Life

Here's my promised post about life. My question to you all is as follows: What life/lives should we care about. How I came to this question is in the wake of finding out about the VTech slaughter I heard a clip of some Congressman saying (paraphrase) "We have a tragedy, a loss of life grave, and it's not somewhere over in Iraq but right in our backyard!" When I heard this dudes comment I was immediately offended because I felt as though he was somehow cheapening the lives of the troops that volunteered to die so that the Iraqi people could be freed from oppression. I then had to question myself and think, would it even matter if he was referring to a car bomb going off and it killed a bunch of Iraqis and Iraqi soldiers, would that make a difference in the offense that I should take to his comments. Is my Christian world-view supposed to differentiate between American lives and Iraqi, Somali, Chinese, German, or Ethiopian lives? (This isn't a rhetorical question! Neither are the questions to follow!) Where does the priorities lie? I know for instance that I naturally would care more about my wife, my unborn child, or my family or friends died than someone in Japan or any other part of the world, or even in the West end in Louisville, or North Tulsa. To what extent is a dead person a dead person and I should be affected by a sinner perishing without believing in their heart and confessing with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and trusting in Him for their salvation?

My second question I guess goes out to all the seminary folks. When Megs and I miscarried, did that child go to heaven or to hell? I know that this is an occasion to use Deuteronomy 29:29, but according to reformed theology and that life begins at conception, is the child that is breathing and living inside of Megs right now capable of sin. When she is squirming around inside of Megs' belly, is she being selfish in any way, is she giving praise to the King? Are all the millions and millions of kids that have been aborted worldwide going to heaven or because they have not breathed on their own and the umbilical chord been separated from their mother, are they not capable of sinning against the King of Kings?

I guess I could elaborate more on these questions but I think that you get my drift. If you take time to think about these things I'm sure you can come up with some more questions along these lines. If you have any insight into this, please help me out and try to answer these questions. Even if you don't know the answers feel free to think out loud here, no thoughts are considered stupid or inadequate to me, I just need some help with these questions and there isn't too many people out here that I know can contribute much in answering these questions so I'm leaning on you peeps for some help!

As always thanks for visiting and come back soon! (I'll hopefully have some more thoughts for you all).

Here are some more good blogs that I've found on the internets that I think may interest a few folks.

Blaquetulip

Reformingchurches (it's mostly black churches)

Dealnews

Slickdeals

Gottadeal

Jed, I've been meaning to call you recently, I'd love to hear your voice but I fear that you are either very busy or out of the country, hopefully we'll talk soon! Joey and Bruce-Bruce, I've seen you all signed in to Gmail here recently but have been too afraid to shoot you a line, hopefully someday I'll work up the courage for I'd love to hear from you all, I miss you both. Russell on the other hand, are you ever signed in to Gmail??? I'm curious about the first year and how it's went for you, I'm very happy for you!

Well, thanks for stopping by and hopefully I'll have some more posts when you stop by again the next time.

P.S. Does anyone know how I can get a gift to Jonathan Christman? I heard that he graduated seminary this semester and I got saw this figurine on-line and couldn't pass it up, but now it's at my house and it needs to be at his so that he can enjoy it but I don't know how to get it to him. If anyone knows how to get in touch with him that would be wonderful!

Please, please, please help with answering my questions! Talk to you later.

Covered by the blood,
Brian Barnes


P.P.S. Thanks for cooking again Megs, it was great!

Post for the Techies

Here's a post I found while perusing through the world wide web. I immediately thought of the "big timers" Big Cheez and Lil' Brother Ricky. I would have just suggested that you click here to see the post but figured that the majority of readers don't click here, so I decided to copy and paste for you all so that it's right in front of your face and you can just scroll through it.

Here it is, enjoy!!!

It's a little messy because I started to clean it up and all that, but I figured that if you really wanted to read it you would just click here.


How To Crank Through Your Gmail

If you get a lot of email — and let’s face it, web workers live in their email — it’s likely that you already use Gmail to handle your communication needs. But are you doing it as quickly and efficiently as possible, so you can get back to your real work (read: Twitter)?

Master the tools of your trade and you will soon be churning through your email like it’s butter.

Crank quickly, and get out.

I get well over 100 emails a day, and I suspect I’m not alone in this department. But I respond quickly to each one (if necessary), and empty out my inbox each time. And with the help of some of the rules and tricks I share below, it doesn’t take me long.

Let’s get into it:

Empty your inbox. Keeping your email overflowing, and you’re soon lost in a sea of undone tasks and urgent requests and unhappy people. It’s a chaotic jumble of confusion, and enough to overwhelm the best of us. Instead, empty out your inbox and keep it that way. When you process your inbox, go through it quickly, dispose of everything, and be done with it. Read on to find out more.

Temporary zone. If you’ve got hundreds of emails in your inbox, the prospect of clearing that out is daunting. Rather than let this overwhelming task stop you, tag everything in the inbox “to clear” and archive it all (except perhaps the last few urgent emails if you’re ready to deal with those now). Then, from here on out, clear out all new, incoming emails. And schedule 30-60 minutes each day to clear out your “to clear” tag, disposing of each email in that tag as described below. Over the course of a few days (or a week), you should be able to get caught up.
Dispose of each email. OK, you’re ready to process your inbox (or your “to clear” tag). Open each email, one at a time, and make a decision on what to do with it. Here are your choices:
respond immediately
tag it “@reply” if you can’t respond now (and archive it)
delete it
delegate it (forward and delete or archive)
put it on your to-do list (and then archive), if it has an action in it that needs to be done later
archive it if you need to refer to it later.
Those are your choices. Do one of those, quickly, with each email, and move on to the next. When you’re done, you’ll have an empty inbox!
2-minute rule. If it takes 2 minutes or less to respond to an email, do it right away, as quickly as possible. Most emails, I’ve found, only require a couple of sentences to reply. Do those now. If it’ll take some thought or more time to write a response, tag it “@reply”, to be replied to later today if possible, and archive it.
Tag and archive. One of the beauties of Gmail is that there’s no need to file things in a complicated folder and subfolder hierarchy. The time spent filing is minimum. Tag an email (if necessary) and archive it. You can always use Gmail’s very fast search to find it later. Most of the time, I don’t even tag — just archive and search later.
No reply needed. Not every email requires a reply. Learn to spot those instantly. It might just be an FYI email, which you can note and then archive. Or it might be something forwarded to you — delete or archive those immediately. Try to avoid responding to emails in which you’re just in the “cc” field, not in the “to” field. Replying to fewer emails means less time spent cranking through your inbox.
Reduce your inflow. Do you get a lot of emails from mailing lists, or newsletters, or advertising, or regular things like that? Unsubscribe to as many as possible. You can drastically reduce the number of emails you receive, and thus reduce the amount of time needed to process your inbox, by stopping many of these automated emails. Also, if someone you know is sending you regular emails you don’t really need, politely ask them to stop.
AHK. OK, so how do you crank faster? AutoHotKey’s text replacement feature is a great tool for doing that — from automated replies to multiple signatures, you can save yourself tons of valuable time by setting up a few regular keyboard shortcuts for text replacement. I use a number of different signatures, depending on who I’m writing to, and after setting up AHK’s text replacement for each signature, I can just type a few keystrokes and the appropriate signature is generated. For example, I have “wsig” and “wsig2″ for my two different jobs, and “psig” and “psig2″ for different personal correspondence, and “bsig” for my blog signature. Another great way to use AHK is to generate a few common replies that you email just about every day. I haven’t actually begun using this yet, but I’m beginning to consider it with a lot more companies emailing me personally asking me to try out their products.
Keyboard shortcuts. Another invaluable tool for cranking. Using the mouse takes way too much motion (and thus time). Stay in the keyboard as much as possible, and your cranking skills increase dramatically. Gmail is great for this — it just takes a few minutes and a little practice to learn the shortcuts. There are a lot of great shortcuts (Go here for the complete list). Just a few I use a lot: “c” for compose, “r” for reply, “y+o” to archive and move to the next message, “tab+Enter” to send a message after composing it, “/” to search, “j” and “k” to move up and down the list of emails, “#+o” to delete and then open the next message.
Filters. I have a couple dozen filters set up — this is possibly Gmail’s killer feature. For example, all comments and pingbacks in my blog go to my “@reply” folder, so they don’t fill up my inbox. Same with Google Calendar notifications. I also have a Monthly Challenge mailing list that I do every day, and those get shunted into their own tag and archived. Others get forwarded to the appropriate address, or deleted immediately.
Killfile. I get a lot of email forwarded to me from people. I hate chain mails and joke emails. After getting a bunch of these from one person, I’ll killfile them. Just set up a filter with their address or name in the “from” field, and make “delete” the action.
@reply: Set up a time each day to go through your “@reply” folder (or tag). If you can’t get to it when you process your inbox, and you tag it “@reply”, you should try to get to it sometime that day, so your @reply folder doesn’t get to overflowing, and you don’t become one of those people to whom I send an email and it gets lost in a bottomless void. Respond within a day, and people will appreciate it. Of course, if you don’t want to respond, just delete.
Batch processing. It’s most efficient to do all your emails in groups, rather than processing them as they come in. For this reason, turn off your email notification. Set times during the day (2-3 times a day is sufficient for most) and give yourself 10-15 minutes to process your inbox. Do it quickly, all at one time, and get out. Of course, if one of those times is when you process your @reply folder, you might want to give yourself another 10-15 minutes on top of that.
Email diet. The above tip may be difficult if you’re addicted to email. Go on a diet, if that’s the case. Go one whole day without even checking your email. If you do this, you’ll realize that the world doesn’t collapse if you don’t check your email. From then on, only process email during those 2-3 set times, for 10-15 minutes each time.

Suns vs. Spurs

The suspension of a First Team All NBA player and last years Most Improved Player because they went up the side line when the leagues 2 time MVP is laying on the ground after being way-layed into the boards is ridiculous.

The suspension is like saying look you took a few steps beyond the coaches box so we are going to suspend you, they might as well have went onto the court and knocked Big Shot Bob’s block off and got that same 1 game suspension.

What-is-more, when you see the tape of Tim Duncan walking out onto the court past the 3-point line when there is a high potential that there is a scuffle after Elson comes down on the head of Jones and ends up on the ground and was corralled back to the bench by Bruce Bowen who also was on the court. To say that just because Jones and Elson didn’t get into a scuffle and Horry decided to deliver an elbow into the face of Bell, Duncan and Bowen don’t deserve a suspension is preposterous. Let’s say that Jones doesn’t run down the court and just stands over Elson and stairs at him, would Timmy and Bruce have been suspended them? It just doesn’t make sense!

I actually would have been ok with both Staudemire and Diaw and Duncan and Bowen have been suspended for a game, but to suspend one set because Horry fired an elbow to Bell’s face and Elson and Jones had some sense doesn’t make any bit of sense! IF YOU LEAVE THE BENCH WHEN THERE IS POTENTIAL FOR A SCUFFLE THAN YOU SHOULD BE SUSPENDED! You shouldn’t be suspended only when some idiot loses his cool and not when cooler heads prevail.

This being said, I am even more upset with the officiating in the Warriors vs. Jazz series. They let the Jazz get away with way to much and had the tight knuse around the neck of the Warriors. The foul on Jackson last night when he went for the steal and Dee Brown went right into him and he gets a flagrant foul for it is just one evidence. I probably would have gotten kicked out of all those games if I was on the Warriors, those refs marred that entire series! There was a play in the first half of last nights game where the ball clearly went off of Barnes and then off of Boozer, the ref that couldn’t see a thing gave the ball to the Jazz and the ref that should have seen everything lets them get away with it, it was so upsetting! Well, I guess I’ll chat with you peeps later. I still haven’t forgot my promised post about life.

Thanks Joey for asking my thoughts on the suspensions, I have much more to say on this but I don’t have the time to write it all down.

Rob-dogg and Brittany, thanks for calling, and thanks for the gifts! It really made my week getting to hear from you all! You both are in our prayers.

Before I forget, how ‘bout Baron Davis’ dunk the other night! It was amazing! Reminiscent of Kevin Johnson (KJ) over Hakeem (The Dream) Olajuwon.

Abortion Article

Reforming Churches blog

For those of you that have never heard of this blog, it's great! If you never read my blog again and solely read this one I'd completely understand! Here's one of the posts, it's about the Stop Snitchin' campaign by rappers and other leaches that are going to suck the life out of the "hood".

After you read this one you should check out the most recent one as well, then peruse through the archives. It also has audio sermons by the members of the blog available here.

Enjoy!!!

Mavs vs. Warriors Series

I don't know about you but the Mavs vs. Warriors series is a very compelling series for me to watch! Most of you in the Eastern time zone can't stay up to watch it so let me summarize the game last night for you. The Mavs built a 21 point lead to start the game, the Warriors fought hard all game and finally came back and took the lead in the fourth quarter. When they got a 9 point lead with 3 minutes left in the game, that's when the refs took over. They consistently called mysterious fouls, when the ball was obviously either out on Dirk or an over-the-back on Dirk, they gave the Mavs the ball. They called Baron Davis for his 6th foul when he was 6 inches away from touching a guy. They kicked Steven Jackson out of the game for clapping towards the fans!!! When the Warriors got fouled with 20-something seconds left in the game they weren't even in the bonus (the Mavs had been shooting free throws since at least theh 8 minute mark!) You tell me if it was rigged???

My prediction for the series, if the Warriors don't blow the Mavs out in game 6 then the Mavs are going to win the series. If the Mavs win this series, this may be the last you hear about the NBA from me for this season!

Persecution in Turkey

Hello all, I stumbled across this post on Denny Burke's blog yesterday and meant to pass it along then, but unfortunately I did not. This is about a German missionary and two other Turkian males that came to faith and we evangelizing some people in the area. If you got 5 minutes you need to