But only for the day.
If you haven’t been listening to TPN Rock recently, you should check it out. Ewan had this great idea to bring guest hosts on to play their favourite podsafe music. This week’s edition is by podcasting pioneer Eric Rice. Check it out. There is something about the energy and in ya faceness of his opening track, Get Ready by Head Pe, that reminds me of “Get Free†by ex-Aussie band The Vines.
Andrew Sullivan recently linked to this 2005 article about now-defunct American Pastor Ted Haggard.
This quote from him lends weight to my recent arguments that Christianity is incredibly violent at its very core:
“I teach a strong ideology of the use of power,†he says, “of military might, as a public service.†He is for preemptive war, because he believes the Bible’s exhortations against sin set for us a preemptive paradigm, and he is for ferocious war, because “the Bible’s bloody. There’s a lot about blood.â€
If you buy the bible as the word of god, then you have to buy its view that everyone who disagrees with you should be killed, maimed or tortured. So I don’t buy this excuse that “oh it isn’t Christianity that’s violent, it’s just a few bad apples”.
I also love this bit about how Ted built his church early on:
He staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his church; his whole congregation pitched itself into invisible battles with demonic forces, sometimes in front of public buildings.
It puts his forced admission late last year of ice-fueled illicit gay sex into some perspective.
Missing AllTunes? I am. I miss it like a lost limb. However, someone called Scottitude in the comments section of my old blog just posted this:
If you’re in the USA and haven’t been able to refill your AllTunes balance, Just do what I did:
From the Balance page, scroll to the bottom and click on the “Purchase Gift Certificate” button. On the next screen, Click on the “AllTunes Payment” button. You’ll reach an AllTunes login page so login and chuckle at the “pay by credit card” option because you’ve tried that countless times and it never works.
Then, click on the “Add Money by Credit Card” button anyway and chuckle again at the “select amount” options, because they haven’t worked either. Again, click the “Confirm Payment” button anyway.
You’ll arrive at a page displaying your basic (name, email, amount, order #, etc.) transaction info and the following message:
===========================================
Credit or Debit card
On the next step you’ll be transferred to the site of processing company E-centru (www.e-centru.com).All products and services, displayed in the Internet-shop Alltunes.com, are accepted for payment via VISA/Mastercard by “TELETRANSINFO” SRL, address 69/1 Stefan cel Mare Blrd., Chisinau, Moldova, through a protected URL https://secure.e-centru.com. For security purposes, the card numbers are not kept by the company.
Please, be careful during typing information about your credit card. All typed data will be transferred using SSL connection 3.0 (to protect the data and prevent and guarantee its safety).”
============================================Enter your billing information and click “Pay Now”. Go to www.AllofMP3.com, login, click your “Balance” tab, scroll to the bottom, and you’ll see “Your Current Gift Certificates”. Click on the “status” link and send yourself the gift certificate by entering your email address.
You can either wait for the email or navigate back to the “gift certificate” (from the balance page)and copy & paste the URL to the gift certificate. You’ll then need to “activate” and “apply” the gift certificate to your account, which can be done from the “Balance” page.
Hurry though, ’cause you never know when this method will get blocked, too.
See you at AllTunes!
I haven’t tried it yet but it sounds pretty sweet if it works.
Chris Saad is one of the whizkid whippersnappers behind Brisbane-based start-up Touchstone. He’s also one of the founders of the new Media 2.0 Workgroup which (according to their site) is
Of course, they haven’t (yet) invited me to be part of the group so I don’t know how authoritative it can be. After all, I *am* Media 2.0. Look it up in Wikipedia and you’ll see my sunnies. ANYWAY…
Here’s some of the links mentioned in the show:
uTorrent
Joost (aka The Venice Project)
Tangler
Here’s a picture of what Joost looks like for those of you who aren’t on it yet:
And because not everyone is on Tangler yet, I have set up a new forum to discuss Media 2.0 further. A place to talk about how media is changing, your favourite podcasts, internet TV, torrent sites, media center devices, etc.
If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed.
The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me†by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.
James Farmer and I will be debating the future of citizen media on Jon Faine’s top rating ABC radio show this WEDNESDAY morning. James used to be a great blogger… until he sold out and took a job with Aussie media dinosaurs Fairfax in the middle of 2006.
Nah, only kidding. Well about James that is (Fairfax are definitely dinosaurs). I’m just trying to get into the BATTLE frame of mind for Wednesday’s event. James is a top bloke although he has become a bit of an apologist for tree media since he went on their payroll (link).
To pre-empt the usual questions:
1. no, I will not be recording it.
2. yes, ABC do podcast some of Jon’s shows but I don’t know if this one will be or not. You can find Jon’s site here.
Michael Specht is my Productivity Buddy ™. If you don’t have a Productivity Buddy yet, I highly recommend it. It’s one of my better ideas.
Basically Michael and I have a regular 10am Monday morning telephone call where we make sure the other person has completed their GTD weekly review, then we talk over our productivity challenges, tips and tricks.
The topic of today’s call was around self-motivation. Each of us said we had a nice list of tasks to get through this week but the trick is actually DOING THEM and not letting other things get in the way. I’m always getting sucked into replying to email, handling tech support issues, responding to comments, accepting Skype calls, etc. All good stuff, fun stuff, all stuff which needs to happen to keep the business running, but all stuff which stops me from getting the “important not urgent” things on my list done.
So I’m wondering what tips and tricks you folks have for forcing yourself to get the hard, smelly jobs done. Do you have a particular carrot or stick approach? Do you reward yourself or deny yourself with something until the job is done? Got any good blogs or podcasts on the subject you recommend?
Technorati Tags:productivity, gtd
Brian Shearer has a great interview with comic book artist Mark Sparacio over on TPN’s new Comic Review Weekly podcast. I didn’t know Sparacio by name but he’s the very talented guy who did the above painting as well as covers for Marvel and DC Comics. Brian talks to him about how he started working in comics, how he produces his paintings, and his friendship with comic legend Will Eisner. Definitely worth checking out if you’re interested in how the sausage gets made.
Believe or not kids, I can’t even comment on my own blog today. I’ve been blacklisted by Akismet!
Recently I discovered an Aussie start-up taking on the big boys in the area of local search – the online business directory dLook. Started in April 2006 by Theo and Meg Tsiamis, dLook is going head-to-head with the bigger online business directories in Australia and is starting to take siginificant marketshare from them, at least in terms of traffic.
Check out dLook’s Alexa chart versus Sensis’ YellowPages:
The best part of the story? dLook has four employees and is self-funded out of the Tsiamis’ bank account!
So I invited Theo onto the show to talk about why they decided to step out of their previous business (real estate development) to set up a search site (hint: a rude reply from one of the existing search providers) and how they are going to continue to beat them at their own game.
If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed.
The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me†by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.
Over the last few weeks I’ve had a number of people, in the comments section and in emails, suggest that science also involves an element of faith and, therefore, isn’t very different from religion.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, but it seems to be one of those memes which has made its way like a virus into the faith apologist camp and I want to give you (the rational thinkers in the audience) the tools to defend yourself against this argument should you meet it in a dark alley some night.
Science, or more accurately, the scientific process, is about the search for knowledge. Those of us who want the human race to survive and prosper know that the key to survival is knowledge. We are incredibly fortunate that evolution has provided us with large brains and, if we fail to use them, we may never understand enough about the universe or ourselves to avoid the vast number of pitfalls that could wipe out life as we know it on this very frail, fragile little planet.
The scientific process, developed over thousands of generations of human struggle, is bringing us closer every year to understanding our true nature, our place in the universe, and the way our universe works at the most fundamental levels.
And part of the scientific process is to speculate.
“Hmmmm, I wonder if….?”
Now, this is where religion apologists will try to tell you that “faith” enters science. They seem to think that the act of speculation involves faith. That’s a mistake of gigantic proportions and demonstrates a failure to truly grasp the scientific method.
Here’s the difference.
It’s important to remember that the dictionary definition of ‘faith’ is “Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.” So when a person has ‘faith’, they believe something to be true regardless of whether or not there is any evidence to support that idea, and, worse still, when there is overwhelming evidence to refute the idea.
When a scientist speculates and develops a hypothesis, they aren’t investing that idea with “truthiness” (as Colbert might say). They speculate merely in order to then prove or disprove. That is the entire process of science. Speculate – investigate – prove/disprove – publish – repeat. The scientist doesn’t need the hypothesis to be true in order to have done their job. If it is refuted, then we now know one more fact. And, again, that’s what science is about – discovering the facts about how the universe works.
So the next time someone tries to suggest to you that science is just like religion, don’t let them get away with it.
Remember:
Faith = believing something is true despite the facts.
Science = searching for the facts.