BlakeAtwood.com

Go here to see the full list, but these would be my three favorites:

I shall attempt to post a weekly NoiseTrade.com album widget for your perusal. I’ll only post ones I’ve actually downloaded. If you haven’t tried NoiseTrade, you should. It has a lot of great music and a great distribution deal – get the album for free if you recommend it to five friends via email or pay what you think it’s worth. They also appear to be adding new artists and albums every few weeks.

I don’t use it as much as I should, but that will change. Tonight’s download was to help ease me out of my bah-hum-bug-ness for the Christmas season (only because I’ve been rehearsing Christmas music for six weeks already!) Click the album cover to hear all the tracks!

From the failblog

This scan reminded me of something that once crossed my desktop that I almost didn’t catch. In an article to get people to volunteer to teach English, one sentence read, “Let’s do our part to help stamp out literacy.”

Here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

These are the words of David Foster Wallace, an author I somehow had not heard about until his untimely, recent death. Infinite Tragedy is now on my ever-lengthening to-read list.

The above quote was copied from Purple State of Mind, the blog of Craig Detweiler.

I haven’t “blogged” (it’s still a strange word to me. Almost too hip. Isn’t it just writing?) in awhile. I’ve been enamored with Twitter, the 140-character limiting status update social network. On there, I’m batwood. My twitter feed is actually on the sidebar of this page, should you be interested in my updates.

It’s much less intimidating to do short bursts of status updates than to write posts of any length. The lack of lengthy updates is possibly due to increasing ADD or simply more time on my iPhone, where 140 characters are much easier than composing an email.You certainly learn the writer’s first lesson – cut, cut, cut. Being concise is key. Suffice it to say that I should be writing, blogging, and describing more of my world than I have been, because I’ve been truly blessed in a multitude of ways and I should share that.

I’ve been hard at work on a few websites outside of my day job. Take a gander at terranova or First Baptist Church Chattahoochee, both run by pastors that I’ve had the privilege of being pastored by. They are different churches, targeted at different demographics; thus the different looks. However, I’m not a designer, just a tweaker. Both of those sites are based on wordpress, a blogging management system that I’ve tweaked into a content management system. There are many, many freely available templates for wordpress sites; I download those then tweak them to find the layout that works.

The terranova site was different because we attempted to use a coverflow script (imageflow) as a major navigational component. While it requires a little more work on the end-users part to get around the site, I think it adds a nice dimension of interactivity and a near-tactile experience. Or maybe it’s just annoying. I’m still waiting on feedback after the newness wears off.

After putting in a lot of hours, it was great to get both of those sites live. Also great – converting the terranova pastor…to twitter. And getting him to have the twitter feed posted to the church’s website. It lets his church members connect with him very simply, but, I think, effectively.

As for my day job, the church finally gave me a title, so it’s a little easier to answer the question, “What do you do?” The answer: Director of Media and Communications. Which only produces another question, “So, what do you do?” I will try to make communications within the church body and from the church to the outside world become cohesive, cogent, complete, contemporary, and, maybe just a little, cool. This includes web to print to newspapers to TV and everything in between. It will be, as it already has been, interesting.

In related news, and for the next post, I’ll be attending the Innovate Conference at Granger Community Church in Granger, IN in about two weeks! I’m looking forward to the whole conference, but learning from the guru of church communications (and fellow twitterer) Kem Meyer is the real draw for me. There’s much I need to learn!

And it will be blogged…