Am I the only one who thinks it would have been cooler (and maybe even marginally easier) to actually do what this guy said he was doing? To connect a bank of Christmas lights to the web, I’d need:

• A Mac running Mac OS X with a dedicated internet connection
• A couple of gadgets from X10.com
• Some PHP scripts
• Some AppleScripts (with the X10 scripting addition)

Maybe I’ll even do it next year. Or set up an X10 system in my home office as a proof-of-concept, so as not to have to wait until next Christmas. On the other hand, depending on how much it would end up costing, I might be able to put that money to better use elsewhere.

I wonder why they’re having so many problems? Could it possibly be related to the fact that the camera is sitting on an erupting volcano?

Parents expressing outrage after a teacher is kicked out of her public school for hanging a picture of President Bush next to pictures of other presidents in her classroom.

Politics can indeed be taken too far. The man is our current president, not just a candidate. Get a clue, people.

On the other hand, maybe this is where I belong for now. I’m only now regaining my ministry-outlook on life. Partially as a result of me living 1.5 hours away, our family singing ministry ground to a halt. We’ve done one or two experimental forays back into that realm, one of them last Sunday — we sang “He’s Still Waiting By The Well” by Greater Vision.

It was actually kind of funny: Alley, Tiffany, Tim and I were supposed to sing “Fly Away” by FFH, because as the result of yet another substitution, Alley’s father-in-law realized he was scheduled to play both special music and an offertory on the same Sunday (and we couldn’t have that). We had played with several songs — Testify To Love by Avalon, and You Found Me by FFH, but we meshed best on Fly Away. So since His Way didn’t carry that accompaniment track, I ordered it from christianbook.com. Turns out they use UPS to ship overnight … but UPS doesn’t deliver on Saturdays. Yup, you guessed it: our overnight shipping dragged on into four-day shipping. Sidenote: the Christianbook.com customer service rep apologized to me for the mixup and offered to refund the shipping when I returned the CD … so don’t think they’re evil or anything.

Where was I going with that? Ah yes: ministry-outlook. I don’t think I’d be content to just live a normal American Dream life: job, wife, kids, vacations, old, nursing home, dead. I need to do something that matters, or benefits a cause I believe in. That’s part of why I decided to work for StewTech. It’s also part of why we might be going on the road again as the Bergey Family Singers or something like that. And why I’m going to renew my efforts to record a piano CD. More on that in another post, though.

MOJAVE, CALIFORNIA – The first non-governmental rocket ship flew to the edge of space today and was piloted to a safe landing on a desert airport runway here.

Civilian test pilot, now turned astronaut Mike Melvill brought SpaceShipOne down to the Mojave Airport tarmac after flying to 100 kilometers (62 miles) in altitude, leaving the Earth’s atmosphere during his history-making sub-orbital space ride.

It reminds me of Tom Swift and his Rocket Ship, which, as far as I can remember, was the first science fiction book I ever read. It chronicles Tom’s participation in a contest to build and fly the first privately-built craft to orbit the earth (similar to today’s X-Prize). Interestingly, it was first published exactly 50 years ago this month.

In other news, God’s creation has once again beat out human ingenuity.