There has been one thing that has kept me from writing about the movie and recommending it in any way. The gratuitous cursing is off putting. Someone who is not educated enough to use courteous speech in a movie that is trying to promote his political agenda loses credibility with me.

I like the idea of an independent film maker being able to seriously promote his cause, but I doubt there will be long term mass appeal for the movie. It certainly won’t be something you want to pull out and watch with the grand kids. And I hope they are not showing it in schools. I know kids see movies with worse language and lots of violence, but it in unnecessary.

If you want to enter yourself to win the download of the movie head on over to Tim’s blog and leave a comment or twitter about the contest. You will earn yourself a chance to download Super Size Me. While you are there check out Tim’s story of his total body transformation. His journey and mine are very similar.

To start off, let me list some of the basic ones that everyone should know.

• CTRL + C = copy
• CTRL + V = paste
• CTRL + X = cut
• CTRL + P = print
• CTRL + S = save

Here are three very useful ones he pointed out that I did not know.

• CTRL + ALT + Up/Down Arrow = moves the current paragraph above or below the previous or next paragraph.
• CTRL + Left/Right Arrow = moves the cursor to the next word either left or right.
• SHIFT + Up/Down/Left/Right Arrow = selects the text appropriately. Just try it and you will understand how to use it.

Jump on over to the original article to see the many others he showed. Not all of them will be useful for everyone, but using keyboard shortcuts really are a better way to work once you learn them. Until you learn them and put them into practice it is hard to see their value.

In the last few days I cleaned up the CSS to make the site more readable. I also changed fonts. You can sign up for our prayer letter mailing at the site. That was a feature at the old site as well. This site is functionally equivelent to the old site, it is just easier for me to maintain.

One thing that has been broken for a very long time at the site was the RSS feed. Now that is fixed.

Since it is a WordPress site, I am going to allow people to leave comments and see if I can build a bit of a community there. My readership will grow over the next year as we travel to our supporting churches and announce the site. I also plan to do regular updates. The old platform was not as easy to update as WordPress is. But, that was somewhat by design. When I built the previous site, I did not want it to look like a blog. I also did not want to bother people with constantly changing content. I am going to treat the site more like a blog now and see if I can get some interaction going.

With that done, I can come back to working on the new design of My Thought Spot. I changed the theme here and then abandoned the work I was doing on it. But, I did learn quite a few things at dpeach.com that will help me working on My Thought Spot.

The bulk of my site building time has been spent working on my main ministry site www.dpeach.com. I have the new site at www.dpeach.com/new which is mostly ready to roll out. Currently I don’t like the header border. I have not figured out how to change that white section to another color and still keep the nicely rounded corners.

I also am working on getting phpList integrated with my theme so that I can still have people sign up to get our prayer letter. My old CMS software that I was using at dpeach.com has a mailing list program built in. With the move away from phpWebSite, I need to find different mailing list software.

The one thing that is keeping me from putting this all together is that I don’t like the “plain text” mail that phpList is sending out. My preference is always plain text mail as opposed to HTML mail. But somehow the text coming out of phpList is different than the plain text I get from any other source. I am subscribed to a couple of mailing lists which use phpList and they all have the same font problem. The font is too small. I thought “plain text” meant a certain standard? Until I can figure out how to get the fonts working right I am hesitant to commit to phpList and therefore the roll out of the new site will be delayed.

Wonderful. What is XBMC?

I checked out the link to the supposedly improved forked OSXBMC. Nothing obvious on the main page as to what the project is. They only say what has been changed in the most recent version.

I hate that. No clear information as to what the project is about when you visit the main page.

Oh, great, there is an About link at the top of the page. Though it requires that I go somewhere else to find just basic information, at least it will be right there. Uh, no. It just says they are a group porting XBMC to OSX. There is at least a link to the official XBMC site in the side bar.

Too much work.

I am picking on this site/project because it happens to be the most recent one I have run into, but it happens often, and mostly in the open source community. There has always been a disconnect between developers and users. The developers give the users what the developers think the users want. Then the users have to think like a developer to figure out how to do it. Often the interface suffers in open source software.

The lack of information at a website is another example of this disconnect. The developers know everything about the project, therefore they don’t understand the need to explain it to the users. They expect the users to understand the project as much as the developers do.

And, no, I am not going to tell you what the project is about. It is not my job to be their evangelist. They need to handle that on their own and win me over as a user. Then maybe I will take up the cause.

Really this is a test to see what it will take to customize and make this theme something I might want to use on my ministry website. Currently I am using phpWebSite CMS software, but I am wanting to move it to a WordPress install like this site. My goal is to make the new WordPress site look similar to the current dpeach.com site, but give it a freshening up. And, WordPress is so easy to use, much better than the CMS software I am using. CMS has its advantages over blogging software, but for what I am doing with that site, Wordpress will work just fine.

What do you think? There will be more changes in the next couple of days, but this is the basic look.

Some of the posts that she links too are long and detailed, but that is the beauty of her site. She gives very clear instructions as to how to accomplish a task in OOo.

I have gotten to where I check her site first when I need help with a project. I used to go to the unofficial OOo forum first. There is a newer forum that seems to be more active these days too. And there are some good tutorial sites out there.

I subscribe to the RSS feed at OpenOffice.org Training and always like to see what she has written. Sometimes the information does not apply to what I am currently working on, but just knowing that the info is there when I need it sure comes in handy.

Yesterday they had a list of Yiddish words that we should all learn. I started to skip over it because I don’t know Yiddish. But I found out I happen to know quite a few words. It struck me as odd though that many of the words in the list such as schlep, schmooze and spiel are words I have used quite often, but always thought of as just strange (funny), made-up words.

There are posts about building vocabulary and others about grammar. Maybe not every day will be your type of needed information, but if you are at all interested in becoming a better communicator, then you should check them out.

They did a fairly good job of covering the event. I think they were severely hit hard by traffic. The site was horrifically slow to load during the coverage. They seem to have recovered slightly since then.

Along with the running news related blog, they have a podcast. It is an interview format. They tend to have some great celebrities on the podcast. However, I have considered unsubscribing a few times since I started listening about 2 months ago. The host seems to be in love with his own voice. I think the interviews are about 40% host talking and 60% guest talking. I would like to see that more in the range of 10% (or less) for the host’s part. Also, there seems to be little editing done on the show. The host stumbles over his words and could do a simple edit to correct it. Certainly some editing would help cut down on the host’s dominance in the audio. If he wants to ask leading questions (which almost all of them are) then state the basic question and edit out the “leading” parts of it.

For now, I am going to continue to listen to the podcast. I have subscribed to the RSS feed for the site and will be reading their coverage over the next few weeks to see how they do.

I make them my Famous Friday pick for this week because of their great coverage of the event this morning since NBC left us without coverage.

[Yes, I know it is not Friday, but in all my time of doing this pick, I think only 2 of them have actually been posted on a Friday.]

Gordon lives on the Isle of Tiree in Scotland. He is a fellow runner and often blogs about his running adventures on the island. Mostly though, the site is about the island itself. He is passionate about his family and the time they spend together on the island and on vacations. And, also he shares some interesting things to do on a slow afternoon.

One thing I have enjoyed about reading his blog is to see how someone several years older than I can have the childlike passion for running that I have. We both discovered running about the same time and we both are elated with some days and workouts and despondent after others. We are not that much different.

I started reading a blog a few months back that has helped me with some of the more detailed uses of OOo. Though I certainly don’t have as much heavy daily use for OOo as some people, I have enjoyed reading Solveig Haugland’s OpenOffice.org Training blog. She has some very detailed how-to articles at the site as well as some great articles on how to make the transition to OOo.

If you see an article that does not apply to you at the time, just skim over it and know that it is there. You might be surprised by how often you find yourself going back to the site to check out a how-to that you previously skimmed over. Solveig has a great way of simplifying a complex process.

There is a lot of good stuff in her archives. Be sure to search around for tutorials. I used to hit the forums when I needed help. Now, before I go to the forums, I check out Solveig’s site.

If you are a blogger, you owe it to yourself to visit ProBlogger regularly for great tips. With all the giveaways he has going this week, you might just win something good too. I am really hoping for those monitors, but there are plenty of other good prizes.

Recently he posted about what to do when dogs chase you. He also gives book reviews somewhat regularly. When he gave away a copy of Coast to Coast a year and a half ago is when I started keeping up with the site. I did not win the book, but consequently bought it and wrote a review of it myself.

Check out Run to Win for the latest track and distance running news as well as great information to keep you on the road doing what you enjoy.

Missionary Geek is a resource offered by Jeff to help other missionaries learn how better to communicate. Not with tips on speaking clearly, but by providing the reader with information about interesting tools which can help with our day to day interaction with the people with whom we work and those we serve.

He makes an interesting case on using Facebook as a possible communication tool. He also informs about the new on-line tools that can make the work of a missionary a bit easier.

Check out his site for more information on how to minister in today’s feature rich world.

In my search to figure out the problem I had determined that it was a corrupt file. The easiest way to remedy that was to google the file name and see if I could download it from somewhere else. It was a script I had pulled off the web, so I knew others were probably using it too.

When I put in the file name at Google, I was horrified to see that my site came up as the 3rd hit on the list! This is one time that you don’t want to show up in the top 10 at Google.