According to blog rules I'm supposed to put a picture here. Then again, like I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I'm not sure if this is a blog (and whether it's still cool or not for us to blog). A picture would be really really token here.
Simple msg today: please don't forget to turn your clock forward tonight, if you do Daylight Savings in your area.
I could probably look this up but wondering worldwide: who does the time change? who doesn't? I know we didn't have to in Saskatchewan. For some reason. And I didn't miss it much.
After seeing KONY2012 posted several times by our Facebook friends, Dana and I finally sat through the half-hour vid this week. Overall, it's worth blocking out the 29:59 of time to soak it in.
In a nutshell: Joseph Kony is one of the ringleaders in Africa who forces boys to be his army and girls to be sex slaves. The video is a call for us all to know his name, lobby our governments to be a military presence and bring Kony to justice by Dec 31, 2012. There's a big rally day slated for April 20, 2012 where posters will cover cities overnight and be an undeniable presence the next morning.
I thought about editing this down and might still do it, but till then, here are some starting points that could shave some of your viewing time:
9:06 in, director Jason Russell tells his son about who international warlord Joseph Kony is
18:30 in, lobbying results in response from "a top pentagon official"...
note: if these links don't work, you might have to just scrub to those minutes/seconds, sorry. dang computers.
counterpoint...
As with just about anything that gets this popular this quick (posted March 5, video at time of this posting has over 55 millions hits) with over 1 million Likes already, there's quite a volume of negative response & critique. Among the counterpoints:
some reports suggest the org is shaving a lot off the top, with lots going to payroll & relatively few cents on the dollar going to actual development in Africa
focusing on one dude misses the bigger picture of the complex struggle in Africa
Steven Van Damme, Oxfam's protection and policy advisor for the whole of eastern Congo, currently based in Goma, suggests the video's popularity might make Kony get more violent
There are mainly from The Guardian's excellent mash-up of various perspectives on the big issue (when the video had only 21 - 27 million hits).
in my humble opinion... Yes, the video is slick. Would we have sat through it if it were 1/2 as slick? 1/4? 3/4? And now we know who Kony is.
Kony2012 reminds me a lot of the shoes-on-telephone wires thing from the movie Wag The Dog, an imperfect reaction of wide swaths of communities outraged by an injustice and wanting some act to crystallize it and feel like we can do something about it.
Especially now that we have a daughter, the message hits home about wanting a world where a child can sleep at night, and not be mutilated or forced into prostitution or the military. The video helped us be aware of the plight in Africa. Did I get a bracelet? Not yet. Did I send money (yeah, they mention that in the video)? No. Do I trust that SOME of the funds given to Invisible Children Inc would help provide education to children in Africa? Sure. Could I combine the freedom and resources I have with the new awareness from this uber-popular vid to find the most strategic place to put my funds? You bet.
Yeah, it's not a perfect picture here. But it's 29:59 that we sat through. As much as I can see reasons for some doubters, I think it's accomplished a great deal of the good it was originally trying to do, namely to remember Kony.
pictured here: Henri Nouwen (right) with speaking partner Bill Van Buren from the Bill Van Buren memorial post on www.henrinouwen.orgI'm still not totally decided on whether this is a Christian blog or not.
(questioning both whether it's totally Christian. And if it's totally a blog...).
At the same time, I had a hoot reading a Christian book this week and thought I'd spread the love. Yes, having a hoot reading a Christian book is possible. At least for me.
Here's the book:
Part of the pleasant surprise for me was due to the title seeming so plain-Jane. As you read it, you see how hugely appropriate it is.
the story
Henri Nouwen is somewhat known among Christians for one crazy career move, from Yale & Harvard Divinity School academia to a priest at Daybreak L'Arche community (Toronto) for people with developmental disabilities. An image indelibly marked in my brain (not mentioned in this book) is his faithful service and indeed sense of calling, even in cleaning up residents who couldn't properly go to the bathroom... As an outline of this massive career transition, and never truly denying how crazy it was, the short book (81 pages total, big type in a small format too) serves as a juicy parable about what's really important enough in our lives to invest our time and energies into.
the story around the story
The prologue and epilogue frame this experience (the book is an adaptation of a talk given in Washington) in Nouwen giving this actual talk with Daybreak resident Bill Van Buren. After reading the prologue, I was so very tempted to skip to the epilogue, an option entirely open to you as the reader. I'm happy to say I resisted the temptation and feel all the more blessed to have the experience unfold as Nouwen had intended. How Van Buren complements the content and becomes a true partner is a parable in and around Nouwen's parable, painting a picture of the beauty of partnering: doing things together and having someone help you out in ways you could never do yourself. Really fighting hard now not to play spoiler...
Overall a very worthwhile read. Mainly intended for Christians but I'm quite curious about how it reads for anyone. I believe there are thought-provoking questions raised in the book about leadership in general. But that might just be me. Honestly, a big reason for reading this was because it's a suggested monthly reading from my church, First Baptist in Vancouver. I am so so glad I took on this little bit of homework.
It may have crossed your mind to set up a website.
If you have any part in the process of creating, editing or otherwise deciding on web content for your organization, plunking up a website yourself is a nice exercise. At one point we called this blogging, but I'm choosing to call it just having a website. For some reason it sounds more pretentious to me to say "hey, check out my blog" and a little less to say, "hey, I made a website, check it out". But I might be wrong.
Without being a hardcore full-time professional geek, this is far from the exhaustive list of resources.
Found something better? Leave a Comment!
1. Reformat a blog. Most blogs these days are set up so you can build one, then take away those things that make it really look like a blog, if you want to. It's a pretty easy google: the usual thing to do is to create Pages in your Menu instead of just doing Posts.
www.posterous.com ...is my personal fave as I can email posts, have photos available at full resolution, and post to three of the other formats below, as well as FB, LinkedIn and Twitter
www.wordpress.com ...has become an industry standard with lots of businesses using their software as their website Content Management System (a slightly different resource, details at www.wordpress.org ...I know, confusing isn't it?)
www.tumblr.com ...blog that's gained popularity for making pictures look good (thanks for the quicky info on this, Lois Patterson). Home to one of my favourite blogs ever, http://foodonmydog.tumblr.com
www.blogger.com ...owned by Google, so if you have a Gmail you technically have access to this, I think. At one point, this was a pretty standard place where people looked for Blogs. It still might be.
www.carbonmade.com ...slightly different animal, specifically for Portfolio purposes. Great quick way for Designers, Artists, Illustrators & other Creatives to put their work out. Thanks to Lixandro Cordero for posting on this.
There are others if you search quickly (something called gybo in Canada?) but this one worked pretty well and they were quite generous with data limits when I played around with it before.
The almost-free one: I had some fun creating and editing content on www.SquareSpace.com which isn't free (not sure if it ever was) but I think it starts at $8US a month if you want to fork that out. In my experience, it was the friendliest interface for simply surfing to a page and just editing that one.
Dinking around with a website of your own can be a fun learning process to discover what it takes for any org to put their stuff out there. If you were on the fence on it, I'd encourage you to poke around with it. I'd love to see/hear/read how it goes for you.
I recently zero-ed my Inbox. It's a productivity tip I've heard from quite a few people (who seem productive). To do it, I had quite a backlog. I think I had 5 digits in the Inbox count. My wife is grateful to not see such a ginormous number in my Inbox. I texted her when I reached 3 digits. She is also grateful I'm done, so that, while I'm home, I can get back to the all-important task of keeping Sasha from putting everything in her mouth. A very freeing feeling to be so cleaned out, and having a resulting shorter queue of messages to work through now.
Addendum: I had to work pretty fast. If you emailed me something and needed some response, please shoot me another message!
2morro's post (for 2sday?!): 2 Ways to Get a Free Website
