MacArthur sermons now free!

I love good, expository preaching; it's the best kind of preaching by a long shot. When I'm studying a text, I love to download a sermon that a expository preacher has preached on the same text and listen to it. So when a great expositor indexes his library of sermons and makes this freely downloadable on the web, that's cause for shouting. John Piper's sermons are available at Desiring God. Danny Akin's sermons are available at SEBTS. And now John MacArthur's sermons are available at Grace to You!

Photos: Emmy's best friend

Emmy loves animals. It wouldn't surprise me one bit to see her grow up to be a vet or a biologist or a zoologist or whatever. Ann's folks have a border collie named Brandy, and she spends every minute possible hanging around her. Brandy is a blast. She fetches soccer balls, catches frisbees, attacks sprinklers, and other fun stuff.

Photos: Lawn mower

Like any boy, Jacen wants to drive. So Ann's father taught him how to drive the riding lawn mower and then turned him loose to mulch the leaves in the backyard and in the neighbor's yard. Jacen had a blast!

Photos: Family Pictures

It's been a while since we've had some good family pictures taken, so we asked a friend to take a few. This one with the yellow tree was my favorite. There are two others near a cypress tree.

Photo Gallery

I've been working on my (limited) photography skills the last few months, so I decided to set up a gallery to display some of my better shots. Since I use iWeb for my website, I started by using the built-in gallery. It was lame. But a friend pointed me to SimpleViewer, so now I set it up to be my gallery. Take a look and tell me what you think.

Online Backup

I've written before about having an offsite backup plan. After reading an article in a magazine, I decided to give Mozy a try. I started by using the free version, which lets you automatically backup 2 GB of data online. It's not much space, but enough to backup my documents folder. I like that it encrypts the data, so that (allegedly) not even Mozy employees can read my data. This won't backup all my data, but it will at least protect the most important parts.

YouTube videos

What would it sound like if you could take everything a mother says in a 24 hour period of time and condense it down to 2 min and 55 seconds? It would sound like this. And the same for dads? Like this.

Minions

I've been playing Desktop Tower Defense on the Casual Collective since it started. They've recently released a new game, Minions. I love it. It's a simple team game of robots destroying each other. It's Flash-based, so nothing to download or install (except Flash, of course). And it's free! Let me know if you like it.

Book: Culture Shock: Thailand

Culture Shock: Thailand is one of several books in this series, providing a guide to customs and etiquette. Thailand, like every country, has its list of things that will feel very strange to foreign visitors. For example, Thais smile lots, so much so that it's called the land of smiles. Smiling is a form of communication; how and when you smile all convey something to the people around you. The head is considered important, but the feet are considered unimportant and dirty; thus, you do not touch someone else's head, nor do you point with your feet. In keeping with their Buddhist beliefs, getting angry with people or even speaking loudly is impolite. Never wear black, unless going to a funeral. And so on. I've enjoyed the book, and no doubt will find it immensely helpful. I recommend it.

Photos: Science Museum

My father and stepmother came up to spend Saturday with us, so we took the kids and went to the science museum downtown. We had a great time seeing the exhibits and watching the shows. Emilee especially enjoyed the animals; she got to pet a giant cockroach (not a joke) and a rat trained to play basketball. Afterward we did a little shopping and had dinner. It was a nice break.

Fixing Spotlight

Recently Spotlight, the built-in indexing service on my iMac, stopped working. Conveniently I found this article while reading the Dec 08 issue of Macworld. I tried the Terminal command they suggest, and it worked fine for me.

Photos: Peter Panda

At Emilee's school, they take turns bringing home a stuffed panda bear, Peter Panda, and taking care of it. This weekend it was Emilee's turn, so we went out Sunday afternoon to have some fun with the bear and take a couple pictures of them together.

Picture: Our family

A friend took a couple new pictures of our family. Enjoy.

Book: The Heavenly Man

The Heavenly Man is the autobiography of a Chinese Christian who started house churches all over China. The most riveting parts of this excellent books are the many times and ways he was persecuted for his faith in Jesus. Bible verses on persecutation and suffering take on a whole new meaning when viewed from a world where Christianity is still persecuted, as opposed to my American Christianity which is still (for the moment) tolerated. I highly recommend this book.

An engineer at the ballet

I took Ann to the ballet this week, a last date of sorts before too many transitions catch up with us and prevent us from going out. We saw the Carolina Ballet's performance of Don Quixote at the Raleigh Memorial Auditorium. It was the first time either of us had been to a ballet.

How should I describe my reaction? Two thoughts: One, ballet is an incredibly inefficient medium for communication. It often took 5 to 10 minutes to convey even the simplest of thoughts. Entire movements were devoted to saying "I love you" or "Will you marry me?" or "Yes" or "Leave me alone, slimo, I love that other guy instead!" Definitely inefficient. (What? What did you expect from an engineer?) Two, the story of Don Quixote was pretty interesting. It actually made me want to go and read the book. Have you read the book? Was it interesting? Was it more efficient than the ballet?