Sometimes Technology SUCKS!

ARGH!
First my digital camera acts up a few months ago, and either needs repairs or replacing. Then my palm pilot up and dies. Now my laptop joins the land of the dead. [Sigh] I can't afford a new computer and I can't afford repairs on the laptop. Besides a few years worth of archived emails and various programs (some of which were downloaded for free like winzip and adobie reader) I have lost some digital photos that I never got around to backing up on a disc or anything. Plus tons of other stuff, that I may not have have used recently or often but are just glad they are available. It appears I may have to start from sratch yet again. This sort of thing always happens when I need to switch to a new computer. I need to refind applications I had gotten used to using that are not standard programs on factory fresh computers, not to mention all the various bookmarks I had. ARGH! I'm not sure but I think I am now locked out of my website access. I need to look into that to see if I can access my account from my mothers computer, I cant login from work, although I can check my bill balance there. UGH!

A Recent Read Number 8

"Judy wants me to read The Bible. Okay. That's what I'll do, and when I read it I'll be able to prove to her that she is absolutely wrong."

Betrayed! by Stan Telchin. A very simple book to read, and very touching. Betrayed is an autobiographical story of a Jewish father's initial reaction to and eventual acceptance of his daughter's life changing decision to become a believer in Jesus Christ. First the author and his wife as traditional Jews, are shocked and angry about their daughter's decision to accept Jesus as her personal lord and savior. Then he reads a bible with the intention of proving her beliefs to be wrong and to win her back. Along the way he discovers that the more he tries to disprove The Bible the more he learns to accept it as The Gospel Truth.

I got a kick out of the fact that the author lives in the DC area. His ministries website (telchin.com) mentions a second book (Abandoned) that I think is sort of an update to Betrayed or perhaps the story of his ministry work.

Betrayed! by Stan Telchin 1981 Chosen Books (Baker Book House Company) 139 Pages. - ***

A Recent Read Number 7

"Either The Massiah came almost two thousand years ago, or the biblical prophets were false prophets - in which case we can throw The Bible out and go join some other religion (or abandon religion completely)."



Answering Jewish Objections To Jesus - Volume One - (General and Historical Objections) Michael L. Brown. This book was intended by the author to be read primarily by a Jewish audience and then secondly by Christians to further understand somewhat were Jews are coming from historically. The book has a basic format of common questions (or objections) that Jews have about Jesus and Christianity, followed by an answer and then often lengthy endnotes as an explanation. It is interesting that many Jews haven't even bothered to find out anything about Jesus. They normally just dismiss anything about him and don't bother with reading any of the New Testament. The author of this book is a massianic Jew, that is someone whe was born into a Jewish family and has accepted Jesus as his savior and believes he is The Massiah. Often they call themselves True Christians, many traditional Jews consider them traitors and believers of a cult or of an enemy religion.

I found this book to be a difficult read, since I am unfamiliar with many of the references to Jewish Scriptures that many Jews wouldn't even bat an eye at since it (the original Hebrew scriptures often not found in the Christian Bible) was something they already know and are very comfortable with. I was dissappointed when I realized that this book was only the first of a three volume set, and many of the objections that I have heard about (and wanted to hear the answer to) are supposedly in either volume two or more likely in volume three. There is a 3-in-1 Volume available now I think, with updates, and I fear there is also a volume 4 now. I believe that many Jewish readers will still be asking the same questions and will not be satisfied with the answers the author gives.

Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus - Volume One by Michael L. Brown 2000 Baker Books 270 Pages - **.5

20 Posts To Match Last Year.

Kewl,
According to the post count on my sidebar there on the right, I had 32 posts in all of last year. Right now I have 12, make this one 13 posts, this year and it's mid-May. Whoops that means just 19 more to tie (match) 20 to beat.

Dead Palm Pilots

Ack! I'm pretty sure my 5? year old Palm Pilot is now officially dead. It was a M130 or some such, I'd have to double check the exact number on it. It doesn't turn on and it doesn't recharge in it's cradle. The worst part is I don't have the info on it backed up, but I think nothing of great importance was on it. A few birthdays remembered for each year, a brief description of a dream I had about 3 or 4 years ago, a few to-do lists, some old phone numbers and addresses, and my schedule/calendar that I hadn't updated since sometime in mid-April. Oh and a few date reminders, and a sort of history of appointments. Other than that no problem. Sigh that makes my second dead palm pilot sitting around collecting dust, my first palm pilot that I had bought used for something like $50 when they were selling for $300-$500 was a Palm III, I think. It's only problem that I know of, is the wire that connects the battery case to the circut board. Well anyway I should replace my ancient cell-phone with one that would double as a palm pilot, but I don't want to loose my number so I'd have to go with whatever deals Verizon (my cell phone carrier) has. It will be several months before I do anything like that though. My financial situation really sucks right now.

April Showers Bringing May Flowers

ACK! April is almost over, it feels like it just barely began. Baseball is in the air and the Washington Nationals are once again losing but are losing while going down swinging. They have got to pick up the pace, but then again the season is only what 3 weeks old. So there is going to be lots of flip-floping all around. OK Next!

I am in rehearsals for a show I am directing with the Sandy Spring Theatre Group (SSTG) to be performed at the Gaithersburg Arts Barn (GAB) in June. The show is Steve Martin's first play Picasso at The Lapin Agile. It is filled with laughs and is great fun. The basic premise is a fictional meeting between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein at the French Cabaret named Lapin Agile (The Nimble Rabbit - specifically a male rabbit) in 1904 Paris, France. They discuss how their respective works may effect the history of the 20th Century. So as a result my May entries will be somewhat limited, and I might only get the one post quota I try to keep as my standard minimum. Hopefully I'll be able to do more, but we shall see.

Weird Huh?

Huh?
Now it seems I can access cdcomplete.com at work, and can view the individual titles again. Weird. I wonder how long that will last. I still think the format of the site needs some work. Plus I wonder why they don't have some of the cover images, when they have all the track information. I guess some of those million selling records only have a handfull of cdcomplete members who have purchased them. That and I guess most of those members don't phyically own the albums in their collections but rather the mp3s, and the downloaded files of the songs. I suppose that is one of the things that even if I do breakdown and get an ipod, I won't do much downloading of songs, I'll just rip (is that the right word?) from the physical CD and copy it to the ipod.

April Showers Or Something

Hmm OK so this seems to be my first April Entry. Yay! I've got several things I need to do and should be doing and as usual no time to do it.

In the next few days/weeks I will be in rehearsals for a show I am directing for The Sandy Spring Theatre Group (www.sstg-home.org). The show is Steve Martin's Picasso At The Lapin Agile the preformances will be in the first three weekends of June in Gaithersburg. Right now I have most of the cast, there are two more male characters that I need to cast. The turn out for auditions a couple of weeks ago was dismal. I had to go searching for most of the actors I did get and have additional auditions a couple of times. Needless to say I will be pretty busy and might not have very many entries here in April and May, so what else is new.

A few days ago I discovered at work that another website I like to visit and use has been blocked by their silly security programs because the site promotes mp3 file posting, ugh. So now I can't update any of my stuff at CDcomplete.com while at work. I used to be able to at least look at my collection there, then I started noticing errors whenever I would try to look at a specific title (while at work). Then work blocked the site all together. Oh Well I still can get to rateyourmusic.com. I noticed they have updated that site since I had last used it. Now there are more cover images and they seem to have more titles. I was using that site only for my cassette and vinyl collections (with some of the special CD box sets) since the CDs were covered by the CDcomplete site. I only have a couple of tapes listed there and about 20 vinyl albums in my collection list, so I have to buckle down and get more entries there. For about a year and a half I only had about 24 titles listed there. I listed more of my CDs there on Thursday and Friday so there are about 100 of my CDs listed there now. I have a big task ahead of me there. I had the same sort of task when I had first set up my account over at DVDSpot.com it took me awhile (Like over a week) to enter my 200+ DVDs I had, now since I'm updated there whenever I get new DVDs I can add it to the list easily. I hope to be able to do that with CDs shortly, but it will probably not be completed until sometime in the summer. Also rateyourmusic has always been a little simpler to add to your list than over at cdcomplete. At cdcomplete you needed to know the UPC number to identify which version of a title you had. It isn't too user friendly when it comes to comparing different versions. Rateyourmusic is more user friendly and more community oriented sort of like over at DVDspot. All this reminds me that I am still only about a fifth or sixth of the way through with catalogueing my books over at bibliophil.org which I have a few issues with, but that is for another blog entry now isn't it?

Blogging Etiquette

You know I think that if someone is going to write a blog, they should make an effort to edit their posts to correct spelling and or grammar errors. There are many blogs around the internet, that constantly have spelling errors and dropped letters. Oh well I guess some people don't have the time to go over something they are done with.

March Madness!

Hmm Have I mentioned in this that I don't watch or care about the sport of Basketball, or the whole championship series called "March Madness"? I used to watch it some as a kid and liked the Washington Bullets (They began as the Baltimore Bullets), but then they moved from the "Capital Center" which was later renamed "USAir Arena" and in 2002 was demolished to make way for a shopping center, which now has one of those Magic Johnson's Movie Multiplex Theatres) in Laural, MD to the "DC Convention Center" (Then to another newer Convention Center I think) in Washington DC which was later renamed "The MCI Center" and then when Verizon bought MCI it was renamed "The Verizion Center". The Bullets changed their name to the Washington Wizards somewhere before the MCI Center name, to be more PC so as not to promote gun violence. So I stopped watching Basketball seriously sometime in the late 1970s around the time that Michael Jordan was making a name for himself, and the uniforms were becoming long baggy skirts with untucked shirts instead of shirts tucked into shorts. Maybe I shouldn't mention the uniform change because people might think I'm gay, but these modern "basketball shorts" that are baggy and look like gaucho skirts are the ugliest thing to come to sports uniforms since boxing sparing head gear. I got the biggest kick one time by seeing a video of some high school kid tripping on his "shorts" as they were falling down, served him right for trying to run around in a baggy skirt.