Free Water for Africans, Free Music for You

Visit HopeAmp, sign up and receive a free song download (from Matthew Smith; I like "All I Owe"), and help Blood:Water Mission (founded by Jars of Clay) provide clean blood and clean water in Africa.

Harry Potter, Loud Music, and Vocabulary

Harry Potter: I'm not very current on what's popular from day-to-day. I have yet to see "The Passion of the Christ" and I have yet to read a single "Harry Potter" book (although I watched two movies, I think). Nonetheless, I found this article in the Washington Post both interesting and sad (sorry about the print-preview version, the main article requires subscription). The line that hit me was the author's daughter asking, "Do we have to keep reading this?" Frankly, it doesn't sound like a children's story to me (comparisons to Narnia and Middle Earth seem to me, at best, a reach), and even the movies don't interest me. The recent Newsweek review of the latest film doesn't make me reach for my mail-order DVD queue, either.

Ripping Music: I've ripped almost all of our CDs and burned them as data discs for my wife; she has just about every album we own in her car, right now, neatly in a 10-CD case. As I was listening to some of the music, attempting to hit them into logical collections on a single CD, it struck me that some music just didn't sound good. Not that the musicians were bad, but the music just didn't "strike a chord," as it were. Then I came across this video, which argues that today's record companies use too much compression; makes sense to me. This is probably why I prefer live performances.

Nonetheless: I first used the word "nonetheless" when I was required to do a paper in 4th grade (I think; his initials were W.W.W.) of a certain length, so I looked up big words in the thesaurus. My teacher chided me for using words in my paper that I wouldn't use in everyday conversation; little did he know that paper sparked an interest in expanding my vocabulary. I find it ironic, then, that I don't like Harry Potter, and struggle to use shorter words when composing sermons.

Music Thoughts

Cathy's new car, Izzy (she named it "Izzy," although "Indie" was a close second), is a Hybrid with all sorts of new technology. We didn't get the navigational package (neither one of us liked it), so we got a CD player instead. One nice thing about the CD player is that it can read MP3 / WMA CDs as well as traditional Red Book.

I personally find WMA a somewhat better audio format than MP3 (though of course opinions differ); the WMA licensing is also less restrictive than MP3. And, since the CD player cannot read Ogg Vorbis, WMA will do.

I'm ripping all our CD's to WMA v9.2 variable bit rate (VBR) at 90%, which produces files about 192kbps. Unfortunately, the car stereo cannot handle anything higher than 240kbps, so I cannot use 98% VBR. That's alright - I doubt I could tell the difference even with great speakers.

So, I'll be creating compilation CDs with all of our Third Day albums on one disc, all of my Beethoven on another disc... you get the idea.

Weird thing... I came across a 2001 album by Tait entitled "Empty." It's autographed; I seem to recall that I won the Michael Tait autographed album from Air1 (great station, by the way).