I’m following the whole Edward Snowden saga as best as I can, and it’s highly intriguing. The government’s behaviors also remind me somewhat of an old Sinclair Lewis novel, It Can’t Happen Here, which tells a dystopian story of the U.S. falling ever so gently into fascist rule. I feel like I need to re-read it. But anyway. Before my browser gets too full again, here is your weekly serving of interesting stuff, featuring one of my favorite subjects: Technology! On Christians naively expecting the best web offerings from ministries they donate a pittance to (if anything at all): (via Challies ) In their mind, every Christian ministry is expected to have every possible resource (study tools, videos, books, audio, articles, apps, etc.) available on every possible platform. And they want it now! Not only do they want it now, that want quality, and they want it for free. A thank you is seldom heard when this is actually achieved, after all, it was online and therefore easy, inexpensive...

I bought a new phone last week. No, it wasn’t an iPhone, though I was thinking about getting either an iPhone 4 or 4S. They wouldn’t have service on the provider I’m currently using, so I decided, hey, what else is nifty and less expensive? I found another pay-as-you-go provider that offered service on a very nice-looking Samsung Galaxy SII. Certain of its specs resembled the things I liked about the iPhone 4S — namely, the 8MP camera, but also the storage capacity, the touchscreen, etc. And this one could turn into a little miniature wifi hotspot for my laptop. And its provider, though also not my current provider, has decent service around here and offers a cheap plan with unlimited data. So I bought it. The nice thing? I was thinking of it for a couple days—as I always do with large purchases—and then what do you know, I look again at the phone and voila, the site is running a “Breakup Day” special on Feb. 13, making the phone cheaper than I could find it on eBay. That clinched ...

I didn’t expect to have a bunch of links to read this week. After all, I didn’t even have internet access at the library for most of it. But today’s catch-up day, and I can’t resist the allure of these links about… education and technology. Why you should postpone college —Amen and amen! Written by somebody at Forbes who forgot to add that summer jobs could just as easily serve his purpose of “grownup training,” avoiding the necessity of a two-year gap between high school graduation and one’s freshman year at college. You can’t afford Apple’s education revolution —yet. I.e., i-Texbooks sound awesome at fifteen bucks a pop (compared to fifty at the used bookstore), but there are some caveats—like the cost of the device itself. (I’m not going to spend my extra $500 on it. When my current laptop poops out, I’m buying a real Mac, with InDesign and Photoshop and possibly Quark if I can afford it.) And for the record, I’m writing an article right now on the bunches of iPads the local schoo...

Smartphoner picks up phone. Smartphoner speaks to phone: Where's the closest gas station? Phone: That is an unintelligible statement. Smartphoner: What's so unintelligible about it? Phone: That is an unintelligible statement. Smartphoner: It's not a statement, it's a question. Phone: That is an unintelligible statement, you idiot. Smartphoner: *sigh* Where can I buy gas? Phone: You are able to buy gas at any gas station. Smartphoner: I know that. Where's the closest gas station? Phone: That is another unintelligible statement. Smartphoner: What's so unintelligible about it? *speaks loudly and distinctly* where is the closest gas station? Phone: Your question contains no frame of reference. Smartphoner: Well at least it's intelligible. Which gas station is closest to me? Phone: Your question contains no frame of reference. Smartphoner: Closest to me, I said. Where's the closest gas station? Phone: That is an unintelligible statement. Smar...

At least I made it halfway through my senior year of college before caving, right? Yes, I went with a new service provider this week, one that will cost barely four dollars more a month and give me twice the minutes I used to have available, plus lots of texting (not unlimited though). I figured that was cheap enough to warrant the switch, plus I wouldn’t have to sacrifice the great cell coverage around here. I’ve always been “the one” among my friends who doesn’t even have texting (not just limited, but none, nada, zip). Even my Quaker friend without the Facebook page has texting. So, it’s kind of a big deal for me to be doing this, at least for my roommate. (She has said for months she always wants to text me random things she thinks of, or observations, or whatnot.) So far I appreciate the additional method of communication; it comes in handy in certain situations. I do, however, worry about being consumed by the texting culture. Number one, I’ve seen so many friends randomly tex...

I have this one Facebook friend whom I’ve met exactly two times. (Not very substantial meetings either; he was at a couple contra dances I went to with his sister.) He is always publishing melancholy “I’m not dating anybody!” statii, his friends always console him in the comments, and once in a while those things show up in my news feed. Random, I know. But this is getting somewhere. One such consolatory remark was written by a woman who said she had followed Rebecca St. James’ advice to “wait for him” ( or some such thing ) and had actually found a decent him. It made me wonder, has Miss St. James ever found anybody? Much good her waiting (which I took to mean passivity) did if she hasn’t yet… she’s got to be in her late thirties, I thought. So I googled—“is Rebecca St. James actually married”? And I pulled up her Wikipedia page, looked under “personal life,” and found out that she had just gotten engaged over Christmas, a rumor on several blogs that she confirmed on her various soc...

Remember that map of online communities that I loved ? There’s a new and improved version…. *does happy dance* By the way, you can see the larger version on xkcd .

I don’t have texting. Yet I have a Twitter account. I accomplish this via a desktop widget on my laptop. Of course, this means I use Twitter only when I’m at my laptop. Sometimes I think of something that I want to post on Twitter—a quick reflection on a piece of news, or whatever—but I realize that, because of Twitter’s extremely time-sensitive nature, it doesn’t really make sense to post anything about it even just a couple hours after the fact. I’d just be behind the times. Then there are other instances when I can think of something to write that is quite timely, but much too long for a Twitter update, even if it comes to me in response to something I saw on Twitter. So these are my problems: Twitter has a memory of about thirty seconds; no long-term memory exists for it. Twitter allows thoughts about ten seconds long, no more. No logical, well-developed conclusions can be permitted; they’re just too long. And that is why I still haven’t abandoned my personal blog.

Remember how I used to post fairly often on my blog, before I was a junior in college? And then how it all dropped off sometime last school year, and I haven’t yet learned to pick the pace up a bit? That was the days before a lot of homework that involved my computer. Also before the days when I got really distracted during said homework, browsing Facebook and re-watching favorite YouTube videos. I bring this up to provide the background for this past week. Over Thanksgiving break—just one week from today, I believe—my brother and I determined that the power supply for my laptop had basically died. Without my laptop, I was forced to rely on the school library’s computers for most of my homework. That was great incentive to do it efficiently—who really wants to spend all day in the library? And then, after getting back to my apartment after supper (or whenever), I was without my laptop all night. It was pleasant—I read, I wrote in my journal, I talked to my friends, I read some mor...

I’ve been reading a book called Writing Space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.) by one Jay David Bolter. It’s about the Internet and how it relates to what we have known as reading and writing. It’s fairly interesting, although a bit jargony and academic-sounding. (What can you expect?) One part got me thinking. This book says one of the Internet’s major advantages is the ability to hyperlink, like this . So, since e-readers, Kindles, and Nooks are all digital “reading spaces” (shall we say), do they let you create your own links? For example, if I read some particularly fascinating sentence in GKC’s Orthodoxy , and then later I’m reading C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity and I notice that Lewis addresses the same issue, can I tell the e-reader to make its own little link between the two books? Providing, that is, that I have the time and inclination to go back to the first book ( Orthodoxy in this instance) and find the part I’m remembering… but consider...