Category Archives: My thoughts

Kindle read aloud ability + Foundations of grace = great experience.

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I have a decent drive each day and for quite some time have use audible books to make productive use of the time.  It has turned out to be a blessing from the viewpoint of getting to read (hear) quite a few books.  I had been going through at least 2 books a month, but missed the ability to actually read the books as well when not driving.

I have had a kindle for some time and never thought listening to a book with the voices that are available I was reading was really possible.  Insert mental thought of computerized robot voice reading with horrible pauses and mispronunciations of most if not all multi-syllabic words.  My experience does not resemble the prior description, surprisingly other than abbreviations it does a fabulous job with albeit a computerized voice. I have become quite used to it’s tone, it now seems very usable, and I get to read the book between trips.

So I am 2/3rds of the way through the book “Foundations of grace“, I will do a more complete review when I am done, but have a quote from the book below that I really found spot on.  If you ever wondered where they get the “Doctrines of Grace” from the bible this is a wonderful book.  The first of five books by Steven Lawson, the book starts in Genesis with Abraham and reviews the doctrines via scripture throughout the entire bible by reviewing men through the apostle John in Revelation.  (For a good review from the discerningreader.com click here)

“It would be virtually impossible to read the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and come to any other conclusion. As shocking as it may sound, Jesus Christ was a Calvinist. While the teaching ministry of our Lord Jesus preceded that of John Calvin by fifteen hundred years, Christ clearly taught the same doctrines of grace as did the Genevan Reformer. In this sense, Christ did teach Calvinism, but not because our Lord received these magnificent truths from Calvin. To the contrary, Calvin received them from the One who came from the Father—Jesus Christ. The truths of sovereign grace originated in the inscrutable mind and will of God, not man. They were conceived in glory, not Geneva. They were birthed in eternity past, not sixteenth century Europe.”

Lawson, Steven J. (2011). Foundations of Grace (Long Line of Godly Men) (p. 241). Reformation Trust Publishing. Kindle Edition.

These are not “new testament” or “old testament” opinions from a theologian trying to convince you one way or the other, scripture is referenced throughout and you can and should check the author on each entry.  Sure I realize the book is friendly to the tenets that are traditionally referred to as calvinism today, but if you have no idea what I am referring to this is a good book to find out.  I come from a Church of Christ background and can say it has taken me over a year to work through what I believed, but I praise our sovereign Lord he blessed me by changing my understanding.  I am still working out my own salvation with fear and trembling (Phil 2:12) and this book has been very good about showing the quantity and breadth of these biblical truths in the scripture throughout the entire bible.

If you think you would enjoy listening to books while you drive, but don’t want to give up the ability to annotate and actually read, the $114 Kindle is a great way to read books you with great flexibility.  Sure it isn’t dramatically read, but it really does seem to get more “normal” each day, and the quote from above shows the added ability to refer back later as you would in any book.  In this case this quote was copied from the Kindle app on my mac, even though I ”highlighted” the excerpt on my Kindle itself when arriving at work from the listening session.

A shot of my office with the Olympus Fish-eye converter FCON-PO1

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Arrived at work early enough this morning to use the Olympus Fish-eye converter to take a picture of my office.  The predawn light was very nice and an earlier evening getting to know the Manual settings of the camera has paid off, the manual shot turned out very nice.  My first rookie mistake with a consequence with the new camera, never reset to factory defaults and shoot expecting to have RAW formated shots available to you.  You will need to go back into the menu and set that as well as the SCP (super control panel) menu to be your default menu for the various types of control settings, particularly the P,A,S,M modes.

Big picture little camera – Olympus E-PL2, from DSLR to MFT

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I have enjoyed photography for most of my 45 years, and been a Nikon nut since my Dad let me use his FE back in the 80′s, B&W processing was fun and cheaper but I departed for many years until I went digital in 2006 with a then new Nikon D40.  Two years later I upgraded to a D90 and thought “OK this is better than film” and it was a real step in the right direction for my photography, shoot as many shots as you want and delete most of them.

After numerous vacations and road trips while schlepping a fairly heavy pack or sling the other day I decided it was time to change the DSLR rut I was in. Get a new lens get a new bag. Go on a trip, decide what do I leave home.  All too frequently my answer was nothing, I might need it all. I went from taking the kitchen sink in a Tamrac Velocity 10 sling to trying to slim down via a variety of midsize bags, medium slings and even 2 different top loading holsters.  Usually I was either simi-naked with just the d90 and my 18-105 or I had almost all of it.

Finally I had enough, my last preferred solution was a Lowepro Toploader 65 Pro AW and then realized it now needed an outrigger to carry my 70-300 zoom, then I would have most of my usual essentials for a trip.  After trying the new lens case mounted on the side of the top loader, I saw that I now had a somewhat largish hump on the smaller than a basketball hump that was swinging around my neck.  Nope, still not small or light enough, I still needed a smaller kit, but there was just no squeezing all of it into a single bag.

For a while I went pretty much all iPhone photography, I know your saying I basically quit photography, but the best camera is the one you have with you. I went a month without getting the d90 out and even lent it to a friend for a couple of his families trips. It served him well so I was happy about that.  Then the other day I saw an article for an upcoming new lens from panasonic for a smaller Micro Four Thirds (MFT) camera. It seemed like it would be impossible to have a camera I could shoot quickly on auto, or have all the control and lens possibilities I enjoyed from the DSLR on a smaller camera wouldn’t it?

But it wasn’t, or at least it hasn’t seemed like it yet, I picked up a red Olympus E-PL2 and really like it.  I’m sure for a pro there are differences he or she could mock me for being unaware of.  I challenge anyone who enjoys getting a really pleasant picture, a bright, tack sharp image, to say the equipment is everything in that equation.  Usually everyone will say the opposite, and some of the coolest pictures I have seen are with more mundane equipment in the hands of gifted photographers.  With all that said, thus far I have not had anything after acquiring the viewfinder that I can’t do with my new camera at a fraction of the space required to carry it from my former camera.

That old smallest kit solution is now my full kit solution, the lowepro now houses my new Olympus 40-150mm as well as all the cables, batteries, SD cards and my new lightweight rig.  The piece I plan to carry around the most is my Olympus E-PL2 with a 14-42mm lens inside a cosmos leather case with my rangefinder and a spare SD card mounted to a Lowepro neck strap.  Now the only thing missing from my abilities is all my flashes, but I have essentially given up on being the guy with all those flashes.  If I am doing portraits again, it will be with lights.

Now to get out and take some pictures.  I will post a few here as soon as I get back next week.  If you have tips or tricks on making the leap from DSLR to MFT let me know.  So far it has been great though all cameras seem to still have issues with low light situations, but the E-LP2 seems to be doing at least as well as my D90… dare I say maybe better, it may be too soon to tell.  But I did take a shot yesterday I will conclude with that I think is pretty sharp and has very nice color.

Warning the links are to full size images, so they may take longer to load than usual if your mobile.



Yet another attempt at productivity bliss – Vitamin-R

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If your like me your desire to be effective in your life with the time and resources God has given you is larger than your realized result.  I have been pursuing the best mix of tool and simplicity for years now.  Literally.  There are so many apps to use on so many different platforms, Windows, OS X, iOS, Windows CE, Linux, Paper, notecard, moleskine, you name it I may have tried it and own more unused shelf ware than I care to admit.  Most is from indie developers who had something that intrigued me and forced me to change yet again.

I have chased the Hit list and Things for over a year, and was a prepay user of Omnifocus.  The later is the tool I chose to match up with a new tool, for what after a day seems like a really nice start.  I know a day isn’t much in the fast paced world of “I forgot to do what when?” but there’s hope.  Vitamin-R, yup I know the name is a bit mysterious and not what you immediately thought of when you started reading this article; but it reflects a solution to the problem I discovered I had.  I can’t multitask.  No really I can’t, and I dare say neither can you we all have a real built in inability to do 2 things simultaneously.  That doesn’t mean we don’t try, and some are more successful than others, but I needed more help perhaps than some.

There is one place where GTD or autofocus or covey’s 7 habits all are correct, we can’t all remember what we need to do and desperately need somewhere to keep them written down until we do them.  And I personally like Mark Forester’s method of review and dismiss from a actual piece of paper, which may be a followup post if Omnifocus with a dose of Vitamin-R doesn’t do thew trick.  The key for me I had perceived was I needed some method of focusing and measuring success, while not allowing or trying to multitask.  Pick one thing and then accomplish it, make sure it is the one thing you really need to do and get after it.  Simple right.  Wrong, most of our tasks are actually many little tasks under one over simplified label.

Enter the Vitamin-R piece of the puzzle, use whatever solution your inclined to track all the tasks and projects you need to, but then take the task you have decided is top or “possible” to dedicate at least a 10-15 minute chunk of time to and put into Vitamin-R.  Then on the Now portion of the Now&Later board place a list of the smaller tasks that will need to be done to accomplish the task on the list if need be, or just place the task into the objective portion of Vitamin-R and kick it off.  Let it hide the other apps you aren’t going to be needing, and focus on getting the task at hand done.

This is where I still have some issue with my current setup, I wish there was a way to pause Growl.  If there was that would help tremendously, as it is I am currently not hiding but actually quitting twitter, mail and other tasks that pop messages up in front of my overly eager to go “Squirrel” mind.  For those that have never seen the movie “Up” the previews of the dog that mid sentence gets distracted should be sufficient to illustrate my normal behavior when working on my machine.

So that’s it after one day thats where I am at.  It’s not ingrained and I am sure will morph but uni-tasking is where I need to be if I ever want to succeed at getting anything done, or GAD.  I’ll be cleaning up my Task/Project management page soon so check back for another post next week.