kylegilbert

I recently started reading a book called Holiness by J. C. Ryle. As soon as I heard of the book (I saw it mentioned in another blog’s comments), I knew that it was something I needed to read.

There were a couple of reasons in particular that it interested me:

1. With the nationwide push for churches to be cool and relevant, holiness seems to be often overlooked.
2. I really desire holiness in my life, but honestly, I fall so short of it even with my best intentions.

I’m only a few chapters into the book, but nearly every paragraph contains a powerful nugget of truth. I’ll share a few of my favorite quotes just in case you’re interested.

Here’s one of my favorite lines: “A true Christian is one who has not only peace of conscience, but war within. He may be known by his warfare as well as by his peace.”

Contrasting justification and sanctification: “Justification is a finished and complete work, and a man is perfectly justified the moment he believes. Sanctification is an imperfect work, comparatively, and will never be perfected until we reach heaven.”

“Holiness is the habit of being of one mind with God… agreeing in [His] judgment, hating what He hates, loving what He loves, and measuring everything in this world by the standard of His Word.”

“I do not say for a moment that holiness shuts out the presence of indwelling sin. No, far from it. It is the greatest misery… that the old man is clogging all his movements and, as it were, trying to draw him back at every step he takes (Rom. 7:21).”

“In short, to talk of men being saved from the guilt of sin, without being at the same time saved from its dominion in their hearts, is to contradict the witness of all Scripture.”

Not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I personally hate websites that feature background music.  Don’t get me wrong – I love music.  There’s just an appropriate place for it, and it’s not on your website.

Here’s a scenario: you’ve finally gotten the kids to bed and you’re enjoying the quiet evening, browsing the Internet, when… BAM!  Your silence is shattered, and it sends you flying for the volume control.

At home is bad enough, but the office is even worse.  Especially if you have a shared office environment (like I do).

This very thing happened to me on Monday.  I was going to pick up dinner for Aaron Goin and his wife who have a newborn, and I was checking a local restaurant’s website for their phone number and menu.  I was looking things over and pretty much settled on chicken fajitas and the Pollo Supremo when suddenly and without warning… the office filled with mariachi music.

The good news is that everybody liked the song (the guy’s laughter is contagious), and we’ve adopted it as the Office of Awesome theme song.  We’ve started a tradition of playing it each day at 4 pm.

If you want to hear it, swing by the Office at 4 pm sometime, or you can listen to it here.

The Faith Promise Communications Team (Heather Burson & I) have been plotting and scheming about revamping the church letterhead, envelopes, and stuff for several months now, but it’s only been in the past few days that we’ve settled on a set of designs. I personally think they’re awesome and a major upgrade, but I’m a little bit biased.

We should be finalizing the order by the end of this week, and there’s a chance that we might get some of it back in the next couple of weeks.

I love this kind of stuff!

Here’s a short video of my son and I doing a little wrestling.  Don’t miss his finishing move at the end.

These look interesting, but I’m afraid I would go insane after wearing these for more than 5 minutes.

Yeah, I start to wig out when my feet are crowded.

Today we launched our first Internet Campus with iPhone streaming, and it went great. Josh was kind enough to get me some screen captures on his iPod Touch, and you can see them below.

The Faith Promise Internet Campus continues to make progress, and thanks to the help of Brad Roberts and the folks at Light Cast Media, we’ll be testing out streaming on the iPhone this Sunday at 10 & 11:45 am. This is a brand new technology, and I’m glad we get to jump on board so early in the process.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can test things out by going to http://faithpromise.org/icampus. If you go there on an iPhone or iPod Touch, you should just see a iPhone specific countdown page. From there, you’ll be able to select whether you want the stream with or without sign language. (Yes, you’ll be able to stream the sign language video on your iPhone.) Even without an iPhone, you can see what it looks like here.

If everything goes well, in addition to the iPhone stream, we will also see substantial improvements with both our audio and video quality. Matt James has helped me to set up a better encoding process, and Phil Bledsoe helped me to work out some kinks in the audio – providing the iCampus with a better range of sound.

What a blessing to work with such a great team! Pray with me that our iCampus will continue to make an impact in the lives of people online.

OK, enough playing around.  Today we’re serious, and I’m looking at a the top three web apps that have been especially helpful to me over the past few weeks and months.

1) YouVersion (mostly the iPhone app) – This application continues to be something that I use at least once a day.  I’m still doing my daily reading on the iPhone, and they keep making improvements on the .com site as well.  Really an amazing resource that you need to check out, if you haven’t already.

2) Mvelopes – This personal finance application is really top knotch.  It’s taken the weekly chore of entering and classifying expenses down to the simple process of dropping the expense into the corresponding virtual envelope.  I expect that I’ve already saved dozens of hours in the few months I’ve used their system.

3) Freshbooks – This is a time tracking and invoicing application.  I’ve always been bad at tracking my freelance time, and many times I’d end up doing updates for free, but now I’m able to easily track my time and produce invoices from the time I’ve spent.  I’m still new to this one, but I’ve been very impressed, and the corresponding iPhone time tracking application is very helpful.  Best of all, they allow you to manage up to three clients for free.

I thought it would be cool to mention a few web applications that I’ve found to be especially useful over the past few weeks, but I think I’ll save that for tomorrow.  Today, instead, I want to mention a useful hilarious web program that had me laughing like a fool at my desk today.

It’s called Translation Party, and what it does is take an English phrase and convert it to Japanese using Google’s translation API.  Then, it translates the Japanese back to English.  It repeats the process until the two phrases match in English and Japanese (“equilibrium”).  Google’s translator is good, so sometimes nothing too interesting happens, but sometimes it gets pretty funny.

Here’s a couple that turned out pretty good:

Sample One

Sample Two

I love my job, and one of the things I get to do each day is make decisions. Decisions like:

• What new projects will my team take on?
• What will be priority?
• Where will we focus our time and money?
• Should we do option A, B, or C?

I hope that I make good decisions most of the time, but even when I don’t, I often get the opportunity to revisit those decisions again. The Deaf interpretation on the Internet Campus is a good example of this very thing.

You see, when we first launched the Internet Campus, I got a kind email that I quickly dismissed as outside our scope for the Internet Campus. That was three months ago.

Fortunately, our Graphic Artist Heather Burson, mentioned the idea to me a few weeks later and cast a vision for the impact the iCampus could have in the Deaf community. This second time, I listened.

Has that every happened to you? Have you ever dismissed an idea but later come back with a new perspective?