Great Sites and Great Music
September 14th, 2006 | by Scott |I’m amazed that every week I meet my sermon deadlines. Each week I come up with 3-4 classes and sermons on time. It seems especially strange on weeks like this one when the sermon isn’t coming along as I would like it. That always happens after a vacation.
But, I digress. I’d like to recommend a couple of websites to you:
Mozy–I don’t brush after every meal. I don’t stretch after every run. And I don’t back up my hard-drive. I never have. That is, until now. I’ve often wondered what happens if your house catches on fire. Unless your backup hard drive is made out of that “black box” stuff, it’s going down in the fire, too. Right? Well, Mozy is a site that backs up your important files for you. You can back up to 2GB of files, music and photos for free. Your computer goes idle? Mozy backs you up. I’m paying 1.95 a month for 5GB of protection. So, I’m set, my photos are saved, my tunes are protected and the NSA has all my files in one nifty location. Check it out.
Daily Lit–This is so stinking cool. I read all of the time and there are a lot of classics that I just never have the time to get around to. This site emails you a five minute segment of whatever book you choose each day. I’m currently reading Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” Every morning I get the next installment. “Crime and Punishment” is next. You can read more, just click the link when you are through and they will send you the next installment immediately. Or you can let it come in those daily snippets. I’m loving it. They have a couple hundred public domain classics available.
Any Sites You Recommend?
Also, I am in love with Kasey Chamber’s voice. She is quickly becoming one of my all-time favorite artists. Her new album, Carnival, came out Tuesday. Give it a spin. Or better, pick up her fabulous album “The Captain”
5 Responses to “Great Sites and Great Music”
By Tracy3906 on Sep 14, 2006 | Reply
Oh my voice is WAY better than hers. When I’m in the shower and nobody can hear me, anyway. It always sounds better to me than it does to others. Sorry to those who hear it at church!
By jasonk on Sep 15, 2006 | Reply
I first came across Kasey Chambers on Austin City Limits a few years ago. She sang “The Captain” and I was in love. Great voice, great personality.
Before she became my girlfriend, a young lady and I performed “These Pines” at a local festival. I knew she was the one. We still sing it sometimes.
By Scott on Sep 15, 2006 | Reply
Jason, thanks for the comment. I hope more and more people will discover Kasey. She is the real deal. No other voice like hers.
I haven’t heard a song of hers yet that I don’t like–that is truly rare.
By Jonathan on Sep 15, 2006 | Reply
These days, essentially all the content I consume from the internet is via RSS feed. That makes it especially frustrating when a site has no RSS feed or doesn’t have one for the specific content I’m interested in.
I recently came across this: http://feed43.com/
It’s a service that periodically “scrapes” new content from another web page and makes it available to you as an RSS feed. It’s not trivial to configure for a particular site (you have to dig into the html of the target site and give feed43 the patterns it needs to scrape the content) and the “help” pages aren’t helpful enough, but I figured it out and am putting it to use. For example, here are feeds for:
Kathleen Parker’s opinion pieces in the Orlando Sentinel
Steve Chapman’s opinion pieces in the Chicago Tribune
Christian Standard
If anyone wants to configure a feed and gives it a try but has trouble, send me an email (blog@jonmower.com) and I’ll help.
By Jonathan on Sep 15, 2006 | Reply
For offsite storage, I use an external hard drive that I keep at work. I haven’t tried it yet, but AOL’s Xdrive was recently re-launched, gives 5 GB of free storage, and has received good reviews.
Another site I have to mention is:
http://theweekmagazine.com/
I love The Week magazine. It’s a great news magazine (in contrast to Newsweek, US News & World Report, etc.) with lots of international content, culture, etc. Basically everything except sports. It’s a sort of Reader’s Digest or Cliff’s Notes of content taken from various other news sources. Typically, the articles on controversial issues quote from sources advancing each side of the issue. Even the recommendations for upcoming TV viewing are great! (I set my Tivo accordingly…it’s where I first heard of the British “The Office”, before there was an American version, for example)
I subscribe to the paper copy. The web site seems to have most but not all of what is included in the paper version (if you like what you see online, I’d recommend trying the paper version). The web site has not RSS feeds, so I’ll have set up feed43 to scrape it eventually (since I tend to spend more time with the laptop than with the paper mag in hand).