You know your employer has a good digital phone PBX when someone puts you on hold and you can hear your blood circulating through your ear.

It’s a weird feeling to hear not your heartbeat, but the actual sound of your blood moving through your arteries and veins. It’s a reminder that we are alive, that we are squishy inside, that life has been breathed into us.

Spammers, that is. Article found via Google News.

Lycos has released a screensaver for the Mac and Windows platforms that will attack spammers.

The screensaver, called Make Love Not Spam, will constantly visit Web sites from which spam has been sent. The aim is to flood the spammer’s server with so many requests that it is unable to respond ? resulting in what is know as a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack.

The sad thing is that as of 8:50 AM EST the Make Love Not Spam has already been hacked and displays the following message:

Yes, attacking spammers is wrong, you know this, you shouldn’t be doing it. Your ip address and request have been logged and will be reported to your ISP for further action.

Update from Justin at 12:53 PST: The download site isn’t hacked any more, but it’s really busy.

Man, I really don’t like spammers.

I upgraded to WordPress 1.3-alpha-5 today. This fixes the problems with comments and with only the first 12 entries in an archive showing up. Use the links at the bottom of the page to flip through the archives 12 entries at a time. Trackback is still not working - leave a comment to link to your post if you want. Have fun. Going to bed. Peace out.

We hit the 50% mark on our fundraising today! Woohoo!

Long ago there was once a doll maker who owned a small shop in the city. This kindly man was said to make the best dolls in all the earth. Each doll was handcrafted, unique, and made from the finest materials. The dolls, in fact, were of such high quality and so specially made that he would only make one doll for each child and ask the child to care for it the rest of his or her life.

One day a little girl, probably four years old, visited the shop with her mother. As was his custom, the doll maker sat the girl on a tall stool beside his workbench with a chocolate-chip cookie and a tall glass of milk. The doll maker talked and laughed with the girl as he worked. Each word she spoke and smile she shared revealed the secret contents of her heart which the doll maker skillfully incorporated into each stitch of her doll. In what seemed like only minutes the doll was complete and quickly engulfed in the little girl’s arms. “Perfect”, she thought and promised the doll maker she would care for her doll for the rest of her life.

For many years the girl kept her promise to the doll maker. She loved the doll, cared for it, and took it everywhere she went. She thought the doll was so special that she actually got just as much joy sharing it with the other children as she did when she played with it. She loved her doll much like she loved herself.

However, time passed and it became more and more unacceptable to have a doll. Often the other children at school made fun of her and told her that only stupid babies played with dolls. “But this one is special”, she tried to explain but the insults only became more ferocious. The little girl cried often and, sadly, it wasn’t long before the girl began to believe the other children. It happened slowly, of course, but the time came when the girl didn’t love the doll anymore. She blamed the doll for causing her so much pain. She abused it. Neglected it! HATED IT! And she loved her doll much like she loved herself.

Many long years passed and the girl was now a woman. She sat alone in her childhood bedroom and became very sad as she thought about her life. “What happened?” she asked herself. As she aimlessly looked around the room she noticed her old doll sitting on her dresser nearly covered in clutter. She took her doll in her hands and inspected it carefully. It was dingy and worn, many buttons were missing, and much of the stitching had come unraveled. It was falling apart, nearly ruined. She desperately tried to fix the doll herself but everything she did only made it worse. The woman wept. And she loved her doll much like she loved herself.

The next day the woman took her doll to the shop in the city. When she walked in the doll maker stood to greet her and smiled as if he’d been waiting to see her for a long time. She started to speak when the doll maker brought his finger to his lips, silencing her. He turned and motioned toward a tall stool beside his workbench on which sat a chocolate-chip cookie and a tall glass of milk. A tear ran down her cheek.

The doll maker took the woman’s tattered doll and set to work. He talked and cried with the woman as he worked. Each word she spoke and tear she shed revealed the secret contents of her heart which the doll maker skillfully incorporated into each stitch of her doll. In what seemed like only minutes the doll was restored and quickly engulfed in the woman’s arms. “Perfect”, she said aloud. “Yes, perfect”, the doll maker agreed. And she loved her doll much like she loved herself.

My wife Amy is blogging at BaederResources.com (our first domain name ever!). She’s really getting into it. Go give her some comment lovin’.

I’m thoroughly enjoying EmergentYS’s Church in Emerging Culture. I just finished the first chapter, by Andy Crouch, and thoughts are racing through my head.

I must first mention that I am part of a small church plant in Seattle. Basically, we are all geeks. There is no way to avoid this fact. We didn’t set out to target geeks as our most promising demographic; we just happen to all be geeks. Obscure Homestar Runner references are never lost on the group when we meet.

Andy Crouch has this to say about “niche market” churches that seek to target specific demographic audiences:

Following the postmodern cue, many churches now offer specialized worship services that depend for their intelligibility on fluency in a particular set of cultural codes. Music, humor, forms of dress, styles of speaking all communicate more or less subtly that certain groups are in and others are out. … Anyone not already inducted into the relevant subculture who somehow wanders into such a service will feel strangely self-conscious. In their zeal to make friends in a certain generation or cultural niche, such churches make strangers of most of humanity. (emphasis mine; pp. 88-89)

I have often feared that this is the case in our church - that we are so much like ourselves that we have lost the ability to welcome others that are truly other - people who are different from us in some noticeable (though probably insignificant) way.

But there is a way forward:

And yet, the sacraments, especially when surrounded by a traditional liturgy, make strangers of us all. They come to us from another time, place, and culture that none of us experiences as home; they do not flatter us by being new, current, trendy, or hip. But as the Greeks knew—their word for “hospitality,” xenia, was cognate with the word for “stranger,” xenos—it is only where there are strangers that there can be hospitality.

The sacraments dispense with an easy familiarity. Instead, they say we are all strangers here, yet we are all welcome too. In that hospitality we meet across our differences and are caught up in a journey in which none of us is privileged, none of us knows the way any better than another, and yet all of us are finding ourselves accompanied by another who is explaining the Scriptures to us, revealing himself in the breaking of the bread. p. 90

The sacraments to which Andy is referring, of course, are baptism and the eucharist. He posits baptism as the answer to “both modernity and postmodernity, with their equally inhuman agendas of assimilation and fragmentation” (p. 82), the “normative experience of death and resurrection that ushers us into a new community” (p. 90).

Similarly, the eucharist is “the place where the church practices postconsumerism” (p. 83), and is “the definitive weekly source of nourishment for our myriad hungers,” a place where we are all welcome despite being strangers, because “the communion table levels those of different economic means—poor and rich get the same portion” (p. 83).

Church in Emerging Culture has running in-line commentary from the book’s five other authors in each chapter. Michael Horton chimes in on p. 89 that ” ‘product-driven’ (Word and sacrament) rather than ‘market-driven’ (demographic niches) ministry builds genuine community that defies worldly measurements.”

So what does this mean for my geeky little church? First, we can’t be afraid to be who we are, and we shouldn’t be concerned with marketing ourselves as something else for the sake of attracting people, be they real individuals or a composite average joe seeker. Amidst our jokes around the table, though, we must create space where all are welcome, where we realize that our particular community’s unique flavor is not a barrier to the fellowship Christ prayed that his disciples would share:

…that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. John 17:21-23

In 1621, a few hundred Pilgrims and Native Americans sat down to celebrate a bountiful harvest. The feast lasted three days, and included fowl, venison, fish, berries, watercress, lobster, dried fruit, clams, and plums. There was no pumpkin pie, however. There was also an alarming lack of user-friendly webmail services.

Now, 383 years later, it’s once again time to celebrate what has come to be known as Thanksgiving?a time to gather with family and friends and give thanks for all that we have. We have many things to be thankful for. But mostly, we are thankful for you?our users?who remind us of why we work so hard all year and why we love what we do. That’s better than all the dried fruit and clams in the world.

Happy Thanksgiving! Thank you for making our approach to email yours.

Gobble gobble,
The Gmail Team

Not just funny-strange … funny-haha. From Gmail’s sign-in page today.