company making these – and they’ve taken it to a whole new level of production quality… 
Go where others fear to tread
Flipping the bird
I’m sick. So this might not be as funny if I were well…
Meal break Musings
Back by popular demand…so i was meant to write blogs here, but then i haven’t since the very first one. This is mostly because 1. I dont have time to write blogs. 2. I dont think people have time to read my blogs. Then with the marketing knowledge that i posses i thought about a solution to this problem – short blogs which i do have time to write in my lunch break, and that you have time to read during your lunch break. Not that i am assuming you would chose to use your precious 30 min meal break to come and read this. It should only take a couple of minutes, or less. It is really just going to be one sentence about something i’ve been muling over.
EG.
Why is it that – it is only socially acceptable for Asians to wear facemasks in public?
Hmmm…food for thought.
I’ll keep you posted (irregularly obviously!)
Spring cleaning
Spring has sprung – well, it feels like it has for those of us living in the tropics and enjoying 27 degree days.
I’ve done some further rethinking about how I structure this here page – and I’ve moved the daily posts of links out of the “Curiosities” column and into the far right.
You’ll also notice some new little images in the footer which were fun to put together. I may move to styling all my images like little polaroids, but we’ll see.
If you’ve got more suggestions for tweaks I should make – hit me up in the comments. I’ve got a fair bit of time on my hands this week.
This little piggy…
It seems I’ve picked up a case of H1N1. We’ll never know for sure… but Robyn went to the doctor yesterday and was diagnosed, and now I’m sick too. I’m going to the doctor this afternoon.
So expect more posts today, tomorrow and Friday.
Robyn wants to make it clear that we’re not dying. So it’s too early to start dividing up our possesions amongst yourselves.
One for the books
I’m a sucker for a good bit of other person promotion. And it’s probably time I mentioned Goannatree anyway.
It’s a good place to read intelligent scholarship from a Christian who is into literature, the arts and all sorts of culture.
This week Goannatree is running a book giveaway to encourage lurkers out of the woodworks – and probably to score a swag of new readers. So get along, check it out. You won’t be disappointed.
Links from August 4, 2009
- Mor(e )on Christian music
- Facing the music
- The wisdom of the world?
- Two koorongs
- Is it just me, or is there a decency pattern emerging?
- Keep Your Files Backed Up, In Sync, And Always Available
- Problems with Plagiarism
- the spiritual peace my atheism provided…
- Blast From the Past: the $3398 10MB Hard Disk
- Birthers glom on to fake Kenyan birth certificate.
- Gsalr Finds Garage Sales and Plans an Effective Route [Sales]
Someone needs to make an Australian version of this.
Facing the music
Another post, another YouTube video…
As I mentioned earlier, Matt Redman, who is responsible for a few cringe worthy "worship" songs, is undergoing a bit of a Copernican revolution. He has realised that some of the soppiness in his songs can be a little bit over the top, and not quite Biblical.
I’m glad he uses the framework he does to assess his songwriting (and that of others).
"In the Bible you don’t see a lot of people coming up to Jesus and saying you’re beautiful"
More new Muse
Here’s the second Muse song from the upcoming album – The Resistance. It’s less Queenish than the last one.
The tracklisting includes quite a few songs with “symphony” in the title. Which is pretty exciting in and of itself…
Unfortunately the YouTube video was pulled for violating copyright. Here’s a link to the song on the Muse website.
Mor(e )on Christian music
Two interesting tidbits to add to my crusade against cringe worthy Christian music…
The first, is an opinion piece in The Age where an atheist journo went along to a PlanetShakers experience*… it’s got all the echos of the South Park episode I mentioned a few weeks back – just so you know I wasn’t exaggerating the issue here’s a quote…
“Christian pop, ’80s power anthems, Metallica meets Cheap Trick. A mosh pit for Jesus was jumping with teenagers in rapture and a balcony of Planetkids went off for Christ. Music blared from the stadium sound system while the screen seduced us with slick videos edited so fast the phrase ‘‘subliminal image" kept popping into my head. Lyrics flashed up: "Come like a flood and saturate me now." I wondered what Freud would have made of the disproportionate use of such words as ‘‘come’’, ‘‘touch’’ and ‘‘feel’’, and the phrases "move within me" and "being filled". My favourite was "King of Glory, enter in".”
Secondly, There’s apparently an article somewhere where Matt Redman – cliched songwriter extraordinaire – repents from his ways of writing love songs to God. I’ll find that article when I get home and update this post.
*As a side note – this gonzo journalism thing where atheists try to experience Christian stuff from a true outsiders perspective is an interesting phenomena and is probably worth listenting to for those people trying to catch the atheist cultural zeitgeist. Other examples are the Guardian’s Alpha experiences and the Friendly Atheist Hermant Mehta’s book on his experiences in churches that he went to after an ebay campaign where confident churches could buy the right to try to convert him.
YouTube Twosday: United States of Eurasia
There’s new Muse coming out this year. Huzzah. Here’s the first track to be released from their new album – they released it in chunks and it made its radio debut today…
A bunch of links – August 3, 2009
- #593. Being a Christian Culture Snob
- Literals
- Use Wolfram Alpha as a Writing Tool [Writing]
“If you’ve ever been stuck trying to fill out a trio of words ending in “ation,” looking for the transliteration of a foreign script, finding proper pronunciation or hyphenation, or other nerdy word tasks, Wolfram Alpha can often pull off the job with a few key words. Enter word before your term to get an overview of what Wolfram knows about a phrase, or words starting with or words ending with to fit a certain phrase into your text.” - 50 Fresh Portfolio Websites for Your Inspiration
- A coin flip isn#39;t random
Yet recent research into coin flips has discovered that the laws of mechanics determine the outcome of coin tosses: The startling finding is that they aren’t random. Instead, for natural flips, the chance of a coin landing in the same position as it started is about 51 percent. Heads facing up predicts heads; tails predicts tails. - From the interwebs part 2
Scamorama
I mentioned the other day that I was going to pull the scambaiting posts off my main page. They were too long for anybody not interested in reading through pages and pages of my interactions with random Africans.
Well, today I did it – so from now on you can get your scam fix here – or subscribe to my scam posts here – for the time being these posts will still appear in my full RSS feed…
You’ll see a link to the Scambaiting category in the far right column, and the headings of the last five posts to appear there.
To whet your appetite – here’s a wordle of all of Dr Paul’s correspondence to me…
