The Unnecessary Webpage

For awhile I had messed around with making a personal webpage (ThinkTankProject.com, and currently allantan.net) but with the advent of the blog, its become practically useless. There's simply so much cool stuff out there. Here's a breakdown of my current setup:

At the base of it all I use Google's Blogger.com to host my blog (which allows anonymous commenting, and you don't need a blogger.com account to come see unlike services like facebook, hi5, etc). There's tons of templates to choose from, and with a little HTML I customize colors, layout, and add my own thingies ^_^. Made the move from Xanga to Blogger about a year ago and its been great.

Then I add on a few free services (all of you can see I've integrated into my blog along the right hand side):

Del.icio.us provides a way for me to share all my links out there. You'll see my tags under "my del.icio.us tags". So i.e. you can see my saved links related to literature by clicking the corresponding tag. It's a great service to share the most popular links out there. If I had to name one site that's revolutionized my surfing, this is it. When first looking for sites to help learn Cantonese, all I had to do was go to http://del.icio.us/popular/cantonese and I was able to benefit from all the best sites that others had found. A must-join site for the web savvy (in my humble opinion).

Flickr.com to host my pictures and give me a snazzy flash badge showing a random selection of my latest pictures. Again no membership required to see the pics, and has a nifty, ajax-powered interface. Other good alternative services include yahoo photos, fotki.com, etc.

LibraryThing is a new social book management site. You create an account and enter books you have, or want, and it organizes them all into a shelf for you. Searchs Amazon and other major libraries for book info. So as you can see on the side, I chose to have a badge that shows 3 random books off my librarything shelf. This site also has all the social networking niceties - tagging, ability to see other users that have books in common, ratings, etc.

StatCounter.com offers a no frills simple web counter. Can be set to visible or invisible.

As for me, I may finally give up on working on my own private website. I still am looking for a way to somehow have "articles", which are clearly differentiated from blog posts, and then have them tagged, organized, and linked on the side as well. Something tells me I could somehow superimpose another blogger.com page with its dedicated del.icio.us account to achieve this.. hmm.. *trails off*

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Faith and Culture

For this Friday I have been planning a movie night for Together Under Grace (TUG), the university/career fellowship at Chinese Alliance Church. I had recently seen a movie that really impacted me called Changing Lanes. I felt it would be great to show, but had some hesitations. Some Christians are definitely sensitive to things like crudge language, violence and that sort of stuff in movies. The question arose - what sort of movie should be shown at church?

This drives to much deeper issues that I've been thinking about - how should Christians interact with culture? Should we shy away from things that some Christians deem as offensive?

Then the deeper issues get into what is art/music and what is it good for. Consider a movie, which is offensive to some, but helps the viewer grow or think in a new way. Is this worthwhile to watch?

I tend to be more liberal when it comes to these issues. I'm glad someone made Saving Private Ryan, showing some of the violence and horror of WWII. Mostly because I think the film did a good job of showing the human stories, and that really impacted me. I don't know, some movies like 8mm, which delves into pornographic sex and severe violence - well I didn't find that very beneficial at all (I recall viewers walking out on the movie in the theatre).

I think we need need to be on the forefront of engaging and influencing culture. This can't happen without interacting with modern culture, and rubbing shoulders with the world. However, this should never be at the expense of our personal devotion to God, nor the cost of causing our brother to stumble.

Any thoughts?

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How I roll

Its been a busy time (but good) time since I've been back. Its good just to catch up with people. Its strange - when I'm unemployed and not in school I'm remarkably productive. Lots more pet projects I'd like to get rolling as well.

My main two objectives right now are job hunting and finishing up work for my Biblical Exegesis course I did at the Schloss. In our day and age, job hunting seems to have boiled down to hours and hours spent in front of the computer, going through various websites and then making lists, and writing emails to each company. I have one good prospect coming up, we'll see if something comes of it.

I've been motivated to read more these days. I've really been craving fiction, just recently read Stephen Lawhead's Byzantium, then Harry Potter books 1 to 3, Joy Luck Club, some Grimm's Fairy Tales, and found myself a copy of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy at a used book store yesterday. Oh for those who are into books, check out this cool new service LibraryThing, which is sort of a social community site where you can enter your entire library of books, have wishlists, compare your library with others, etc. Its quite sweet, just enter the title, author, or ISBN, and it searches major sites (primarily Amazon) and then enters all the info for you. I tried entering a few books, its really easy. Check out the few books I have on my page so far here. I plan to use this as a list of books I've used/read, regardless of whether I own it or not. I've been looking for awhile for a nice way to keep track of books, and this looks like the ticket.

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Home

There and back again... got back Wednesday afternoon. "Sweet Home Alabama" has been stuck in my head. I can truly say Winnipeg is my home. Some former Winnipeggers have different sentiments (see the song One Great City! by The Weakerthans).

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Toronto

Well I arrived in Toronto Wednesday night, a rather tiring trip. It took me a bit over 21 hours from the time I left Ross' house in Oxford until I walked in the door of my sister's apartment. I should consider myself fortunate though, the day after I left, this happened, delaying/messing-up all flights from UK->North America. The bottom picture in that news article was the airport I flew out of (London Stansted).

Its been good for me to relax here. Cambridge was very busy and tiring. Oxford was great as I visited Ross. I quite like England, hehe birthed a new dream, albeit most likely a pipe dream. Oh, to have an EU passport... hehe.

Now I'm lounging around, had breakfast a couple hours ago, spent some time emailing/surfing, and now going to read some Harry Potter. Its not a glamorous life... but I'm okay with it :P I don't have any big plans for Toronto really, other than spending time with my sisters. Going to hit up a couple musems, also there's an international dragonboat festival I think we'll check out. Some friends here to see also, but generally it'll be pretty laid back I think. Jen also has a djembe, cello and cajon which I can entertain myself on :D

It'll be good to have this week to transition into going back home. Lots to reflect on, for my experiences at the Schloss, my time in Cambridge... and the job hunting and road ahead. Back in Winnipeg this Wednesday!

Oxford - Ross and I outside the famous Eagle and Child pub,
where JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis used to meet to discuss books/ideas.

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Live and plugged in Cambridge

I scarcely believe its only been a week since I left the Schloss. I'm in full swing and halfway through my time serving with the Cambridge International Outreach.

Coming here was tough. The Schloss is a place where theres tons of visitors already, so each person there has to strike a balance between having a comfortable circle of friends, yet also meeting new people.

What basically happened was I left that community on a Sunday morning, and by Sunday afternoon I was surrounded by the new Cambridge Int'l Outeach (CIO) team, 40 people from all over. Everyone else was very excited and everyone was getting to know everyone, however I was still coping with the idea of leaving the Schloss community. So it was tough, I wanted to retreat... I am getting used to it now. Community is important - after getting more comfortable with the team it has been easier for me to extend myself and start to open up more to the int'l students (which is the whole point of the ministry lol).

The days are busy here, the weekends we have more time off, but my average day look like:
Wake up around 9:30 (staying with a host family), bike over to our main HQ, we have a time of singing and then someone teaches from a bible passage (we're going through 1 John), then morning tea, then a seminar teaching us about different cultures, then lunch, then prayer time, then afternoon activities (sports, flyering, getting to meet int'l students and invite them for evening events), coffee break, small group discussions, dinner, cafe setups, then we open up our 2 cafes. Int'l students come and we hang out with them, get to know them, host optional bible studies, etc. We close up at 11:00, clean up, debrief, and I bike back home around midnight. Five days of this in a row and I was really ready to have the weekend off.

Cambridge is a beautiful city, a lot of history, and plenty of sites to see and things to do. The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival is on, so we went to see Hamlet in the gardens of the famous King's College here which was neat.

Cambridge is interesting, mostly a university town, so there's tons of students. However during the summer most of the regular students leave, and what happens is Cambridge has many language schools that then open up, with people from all over the world coming to study and learn English. Many are only here for weeks at a time, its quite an incredible thing to see - and all the multinational friendships that come out of that. So all sorts of bizarre mixes of ethnicities are seen.

I have to go - miss you all very much.

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Bye...

Going in 5 hours. Off to Cambridge for 2 weeks, Oxford for 3 days, Toronto for 7 days, then home!

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End is coming

4 more days to finish up everything before I leave the Schloss. So much to reflect on, both on my time here and to peer at the steps ahead. I think leaving always involves sadness :(

Sat in for a couple lectures on a course "Building Christian Communities", had some really interesting content. We often remember that after the fall people long for a reconciled, perfect relationship with God, but perhaps we often forget that we also long for reconciled, perfect community. It was who we were made to be - so the course looks at how do we understand, approach, and then pursue community. Certainly my time here has really influenced my thoughts on community, and renewed my hopes of bringing some community-mindset back home as well.

Oh also check out My Google Calendar, hm seems like Google's always cooking up something cool. Google's set of web services is simply unbeatable. I can manage several different calendars, and download others. So I have my own personal one (which I linked above) which I can share, I could have a work one, Canadian holidays, Christian holidays, all color coded, and can be overlayed on each other. I can also create events and send out invitations and all that jazz. Basically small companies could easily move over to Gmail and Google Calendar to replace a shared Microsoft Exchange Server setup. Nutties. Haven't made the switch to Gmail and Google Calendar? Its worth it to make the switch.

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When things come to an end

*glances uneasily at watch*

4.5 days left.

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Where did you come from where did you go

Its been quite awhile since I last updated, its good for me to pause and try to sum up where I am and where I'm going. I leave Schloss Mittersill in 12 days, and I don't think I'll be back anytime soon. Since my last update its been a nonstop rollercoaster ride as summer is the busiest season here. I have often tried to summarize what life at Schloss Mittersill is like - well in many ways the summer is very un-mundane. The summers especially, as we have groups constantly in and out.

Arts Conference (pics)- We just finished up the busiest conference of the year, in which I took full part as a delegate but also helped out with music and audio/video setup each day. An amazing conference - gathering musicians, visual artists, filmmakers, actors, writers from Europe and North America. It was such a moving time to really consider the gift and calling for artists to be creative in our world. I think our culture totally doesn't appreciate the arts - its just some nice hobby to do, but not really important to the larger scheme of things. One of the speakers pointed out the first occurence in the Bible where we are told of someone being filled with the Spirit was actually the artist God commissioned to work on the tabernacle (Ex 35). It was great, there were workshops on painting, acting, percussion, musical arrangement, sculpture, etc. Highlight for me would be playing in a worship team with a amazing guitarist, cellist, percussionist and a jazz pianist (3 of which made a living as a musician).

Other thingies - Hard to summarize the past couple months, but a few highlights: Been doing a fair amount of hiking (pics1, pics2), and learning more about enjoying the beauty of nature. World Cup (pics) was a big thing, and especially neat as so many different nationalities come through and its interesting to watch the Swedes play with actual Swedes in the room, or Germans, Dutch, Brits, Poles, etc. As I'm the one doing technical setup for a lot of these groups that come through, I get more of an opportunity to actually get to know them. Neat opportunities come up out of that, a Swedish confirmation group of around 35 invited me to lead their worship night on their last night at the Schloss, it was a special experience and I've been really thankful to be a part of what God's doing with these groups.

Comings and Going - Many friends have left me at the Schloss, as there has been so much change within the Schloss Community. Sadly I know that in 12 days I will be the one that leaves. Its been a great time for me, from here I'll go to Cambridge for a 2 week student outreach, then visit a friend in Oxford for a couple days, and then fly to Toronto to visit my sisters. I'm sad when I think about leaving, yet excited for the steps ahead. The theme of the Arts Conference will stick with me, as a calling to what it means to really follow Jesus, whether in an artistic or just a broader sense. What he calls us to is a long obedience in the same direction. Here I am, getting ready to end another chapter, may it all be obedient in God's direction.

I've uploaded a bunch more pictures on my flickr page.

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