Vox Lucens

So I’m around 12 hours from departing to Thailand, having not even touched my personal packing, and desperately afraid that I’m forgetting something important. There’s a rather significant responsibility to leading a team to foreign places, and I have got to have my act together.

In finishing up projects this morning, I came to the following conclusion:

So, assuming I get packed in time, I’m leaving around 3 am tomorrow for around 28 hours of non-stop travel across 11 time zones. Remembering last time I did this, the following was appropos:

But in the final analysis, this is all that really matters:

And in case you hadn’t gathered, this is the most awesome thing I’ve seen on the web in a long time.

Travelogue to come! Stay tuned.

Well, I thought I’d pop up for a breath of air amongst the stultifying mental smog that comes from studying UCC. That chance is coming few and far between, though, as UCC is only the first of many things that are burying me in hyperactivity.

I would greatly appreciate your prayers over the next three weeks of insanity. Here’s the overview:

This weekend I head to Sumter for a homeschool conference, as well as catching some volleyball action. The upcoming week is full of meetings and packing and preparing to leave. In the middle, I’ll be spending a day in Atlanta meeting with another ministry that we will be partnering with as we head to Sudan at the end of the year.

And at the end, our team is heading out for Thailand. We’ll be doing medical work up north–please pray that we will be successful in helping prepare many of these kids for resettlement.

We get back July 1, and I do a quick turnaround and head up to DC to knock out Trial Advocacy assignments with classmates.

And somewhere in there, and the months to come, a 30-50 page paper just sort of “happens.”

Much more to come. In it all, God is good.

Ah, I remember the days when I used the Altavista search engine. Back in those dark ages, there were a variety of search engines which were roughly equal in their ability to find what one was looking for.

But now, now is the time of modernity, and since my conversion to Googlehood I have not been reticent to sing the praises of the modern search giant. I have cast aside all apocryphal fears that its success is a sign of the times, or that it will someday arise as the beast out of the sea.

If any of you follow the workings of Web 2.0, you know that Google is far more than just a search engine. It is a blogging service, a shareable calendar program, the end-all of web-based map programs, even a document collaboration system, and I have only begun to scratch the surface. It is also, my friends, a terrific RSS reader. (If you don’t know what RSS is, watch this video.)

I must admit that I jumped into the world of RSS with a lot of trepidation. Eventually, though, it became a necessity. I am expected to know what is going on in the world of the persecuted church, for instance, and RSS is simply the best way to do just that–not to mention all of the other things I am interested in following. So, throwing trepidation to the wind, I jumped, and quickly became addicted. The fact that I can cover my highly eclectic interests in one place–Google Reader–is amazing. Nothing else has my personalized blend of ESPN, blog tips, international news, right-wing opinion, San Diego Padres, legal news, tech updates, and humor.

That is all well and good, or was, until Google blew my mind with another possibility. To give some background, one of the goals of Remember Ambassadors is to share news and updates with Christians who want to serve the persecuted church. But how do I, a technologically inept wannabe, give up to the minute updates? What about sharing the stuff I read?

*drumroll* Ladies and gentlemen, Google Reader…

Using Google reader and a beautiful little piece of javascript, I can now share with my readers up-to-the-minute news on the persecuted church. All I need do is mark it as I read it. (Check it out in the Ambassadors sidebar!)

So now I’m debating adding a “What I’m Reading” box to this blog. Would anyone read it?