Giving In Reverse

I learned a very important lesson in the past couple of weeks.  A very wise friend told me that it’s a little bit selfish to refuse to allow someone to help you when you need it.  To do so denies the person wanting to help you from receiving the blessings that come to those who want to help.

That didn’t quite hit home until this week.  Usually we’re the ones that do the helping and giving.  This week we’ve hit some personal crises of our own, which seemed insurmountable at the time.  Our church family stepped in to provide the help we so desperately need.  My normal reaction would be to thankfully decline the help, but now I’ve learned the difficult lesson of thankfully accepting the blessings that others want to give.

It’s a hard lesson, one that’s taking a lot of prayer on my part.  I’m not a “taker” – far from it.  I only hope that I’m able someday to give back to those who are giving so much of themselves to help us in our time of need.

-- //Steve//

PS: A profound and heartfelt “thank you” to those of you who have so faithfully provided support and prayer for both Claudia and me during my recent hospitalization.  I’m eternally grateful to all of you, and especially those who have been there to support my wife during this time.  By being there for her, you’ve helped her be there for me – and without her, I seriously doubt I’d be here to post this to you.  She’s the love of my life, someone I really don’t deserve but am grateful beyond words to have in my world.

“Our Daily Bread”

At one time, I was getting a monthly booklet with daily devotionals called “Our Daily Bread,” produced by the Radio Bible Class (RBC) organization.

Now they have an online version at http://odb.org which has each day’s devotional online.  Well worth checking out.

-- //Steve//

Time-Warner just blew it

Just saw a Time-Warner Cable commercial on TV, slamming DSL.  “Tired of slow DSL speeds delivered over old copper wires?”

Guess what, TWC – the center conductor of your cable is copper wire!

-- //Steve//

Proof that cats do not need chiropractors…

Without further comment…

-- //Steve//

A desk clock for ultra-geeks!

My daughter, Shawna, gave me this some time back.  I kind of take it for granted but today for some reason it just caught my eye in a special way, so I thought I’d share it with the world.

A few years ago she was shopping around and found this little trinket:

Believe it or not, it’s an old 2400-baud internal PC modem that someone mounted on a base, including part of the motherboard!!!  Then whoever this inventive soul was mounted a clock on it!

A simple little trinket, but it’s one of my cherished possessions.  So no, you won’t see it up on eBay – at least not mine! :)

-- //Steve//

PS: Yes, boys and girls, at one time having a 2400-baud modem meant you really had a hot system!  (I once had a 1200-baud half-duplex modem – wouldn’t go full duplex on my Apple II Plus – and was envied, so that dates me a bit.)

 

Check before you forward that message…!

I don’t know how many messages I get every day from well-meaning friends – and family members! – who see something heart-warming in their mailbox and forward it along to everyone they can think of.  I appreciate seeing a lot of them, some not so much, but before I forward anything like that I always check the most reliable source I have yet found to make sure they’re real before sending them on.

The Snopes web site at www.snopes.com is by far the most reliable source I’ve yet discovered for back-checking to find out if such-and-such a forwarded message is real or not.  Some have turned out to be legitimate.  Others started that way but morphed out of control over the years.  But the bulk of the stuff that I get forwarded to me turns out to be just plain bogus.

Today I got one that was probably the greatest story I had seen in a long time.  I so wanted it to be real, but I had to check.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t.  It wasn’t a hoax, just an article of fiction written for a magazine in 1998 and has since been treated as fact and forwarded along.  Details are here for those who are interested.

If you read it, you’ll know why I wished it were true.

Anyway, the point is, PLEASE back-check anything you read before forwarding it along.  Do your part to keep the volume of email traffic down as much as possible.  Your mail provider will thank you.  (Well, maybe not but you can give yourself a “warm feeling inside” by knowing you did the right thing.)

-- //Steve//

 

“Folding the corners down” on electronic magazines…

I’m finding myself more and more drawn to the idea of using electronic magazines rather than print.  Not surprising, considering I come from the deep end of the geek pool, right?

Anyway, a lot of my magazines come to me in electronic form, either in PDF format or via the Zinio service.  There are a few other such services, but Zinio is the only one I’ve found that’s really worth bothering with.

One thing I usually do with print magazines when they come in is to quickly page through each one and dog-ear the pages where an article or ad appears which is of interest to me.  Later, when I have time to get into the serious reading part, I just flip through and go to the pages with the corner folded, and read those articles.

Zinio has a cool feature where you can annotate the information on your page.  You can either use the “highlighter” mode and put a highlight on the article title or advertisement of interest, or you can put a little Post-it type of note on the page with whatever notes you want to make – the digital equivalent of jotting down notes in the margin of the magazine.

The problem with that approach on print magazines is that it would require you to page through the whole magazine to find where the highlights and post-its are located, unless you “dog-ear” the pages to mark which pages have notes.  Zinio makes that easier with the option to “Show Annotation List.”  It puts a list on the right side of the window with a list of all of the annotations you’ve made in the magazine that’s currently open.  Click on the annotation in the list, and you go straight to that page.  Once you’ve finished dealing with whatever you noted, you can delete the post-it note or erase the highlight, and move on to the next thing.

I haven’t yet discovered a way to do that in Adobe Reader yet, but give it time.  I know it can be done in the full Acrobat software, but unless you have a need to create PDFs that are more involved than just using the “print-to-PDF-format” option, getting Acrobat for something like this is more like swatting a fly with a sledge hammer.  Give it time, though, I’ll either find that feature in the free Adobe Reader program, or a free or inexpensive alternative to it somewhere else.  Stay tuned.

-- //Steve//

PS: The only down-side I’ve found so far in using Zinio is that if your magazines come with a free DVD included, you don’t get that DVD with the electronic version.  At least, that’s the case with the publications to which I presently subscribe.  Hopefully as more publishers sign on to the electronic-publishing format, they’ll determine a way to make that possible.