I’ve read a few reviews of the Magic Mouse and find it unfortunate that the functionality of the multi-touch trackpad on my MacBook is not available on the Magic Mouse. It sounds like a bit of a nerfed interface that comes across somewhat disappointing. So here’s an idea – why not create a wireless trackpad that retains all the functionality and replaces your mouse. (Although you’d have to do a LOT to make me replace my Logitech MX Revolution, now updated!)

The mouse is a wonderful invention and the multi-touch trackpad on my MacBook is the first device of its kind that I actually use. Generally the first thing I do when I get a laptop is buy a suitable mouse to go with it. Now there’s finally a device that comes with my laptop that doesn’t make me curse it’s inclusion and replace it immediately. Sure you couldn’t really use a trackpad like the one above for gaming like you can with Microsoft’s concept multi-touch mice, but for all other work activities it would be suitable except for where an actual tablet is required.

In the picture above, of the wireless Trackpad, there’s space for your palm to rest on that can serve as the storage area for the batteries.

I’d love a trackpad like this for my desktop.

Wouldn’t you?

One of the designers in our emerging community has redesigned the logo for Urban Mystic. Here’s the end result of several weeks of exploring. This has been an exciting process to be part of, having had chance to look at a number of work-in-progress concepts. I really like this, what do you think?

I’ve recently re-watched Horton Hears a Who, one of my favourite animations. Not only does it capture the artwork in Dr. Seuss’ books but it also happens to contain some of the best dialogue around faith and evidence, or faith and experience.

If you haven’t seen it I highly recommend it. You can also read a summary about the book on Wikipedia, but the more relevant article is the one about the film in another entry on Wikipedia. I’m quoting from two conversations in the movie:

Horton: I know I heard you say something. I just know it. Where are you?

Kangaroo: Horton! There is nothing on that speck!

Horton: But I heard.

Kangaroo: Did you? Really? Oh my.

Well, then how come I don’t hear anything? If you can’t see, hear or feel something it doesn’t exist. And believing in tiny imaginary people is just not something we do, or tolerate, here in the Jungle of Nool.

Horton: Really? Cause I bet if I tried I could find somebody who’ll believe me.

Kangaroo: You will do nothing of the sort! You will not breathe a word of this lie to anyone else … especially the children. I do not want you poisoning their minds with this nonsense. Our community has standards, Horton. If you want to remain a part of it I recommend you follow them.

Later in the film the Mayor of Whoville has a parallel conversation with the Chairman of the Board:

Mayor Ned: Horton believes me.

Chairman: Who’s Horton?

Mayor Ned: Horton is a giant elephant in the sky. Don’t bother looking he’s invisible. And he’s the one risking his life to get Whoville, which by the way is a speck on a clover, to safety.

I love the way that faith and experience are brought together in the movie, with two parallels:

Horton and the Kangaroo – where Horton has an experience and therefore believes that Who’s and Whoville exists, even though there is no effect on the observable world around him. The Kangaroo hasn’t, on the other, doesn’t believe in either and has had no experience of a Who or Whoville. How they live in relation to their belief is really worth chewing through, raising some serious questions about militant and fundamentalist atheism.

The Mayor of Whoville and the Chairman – where the Mayor hears Horton, who enlightens him regarding observable changes in his world, while the Chairman does not, and, despite observable changes in the world, continues pushing an ‘all is ok, the Mayor is an idiot’ agenda. The difference between the Mayor and the Chairman is interesting as the defining line is not so much the observable world around them but rather the Mayor’s openness to reality versus the Chairman’s denials.

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* I grabbed the image off a Google Search, it saved me having to screenshot it.

I recently sat down with a professional designer. We worked through a 101 Q&A sheet to work through not only my design preferences but also a complete overview of what exactly Urban Mystic is.

I’m very excited.

Firstly, this represents a shift from trying to ‘do it all myself.’ Secondly, it means I’m likely to drop the “the,” so now “Urban Mystic” rather than “The Urban Mystic.” Thirdly, this means I get to take Urban Mystic a bit more seriously, picturing where its headed and how we’re going to get there.

Today just got a bit more exciting! I’m downloading the Technical Preview for MS Office 2010. I had to apply to test it, as opposed to testing Windows 7 Release Candidate where I could simply log on and downloaded it.

I really like Win 7. It’s the best OS experience I’ve had to date (and yes to all the MacVangelists out there that includes OS X which I’m running on my MacBook). Office 2007 has been an outstanding product – leagues ahead of similar products I’ve tried. Admittedly, the other options are free so on a budget I’d be more than happy with them. Fortunately though the trial comes for free so that means not having to purchase Office 2010 till its released.

With Office 2010 there’s a 64 bit and a 32 bit option. As I’m running the 64 bit version of Win 7 on my desktop I’ll be trialing the 64 bit version of Office.

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Updated Fri 7 August:

The install process was quick and easy. To start it asks for your license key. The next option was a custom install as opposed to the default install so that I could tweak the installation.

My first impression is that this version of MS Office is freakin fast! Everything from Word through to Access launches really, really quickly. I still need to see how each application handles files but I will go 64 bit in future. Its just some games that don’t offer 64bit versions while all my work applications have finally caught up – Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 and MS Office and finally my software for cartography. Though my current version of my cartography package is only 32bit it performs phenomenally well in a 64bit environment. They have a new version out that is 64bit but that’s only happened in the last month. I’ll happily be purchasing Win 7 64bit and Office 2010 64 bit based on my impressions so far.

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My desktop is not a Core i7 but I wouldn’t recommend anyone purchasing a new machine to purchase anything with specs lower than mine, especially if your thinking of doing any gaming.

My desktop:

• 2.4Ghz Q9600 – Quad Core Processor
• Genuine Intel Motherboard – Media Edition, can’t remember exactly what its called
• 4GB DDR2 800 MHz – Memory
• Leadtek GTX 280 – display card
• Seagate SATA 320GB x 2 – Hard Drives, and one or two others that go in and out as per my needs

For the most part I’m really happy with Office 2008 for the Mac. It’s a great product – arguably as good as Office 2007 for PC. I do find, though, that the toolbox is a great feature that could’ve been better.

Size matters, and the toolbox is just too small.

I spend time editing and writing. When editing I make use of the styles palette; when writing I make use of the citations palette. In both cases the inability to resize the palette results in an inefficient working experience.

Toolbox - Styles

Above is the Toolbox for Styles. That’s it, no option to make it larger. I have to scroll down – despite adequate screen space – to find the style I wish to apply. With a few styles that’s not too cumbersome but when I’ve got a tonne of styles to work with that gets a repetitive and annoying.

Toolbox - Citations

Above is the citations palette, a previously ignored feature in Office that I’ve ignored until now. I’m currently pursuing a Masters and am using Word’s citations feature to keep track of all my references. Once again, I have adequate screen space, but cannot resize the palette to accommodate a longer list of titles. This is not that serious a concern horizontally but vertically – when there are a lot of titles – this gets cumbersome. I have to continually scroll up and down to find the title I wish to cite.

I’ve had my MacBook for just under two weeks now and have finally made peace with it. The OS and dyslexia of the CTRL, CMD and ALT keys are still frustrating but the aluminium chassis and battery life rocks. Drawing inspiration from the iPhone and iPod Touch I’ve come up with a Tablet design and loosely called it t he MacBook Touch or Itablet.

I’ve thought about the old HP Tablet for a long time (can’t remember what its called and didn’t bother to find a link, sorry (almost)). I had high hopes for it a while back but the price range was way beyond what I was willing, let alone able, to spend. The product has also been discontinued and it would seem that overpriced laptops with tablet functionality have filled the gap. Do hardware designers not realise that there is an upper limit to what people are willing to spend? I still reckon the Tablet is an awesome concept – just look at the new Ciniq. Seriously, if it was portable I would’ve purchased it over a MacBook (which I only got because of a clients bias toward them anyway)! I would’ve purchased the Cintiq except that mobility is very important to my lifestyle and I’d keep pulling the plug out. The real issue I have is that it’s just a screen and not a portable PC.

The iPod Touch and the iPhone have been two great additions to the handheld market. I seriously covet the iPhone 3G S (and will upgrade to it when my current contract runs out). Sure the Nokia 5800 is probably better (or so my geeky friends inform me) but the iPhone speaks to me as a designer on a deeper level.

So, drawing on inspiration from the iPhone and iPod Touch, I present my version of the MacBook Touch or iTablet or whatever the gurus at Apple decide to call it in the end (please finally produce one and don’t offer perennial promises that leave covetous desires unfulfilled!). If you want you can download my design as a PDF then please right-click and download as – link – the full file is around 3.9mb.

I guess I should offer a note to Apple saying that I’d be willing to road test the device!

I’m busy preparing my next series, which will run in about a month. It’s based on Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, arguably one of the best books I’ve ever re-read. I say “best books I’ve ever re-read” cause I read it in my early 20’s and it’s improved considerably since then!

I know you’ll understand that I’m making a tongue in cheek statement there. Foster’s book has stayed the same, but my point of view has shifted as I’ve matured. Foster’s book is rich in content and advice on the practice of spirituality. It’s over 25 years since it was written and I’m glad to be rediscovering it thirteen years after first reading it. This is also one of the series I’ve had in mind for a while now and can honestly say I feel very excited about running it.

I’ve always sworn off Mac. To me those who own and love their Macs are like snobby people in clubs, not unlike those who surf. There’s an attitude an image that goes along with the hardware, a snobbery of ‘lesser people’. Sure the design looks cool and the build quality is fantastic but the MacVangelists are a little too much – especially as I’ve gotten half the processing power, memory and hard drive space of a competitively priced high end machine.

Yes a budget PC is going to give you problems while spending a ton on your Mac means you won’t have that problem. Well, the thing is I’ve never skimped on my PC hardware and hence never had hardware issues. I really do feel abused. I’ll suck it up.

So it is with a sense of sadness and a hint of feeling abused that I’ve had to purchase a MacBook. Walking into several Mac shops left me feeling highly peeved. The attitude, the ‘we sell Mac’ that I encountered really made me feel like putting an “s” in front and applying some “one hand clapping” methods. After shopping around I eventually settled for the MacBook silver, one step above entry level. I bought it from the nicest and most respectable salespeople. I actually went to a store other than the ones I’d looked at to find a decent salesperson!

Looking at their entry level machines I can’t help but feel the same sense of “I’m being schnied” as I get from looking at the entry level City Golf. It was like sensing that my bank account was about to get raped. I kid you not.

So why’d I go for a MacBook? I have to. I’m wanting to pick up some more typesetting work and have been told that the design industry in my country is dominated by Adobe and Mac. Allegedly there’s a major difference between how fonts are handled on Mac and how they’re handled on PC. Hence the need to have a Mac rather than a PC.

So I’m writing this post from the MacBook having just finished updating all my software. All the ‘it just works’ ends up sounding doubly like propoganda now that I’ve got it up and running. For instance, the email program is having problems navigating my smtp server for my email, the Adobe downloads are twice the size of their PC counterparts, the UAC annoying bugs me at every opportunity, I have to reboot after most of the updates, and the lack of a DEL key just puts me over the edge.

Maybe I’ll feel more convinced about the change once I’ve got the iPhone to go together with it. In the meantime I’m selling off my HP Laptop which is happily running Windows 7 RC and performing just beautifully on everything. It was half the price and does everything perfectly. Maybe the alleged 4.5 hours of battery life will make up for it.

On the whole subject of post-modernity and Christianity in all its post-forms I can’t think of two quotes that better summarise my feeling on the whole situation than those by Mike Breen and Eddie Gibbs in the following video:

For those who don’t YouTube I’ll loosely quote:

Lance Ford poses the following question to Mike Breen and Eddie Gibbs, “Christendom is over. Is the death of Christendom a good or bad thing?”

Breen says the following:

I think it is both a good thing and a bad thing. The reality is that when the Berlin wall came down everyone was free but a lot of people went hungry. When the crisis came to wall street it gave us opportunities to look at finance and world banking in a new way. When you see the collapse of a system, however quickly or slowly, there’s always going to be a negative and positive effect for that. In terms of mission, which I’m interested in, overall the opportunities are going to be greater than any of the losses because we do mission in a more authentic way. We’re not dealing with Christendom questions and concerns like whether we baptise babies or only adults. Rather, we’re the minority and we have a message to change the world. Let’s go for it.

Gibbs says the following:

The principle challenge of the church lies in that it has been the majority for 1600 years. That’s generated a ‘come to us’ mentality. In a post-Christendom context the church can’t just invite the world to itself on its own terms. Rather we go to the world on its terms. Also, not every church was reproducible. We now need reproducible churches, not in terms of cloning but in terms of figuring reproducibility out.

Those two statements summarise both the frustration and the hopes I have with Christianity. You may wonder what this has to do with the subject of the kingdom of Godde. Basically:

1. Christians have been caught up with Christendom issues

2. We’re reforming while shifting paradigms

3. We need to rediscover our message and express it in a contemporary way

I’ve asked everyone I know that’s trying to reinvent Christianity what their message is and though several make allusions to the kingdom of Godde I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone say “Christ and His Kingdom to a post-modern world and life in the Spirit in the church” with any kind of certainty (and here I don’t mean a modern kind of explanatory certainty but rather a personal conviction based on real world experience).

Many have said I/we want to reinvent Christianity or I want to reinvent Church. But in many instances this amounts to not having enjoyed or liked or appreciated one form of church or other where Godde has served as reference point but not where Godde is truly present. Sure, why don’t we just do the same old stuff in a more enjoyable way? I don’t believe that ought to be our point of departure. For me the message and demonstration of the kingdom of Godde ought to be central for both mission (missiology) and church life (ecclesiology).

Why is the kingdom of Godde so central?

The message of Jesus is the kingdom of Godde (see Mark 1:15) and the message of Paul, and the apostles (see Luke 9 and 10 and Matthew 10), is the King and His Kingdom (see Acts 28:30-31). This is a message they were to announce and demonstrate. It is in the demonstration that the evidence that the King and His kingdom have drawn near that serves as verificationary evidence for the claim itself. Jesus also says that we are to make it our highest priority (Matthew 6), letting its reality and agenda shape our prayers and our practice of mission (reorient your life around the kingdom of Godde which is near and at hand!) and church life (life in the Spirit).

The message about the King and His Kingdom is one about knowing Godde, about hearing Godde, about co-labouring with Godde to bring His Reign in and around us. It is the one about Godde loving us actively in speaking to us and acting in and through us.

I’m looking forward to us recapturing the message of the King and His Kingdom as well as life in the Spirit. I’m looking forward to seeing a postmodern expression of church shaped in its mission by the one and its communal life and worship by the latter. I’m looking forward to church experiences that are about knowing and relating to Godde in a present and immediate sense, where we draw near to Godde and S/He draws near to us.

Synchroblog

This post is part of a synchroblog on the theme of The Kingdom of God. You may see other posts on this theme at:

• Andrew Hendrikse (Christian) of Feotu on The Kingdom of God is…

  Susan Barnes (Christian currently attending a Baptist church) of Abooklook on My kingdom goes

  Matt Stone (Christian) of Glocal Christianity on The only Christian nation is the Kingdom of God

  K.W. Leslie (Christian/Pentecostal/Assemblies of God) of The Evening of Kent on Politics and the Kingdom of God.

  Timothy Victor (Christian) of Tim Victor’s Musings on The reign of Godde

  Ronald van der Bergh (Dutch Reformed) of Ronalds Footnotes on Notes on “the Kingdom of God” in the New Testament

  Bryan Riley (follower of Jesus) of Charis Shalom on Multiple Bloggers on the Kingdom of God

  Liz Dyer (follower of Jesus Christ) of Grace Rules on The Kingdom of God is at Hand

  Nic Paton (fundamentalist, charismatic, liberationist, apophatic, heterodox) ofsoundandsilence on The “Kingdom”: of God?

  Beth Patterson (Non churched follower of Christ) of Virtual Tea House on What it’s like rather than what it is

  Jeff Goins (Non-denominational Christian) of Pilgrimage of the Heart on The Kingdom of God: Now and Not Yet

  Phil Wyman (Non-denominational Christian) of Square No More on Jesus as the Archetype Shaman (Part 2): A Nostalgia for Paradise

  Stephen Hayes (Orthodox Christian) of Khanya on Kingdom, power and glory