tonyandkirsten.org

This week I found an incredible resource that anyone desiring to listen to Biblical teachings should check out: discipleshiplibrary.com. This site is in the process of sorting and digitizing around 30,000 messages from the past 50-60 years!!! That is ten times as many tapes as in our tape library. It’s hard to say how many are already on the website, but the number is definitely in the hundreds, and perhaps in the thousands.

Most of these messages come from either the Navigators audio archive or the tape library of the Baptist Student Union at the University of Oklahoma. Many of the teachings are from speakers/authors whose names you might recognize, like Dawson Trotman, Lorne Sanny, LeRoy Eims, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, Robert Coleman, J. Oswald Sanders, Howard Hendricks and A.W. Tozer. The statement of faith for the site seems pretty right-on, and of course with teachings from the sources they are pulling from there should be little worry about questionable theology anyway. (Of course, use your head and evaluate any teaching you might hear against the scriptures themselves!)

Message on the site are available in either MP3 format, or in streaming WMA format. Some messages have .pdf files of notes or outlines as well. The only complaint I have about this site is that they do a stupid operating system/browser check before letting you in. I only had a problem with this on our Linux laptop. At first I got a pop-up error message telling me that because I had a “non-windows or mac OS and a non-compatible browser” their site would not work properly. How silly is that!

To get around the problem, I simply installed the Firefox User Agent Switcher (which fools websites into thinking you have a different browser and OS than you are really using, but doesn’t change anything really about how the web browser works) and the site works perfectly fine, (possibly even better than in IE). There is no reason they couldn’t let a computer running linux with a mozilla-based browser into their site without any user-aget monkey business. I will probably email the webmaster soon and tell them just that! Normally I would advocate boycotting a site with such a silly browser/OS check, but this is such a great resource I would hate for anyone to miss it.

I’ve officially begun a project that I will definitely be working on for at least the next year, and probably longer: Digitizing and archiving Stonebrook’s audio tape library. Hundreds of teachings from the first 30 or so years of our church will soon be available MP3 or audio CD format!

This project has been a long time coming. I’ve known for years that the old audio tape masters won’t last forever (some may have already disintegrated beyond use) and that cassette tape is a dying format. Tony and I have been talking about starting a digitzing project for almost three years (or maybe longer). We had a couple “false starts” with other people potentially doing a lot of the work, but things never seemed to really pan out.

We acquired off of ebay a cassette deck with the appropriate features for the process several months ago, but it just sat in our basement. Finally a few weeks ago I proposed to Tony that I should be the one to do the work. It makes complete sense: digitizing is a lengthy process because it is done in “real time.” If a teaching is 45 minutes long, it will take the full 45 minutes to digitize it. But, it doesn’t require someone to sit in front of the computer for the entire time. The process of digitizing tapes is one of many 30-second to five minute tasks over the course of many hours. Since I am home most of the day with Madeline, this is no problem to fit into my life. I just run downsttairs, pop in a tape, press record on the computer, and set a timer to remind me to flip the tape. The tape gets flipped, and then when the teaching is completed I export it and convert it to the necessary formats. Probably no more than five minutes is spent per teaching.

Eventually all the teachings will be transferred to some kind of data storage server at church, as well as backed up on DVDs. (Isn’t it handy we just bought a DVD burner on sale recently?). It will be a simple process for Stonebrook Media Library workers to burn CDs (or maybe even DVDs) of audio or MP3s for anyone who wants it. In MP3 format, you could have the entire audio library (at least the teachings worth saving) on just a few DVDs! What a resource for individuals or for other churches in our movement.

But, that “entire audio library” thing is a ways off. So far I have only archived about 35 of 3000 tapes! I probably won’t do them all. I mean, do we really need to digitize and preserve all 10 or so different seminars that have been done over the years on finances? Other things are just out of date (like a teaching on using the media effectively from 1987) or have been superseeded by newer teachings (old membership seminars, for example). I’ll definitely do everything that is classic or has historical value, like all the old Herschel Martindale, Jim McCotter and Dennis Clark teachings. I’ll also be striving for breadth of topics, so if some topics only have a small number of teachings that have been done over the years, I’ll just do all of them.

If you have any requests for topics, speakers or specific messages you would like me to do sooner rather than later, please let me know (either in comments or email). As long as I keep accurate track of what I am doing, the order shouldn’t matter. Also, until the “official” system for distributing the MP3s/audio CDs/DVDs of old teachings becomes available feel free to let me know if you would like any CDs or DVDs burned of the teachings I have already done. I also have a growing collection of great teachings I have downloaded from various websites, so let me know if you are looking for teachings on something in particular.

Here are a few fun things I’ve run across lately…

The Google Maps Pedometer: Use this tool to find out the exact distance along the streets of any city. Perfect for tracking the distance of your running/jogging/walking routes! Allows you to bookmark a route or starting page to come back to it later. Example of a bookmarked map centered in on our neighborhood in Ames.

Panda Cam: A rare Giant Panda cub was born at the National Zoo in Washinton DC a couple of weeks ago. The baby panda is still quite small and hard to see on the cam, but in another few weeks or months it should be pretty adorable. Check this page at the National Zoo website for updates on the panda cub’s progress.

Guess the Google game: This looks like a really fun time-waster. Lots of images are shown from Google Images, and you have a few seconds to guess what Google Image keyword search would bring up those images! The timing didn’t quite work right on our Linux laptop, but I would guess that it would be fine on other computers.

Google Moon: No, it’s not a joke. Today is the anniversary of the first moon landing in 1969. So in honor of the occaision, Google has released a version of their Gmaps interface that allows you to explore images of the moon’s surface. Zoom in all the way for a fun surprise!

In case you haven’t gotten enough of it yet, here’s a round-up of links related to the Towers implosion yesterday:

• ISU Facilities page on the implosion, including downloadable video!
• Video from the Des Moines register
• Des Moines Register article on the implosion
• Article and video from WHO-TV
• Article and video from The Iowa Channel
• Cool pic I found on a random flickr photo stream

I also went back last night and got a few more pictures of the rubble from close-up. It was getting dark and my camera battery died before I could get very many pics of the Knapp rubble, but I got a few good ones of the Storms rubble. I’ve added these pictures to my Flickr photo stream.

I know they were just buildings, but they held oh so many memories! Many of us from the Rock waited for an hour or more to watch the big event. The period of time where Knapp and Storms were actually crashing to the ground was only a few seconds long. Most of the crowd was cheering while I welled up with tears and thought back to my years of association with those buildings.

I only lived in Towers for one year (3232 Knapp) but I was involved with doing ministry there for about another four years after that. I’ve hopped around to various areas of ministry-focus since then, but nothing holds the same emotional power as the Towers. With its isolation from the rest of campus, reputation as party dorms and general fun-loving atmosphere, it always seemed just a little different than the rest of the residence halls at ISU. I have so many wonderful memories of friends I met there and life experiences that happened within those former halls. With the way dorms are heading now, it seems no building will ever be quite like that again, at least not for the foreseeable future.

We got some good pictures of the implosion, which I have uploaded to my flickr stream. At some point I will also post high-quality versions on our photo gallery.

So, I saw this video at the conference last week. It’s kinda funny.

meChurch

It lead me to this next video, which was much funnier.

Real Christians of Genius

This next one isn’t actually funny. I saw it at the conference and it made me cry.

Together | Team Hoyt

You may want to check them out.

I heard about a great concept called FreeCycle this weekend. Basically, the idea is this: bring people who have stuff to get rid of together with people who need stuff…but have it all be a free exchange! The main rule is that everything must be absolutely free — no sales, exchanges or bartering allowed.

Here’s how it works: FreeCycle groups are formed in various localities, and a mailing list is started for each group. There are currently over 2800 FreeCycle groups and over 1.4 million members! List members post a message when they have one or more things to give away, then list recipients email the person offering the item if they would like to take it, and finally the person taking the item arranges a time to pick it up from the giver. It’s less work than taking things to the thrift store, and seems like a great way to get rid of things you don’t want to take time to sell, or don’t want to keep until the next garage sale.

And, of course you can get stuff other people are getting rid of! I joined the Story County FreeCycle list on Sunday night, and picked up my first items last night! A woman who is planning to move out of state posted a long list of items she wants to get rid of. I emailed her and let her know I was interested in the waffle maker, some hanging file folders, and the filing box. As it turned out she only lived about four blocks from our house, so we just took Madeline for a walk in the stroller and went to grab the items after dinner.

Such an easy, wonderful way to put into action the principle that “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure”!

On the off chance you were wondering what we were up to while our blog sat silent for almost two weeks, here is a run-down of our activities:

We returned Sunday night from a week of travel that included a trip to the Great Commission Pastors’ and Leaders’ Conference and a few days in Atlantic with Tony’s family. The conference was great, but I can’t say I have lots of great insights right at the moment. Since I was trying to keep Madeline playing quietly during most of the teachings I attended, I couldn’t take notes, and that makes it hard to remember the points the speakers made. We ordered the CD with MP3s of all the teachings, so I am really looking forward to listening to them again (or for the first time, in the case of teachings I missed while Madeline was sleeping). Besides the teachings, the conference included many other good times like taking Madeline swimming for the first time, and lots of great conversations.

We celebrated the 4th of July here in Ames by eating (going to a free pancake breakfast downtown, picknicking at Emma McCarthy Lee park with a few friends for lunch, then BBQing at the Heerema’s for dinner) and watching fireworks from the Heerema’s front lawn. Yesterday I finished another issue of Daylights and caught up on email and errands while Tony went back to the office to resume a normal work schedule.

Now it is back to a normal schedule, if you can ever describe our life that way!