TallSkinnyKiwi

Mike Yaconelli goes to heaven

I am grieved beyond words to hear this announcment from Youth Specialties:
"El Cajon, CA, October 30, 2003 - Mike Yaconelli, owner and co-founder of Youth Specialties, was involved in a fatal car accident late Wednesday night, October 29, outside his hometown of Yreka, in northern California. He passed away early Thursday morning, October 30. In addition to founding Youth Specialties, an organization dedicated to equipping and training youth workers through events and resources, Mike was the founder and general editor of The Door (formerly The Wittenberg Door) and the author of numerous books, including Dangerous Wonder and Messy Spirituality. Mike was also a contributing columnist to Youthworker journal."

Thanks Jason Clark for the news.
I got to hang with Mike just 8 weeks ago at Greenbelt Festival in England. It was the first time I had actually met him in person. He was hugely popular at Greenbelt but always had time for people. He was very encouraging to me. I shared with him what I saw in the emerging culture and of the different movements going on. He had lots of time for me and even asked to spend more time. I got to pray for him right before he spoke. I put my hand on his shoulder to pray for him and I looked up at the thousands of people in the grandstands, and I felt God say that he wanted to Mike to speak "straight up" to the people - to tell it like it really was, to tell them exactly who they were. Maybe his humor was just HONESTY. Maybe he carried part of how God sees us.

He made jokes about his age, connected with everyone, connected them with God. The Door was also fantastic. It is still a model of Christian satire and irony - something that we desperately need in the church. We need to laugh at ourselves and Mike Yaconelli showed us how.
We will miss you, Mike. May many more rise up in your place.

The Skinny on Type Pad

Today is the last day of the 10% off for life Launching sale of TypePad. My advice is to sign up today for the one month free trial which gets you in on the final day, and kick it around for a few weeks. If you dont like it, cancel.
I find Typepad works better on PC than Mac - I have encountered some Mac-related problems already:
1. Photo album is not aligned in Mac but perfect in PC
2. I am lacking posting tools in Mac version.

Another let down - the moblogging (blogging from the phone) is email related and so i still cant use MMS on my MMS Ericsson phone to send an image with a few words of text/or a soundbite to accompany it.
Hopefully Typepad will add this soon.

The biggest problem is not having the html handy to adapt the way i want to post text with the image - i have to add it myself and it is not called up like in Blogger. And when i want to upload and add an image to an existing post, it wants to create a new posting.

However, i am sticking with it - it is the best blogging tool in the whole world and it feels very exact and quick to play with. And the photo album ability is the best I have come across.

Big plus - i had a problem importing files from a previous blog (still havent figured it out - can someone help?) and i hit the report button - within a few hours someone from Typepad had sent me a personal email telling me the answer. How nice to have a person respond!!!!!!!
I'm glad to be with Typepad.

Hotmail free again

OOOOPS. Some of you tired to email me in the last 2 days and had your email sent back. Hotmail got overloaded with a lot of files that I sent out and didnt delete. Sorry. Things are back to normal again. Please try again.

Bloggedyblog for halloween ideas

Andy C's List of 13 Scary, Spooky, Silly or Sublime Songs Suitable for Samhain.

Go-Carting

Go-carted today with the kids - well i watched them anyway. Same go-cart race that we used for our Inspiration Bohemia event last year. This photo was taken off some of us watching the racing. Brian and Grace McLaren are in the center. I should see Brian in a few days in London.

Why start a ministry conference with an International Go-Cart Race? Because the way they often start is by the leaders bragging on themselves and what they do, how many butts they attract into one room on a Sunday morning, how many listen to them talk, and other ways to establish the pecking order of the conference. So we put a ban on self-pimping and decided to meet each other on the race course.
And see who the real heros were. The real men.
Who was the real man???
Probably Kerstin Hack.

Blogaholic

Dang! Now i REALLY have to go to bed. Just reading all the blogs coming up by Christians, recognizing all the people and writers and realizing that:
1. It really is a small world
2. This new blog is really narrow minded and i might be off to a bad start - i look like a fanatic of the Fundy kind - i keep talking about church! Is that good?
3. I might be stepping back in to my blogging addiction
4. I really need to go to bed
5. ahhh. I think i am getting old.

i have to go to bed

Its really late and i am tired. But i was just watching the "Recently Updated" list at the bottom as it changed, checking out who the Typepad bloggers were, and wondering how many Christians were blogging.
Answer?
Out of 10 newly updated blogs, 4 were Christians (and i knew one of them).
40%
Thats worth thinking about but now i need to go to bed. Goodnight.

Typepad: I saw my name!

I saw my name pop up on the "Recently Updated" list of Typepad bloggers. Thats cool! That used to happen to me a lot in the early days of Blogger - back in 2001, when there wasn't a gizillion Blogspot Bloggers all posting at the same time.
BTW - I jumped on the Blogger.com site and saw JordonCooper had just recently posted - congrats Jordon for your 10 minutes of Blogspot fame.
Typepad is working out for me and i think i will stick with it. Today I pointed my domain name to this site. I was supposed to do this on Dec 1 but . . . hey . . . why wait until i get out all the bugs when i can invite all my friends in today and let them see the bugs for themselves.
For those of you bloggers that have come to pay your respects to my new home and are interested in migrating, Typepad just launched Oct 6 and is offering a 10% off for life deal if you sign up in OCTOBER.
Even better is the one month free - Sign up now and cancel out if you dont like it. If you stick with it, you get a much cheaper deal - but you have to do it today!!!!!!!

Help needed with the last post

Hey you geeks! Somebody help. I am still working on the xhtml for this site. I would like the previous post to be approx. 3-5 pixels away from the side of the image. I added padding=5 and margin=5 but neither helped. What do i add to the xhtml to make this happen? You could give me the answer in a comment below.

Proverbs translated in our bedroom

The Scribe in our basement is now the Scribe in our bedroom. Space at our place is scarce and Sasa Flek has moved his desk and office into our bedroom for the time being.
No problem - He arrives for work at 8am and leaves at 5pm.
No . . . he is not there at night time.
Yes . . my wife and I do have a sex life!!
Anyway, he just completed the translation of Proverbs and the book came out just in time for him and his people to show it off at the International Book Fair.
The cover is cool.