i am not a television watcher, but i just watched all four seasons of battlestar galactica over a span of two months earlier this year, and I’ve got to say the series rocked. There’s so much in there, I wish I blogged about it throughout each season.
I don’t want to give away too much if you haven’t watched it, but it’s a sci-fi oriented post-apocalyptic drama – a bit like the explorations of noah’s ark in space. It sounds kooky but the characters and the questions it provokes are phenomenal.
What I loved about the show:
How humans have an incredible capacity to survive the toughest conditions
Questions of why we of all species deserve to survive?
How humans were either atheists or polytheists, while the ‘evil’ robots were monotheists
What it’s like to become that which you hate
pressing the limits of what it means to love and value – regardless of beliefs and even origins
How they managed to mix themes of technology and progress with mythical stuff like angels
The cyclon robots seemed to have a type of militant evangelicalism.
Themes of Islamic jihad and even Buddhist reincarnation were explored (ie. the downloading to new bodies)
Questions of who your creator is, why he made us, and what good is he?
I didn’t like Baltar’s christ-like evolution, but I loved the subtle bits of him despising his farm boy childhood and re-embracing it.
Whether we truly value the soul, or the shell it’s encased in?
I could go on and on. Anyone else love Battlestar? See incredible themes that tie in issues of faith and humanity?
Here’s my latest technology update that helps me in life, ministry, mission, etc.
- I’m on google chrome (their new browser), right now. It rocking so far. You can read the comic book they released describing what’s behind it here.
- A new google picasa v3 is to be released today as well, with synchronization and facial recognition.
- I’ve switched from using Microsoft OneNote and Google Notebook, to evernote. It doesn’t have onenote’s snazzy tabs, but it allows me to sync my laptop, desktop, and online notes finally.
- In preparation for the event, I researched online ticketing and discovered brown paper tickets, eventbrite, and money transfer through paypal. All with a lot of potential, but I was too cheap to succumb to the 2-3% cut the services take.
- Facebook Events… somewhat works. I was feeling really about about the response rate for my event, but then looked at many others, and it looks like there’ really only a 5-10% response rate. I know I’ve rarely responded to mine, but a great easy start for building some buzz.
- Skype – I’ve began doing marraige counseling through it for some friends out of town, but I’ve found it’s almost as good even with local meetings, saving gas and travel time.
- Google phone – I don’t know how many years I’ve been waiting for this one, but rumours are it’s coming along to be released by the end of this year. Some pics here. One day I’ll be cool.
- Wordpress, absoutely rocks. I created the event page with it. And lightbox plugins bring photos to a whole new level.
- Starbucks wifi – This one applies to Canadians too for once, 2 hours of free wifi with an active starbucks card. And no, you don’t have to be a bell canada customer.
- After a long while, I just received my first hundred bucks from google ads, but text-link-ads pay out is probably 3-4 times more on average I find.
- Search – through del.icio.us bookmarks and my own blog. I can’t describe how many times I’ve depended on archived clippings and personal writings I’ve long forgotten for talks and ideas.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I need to leverage technology more on a personal level. Quite often when friends move out of town, I find we often lose touch so easily. There’s no reason to really when most of us have high speed connections.
I’ve always tried to integrate technology on an organizational level, but there’s no reason I shouldn’t be leveraging it on a personal level as well. I think the future will be highly local and highly virtual.
