The Longmont Pastor

I recently started another blog, which is titled: The Longmont Pastor and can be found here: http://longmontpastor.wordpress.com/

I will continue to update this blog, so please do keep checking in. This has always been more of a personal blog, detailing the lives of our family and ministry for those who know us personally and want to keep up on our lives. The Longmont Pastor is going to be very focused on issues relating directly to the Longmont from a pastor's perspective. I have written articles on there about marijuana legalization and other local issues.

If you have a Wordpress account, make sure to follow me on there, and if you don't, be sure to click the "Subscribe by Email" button at the bottom of the page.

 

 

Pastor Chuck Smith Memorial Service and Tribute

A few weeks ago, during our series called DNA: The Building Blocks of Life, I spoke about Pastor Chuck Smith, who recently went home to be with the Lord (click here to listen to it).

Pastor Chuck was a man who was used greatly by God and left a profound legacy. His ministry had a huge impact on my life and on the lives of people around the world. 

A memorial service and tribute to Pastor Chuck is going to be held this Sunday, October 27th at 6:00pm MDT. The service is going to be held at the Honda Center in Anaheim, CA, but will be simulcast on the internet so you can watch it live wherever you are at on your computer, tablet or smart phone: http://watch.pastorchucksmith.com.

The story of what God did through Chuck is one that should be shared and heard around the world. I encourage you to tune in on Sunday night and listen to the stories and be encouraged and celebrate a life well-lived for God's glory.

In Transit

I was sitting on the plane from Amsterdam to Minneapolis, and I decided to play Angry Birds to pass the time. The only reason I have Angry Birds Star Wars on my iPad is because Nate begged me to buy it for him.

So here I am playing this game, and I realize that all the levels I am playing, Nate has already beaten on his own - not to mention that I have to try multiple times to pass his high scores!

Lets just say, I'm feeling humbled that my 5 year old is way more clever, or at least way more persistent than I am....

I'm in Minneapolis right now waiting to get on my last flight back to Denver. On this trip I've passed through 5 airports, and here's what I think:

• I like Denver's airport. It's easy and quick to navigate.
• At JFK I had to do something I've only done once before: I had to leave the airport entirely and walk down the street to another terminal building. The only other time I've had to do that before was in Paris, when Charles du Gaulle was under construction a few years back. JFK was not a great experience this time around, especially since it was snowing outside while I had to walk from one terminal to the next.
• Charles du Gaulle was ok, but it took so long to get to my connection that I missed my flight. It was pretty boring to spend 5 hours there and the Internet connection wasn't good.
• Budapest is nice, especially since they've renovated it. Easy to navigate, free wifi, very comfortable.
• Although I like KLM a lot, Amsterdam's airport was a mixed bag: on one hand they had a good system of getting people through passport control, with people standing around and allowing those who were close to missing flights to cut ahead in line. It was very efficient, and I wish I had that before at times when I've missed flights because no one would let me ahead in line. After that though, they had a terrible bottleneck at the gate, because they do security at each individual gate for the transcontinental flights.
• Minneapolis is simple and easy to navigate, comfortable and has free wifi. All things I love to have in an airport, especially if you have to spend a few hours there.

Almost home...

 

Check out White Fields On YouTube

A few weeks ago Balázs started uploading videos of the sermons at White Fields Community Church to YouTube. You can check out White Fields' channel here: http://youtube.com/user/WhiteFieldsChurch

 

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I Bought a Mac

I bought a new laptop last week. Balázs will be doing the rest of this semester of school online, so he needed a computer, so I gave him my PC laptop and I got a MacBook Pro.

I kind of felt like a lemming buying a Mac, but I really do like it a lot.

I like the operating system, I love all the touch pad fast gestures, how the email program integrates with the calendar and how I am able to sync everything together.

I also love that my battery lasts 6 hrs on one charge.

I'll say this - a few months ago I got to the point where I hated using my laptop, and rather used my tablet as much as I could, only turning on the laptop when absolutely necessary, about once or twice a week. Using this Mac has made me enjoy using a laptop again.

Slavery to Our Tools

Check out this presentation about the hold that technology can have on us.

There is a lot to take note of in what she has to say - lest we become slaves to our tools.

My favorite quote: "we used to share what we think, now we think so that we can share."

Check it out:

Putting It to the Test

I have had my Samsung Galaxy tablet for a few months now, and have really been able to put it to the test.

Using a tablet for school
Aside from everyday productivity, one of the main things I use my tablet for is my theology studies. It is really great for this, because I can carry all my course material on it, all my books and keep all my notes on it with Evernote. It is much nicer to read off of than a laptop - much more like a real book in shape and size.
The only problem I have run into so far is that my course material gives me page numbers from my text books, and the Kindle app only gives "location". You can navigate by page number if you use Kindle on a laptop, but not on a mobile device. So I'm not totally lost, but sometimes I have to open up my laptop - like people used to do in the old days :) - to find out what location relates to a given page number. I hope that Kindle will add page number navigation to their tablet and mobile apps soon. I think more people would be interested in using Kindle books for reference and school if they did.

Traveling with a tablet
The trip we took to Colorado a few weeks ago was the first time I have traveled without a laptop in about 10 years, and I must say that it was a great feeling. The battery life on the tablet is great. I was able to use the internet, study, read books to my kids, watch movies on the airplane, all from a single charged battery, which was still going strong for a whole day after we arrived. The key to saving the battery on the tablet is to turn off the wifi when you are not using it.

Preaching and teaching from a tablet
This is probably the thing I use my tablet for most. I have been teaching Bible studies 2-3 times per week for years now. It is great to have all my teachings stored on my tablet, so I can access them any time I'd like, and I never have to print my notes any more.
A few weeks ago we visited another church. We walked in late: the service had already begun, and the pastor walked up to me and told me that he had scheduled me to preach! I didn't know that when we arrived, but I was ready to go nonetheless, and I asked the Lord what message he wanted me to share with the church.
Having a tablet adds a new dimension to 2.Timothy 4:2 -"Preach the Word; be ready in season and out of season".

This week I am going to Ternopil, Ukraine to teach a course on church history for their school of missions. This means I will teach for about 20 hrs over 4 days - and I will do it all from notes on my tablet.

One of the only weakness I see so far is that Google Movies hasn't been released for all Android tablets yet. The release is rolling out, and there are other apps like Netflix and Redbox that you can watch movies on, but if they want to compete with Apple, Google really needs to fix that soon.

Was there life before tablets?
I look forward to the future, when all the bugs will be worked out. These things are great tools.

More Thoughts on Tablet Computers...

CNN put out this video report today about the legal battle going on between Apple and Samsung:



I have one of these disputed Samsung tablets, and I love it. It is really similar to the iPad - perhaps the only significant difference is the operating system, which in the end was the very reason I chose the Galaxy Tab over the iPad - because I prefer the Android Honeycomb OS to the iOS.

I haven't seen many people in Europe with tablets yet, but I suspect that Android tablets will dominate the iPad in Europe because Apple products are much more expensive here than in the US because of all the import taxes. And if people here can choose between two products that are essentially the same, but the one costs less and uses a more widespread operating system, I'm sure people would choose that.

We'll see what happens :)

Saving Trees

I just bought my textbooks for my next semester of seminary. For the first time ever I won't have to pay expensive shipping costs to get my school books to me in Hungary because I bought all of them in Kindle format.
Besides saving on the shipping costs, all the books also cost less in Kindle format.

I was a bit concerned about using e-books for school, but after using one of my Kindle books as a reference last year, I realized that it is actually much better than having a paper book. Besides not having to carry huge texts books with you in order to study outside of your house, you can easily do word searches and highlight, and if you want to reference something, you can simply copy it and Kindle automatically gives you all the reference information for your footnotes.

I have had my Android Tablet for 3 weeks now and absolutely love it. I preach from it at church, I read on it, takes notes on it, blog from it, etc.

I'm excited about going paper free - saving some trees, not having to store a bunch of books and handwritten or typed notes all over my house...

Here are my favorite apps for my tablet:

• Kindle reader
• Documents to Go (the full version is well worth the money - it is the one app I have paid for)
• Dropbox
• Evernote
• Pulse

When will you join the revolution? :)

Attitude

Attitude

Took this, photoshopped it, and uploaded it from my tablet.

Taking it easy this week, decompressing after a very blessed English Camp last week.

New Toy

My parents generously bought me an Android tablet - a Samsung Galaxy 10.1.
The team from Whitefields Community Church in Longmont, CO brought it over for me when they came out to serve at our English Camp, so I've only had it since Saturday, and am still learning the ins and outs of it.
I'm looking forward to seeing how I will be able to use it. I am planning to preach from it - and am looking forward to not having to print anymore, and having all my sermons and messages saved on one portable device. I have also been using the tablet here at camp a lot to look at and update the excel sheets we use for camp and for the church accounting. Whenever someone comes to me with a question I can easily access the information they need.
I've also been reading a lot on it with Kindle - which is awesome on it - as well as using it to blog during the camp.
I expect that my laptop will gather quite a bit of dust in the near future, and that I will mostly use it for writing sermons and papers for school and for uploading photos from my camera. It's hard for me to see tablets totally replacing laptops, although I'm sure that time is coming soon.

I had debated between getting an iPad or the Galaxy tab, as they are the same price, but decided on the Android for the following reasons:
- I have an Android phone, use Google calendar, Gtasks, Picasaweb, Google Docs and have all my contacts synced with Google - and on Android this all synchronizes so well.
- It has a great screen with higher resolution than ipad.
- It runs flash. Using it to browse the web is not like using a big phone, because you can do everything on it that you could do on a laptop.

The only thing that was enticing about the ipad is that there are more apps available. But as the Android market share grows, more and more apps will be made for Android tabs.

Anyway, I like this new toy.

Finally a Mobile Version for Blogger

A few years ago, when we started a church newspaper, we made the decision to do it online rather than have a printed version, for various reasons. One reason was because having an online newspaper would make it possible for us to reach more people with our articles and another reason was because paper is so passé.
Seriously, who reads on paper any more? I barely even read books on paper nowadays - and I read a lot of books!

Just as paper is now passé - it seems to me that desktop computers are also passé, and it is a matter of time before laptops will also be passé.
Even if laptops will not be passé for a long time to come, more and more people are using mobile devices like smart phones and tablets so they can be productive on the go.

I have used both Blogger and Wordpress to blog. Our church's blog is on Wordpress, and I like many things about it - but I started this blog on Blogger, and I like how simple and easy to use it is, so I have kept it here.

The thing I really like about Wordpress is how well it works on mobile devices.
I have an Android phone, and I can easily write and post on Wordpress through their official Android app - which is superior to any of the apps for Blogger.
Furthermore, I prefer reading Wordpress blogs on my phone because they are automatically switched to the mobile version, which doesn't take as long to download and is easier to view on a phone.

So, I was glad today, when I signed into Blogger, to find that there is now a mobile optimized setting for Blogger blogs - and I must say, that I think the Blogger mobile versions look better than the Wordpress ones.

If you want to check out how this blog looks on an iPhone or Android or other smart phone, you can either look it up the old fashioned way, or scan this picture with the Barcode Scanner app.

An Interesting Day

Today I was at McDonald's with the kids, and when we were getting ready to leave, a parade started going by, with a marching band and all, filling up the whole street. We were in a bit of a hurry, and I could see that it was going to take a while for the parade to pass - and it was going in the same direction as where my car was parked - so the kids and I joined the parade!

People were taking pictures and video of us walking in the parade - and for the first couple of minutes I didn't even know what kind of parade we had joined; I was just hoping it wasn't a "love parade"!

Turns out the parade was for alternative energy vehicles, and once we got closer to where our car was parked, we ducked out and went on our way.

Other things that happened today:

• The screen on my computer died...which was really bad timing as I have an assignment due for school next week and all my notes are on this laptop. Thankfully I was able to get it fixed right away...but it wasn't cheap...
  I've had quite a few problems with this Toshiba laptop in the short 2 years I've had it.
  

• They recently introduced paying for parking by text message in Eger, so I tried it, and then when I came back to my car I had a big red parking ticket waiting for me. Hopefully I can get that worked out.

• At one point today I told Nate that I am going to take him to Austria and we will see a castle in the mountains. Later on I heard him talking about how excited he is to go to the castle in the mountains where there are ostriches :) Hopefully he won't be disappointed on our trip - or else, hopefully we will happen upon some ostriches!

Published

There are many reasons I love Flickr. One of the reasons it is great is that photos posted on Flickr are copyrighted, and you can also decide whether you want to allow people to be able to download your pictures or not.

For this reason, there are a lot of both professional and amateur photographers who use the site and post high quality images. Because of this, Flickr is a place that people like journalists and newspaper writers will go to search for images to illustrate articles, travel guides or websites.

In the past few years I have had 3 pictures published, and I got an email yesterday requesting my permission to publish another one.
For an amateur photographer, the recognition feels great.

Here are the pictures I've had published. I don't actually think these are my best photos, but they were what these people were looking for.

This one of the Denver City and County Building was used in a travel guide:


This one of Bill Clinton Street in Prishtina, Kosovo was used in a French news article about the unveiling of a statue of Clinton in Prishtina:


This one of Nessebar, Bulgaria was also used in a travel guide:


This photo from Sirok, Hungary will be published in a German economic journal:

Angry Bird

If you have a smart phone, or know anyone who does, you have probably heard of Angry Birds.

Nate loves playing Angry Birds on my phone, and he is actually pretty good at it.

The other day he got an idea, and came to me and said, "I want to fly like an angry bird!" Then he went and stacked up some pillows and wanted me to throw him into them and knock them over.

Here's the video:

Digital Nativity

What if social media had existed when Jesus was born?
Check this out:

Android 2.1 Review

A while back I wrote a blog post about my Android phone (click here to read that post).

Recently I got the update from Android 1.5 "Cupcake" to 2.1 "Eclair".
I had been waiting for this update for almost 6 months. During this time, as I was checking online, waiting for news of the release of the update, I realized that there was a whole community of people online talking about Android and the different updates.

Now that I've had the upgrade for a few weeks, here are a few thoughts about it:

• With this update, it is as if I have a whole new phone. The interface is much better.
• I now have the apps that I was missing before - Kindle reader and Tweetdeck, and I think Tweetdeck for Android is actually better than the one for iPhone/iPod.
  
• My phone is slower now. It seems that my phone doesn't have the resources to handle this new software very well. Lately it has been taking a really long time to access my contacts list, which can be a pain in a jam. If anyone has any suggestions about how to fix this, I would love to hear them.
• The battery life is shorter now, and some of the apps that I couldn't get on 1.5 use a lot of resources, as does the Android software itself. Also, because Android allows multitasking, when you have multiple apps running, it runs down the battery. One helpful thing though is that Android 2.1 has a task manager which you can use to turn off programs that run in the background, and also set programs to automatically turn off after a certain amount of time if they are running idly in the background.
  

All in all, I'm really satisfied with Android Eclair - and I have no plan to buy a new phone any time soon.

Tweeting the Bible

This British man made the news with his project to tweet summaries of every chapter of the Bible.


I think this is an interesting idea, and I think it's great that he's getting so much press for it.

You can follow him here: @biblesummary

Are you on Twitter? If you are, you can follow me here: @nickcady

Android

A few weeks ago I got a new phone, a Motorola CLIQ, which I bought used from a family member in the US.

The CLIQ uses the Android operating system, the main competitor to the iPhone - and it seems that Android has actually surpassed iPhone in sales in the smart phone market.

I've never had an iPhone, but I do have an iPod touch, and have some experience using the iOS operating system which also runs on both devices. There are some things which I like must better about Android, and there are others ways in which I think the iOS is better.

One of the main things that makes the iPhone better I think is that it functions as an iPod. Android also has a media player, which is also very good - but it is not as easy to navigate and use as the iPod in the iPhone.
There are also some apps for the iPhone/iPod touch which I really miss on the Android, such as the ESV Bible app, Tweetdeck (coming for Android, but still in development), and especially Amazon Kindle reader.
To me, the iOS seems a bit more fluid and responsive, but there isn't a huge difference.

On the other hand, there are some things I prefer about Android, particularly how it syncs so well with everything on my Google account - particularly that it uses the Google Calendar and GTasks.
Another thing I really love is the universal inbox, where I can view both my email accounts, text messages, facebook and twitter messages all in one place, and respond to them all without having to open separate applications.
The CLIQ has a virtual keyboard, similar to the iPhone's, and I actually prefer the Android's spell check to the iPhone's. The CLIQ also has a full keyboard, something I didn't think I would use or like, but which I now actually prefer to the virtual keyboard.

All in all, I really like Android, and don't feel any need or desire to switch from it to the iPhone - although I really do wish I could read Kindle books on it!

Anyone else out there using Android? What do you think of it?
Is there a way to read Kindle books on it? Will it ever be possible?

Be Careful What You Search For

I use Google Analytics on my blog to see how many people are reading my blog and from which countries.

It also tells me how they find their way to the blog, and if they got there through a search engine like Google or Yahoo, it tells me what 'keywords' they typed into the search engine which led them to my blog.

Every now and again I get some weird ones. I guess people type strange things into search engines when they think no one is watching. Today I saw that someone found my blog by searching for this:

A closer view:
I'm guessing Google directed them to this post about a baptism in our church - but why someone is looking for pictures of Pastor Nick bathing...that's just weird.
I just hope that they were looking for a different Pastor Nick!