There are a lot of things on my mind right now. Normally, that would mean for a very productive time on the blog. And yet, as I'm sure you've noticed...silence. Perhaps that means that there has just been too much on my mind.

Part of the difficulty has been that I've had to devote my writing time elsewhere. School, naturally, takes its share. But that's typical. Really, the bulk of my writing time has gone to church preparation. Writing sermons. Writing Bible studies. Writing children's lessons. It's just unfortunate that none of it is really "web-publishable." I think the next sermon I do (to be preached next week) should be publishable, so at least that will go up on bdwhite.com in the near future.

The major thought process going through my head right now, though, has to do with the Church. I've been reading a significant amount of Barth lately, and have been challenged by him, as well as by one of the classes I am currently taking at seminary, to really think through what the Church is and what my part is in it. Fundamentally, the questions I have seem to be presenting themselves in new and interesting/difficult pragmatic ways in my work at Praise. And I don't want to steer my "flock" wrong.

So what is required now? Much Bible reading. Much prayer. And the always welcome dialogue with friends and family (whether you're Christian or not).

Here is are some really basic (and therefore difficult to pin-down) questions. And I would love it if you all would feel comfortable leaving your answers in the comments so that all could benefit from your insights. If you're not comfortable with that, though, do email me. I really do want to try to think about these questions in the context of the community.

Right...basic questions:
1) What is the Church? How does it function in our society? How should it function in our society?

2) What is the Church's vocation? Who gives it this vocation? Who empowers the Church to fulfil its vocation?

3) Who makes up the Church? What are the membership requirements? What does it mean to be a member? What does it mean to be excluded from membership?

That's a start. My hope is to offer up my own answers to these questions in time--maybe a week or two. :-)

A simple title for a simple entry.

It's good to be home. I've spent the vast majority of the time so far with family. It has been especially good seeing my sister again. I don't see her nearly enough. Also, my grandmother made the trip down from Boise City, and I've really missed her since leaving the farm for NJ last Fall.

It's sad that the Christmas holiday will vanish so quickly. But, I'll do my best to cherish the time that I have.

Many Christmas blessings to all of you. May the joy of the choir of angels that sang to the shepherds that night long ago be with you!

Here's a quick entry that will bore all of you who tend to skip my open source/nerdy computer posts. All the same, I hope it will be of use to some out there on the interweb.

A while ago, I gave a brief review of my new ASUS Eee PC 901 and Ubuntu-eee 8.04.1. Overall, it was a very favorable review, but one of my big niggles with Ubuntu-eee was that it did not support the VGA-out on my Eee PC. Now, I use my Eee to project slides for church, so this was a major set-back, and I was always having to reboot into the native Xandros OS just for this functionality. Until last week, that is.

As it turns out, I was wrong about Ubuntu-eee not supporting the VGA-out on my Eee PC 901. Actually, it does. It just doesn't display that functionality up-front, in a nice, easy to access GUI. This is one thing the Xandros OS did a fantastic job with. You could actually just press two buttons on the Eee to (1) change the resolution and (2) enable the VGA-out.

But, as I've already alluded to, it turns out it is quite possible (and actually quite simple) to get the VGA-out going with Ubuntu-eee 8.04.1. And here's how:

We're going to use a fantastic program that comes with Ubuntu-eee called "xrandr". This program will let us set the resolutions of the internal monitor, the external monitor, and turn the external monitor (VGA-out) on all with one, easy command. The command that I use when I hook my Eee up to our church's projector is:

xrandr --output LVDS --mode 800x600 --output VGA --mode 800x600 --same-as LVDS

Basically, this command first sets the internal monitor (LVDS) to a resolution of 800x600, and then it turns on the VGA-out port (VGA) and sets it to the same resolution of 800x600, and then it sets it so that the VGA-out will mirror the internal display.

I use a resolution of 800x600 because I want the screens to mirror each other, and this is the largest "standard" resolution that will fit on the internal Eee screen (because it's max resolution is 1024x600). Now, you can use xrandr to create one large virtual screen such that the external screen is a different resolution from the internal one. But, unfortunately, Ubuntu's netbook remix interface doesn't play nice with that type of setup. So, for now, I'm happy with mirroring the two displays.

Now, what happens when you want to unplug the VGA-out and set the internal monitor back to the native resolution? Well, you just use another simple xrandr command:

xrandr --output LVDS --auto --output VGA --off

As you can probably guess, this command first sets the internal monitor to the "auto" resolution (which is the native resolution of the internal screen), and then turns off the VGA-out display.

Now, to make it even easier to set up my Eee with a projector, I simply wrote these two commands into their own files, and created icons on the top panel--one that points to the command that turns the external monitor on, and one that points to the command to turn it off. Easy peazy!

Let's see. Just a couple of check-in things right now, I guess.

First of all, school is going well. To be honest, I've had a difficult time getting my writing back in the groove. I'm really hoping that I can end the semester in strength, though. I'm working on my two main papers very early, and the 10-page summary of my thesis shouldn't be too bad now that I actually know where I'm heading with it.

Church is going really well. I'm very much enjoying being back at Praise, even though it is busy as ever! I continue to be confronted with my own shortcomings as a youth and children's pastor, though. I still have a lot to learn, and I may just have to accept the fact that it won't matter how much I learn, I will always be lacking in this area of ministry. However, as I say that, I also have grown in the faith that God is in control. Specifically what I mean by this is that I know that God knows who I am--God is the one who has given me my personality with all its interesting quirks. God made me the introvert that I am. And, while God may sometimes expect me to stretch myself and move outside of where I am comfortable, at the end of the day, I trust that God has not called me to a place where my particular individual traits are not appropriate. In other words, I am comfortable with myself and my shortcomings (while nonetheless continuing to strive to be a better "me") because I know that God made me who I am, and that means that God can use me as I am.

Some fun facts:
1) I finally finished Resident Evil 4 on my Gamecube. This was a great game. I'm really glad that I finished it, though, because now I won't have to feel guilty playing my Gamecube for an hour when I know I should be reading.

2) The farmers are starting to harvest the corn out here. I was driving back from the store yesterday, well past dark, and a farmer was busy harvesting in the combine with his flood-lights blazing. It made me a little sad. I would have loved to be home to help out with our harvest. It made me wonder, though, if I stick around for the next year (as is my current plan), if maybe I could get a job helping some of these local farmers out during harvest or planting season. :-)

3) I had a wonderful time meeting up with my old small group from Seminary this past weekend. I am just amazed by the group of people who I can call friends. They are all just incredible--and the way God is using them and working in their lives makes me a little jealous, but mostly just glad.

Well, I think that's a pretty good update for now. I hope everyone who reads this is doing well, and is preparing for a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday.

Yeah. I'm really not dead. I've certainly been busier than I would like, what with school and especially church work. Unfortunately, I'm not looking for this to change much until mid-December. However, I think I am going to try to be better about giving small updates via the microblag (over there on the right). This way, at least you won't have to worry that I've been transported to some parallel universe, or fell into a giant pit, or was sucked up by a black hole created by the Large Hadron Collider. Because I know that's what you all were worrying about. :-)

The interplay between Calvin and Wesley in one quote by a semi-Barthian missiologist:

Faith can only be appropriately defined as at the same time a divine gift and a human act.

Beautiful.

Well, mid-term reading week is here at PTS. And, naturally, that means that all good procrastinators will once again turn their eyes to their neglected blogs as a way to escape from the mounting pressures of papers that need to be written and books that need to be read.

I count myself as one with those brave procrastinators. And you, gentle readers, will be the benefactors of our stressed disobedience.

So, what have we in store for today? Well, nothing all that exciting, probably. A review of something that has been reviewed many times over. But, I felt it my duty (er...procrastinatorial duty?) to offer my own thoughts on the ASUS Eee PC 901 and the Ubuntu-eee operating system. That's right! You're actually getting two reviews in one...so we'd better get started! Read more »

Now that I'm back to working semi-full-time again (as a youth pastor), I'm realizing just how useful all these new communication tools that we now have can be. A large part of my work involves communicating with the other pastors, as well as the kids and parents.

For example, this past weekend we had our Fall BBQ. Pastor KC was in charge of most of the planning, but he got help from Pastor John (for sports), the parents (for food), and me (for small group time). We all really needed to be on the same page, so we sent a lot of "Reply to All" emails back and forth.

Here's the thing, though. At least on the Linux side of things, we have some great tools that could have made this whole process even easier. We have Pidgin (with Jabber) that we can use for instant messenging, and it even supports chat rooms and file transfers. This would have made several meetings, where we all had to drive the 45 minutes up to church, completely unnecessary. Also, there is the fantastic Abicollab, which is a word processor (think MS Word) that allows for multiple people to edit online, at the same time. So, when I was working on the small group curriculum, instead of sending out email attachments to everyone to get checked and revised, we could have just held a couple of Abicollab sessions to take care of it in one place.

Now, these are just a couple of simple examples from the Linux side of things. I should note that in a cross-platform situation (like the one I have at church), Google offers most of these services with their "Google for your domain." They have GTalk (which actually runs on Jabber), which also supports voice calls; Google Docs, which allows for easy sharing of documents (though not concurrent editing like Abicollab); and, of course, Google Calendar (which allows you to share certain events to the public, or to particular contacts).

The problem is, at least at church, not everyone uses (or knows how to use) these tools. And so, we end up with mammoth email discussions, physical church meetings that take time and gas, and a lot of extra paper flowing around. I'm not really sure what the solution is. Part of the problem is that there are too many standards floating around. Not everyone uses GTalk (or Jabber) for IM. AIM, MS IM, and Yahoo are all still very popular. Not everyone even uses gmail (which would make switching to using the Google services much easier). What I would really like to see is the person in charge of the church website take the time to set up these services specifically for our church. In other words, run our own Jabber server, so that we can have church-only IM. Run our own mail server, so we can have church-only email. Run our own Abicollab server (which is actually really, really easy), so that we could have a centralized place to store church-planning and finalized documents. Hey, why not run our own CalDAV server so that we can have a centralized, easy to edit calendar?

The tools are all here. We just need someone to make them available. Using them is not even that much of a problem anymore. I don't know any of the current pastors who don't know how to use an instant messenger.

So, what do you think? Do you use these types of tools at your work. And if you do, does your employer serve their own, or do they use the large, centralized servers of Google/Yahoo/&c?