The time has come for Angelina to start school in Sweden, as we do not live in the right neighbourhood where the corps is she will have trouble getting in to the same school as her friends from pre-school.
Please pray that the impossible becomes possible for Angelina and that she will be allowed to go to the school that is around the corner from the corps.
The Apologetics Study Bible by Norm Geisler
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
This Study Bible while filled with a lot of amazing facts is a very biased book, it promotes a very specific strain of theology and therefore, in my opinion is a poor study bible for the serious bible student or scholar.
A lot of geeky posts right now, for that I appologize. But beta testing is fun. It is even more fun when people are doing old things in new and exciting ways.
I have had my eyes on bumptop for quite a while. And now the mac alpha version has come out and I have been asked to “beta” test. It is a new way of doing “desktop” it treats your desktop as an actual desktop where you can organize files and folders in piles, you can scoot things around on the surface and they slide over your desktop…. What I wouldn’t give for a touch screen right now ……
Yesterday I posted about my 6 remaining Google wave invites. So far I have not had a single reply. I make one more try. I am looking for people interested in the emergent comversation or churchplanting. If I can find none, then I will randomly select people randomly from my adress book. If you want an invite comment here and add me on tumblr or twitter. I will give out at least one random invite.
I have now received some invites for google wave. This has been something I have been longing for as the wave is quite boring until you have people to collaborate with.
However, it is proving harder than I thought to choose who to invite. Therefore I will extend invites to people who can be beneficial to me, Hanna and the Malmö corps. We are in the starting phase of replanting the corps. We are a NEO (New Expression Of the Salvation Army) and rapidly becoming part of the hyphenated church ie. Salvo-emergent.
If you are a person who wants to have theological discussions, and you think you can come with insight and ideas regarding emergence, Salvation Army and or planting let me know by a comment below, and sign up to follow either my twitter or tumbler feed and I will consider you for one of my six remaining invites. In the end I will also randomly select one person to receive an invite so even if you do not fit the description below.
The only other condition to this is that if you get an invite from me, please consider giving one of your invites to someone who commented below and did not get one.
As a Salvation Army Officer, pastor, public speaker, thinker, theologian and human being, I read a lot. And as I do I find some really cool quotes and interesting thoughts. I have decided to keep publishing these quotes and uplifting/provocative thoughts in a separate forum so that those who do not lie to read wordy (and sometimes rambling and aimless) blog posts.
So without a bone of shame in my body I hereby promote my own Tumblr page where you can read these quotes and take part of these thoughts. If you would rather aggregate them in your RSS reader you can capture the feed here.
While this feed is also available via my twitter feed, it just looks much better in your RSS reader if you take the feed straight from tumblr.
I have done some beta testing in the past, mostly games (Anarchy Online, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft) but now I am having loads of fun beta testing some other stuff.
Google Wave
So I finally got a google wave invite. Wave looks very promising but it is extremely booring. Having a wave account and no invites to give out proves to be challenging. Being alone on a service that is designed for collaborative work is well not very productive. I can’t wait until google wave is as well used as gmail.
Accordance - Svenska folk bibeln
Last night I was asked to try out the a new accordance module with ‘Svenska Folk Bibeln’ (Swedish Folk Bible). The Bible translation that I have been using the most and desperately need for my sermon and bible study prep.
Honoured and very tickled to be asked personally by the accordance staff I naturally accepted.
Voddler
My ISP – Bredbandsbolaget are offering all their customers free beta accounts at Voddler, an internet movie service much like spotify but with movies instead. I am amazed at how right away after creating my account I was streaming a HD movie without a single hiccup.
Voddler have received a lot of criticism, but I wonder if it is not just a great service in it’s infancy. well we shall see. It is going to be fun trying it out though.
I haven’t posted a tech/geek post in a very long time but now I just feel I have to. As many of you know, I switched to Mac a while back and I must say I am fairly happy with the switch.
Together with the switch to mac and getting an iPod came the switch to iTunes something that I have been less than happy with. iTunes is a bloated music player that works well as long as you are on a mac and as long as you want to work with mac/iPod etc …. then I found ecoute a small little player that hooks up with iTunes seamlessly and as an extra bonus scrobbles your songs to last.fm.
Now having 4000 songs in your library (some years back me and Hanna thought we where moving to Africa and ripped our entire CD collection, a good thing to, we had three break ins in our car during the move and lost many of our favourite CD’s) is messy, most of them untagged and without artwork etc. I tried Song genie but it really barely made a dent in my collection. Enter Pollux, not only is Pollux recognising almost every song I chuck at it and find both artwork and lyrics, it simplifies it (yes you do not have all the bells and whistles of Song Genie) in a zen like way, it is also free!
It is now munching through my entire collection sorting tagging and adding artwork.
With these little helper apps, I am now much happier with iTunes.
It has been to long since I posted on this blog and I feel that the time has come to do so. My good friend Mackan asked me if I would get him ready for a MMA (mixed Martial Arts) competition in Belgium in October and I could not resist the opportunity to do some ground fighting and to work on my standing game.
And while my Fiore Abracare skills are up to specs, I am unsure how well they would fare in a MMA competition where the fighting is fierce but you are not allowed to break your opponent or drop them on their heads. So I went looking for an alternative, and decided to use Crazy Monkey Defence, a school I have had my eye on for a long time and really wanted to see if they are as good as their hype.
So last night I signed up to the Crazy Monkey Defence school (CMD) online and have been sampling the boxing teaching on there. I must say that I am impressed so far. I have never been a boxer and although we experimented with some unarmed sparring in our Latvian WSD group it was just a few times other than that, I have no fighting experience from standing up using my hands. Today I met with Mackan and we had our first session. Although I have next to no experience in boxing I could, with the help of the CM1 skills stand my ground and play a good defensive game. Although my punches are ridiculously weak and slow.
I was delighted to see that CMD also had a special Brazilian Jiu jitsu section with some really good videos strengthening my ground game. It was really good to get rolling on the ground and train some BJJ again, I have really missed it (the only caveat with medieval combat training is that there is no ground wrestling. We worked on the four base positions and started on passing the guard. It was a really good workout and I look forward to spending a month coaching a fighter to competition readiness again. It has been way to long!
It is good to do some up close and personal fighting again (not that longswords can´t get up close and personal but, well, there is not much wrestling with longswords, as you do not want to cut your bits off)
Pictures from today will be available on my facebook page.
Wow, it has been a long time since I had time to sit down and write a blog post. Do I have time right now? Not really.
Be that as it may, here I am writing. Since wrote last I have been to Boston where we had a fabulous SSG gathering and where I graded to Scholaro Maggiore within the SSG Spada di Duo Mani. I have also been to Sweden, twice!! The first time to find an apartment and to sort out some practicalities for our coming move to Malmö. I didn’t find an apartment but did some good networking and groundwork for the move. The second trip was a delightful break for the whole family as we spent midsummer in Alingsås and the Sunday doing our home corps specialling at Hisingskåren in Gothenburg.
After this commissioning preparations began in earnest. On the fourth of July Hanna and I became “Mr Lieutenant Hanna Olterman” as it was clear to all that Hanna was the brightest shining star on the day and the day after when she gave her testimony at our farewell meeting at William Booth College. We had the house full of guests and just before the farewell, Hanna’s and my parents where awarded the Silver Star in a short outdoor ceremony that was somewhat cut short by the incoming rain.
It is surreal to suddenly be Salvation Army Officers after these two years as Cadets. Yet we are and we are “God Willing” moving into a flat in central Malmö to take on the task of planting a new kind of Salvation Army corps in the best city in the world … Watch this space ….
