A Living Text

This week I made a new friend via the net, he is Peter, and this is his blog:

rise children rise

He is looking to be part of the AMiA, and he is full of cool ideas.

There is an interesting LDS conference coming up - I wish I lived close enough to sit in on it. Here are the topics from a brochure:

The Religious Studies Program at Utah Valley State College presents the eighth annual Mormon Studies Conference entitled “Restoration Christianity: Commonality and Divergence in Latter-day Saint Movements” on Monday, April 1, 2008 in the UVSC Student Center, Room 206a. The conference will explore the relationship between the traditions that trace their history and teachings to the revelations of Joseph Smith.
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About six months ago, I wrote that the local APA parish would probably not last for six months. Indeed, St. Michael’s APA folded three months later, in December, 2007. It is hard to see what the attraction of Anglo-Catholicism is in this age. If you are ok with praying to Mary and the Saints, bowing to objects, and believing in seven sacraments, then why not become Roman Catholic? Add to that the reality that these kind of parishes are seldom if ever evangelistic, and Anglo-Catholicism looks like a club of Anglophiles, not a real church that gets in the trenches. St. Michael’s specifically had other problems including vestry members who were Masons, which I guess didn’t phase the APA Bishop over the church. The crying need in this neck of the woods is for an updated version of the Anglicanism that was generated by Ridley, Cranmer, Donne, et al.

I despair of anything to write about. Who cares about politics - does it matter? And do I have anything to say that anyone else hasn’t said? Probably not. I do have a couple ideas in mind, but don’t make time to write them out, so they probably aren’t that exciting if I can’t even care enough to write them. I am excited about the Clone Wars movie this summer, that ought to be fun. I hope Prince Caspian is good, but my hopes aren’t up too high. I’m really tired lately. Work has been very busy. Add the commute and I don’t have much energy for things such as blogging. I did rake more last weekend. Yes, I am still raking in March. That’s what I get for living in the forest - General Beauregard’s revenge perhaps. Spring has sprung. Buds are everywhere, things are growing.Easter was wonderful, the service was great. We re-watched some of the Gospel of John movie. That is a great movie. It was moving to see the end of Jesus’ life, and then His resurrection.  Considering trips to the coast, New York City and points elsewhere.Anxiously awaiting the next update of Buzzword which should add some cool functions.I moved all of my 401k into bonds to avoid the current turbulence. I have a sense that things are going to even out and stabilize. The bad news is a trailing indicator, I think the worst is behind us, but then I don’t know anything more than anyone else, so that could be totally wrong.OK, enough for tonight. 

 My grandfather, Lester Forest Moar, while in the Navy. He served aboard submarines in WW I:

I’ve been uploading and touching up pictures of my ancestors as part of a project to digitize all of the genealogical work that I have done over the years. Here is one example: 

These are scary times in the world of finance, and increasingly in our every day world too. The collapse of Bear Stearns shows the instability in the system. Housing prices have fallen, oil and gas are out of control and the dollar is weak. I am currently reading the Black Swan by Naseem Taleb (you should too) and his book seems incredibly relevant given the situation we are in.

Essentially he says the obvious: no one knows the future and the value of all predictions is next to meaningless. Statisticians and “experts” rule out massive outliers and thus their predictions are moot. They assume a nice, stable world where massive changes do not happen, when the reality of our time is that massive changes are more and more likely. No one predicted 9/11 of course, but it invalidated all financial models made up to the day before it. The current crisis in the financial sector is somewhat more predictable, but still, the collapse of Bear Stearns was not on the horizon. I read Tobias Levkovich weekly, and note that he assumes nice stable historical patterns, which mean that his predictions are as useless as mine. I am not doing justice to Taleb’s book or his ideas, but the main takeaway is that forecasting the future is almost utterly vain. What if the USA collapsed next month, or a new disease wiped out half the planet, or some other huge event? It would be unforeseen and disruptive. Also, in its wake we would see books and stories that tried to make sense of it in a narrative way, that would show us how we should have seen it coming and how it all made sense - but it wouldn’t.

So the financial situation can cause panic and fear. All I have to lean on are the word’s of the Messiah: “sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof.”

You have to see this link on Apple design. The source of their inspiration is obvious. Johnathan Ive is paying homage to Dieter Rams. Whatever he is doing, he needs to keep doing it!

As I read a book which mentions the Final Report of the Anglican-Roman Catholic Truth Society (1982) report which endorsed a role for the Papacy even for Anglicans, I began to wonder: how much of the past will the new Orthodox Anglican bodies appropriate? There are many, myself included, who want to start fresh from Biblical and Patristic sources, as well as the Anglican Fathers and the formularies of our early days. But what of the developments of the last century? What of ecumenical dialogs, joint statements, and the like?

We are clearly rejecting the recent innovations of ordaining practicing homosexuals. But we have already seen that when it comes to ordaining women, the consensus wavers. So what of other statements signed on to by past Primates and the See of Canterbury? Do we ignore them? Do we discard them? Do we live up to them? I don’t know, although I suspect that they will largely be ignored as the church operates from a semi tabula rasa.

I think that 2007 was a watershed year for the end of the Microsoft Office empire. There are so many quality tools out there now that provide viable alternatives to Office, that it is no longer necessary to have Office. The NY Times talked about it recently. The only gates to the revolution are the institutional acceptance of Office, which demands that papers and documents at schools and businesses be turned in using Word, Excel, etc. Thus, the issue of interoperability is the key ~ can documents be saved into .doc format, for example, and look ok? To me, PDF solves this issue, but professors and managers don’t all have, or know how to use, Acrobat Professional, and so the need for word processors continues.

Let me review some of the tools that I use that are free, and in some cases more aesthetically pleasing than Office.

1. Buzzword. I can’t say enough about Buzzword, I just love it. Buzzword saves to .doc, and .docx amongst other formats. It doesn’t save to PDF yet, but should soon. The interface is elegant, the font choices, although limited, are very nice, and best of all, it’s free.

2. Adobe Share. Share allows you to upload PDFs and share them with people, or embed them.

3. Google Apps. Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Page Creator and Presentation give you the free ability to do a lot of what Office does. I’m not wild about the Google interface, it looks a little cartoonish and doesn’t do all the things that Word does by a long stretch. It does export to Word, Open Office, and PDF. Again, it’s free.

4. Lovely Charts. Sort of a Visio alternative, I just signed up so I’m not sure about it yet. But I think the interface is clean (built on Flash of course). Some day perhaps it will export to Visio, but who cares? It’s an alternative.

5. OpenOffice. If you want to download a large Office alternative you can use OO. It is bulky, and not accessible online like Buzzword, but it does a lot.

6. IBM Lotus Symphony. This group of tools should be available for Macs this year, right now it is only on PCs. It’s sort of slow and a resource hog, but it gets the job done like Word does.

With all of that said, I have been using Office 2007 at work recently, and I really like it. But I wouldn’t want to pay for it at home. Microsoft ought to get radical and make it free, then we would see a true revolution. I’m also using iWork 08 at home, and I love, love, love Pages. So there are a lot of options out there, but I think we are living through the end of the Microsoft hegemony.