Category: Status

Online or Offline: GMail vs Evolution

Having a difficult time trying to decide how best to manage my email, feed reading, IM and metadata.

Offline or online?

Ubuntu uses the gnome desktop and has flexible yet powerful apps such as Evolution (sort of like Office, but with intelligence), Liferea (feed reader similar to FeedDemon) and Gaim (IM convo’s).

The struggle is complicated by the fact that Ubuntu has such a great file and data searcher (Beagle) which even has a Firefox plugin to keep everything organized for you.  It’s amazing how detailed you can drill down.  I don’t even put things in folders on my system anymore.  I just dump everything into one folder and let Beagle sort it out based on the tags I’ve applied and the data within the podcasts, mp3’s, jpg’s or .docs.  That’s pretty cool.

On the other hand, GMail, Goog Reader and Googl Desktop are great applications that don’t keep me tied to one box.

But with a laptop, is that even an issue anymore?

Decisions, decisions…

Youth Ministers and Future Preachers

I’m at my “office” in the Broad River Coffee Shop sitting across from a group of young ministers and youth ministers.

Eaves-dropping on their conversation, I’m reminded that we Religious Studies folks should be thankful that Adonai chooses to work with slackers and jerks like Abram, Jacob, Joseph and Moses or Divinity Schools would not exist.

God works in Mysterious Ways…

Epoch of Juxtaposition

Doing some Sunday reading and came across this from Michel Foucault’s work “Of Other Spaces” (page 22)…

The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.  We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.  We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.

That is life changing.  Read it three times to make sure you at least see the direction Foucalt is pointing towards.  When I try to explain to people “what I do for a living” (academics, teaching and online marketing), I should point them to that quote.

Back to burying my nose in Foucault on a snowy Sunday afternoon (could life be any better?)…

Teaching College Students Versus Teaching 8th Graders

Wow, what a difference.

I’m enjoying the college students at Gardner-Webb Univ (harrelsonreligion.com if you want to follow along) and we’re starting to get the questions flowing.

However, teaching the 8th graders at Hammond School for the previous two years was mesmarizing because I was constantly having to think on my feet, adjust and react to the crowd.  It was a bit like playing jazz.

Teaching college is more like a staged  and choreographed production where the script stays the same every day and includes little audience interaction.   I’m sure that it’s my fault that the crowd isn’t clapping and dancing in the aisles… need to work on that…

Snow Day

Got up at 4:30, took the pups out, got dressed, had my coffee and was ready to go for a day of teaching at GWU.  I’d repeatedly called into the University’s weather hotline all last night and this morning and according to the nice sounding lady’s voice on the recording, classes were still being held today.

So, I get into my car and make it about 40 minutes down the road from Asheville.  When I hit the Saluda grade, I decided to call the hotline once more just to make sure we were having classes because NPR was reading out all of the closings in the area.  Sure enough, classes were cancelled.   Ugh.

I’m glad for a day off, but at this point, I’d rather go ahead and teach!  We were covering the Exodus today and had a reading quiz scheduled, so this puts us yet another day behind (I spent too much time on Genesis 1 and 2).  Squeezing the entire Old Testament into one semester is unbelievably hard, especially when you have so much passion for the topics we are covering (and the students are beginning to ask good questions about the Documentary Hypothesis, etc).

Anyways, I’m kicking back with some Neil Young, hot chocolate, Josephus and Schaefer today.  I’ll send pics to Flickr if things get fun outside.

Enjoy your day, whereever you are!

Las Vegas Trip

On Tuesday morning at 5:44am, I returned from a four day trip to Vegas for the Affiliate Summit West conference.  I had to be in class at 8am to teach 35 eager young minds about the Old Testament.  Needless to say, I was wiped out the entire day (and most of today).

There are some pictures on my Flickr page, and I’ll be posting more about the trip later.

Glad to be back on EST!

Going Back to Google and 30Boxes

Since I made my monumental switch to Ubuntu back in October, I’ve also attempted to move my email, feed reading and calendaring off the web as well.  I’ve been using Linux info manager Evolution for mail and calendar, which is a nice product.  It’s almost Outlook-lite.  For my feed reading, I’ve been using Liferea, which is also a simple and easy to use program, but lacks the speed and flexibility of Google Reader.

So, I just haven’t been able to accomplish that goal of going offline since I’m constantly on the road.  I miss my GMail interface, I miss the fly-through-feed reading of Google Reader and I certainly missed my 30Boxes.

So, I’ve decided to put everything back up on these platforms and get back to what I’m comfortable with in terms of usage.