This is a neat new site which I'm sure will be acquired by Google or Yahoo in the very near future: Frappr. For free you can create groups where anyone who knows about the group can enter their location, a little picture if they want to, and a shoutout to the group.

So, faithful readers, here's your chance - go to the johnstephi-blog group I just created, and post where you are in the world.

Let's see how many thousands of people actually read my blog. OK, maybe it isn't thousands, maybe...it's 4? 6? :)

A very surreal thing happened to me this week

I'm walking down the street, and suddenly notice a car stopped in front of a pedestrian crosswalk (one of those without a traffic light or anything). What's weird is no pedestrian is crossing or wants to cross, but the driver has this blank look like she's waiting for someone. OK, so she's spaced out, I think. But the taxi driver behind her and the car driver behind the taxi driver have the same blank look. Nobody's getting impatient with her at all for just standing there. I seriously am staring at this situation for a full 20 seconds at least before a truck comes up behind these three cars, honks, and everyone starts driving again as if nothing weird just happened. You have entered The Twilight Zone...doodoodoodoo....

Oh, another funny thing: Someone's listening to rap music in the subway so loud everyone can hear the music. Again, nothing special, except for the music: The chorus's beat is the loading sound of a shotgun and the shotgun shoots every 2nd beat. Writing this down I wonder if you all think that's as funny as I do. I couldn't help but laugh, in any case, and hope the guy doesn't pull out his own shotgun to shoot me. :)

Cool link of the week: Right here.
Click on one of those pictures for a year-long time-lapsed satellite shot of the States with each hurricane very visible. VERY VERY cool.

Us Three

Us Three
Originally uploaded by epaga.

Hi, just a quick pointer to our Flickr site, especially for this picture, this is the only picture of the three of us that we have, since usually one of us is snapshooting the other two.
Anyways, I think it turned out nicely (especially Joshua's drool line, very artistic).

Sorry for the delay, o great and mighty faithful readers. :)
Wow, I just noticed Stephi blogged! Sweet!

Anyways, my thoughts on that article - it's kind of a sensationalist article, since naturally the Catholic church still says the Bible is true, just not meant literally in all passages.
However it still shows a shift in their thinking - the Bible is losing more and more of its sovereignty - it is now subject to scientific interpretation: If something like Genesis is hard or impossible for scientists to accept as literal truth, then it's interpreted symbolically. But that's definitely a slippery slope. Which scientists decide what is to be interpreted symbolically? Do we take a vote?

In other news, I'm TOTALLY into "Getting Things Done"(GTD) lately, a book on stress-free productivity by David Allen.


I really think that after long years of searching (seriously!) I might have struck gold here on a system that actually works for me. I noticed there are loads of techie geek blogs saying the same thing so I think the system works especially well for techie geeks, although I'm sure the author would disagree and say it's for everybody. ;)
Here's a pretty good summary of the book in practical terms.
Here's a very cool blog on "life hacks", that is, productivity tricks.
Here's another very cool blog having to do with various GTD things.

Enjoy.

Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible - World - Times Online

This is a pretty intense article. Read it for yourself. Thoughts later.

This window popped up at me this morning at work. Thought it quite funny. Microsoft is protecting me from Internet Explorer. Nice.
Oh, and a cool link - check out this INCREDIBLY close-up detailed picture of a grain of salt next to a peppercorn. I like to think how God is not only infinitely big, but also infinitely small - going into the depths of cells, atoms, quarks is just as amazing as going into the depths of space.

Joshua on Cover of Cute Babies Magazine!

There are some nice little Flickr toys over at http://flagrantdisregard.com/flickr/.

In just about five minutes I made up this (fake) magazine cover. Pretty cute, eh? ;) Admit it, at first you actually thought this was genuine! ;)

Found this neat little personality test on politics right here: The Politics Test. Here's how I fared, believe it or not:

You are a Social Liberal (61% permissive) and an... Economic Moderate (50% permissive) You are best described as a: Centrist

For those of you faithful readers who don't speak a word of German, try using Google's Translate tool to decipher what Stephi wrote. It gets especially interesting when you translate it into French then back to German then English.
"I hope you forgive me for not having written a blog entry for such a long time" then becomes:
"I hope that you forgive me, in order one blogeingang during a so long hour to have written."
Nice, eh?

One final note - the comments for the posts are getting spammed, so I had to switch to a word verification thingy that you have to enter. Sorry, but better than having a bunch of offers for "curing baldness" or enlarging your...uh...credit rate, for example. ;-)