What do you get when you cross a Nintendo DS lite with a Macbook air? This....

My youtube is not working in the hospital network, so please let me know what you think of the video (I haven't seen it), but this looked pretty funny!

From engadget.

It's hard to deny that Apple's MacBook Air advertisement is pretty catchy, and while the DS Lite doesn't exactly pull off the whole envelope exit quite as elegantly as Cupertino's latest lappie, it doesn't do a half bad job representin'. In the spoof waiting for you after the jump, you'll see a black DS Lite retrofitted into the MBA spot, and while the text, lighting and overall smoothness isn't on par with the original, at least the music is spot-on. Click on though to see for yourself.

[Via DSFanboy]

Update: Psh, thanks for pulling the video, YouTube and / or user. Well, trust us, it like totally existed. ... Ok, looks like we're back. Thanks EspadaUno.

Continue reading Nintendo's DS Lite retrofitted into MacBook Air ad

It 'lures' your children outside and 'tricks' them into moving around!

First the Nintendo Wii, now THIS! Next scientists will tell us that exercise is good for children! I say, PSP and a packet of crisps.... Just kidding!

From engadget.

We saw a few clever products at Toy Fair 2008 designed to get kids up and active, but none so nefarious -- and cute -- as Swinxs. The "toy" is basically a talking computer with an RFID reader, that guides kids through different pre-loaded games or stories. The kids wear RFID wrist bracelets that identify them in the game, and let them interact with the machine. We heard, from a reliable source, that if kids engage in this type of "running around" in "grassy areas" they very well may die, but that's all hearsay. Once kids grow tired of the included games they can download and install more over USB, and there's a free SDK for developers to create new entertainment for Swinxs. No word on a price or release date, but hopefully we'll be seeing more of this one as time progresses.

Tips for dealing with multimedia meltdown in your worship services

Our Church's worship coordinator sent these great tips to us. They are quite useful and simple to implement and apply.

Worship Concepts
The Online Newsletter of WorshipFilms.com

Vol.6, No.2

Recovering from a Multimedia Trainwreck
by Jesse Lewis

We had just begun our praise and worship set when our projector suddenly flashed a warning message about overheating, then decided it needed a rest and shut itself down. This type of event occurs in churches all around the world every Sunday: a computer locks up; a bulb blows; there is no audio feed from the DVD player; the disc that worked fine 20 minutes earlier now will not read.

As techies, our goal is to go unnoticed, and when things go wrong, everyone notices. So how can we make the best of these situations?

1. Don't let the distress that you feel over the event show outwardly during the service. Remember, our goal is to go unnoticed, so the less demonstration we make, the better.

2. Priority number one is to clear the screen or platform of anything that is distracting. It is far better to have nothing on the screen, than to project something that should not be projected.

3. Look for the fastest way to minimize the disruption to the flow of the service. For instance, if a sermon illustration video clip is malfunctioning, it is probably better to move on and skip the illustration than to wait several minutes for the video to be resurrected. Ask this question: 'Is the overall effectiveness of our communication today going to be higher if we simply move on or if we wait it out?' Obviously, there is not one answer that fits every situation.

4. Do the best possible job you can without taking yourself too seriously. No matter how much you plan and prepare, something will happen sooner or later that is unexpected. And when you have done your homework and it still happens, most of the time a little laughter is better than a big blow-up or silent sulk.

5. Learn from the wreckage. Research why things happened the way they did, and take the steps necessary (assuming they are financially feasible) to prevent their recurrence. Was the incident caused by operator error? If so, would additional training help? Was it because of equipment failure? If so, look for ways to add redundancy, so that if your primary mode of media delivery malfunctions, you have a quick fix (e.g., if the church uses a desktop computer, is it possible to have a laptop on standby?).

Technorati tags: worship resources, dealing with multimedia failure, Church equipment, tips

What do you thnink about the South African campus riots by disgruntled students?

What are your thoughts? Today we heard of another campus that was disrupted and vandalised by unhappy students...

I can understand that a student (or group of students) would become angry when there is no service delivery by their academic institution. I can also understand the desperation to gain higher education in order to be employed, and the frustration with the cost of education (and particularly higher education in South Africa).

Cost is a complex issue, as a Dean of a college we have found that we simply cannot register too many 'private' students (i.e., students who will have to pay fees as opposed to our 'Church sent' students for whom no fees are required). The sad reality is that the expectations of the Department of Education and the Council on Higher Education are so high that they cause institutions to incur HUGE costs that are not directly related to education. These are costs such as administrative systems, reporting mechanisms, sureties, and other such things. We have incurred hundreds of thousands of Rands worth of costs to meet the requirements. However, if one were to conduct an 'audit' of the DOE I'm fairly sure that one would find that they are not fit to offer the service they are required to offer... But, tha't is another matter entirely.

Sadly, what this means is that private and public institutions either need to find donor sources to absorb the new costs, or they have to recoup them through registrations and student fees. This is simply not feasible! We currently have to provide a surety ammount that is more than double our student fees for every one of our private students (in other words, we don't make money on their training, we loose the cost of their education, plus pay an additional amount in surety!) If we were ruthless we could simply charge three times what we currently charge in order to make a profit (and so grow our operation and train more people).

However, that is not the case....

In reality, I guess, that most administrations do a bit of both, they try to fund some of these costs by donations, budget cuts, and some other creative means, and then other parts of the cost through raising student fees. The pressure must be released somewhere!

Sadly, it would seem, that the students who are threating educators, intimidating fellow students, and destroying the costly facilities of their campuses show no insight into these struggles! In fact, if the news reports are to be believed, many of the students in Durban and at the Tshwane University of Technology who are 'striking' are doing so because they have been excluded from current study because of unpaind debts arising from previous study... Now that is just thuggery! How can one carry the costs of previous students (and previous years) into the current year and still provide quality education if there is no money coming in!

It is a grave situation! Perhaps Naledi Pandor's student pledge is not such a bad idea after all (I have not read it yet, I need to do so). From what I understand it deals with the issue of entitlement and encourages learners to understand the privelages and responsibilities of learning.

What are your thoughts? What should we do? Someone is going to have to pay, it is either the tax payer, or the learner... Who should bear the cost?

Many world quantum theory, an easy explanation using a multiplay Super Mario game!

This is so cool! Multi world quantum theory explained in a fun way!

The Mechanically Separated Meat blog has created a merged video of hundreds of games played against "Kaizo Mario World" (an insanely difficult homebrew Mario level) and used the resulting video as the jumping-off point for an extremely stimulating and enlightening discussion of the Many Worlds hypothesis in quantum physics. If I had to explain Many Worlds to an eight-year-old (something I expect to have to do in, oh, about eight years), this is where I'd start. I'm especially enamored of the choice of Mario for this, since it's just the right blend of puzzler and jumper to make you want to explore all possible choices (I've recently become brutally addicted to Paper Mario, which now occupies about 10 percent of my brain on a more-or-less permanent basis as a kind of low-grade background process).

This said, tiny quantum events can create ripples that have big effects on non-quantum systems. One good example of this is the Quantum Suicide “experiment” that some proponents of the Many-Worlds Interpretation claim (I think jokingly) could actually be used to test the MWI. The way it works is, you basically run the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment on yourself– you set up an apparatus whereby an atom has a 50% chance of decaying each second, and there’s a detector which waits for the atom to decay. When the detector goes off, it triggers a gun, which shoots you in the head and kills you. So all you have to do is set up this experiment, and sit in front of it for awhile. If after sixty seconds you find you are still alive, then the many-worlds interpretation is true, because there is only about a one in 1018 chance of surviving in front of the Quantum Suicide machine for a full minute, so the only plausible explanation for your survival is that the MWI is true and you just happen to be the one universe where the atom’s 50% chance of decay turned up “no” sixty times in a row. Now, given, in order to do this, you had to create about 1018 universes where the Quantum Suicide machine did kill you, or copies of you, and your one surviving consciousness doesn’t have any way of telling the people in the other 1018 universes that you survived and MWI is true. This is, of course, roughly as silly as the thing about there being a universe where all the atoms in your heart randomly decided to tunnel out of your body.

But, we can kind of think of the multi-playthrough Kaizo Mario World video as a silly, sci-fi style demonstration of the Quantum Suicide experiment. At each moment of the playthrough there’s a lot of different things Mario could have done, and almost all of them lead to horrible death. The anthropic principle, in the form of the emulator’s save/restore feature, postselects for the possibilities where Mario actually survives and ensures that although a lot of possible paths have to get discarded, the camera remains fixed on the one path where after one minute and fifty-six seconds some observer still exists.

Link (via Kottke)

A plushie brain cell... mmmmm.. gifts for geeks!

I don't know about you but getting a gift that shows thought, care, and insight, is always a great blessing! Examples are: the two die cast Vespa's my friend Wes bought me, the tin Vespa model my wife gave me to celebrate the award of my Phd, the Vespa cap that Ingrid Turton gave me for my birthday two years ago, the Vespa T-shirt Pete sent me for Christmas in 2006, and the 'geek questionaire' book that Dr Kate (Wright) gave me in 2005!

These are all great gifts because show insight, care, and thought.

Here's another great gift idea for the geek in your life!

The fun folks at Giant Microbes--makers of such plushified diseases as Hepatitis, Staph, and Ebola--also sell this cute stuffed neuron. It's only $7.95.
Link

Previously on BB:
• Plush guts Link
• Cute virii stuffies Link (via Mind Hacks)

An emotional recovery

At first I thought that I would entitle this post 'the emotions of recovery', but in truth, I have no idea what these emotions are, and I would hate to sound like I have any insight or expertise in such matters.

So, I chose the more honest title 'an emotional recovery'. I woke up at around 3.30 am this morning with some pain. I guess it is the pain of recovery. As the wounds turn into scars and the experiences form memories I have begun to feel a fairly profound sense of loss. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of instances in which I express my gratitude to the Lord for saving me from a much worse fate than a broken leg! I am truly grateful for that! But that is a gratitude that comes from the creation of perspective. The reality, for me, is that I have a set of experiences to deal with that form my reality and challenge me to find and create meaning and hope.

The first set of experiences are what I call 'dailyness' - I'm not sure if anyone else has experienced these? What 'dailyness' refers to is a grinding routine, not a blessed one, but a necessary one. 'Dailyness' has to do with survival, not with living. I have experienced 'dayliness' before, as a young child seperate from my parents, as a young man in the army, when I took up my first post as a minister in a strange context - I feel it now again at just before 4am on this morning. In the intercessory prayers in the order of morning worship there is a prayer that goes something like "Lord, help all people to rise above the drudgery and want of their daily lives into the joy and glory of Your life..." Something like that. It speaks of the reality that so many people face - simply rising, working, sleeping, rising, working, sleeping.... There is no joy, no excitement, no wonder, just each day. I awoke with that feeling today - in a short while I'll be woken for the morning rounds (change the drip, take my blood pressure, take my temperature, have my morning medication...), then the day moves towards its regular rhythm of interupted sleep, therapy, thought, longing, concern, medication, sleep, therapy, thought, longing... You get the idea.

Perhaps recovery requires some measure of consistency, some measure of calm and 'dailyness' for the drugs to take their effect, the bones to heal, the scabs to form, and the experiences to become memories.

The second set of emtions are those that are far more profound, they are much less tangible, and much more subtly powerful. These emotions form the backdrop of every moment (whether waking or sleeping), they are what Paul Tillich would have called 'existential' realities, truths that really are true. Of course we seldom face these existential realities because of the 'undailyness' of our regular lives. For most of us, our regular lives are filled with drive, commitment, energy, encounter, discovery, renewal, objectives, and a myriad of activities. These things fill every waking moment (and sometimes even the moments that should be given over to sleep!) Achievement, success, qualifcation, ownership, satisfaction, hunger and freedom are but a few of the things that drive me away from the existential questions. So, this week, lying in my hospital bed, as the world goes on without me, I have been given a chance to ask a few of these questions 'What am I here for?', 'What does my skill set and personality contribute towards humanity, and of course the will and work of deity?', 'How am fairing on life's journey? [in my instance this is a question about 'depth of living', not 'speed of living' - I guess it will differ from person to person]. Of course there are many other questions I have been asking, some have to do with my past, some with my present situation, and others about the future.

One thing is certain, such 'existential' reflection requires change, not the kind of change that says I will move from doing this activity to doing that activity... The dailyness will return to any activity if it is not filled with some greater purpose, meaning, and intent. No, this is a substantial change, the kind of change that has to do with values and virtues - what matters MOST and why it matters most. These must surely be the things that shape my living.

You see, the one thing I have come to realise is that recovery could simply be a process of return to the functioning I had before my accident. But, that is not recovery at all. True recovery requires the courage to get to a state of greater well-being and wholeness than what I previously possessed. Pete spoke of this in a recent post on his blog about 'balance'. I have lived with imbalance so long that I though life was supposed to be a bit skew!

An emotional recovery... That's what I am experiencing. My recovery has emotion within it, it also deals with a myriad of emotions that stem from 36 years of living, the dayliness of this day, and the existential hope of a better day to come.

I have had a verse from the Psalms within my heart for the last few days, Psalm 18:35-36 "You give me your shield of victory, your right hand sustains me. You stoop down to make me strong. You broaden the road I walk on so that my ankles do not break" (I would add the addendum, "and IF they do break, you make the whole again")

Have a blessed day. Spare a prayer for those in hospital.

A picture of the (broken) leg in question

I must be bored (and feeling a whole lot better after the accident and surgery) since I am taking pictures of my leg.

Here you can see where it was cut to put the plate, pin, and screws in place. There is one other wound on the back of the leg where the bone punctured the skin either as the car hit me, or as I hit the road when falling from my bike.

Better days ahead! Sun is shining!

My blogging equipment while in hospital (Pic)

Here's a photo of my blogging equipment while I'm in hospital. Sadly the Macbook Pro (may she rest in pieces) died in the accident.

This photo was taken on my trusty iPhone. In it you see my tiny little Sony Vaio UX 180 palmtop, a foldable (cheap) Bluetooth keyboard, and my Nokia e90 miracle phone! I can coonect the phone to the computer as a 3G modem, and the keyboard via Bluetooth to either the phone or computer to reply to emails etc.

It is quite frustrating not to have my regular laptop! But, this forms a good substitute system. I can browse the web, respond to emails and even post to my blog!

The only downside is.... Windows... Well windows and the fact that this rig requires a surface to put the notebook and keyboard on (not easy in hospital). Can anyone guess what book is currently under the keyboard?

Luckily I did a timemachine backup of my Mac laptop the day before the accident, so if the insurance pays out I should be up to speed in next to no time!

Being a minister in a secular world...

I don't know how the other 'ministers / pastors / priests' feel about telling people what they do. I seldom tell people that I am a minister, unless they press and pry I tend to say something like 'I am a teacher', or ,'I train people for a living'. These are not untruths, but they do veil the truth of my ordination slightly.

The reason that I do this is twofold. First, I don't tell people what I do upfront because I find that when most people realise that they are speaking with a minister they cast me in the light of their own stereotypes. For some that is the stereotype of a holies than thou person who is obsessed with morality, the Bible and God (which is not entirely untrue - although I do hope that I don't come across that way!) For others it may be a scant reminder of some televangelist they have heard or read about. And so before we have even begun to relate I sometimes get the feeling that I have been judged and boxed, and that their responses are guarded and unnatural.

The second reason why I don't tell people what I do is because there are some times, I have come to discover, where I cannot do what is expected of a minister. My current state is one such example. I am in pain, I need to muster my resources to cope with my own feelings, emotions, fears, and struggles, and I would not be of much help as a counsellor or spiritual director to any other person at the moment. Sadly, my accident has left my world rather small (about the size of the bed to which I am confined). Sure, I shall be able to draw on this experience in the months and years to come, but for now it is best that I don't create an unrealistic expectation of what I can do.

I still pray for the staff and patients, the care givers and administrators, in the ward. I remember them before God and ask God to heal them, as I ask the same for myself. But that is a private matter - it is my joy and duty to do so as Christian, not as a Methodist minister.

So, I have not told anyone that I am a minister. I have, however, gently guided conversations towards prayer, faith, and the hope of God's healing power. And, it has been great to see how people have responded. A well to do gentlemen with a lovely young wife (no doubt a second wife) was with me in the ward last night. As we chatted I asked him about his faith, and about his surgery and how we was coping with the pain and slow recovery. As we chatted he spoke of how his life has changed through this experience in hospital. He spoke of a woman cleaner who prayed with him in the middle of the night a few days ago when his pain would not subside, and of how he has come to appreciate the value and blessing of life!

I just listened and asked a few pointed questions. It was glorious! It has been years since I have been able to do this with anonimity. Often people come to see me now because I have a title, I hold a prominent office in the Church, or because I have some influence to practically change their situation within the Church. This person, however, did not know any of that. He simply knows me as a reckless young man who broke his leg in a motorcycle accident. And so he talked, and we prayed.

I had a tough night last night. We are not sure why, but my fever has stayed at around 38-39 degrees. It could simply be the body reacting to the breaks in the leg. It could be that there is an infection brewing somewhere. This morning I fittedn my 'boot' and made my way to the bathroom with a walking ring to have a shave and a wash down. My blood pressure dropped and so did I. Luckily I passed out onto a chair. I am somewhat disheartened! I hate being so helpless! I hate being subject to a broken leg (of all things!)

My friend prayed with me because I am a fellow journeyer in this life that has an ebb and flow. He understands that sometimes things go well, and at other times it does not. We are just two people who are discovering things about ourselves, about our lives, and about our God. And that is good enough.

Surgery is over, now it's time to mend

Thanks for the many good wishes after my bike accident yesterday. I was on my way back from a radio broadcast on Radio Pulpit heading back to the office to conduct a staff meeting. With the problems that my car has been giving me I decided to ride 'Mertyl' my lovely old orange Vespa (who now is no more...) Just near our college is a police depot where cars park on the pavement since there is no parking elsewhere. As I drove down the road a person came shooting off the pavement in his 4x4. He obviously did not see me since he rammed me on the left breaking my leg and sending myself and the Vespa to the ground under the huge wheels of the 4x4.

When I caught my breath I could see that my left leg was broken in two places, and that the bone punctured the skin. Thank God that when the accident happened a past student, Kemp Tube was on his way to the College. He helped to carry me to the pavement and got my bag (in which my Macbook Pro laptop was - it also did not survive the crash! Very sad!)

The guy who hit me loaded me into his car and took me to the local Medicross - not a very comfortable trip with the broken leg!

So, I went into surgery last night where they operated to fix the leg. I hope to be discharged from the highcare today and move into a regular ward tonight.

My neck, back, and arms are fine (just a few scrappes and bruises). My heart is so sore over the dead Vespa and the dead Mac laptop... But, I praise God that I am fine!

I've been in an accident... I'm on my way to surgery.

I'm waiting to be taken to Pretoria East hospital for surgery... I was knocked off my lovely little Vespa this morning... She is worse off than I am. My left leg is broken and possibly a shoulder blade.

Please say a little prayer for me!

Thanks! Dion (blogging through thick and thin!)