Goodbye Rhapsody

For those of you who know me well, you know that for a long time I have been an avid user of Rhapsody.  Matter of fact, during my sophomore year, as I was using Audiogalaxy to download hundreds if not thousands of illegal mp3s, I began to feel convicted that what I was doing was stealing.  The biggest barrier to me purchasing all of those tracks on cd was the eclectic nature of my listening habits.  I listen to a lot, and I like to listen to new music often.  That is where Rhapsody came in.  Rhapsody launched in December of 2001, and I quickly subscribed.  For a monthly fee (that has gone up and down over the years, but usually settled around $9.99), I could listen to unlimited tracks by most of the artists I wanted to listen to legally.  The downside was that the service only worked streaming (they later added the ability to purchase mp3s).  This wasn't too much of an issue for me since most of my listening was in my dorm room.  Much has changed over the years, and much has stayed the same.  For many of those years, Rhapsody was a player installed in Windows, and recently, they launched a web player and iOS apps.

I have been a faithful customer for all of those years.  Rhapsody really has been a part of my music life, especially now that I'm a worship director, listening weekly to new albums and artists.  So, why am I saying goodbye after all of these years?  Simple, something better and cheaper came along.  This week, the Chrome app store launched, and one of the reviewers commented that the Chrome version of the MOG web player was really nice.  To be blunt, it blows Rhapsody away, and it is an early beta with features missing.  Rhapsody has been slow to change (in 9 years, the player changed little), and has become in many ways bloated, including the web player and the amount of resources it uses.  In my geekiness, I have switched to Ubuntu, and the only way to play tracks is through the web player, and it's just plain awkward, and it hasn't changed in two years.

So, MOG it is.  Maybe someday I will return to Rhapsody, but for now I'm going with the new kid on the block.  Oh, and did I mention that MOG is half the price of Rhapsody.  Makes a big difference!  I figured out how much I have paid to Rhapsody over the last 9 years, but I will spare you the wincingly large amount.

Goodbye Rhapsody, you will always be my first music streaming love.

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It's been a long day. This Sunday, the Flack family had gone out to Tuttle Cove (if you didn't know our Church Picnic is out at Tuttle Cove), and they came back and said that the site was pretty torn up. So, I went out this morning, and pretty torn up was a gross understatement. It is more like a grassless mud-hill. Certainly not a place where you can have 500+ people walking around, sitting, etc., much less building a stage on with sound equipment and a generator. So, the picnic is cancelled. Yes, yet another event cancelled. After trying every other possible venue in town, I ended the day frustrated. Thankfully, things like the meat had not yet come in, so the order could be cancelled, but honestly, I really look forward to these combined services.

If you look back through my blog, you will see that I often talk about my desire to see the congregation together more. It is a healthy thing for the members of the Body to occasionally see the whole Body gathered together. So, stick it on your calendars. Easter 2011 is coming up fast! Actually after all my calls, it looks like City Park might be a better venue for us for the college, so I'm starting to plan now!

That being said, I look forward to see God work Sunday. After the let down of this week, I am again reminded of God's providence (sovereignty). Nothing is outside of God's control or plan... even a muddy slick instead of a grassy hill! Poor example, but today I needed to be reminded. I think sometimes we get into the habit of talking about God's providence in the big things. When things are going really good, or when we are going through tribulation, we think of how God is sovereign in the situation. We forget that God is in control in the little things too. After all, in addition to naming and counting the stars, He also numbers the hairs on our head (Matthew 10:30).

If I may, let me quote quickly from Kevin DeYoung's book, "The Good News We Almost Forgot: Rediscovering the Gospel in a 16th Century Catechism"

"... Like most of us, ... students are much more at ease using passive language about God's permissive will or comfortable generalities about God being "in control" than they are about stating precisely and confidently to those in the midst of suffering "this has come from God's fatherly hand.... If God is a Father, then surely He exercises His authority of His creation and creatures for the good of His beloved children. Providence is nothing more than a belief in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, brought to bear on our present blessing and troubles and buoying our hope into the future...."

Lord of the Rings, Programming and Karate Kid

Poor kid, this morning started out with Isaac's 9 month appointment. All continues to go well. He's 93rd percentile in height and head circumference and 76% in weight. Healthy kid.

The worst part about these appointments are the shots. Jodie of course will have nothing to do with holding him down, so it inevitably falls to me. Every time, he has laid there calmly, making eye contact with me. Then out of the corner of my eye I see the nurse jab, and then a split second later, I see a jump, a realization that something just hurt big time in his eyes, and then the tears well up. Then the screaming..... You get the idea. Anyway, poor kid took a really long nap this afternoon.

So, while the Gerling family worked on their naps, I headed downstairs to continue my whirlwind quest to get all of the programming projects that have been piling up done. I hunted a bit and decided on Lord of the Rings for a background movie. I can't really say that I watched it all that closely as I was engrossed greatly in converting Jodie's Joomla website into a Habari one. Again, I love Joomla, I've worked with it a lot, and it works great for sites like the church website. However, the major complaint from Jodie has been that the comments don't work. I really have no idea why such a thing would happen, and therefore had no idea how to fix it. Habari has a nice elegant comment solution, so I spent my day learning how to create a template for Habari! You can see the result at psalm127mom.com. If you saw the site before, you actually really shouldn't notice that much of a difference (other than the fact you can leave comments), but rest assured, the site is now actually on a blogging platform!

This leaves one final project. I need to redo the Jodie Gerling Designs & Photography page. Jodie actually has had a design done for several months now, but I just haven't gotten around to it. I've spent most of the evening looking at various platforms for photo blogs with a nice gallery layout and after some consideration of PixelPost and ZenPhoto, it looks like the winner is ye old classic platform, Wordpress. Anyway, that's tomorrow's goal, so hopefully you can see the results soon.

Now, while I was trying out various CMS platforms, I put in Karate Kid II. I just can't believe that I always forget how much I love this movie. I know, some of you are saying that Karate Kid I is better, but I have always loved the sequel far more. Sure, the original has lines like, "Don't forget to breathe," and "Wax on, wax off," but how does that relate to you in real life? Really. The second movie teaches us about things like honor and sacrifice and has a wonderfully pure love story between Daniel and Kumiko. What could this be? A love story without any make out scenes or other junk that manages to work its way into modern movies? No, just a story where two people get to know each other by spending time together, realizing that despite being from different worlds, they have a lot in common and they fall in love. Note, it isn't till after they declare their love for each other that they even consider kissing! This is so much more like real life.... well, the way it ought to be, than what most movies portray.

Anyway, I digress. Let me just throw some quotes out there for digestion.

Mr Miyagi: "Daniel-san, never put passion before principle. Even if win, you lose."

Mr Miyagi: "Lies only become truth if other person chooses to believe them."

Would you not agree? So much more profound than, "Paint the fence."

 

Beautiful Things

A new group I've started listening to here in the last couple of weeks is Gungor. At the worship conference this year, one of the bands played their song Beautiful Things. The search for that song brought me to them. I will probably post some more songs of theirs, but this is the first one I heard. I love the juxtaposition of instruments that you wouldn't typically put together to form a worship band. I can't remember the last time I saw the glockenspiel used outside of a classical setting.

The Divine Commodity

The modern church is beset by a consumer mentality and filled to the brim with consumer Christians. That is the premise of Skye Jethani's book, "The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity."

Using a mix of examples from modern church leaders, Bible stories and interestingly, stories about Vincent Van Gogh, Jethani attempts to deconstruct different ways that the Church has adopted consumerism and restore Christians to use their imaginations. In the book, he deconstructs: our commodified view of God, our branded identities, our attempts at transformation through external events, our devotion to institutions as God's vessels, our unceasing pursuit of pleasure, our contentment with segregation and the individualism pushed by consumerism.

The book had a tendency to hit pretty close to home. I would imagine anyone involved in a church in America would see examples in their own experiences. I should make it clear that Jethani's purpose is not to tear down the Church, but rather to illuminate the power of the Gospel.

The chapters that spoke to me particularly were the chapters on attempting to transform people through external events and the chapter on our contentment with segregation. I am as guilty as the next person of using programs and ministries to affect change in peoples' lives, but we too often forget that it is the Holy Spirit that affects change. That, and it is through relationships with Christians living the Gospel that unbelievers see Christ. Also, the chapter on segregating ourselves according to our own tastes speaks so strongly to the situation we have now in the church. Like hymns? Go to the traditional service. Want to have fun in church, go to youth group, etc. The Church is a diverse Body, not a loose corporation of separate groups.

Overall, Jethani is a decent writer. I found myself getting bogged down several times, not following his connections from one thought to the next. I wonder if part of this was my reading of this book on Kindle. Perhaps in the print version, things are laid out such that there are distinct separations between subjects. That being said, there were many parts that I took notes and several times that I thought of people that would benefit from reading this book.

So, I would recommend this book to anyone who is a part of the American church, especially to those who find themselves disillusioned by the church. This book is eye opening and refreshing.