This is a fairly standard Movable Type blog for a Friend (Quaker) based in the West-Philly neighborhood of Philadelphia, PA. The most unusual element is that the client wanted two separate blogs: one meant for daily posts and the other for more weekly posts (it’s all set up in MT via categories). This also shows the use of Slidoo for a photo banner head. The pictures are all pulled from a particular set of her Flickr account. Visit site.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Doing it Twitter style
May 5, 2008
I’m a big user of both Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking system (it powers QuakerQuaker and the daily posts of links) and Twitter, the “micro-blogging” system that puts mini-messages into Quaker Ranter (currently with a brown woodsy boxes). They both serve different purposes for me and have different styles. Well, I just realized I had written a Deli.icio.us post in a Twitter style.
I was bookmarking a new post by Dave the “Quaker Agitator,” who’s looking for help writing a small grant. I left a minor comment and bookmarked the post in Del.icio.us. I try to do that for most comments so that I can go back later and see if any interesting conversation took place in the meantime. This time though I made an appeal for readers directly through the Del.icio.us description: “The Quaker Agitator is looking for help writing a small grant. Any Ranter readers able to lend a hand?” I did this knowing that a few hundred sympathetic readers will see this tomorrow morning when the links go up. It’s probably a moot point as the Quaker Agitator has a much larger audience of sympathetic readers.
But stylistically it’s an example of a culture of a new media form starting to change an older form. This is a common phenomenon in this fast-moving Web 2.0 world. Whether my Del.icio.us style will adapt or not I don’t know. It’s just an observation for now.
Save St. Mary’s
May 5, 2008
Julie’s been busy this weekend following up on the rally she attended Friday, hooking up with all of the organizing that’s happening to save St. Mary’s Church in Malaga NJ. She’s taken lots of pictures of St. Mary’s and yesterday made up t‑shirts for the cause!
One positive element to come of the Bishop’s decision to close down St. Mary’s and half the Catholic churches in South Jersey is how parishioners are coming together for their churches. Julie’s already typed in half of a 1997 history of St. Mary’s onto the internet, and there are plans to interview elderly members, the oldest of whom remember the church being built.
The story of a little church in a sleepy rural town is the really the story of the Italian Catholic experience in America. There’s a certificate in the back of the church that lists all of the donations that were collected to build the church, some from dirt poor farmers who couldn’t even afford a dollar but still put all they could to build a house of worship.
To my Quaker readers: don’t worry, I’m not going Catholic on you all. It’s just that even I can tell there’s something special about St. Mary’s and the devotion and the newfound-feistiness of it’s community (how did they makes the Times?! And two pictures!). The bishop wants to sell all these little rural churches and replace them with impersonal mega-churches. The struggle for authenticity, humanity and the remembrance of the experience of those who struggled before us transcends religious denominations. We’d all lose something if churches like St. Mary’s were all torn down to make way for more Super Wawa’s.
Tags: southjersey, catholic, st mary’s, malaga, nj, diocese of camden, bishop galiante, farmers, italian, authenticity
Using VMWare Fusion to run Windows on a Mac
May 3, 2008
I just purchased a MacBook and have the joy of learning a new set of routines and programs, all while reconfiguring my services again. I’ve used Macs in various work settings but the bulk of my development time has been on Windows, most recently XP.
I will recommend VMWare’s Fusion for other Windows users making the switch. Fusion is an $80 program that lets you run Windows through Mac (you have to pay for a fresh version of Windows, a copy of XP put me back $200 at Staples). Apple has an alternative called Boot Camp which lets you install Windows so you can start up in it when you start your computer. This presumably runs faster (there’s no Mac OS overhead while in Windows) but Fusion is much more practical since I’m using simultaneously with my Mac programs. The speed is fine, even with lots of Mac programs running. Fusion is also more flexible about disk space allocations.
I’m quite amazed about what it can do. Netflix’s Watch Now service is unavailable for Macs but runs fine through my Fusion-powered Windows XP. The Rhapsody music client also works and I’m listening to music as I’m running my Mac programs. In an amazing feat, I was able to use Rhapsody to sync songs on my Palm T/X via USB cable. This is Windows XP running atop Mac OS X syncing digital rights managed-protected data with Palm OS over USB. Really amazing that it all worked!
I’m sticking with Windows XP because of all the nightmare stories I’ve heard about Vista, but also because it uses less memory and so will run faster. Also, I know XP very well and don’t really relish the thought of learning a whole new system in addition to Mac OS. I’m presuming that over time I’ll use Windows less and less and will just have it for browser cross-checking purposes and to run the occasional Windows-only software like Rhapsody and Netflix.
Rally to save St Mary’s Catholic Church in Malaga NJ
May 2, 2008
Julie and Theo took a bus into Camden NJ this morning to attend a rally in support of St Mary’s. It’s one of dozens of churches that the Diocese of Camden has slated for closure. St. Mary’s Father Romanowski was scheduled to meet Bishop Galante today but the Bishop canceled at the last minute. Channel Six Action News profiled St Mary’s a few days ago and the video gives you a little idea why it’s a special little church.
More pictures of the St Mary’s rally here.
(Too) Silent Worship and Whithered Meetings
April 27, 2008
One of the things I liked about my old Quaker job is that I occasionally had a moment in between all of the staff meetings (and meetings about staff meetings, and meetings about meetings about staff meetings, I kid you not) to take interesting calls and emails from Friends wanting to talk about the state of Friends in their area: how to start a worship group if no Friends existed, how to revitalize a local Meeting, how to work through some growing pains or cultural conflicts. I’ve thought about replicating that on the blog, and halfway through responding to one of tonight’s emails I realized I was practically writing a blog post. So here it is. Please feel free to add your own responses to this Friend in the comments.
Dear Martin
I have read that Meetings that are
silent for long periods of time often wither away. But I can’t remember where I
read that, or if the observation has facts to back it up. Do you know of any
source where I can look this up?
Thanks,
CC
Dear CC,
I
can’t think of any specific source for that observation. It is
sometimes used as an argument against waiting worship, a prelude to the
introduction of some sort of programming. While it’s true that too much
silence can be a warning sign, I suspect that Meetings that talk too
much are probably also just as likely to wither away (at least to
Inward Christ that often seems to speak in whispers). I think the
determining factor is less decibel level but attention to the workings
of the Holy Spirit.
One of the main roles of ministry is to teach. Another is to remind
us to keep turning to God. Another is to remind us that we live by
higher standards than the default required by the secular world in
which we live. If the Friends community is fulfilling these functions
through some other channel than ministry in meeting for worship then
the Meeting’s probably healthy even if it is quiet.
Unfortunately there are plenty of Meetings are too silent on all
fronts. This means that the young and the newcomers will have a hard
time getting brought into the spiritual life of Friends. Once upon a
time the Meeting annually reviewed the state of its ministry as part of
its queries to Quarterly and Yearly Meetings, which gave neighboring
Friends opportunities to provide assistance, advise or even ministers.
The practice of written answers to queries have been dropped by most
Friends but the possibility of appealing to other Quaker bodies is
still a definite possibility.
Your Friend, Martin
Floating on Clouds
April 26, 2008
Last weekend I found myself with the scenario no solo web designer wants to be faced with: a dead laptop. It was eighteen months old and while it was from Hewlett Packard, a reputable company, it’s always had problems over overheating. Like a lot of modern laptop makers, HP tried to pack as much processor power as they could into a sleek design that would turn eyes on the store shelf. They actually do offer some free repairs for a list of half a dozen maladies caused by overheating but not for my particular symptoms. When I have a free afternoon, a big pot of coffee and lots of music queued up I’ll give them a call and see if I can talk them into fixing it.
Once upon a time having a suddenly dead computer in the middle of a bunch of big projects would have been disaster. But over the last few years I’ve been putting more and more of my data “in the cloud,” that is: with software services that store it for me.
Email in the Cloud
I used to be a die-hard Thunderbird fan. This is Firefox’s cousin, a great email client. I would take such great care transferring years of emails every time I switched machines and I spent hours building huge nested list of folders to organize archived messages. About a year ago Thunderbird ate about three months of recent messages, some quite crucial. At that time I started using Google’s Gmail as backup. I set Gmail to pick up mail on my POP server and leave it there without deleting it. I set Thunderbird to leave it there for week. The result was that both messages would be picked up by both services.
After becoming familiar with Gmail I started using it more and more. I love that it doesn’t have folders: you simple put all emails into a single “Archive” and let Google’s search function find them when you need them.You can set up filters, which act as saved searches, and I have these set up for active clients.
Why I’m happy now: I can log into Gmail from any machine anywhere. No recent emails are lost on my old machine.
Project Management in the Cloud
I use the fabulous Remember the Milk (RTM) to keep track of projects and critical to-do items. Like Gmail I can access it from any computer. While messing around setting up backup computers has set me back about ten days, I still know what I need to do and when I need to do it. I can review it and give clients renewed timelines.
An additional advantage to using Remember the Milk and Gmail together is the ability to link to emails. Every email in Gmail gets its own URL and every saved “filter” search gets its own URL. If there’s an email I want to act on in two weeks, I set up a Remember the Mail task. Each task has a optional field for URLs so I put the the email’s Gmail URL in there and archive the email so I don’t have to think about it (part of the Getting Things Done strategy). Two weeks later RTM tells me it’s time to act on that email and I follow the link directly there, do whatever action I need to do and mark it complete in RTM.
Project Notes in the Cloud
I long ago started keeping notes for individual projects in the most excellent Backpack service. You can store notes, emails, pictures and just about anything in Backpack and have it available from any computer. You can easily share notes with others, a feature I frequently use to create client cheatsheets for using the sites I’ve built. Now that I use Gmail and it’s URL feature, I put a link to the client’s Gmail history right on top of each page. Very cool!
Another life saver is that I splurge for the upgraded account that gives me secure server access and I keep my password lists in Backpack. There’s a slight security risk but it’s probably smaller than keeping it on a laptop that could be swiped out of my bag. And right now I can log into all of my services from a new machine.
Keeping the Money Flowing from Clouds
The latest Web 2.0 love of my life is Freshbooks, a service that keeps track of your clients, your hours and puts together great invoices you can mail to them. I’m so much more professional because of them (no more hand written invoices in Word!) and when it’s billing time I can quickly see how many unbilled hours I’ve worked on each project and bang!-bang!-band! send the invoices right out. Because the data is online, I was able to bill a client despite the dead computer, providing my exact hours, a detailed list of what I had done, etc.
Others
Calendar: I always go back and forth between loving Google Calendar and the calendar built into Backpack. Because I can never make up my mind I’ve used ICal feeds to cross-link them so they’re both synced to one another. I can now use whichever is most convenient (or whichever I’m more in the mood to use!) to add and review entries.
Photos: Most of the photos I’ve taken over the past four years are still sitting on my dead laptop waiting for me to find a way to get them off of the hard drive. As tragic as it would be to loose them, 903 of my favorite photos are stored on my Flickr account. And because I emailed most of them to Flickr via Gmail most of those are also stored on Gmail. I will do everything I can to get those lost photos but the worst case scenario is that I will be stuck with “only” those 900.
Your Examples?
I’d love to hear how others are using “the cloud” as real-time backup.
Burnt Ubers and Reluctant Ranters
April 18, 2008
Interesting reading today about how our Quaker structures can choke the Spirit and hem in our communities. Johan M is no stranger to Quaker institutions, but in “Clerk Please” he writes:
But who will see and proclaim these things to new audiences if we are so busy trying to sort out our structures, nomination processes, and interpersonal animosities that we don’t take the time to discern and honor leadings?
Susanne K echos some of these themes in her latest post, “Quakerism and Structure”:
One of the key parts of George Fox’s revelation was that religious structures can kill the free movement of the Spirit… My Ffriend R has advocated the practice of disbanding the Religious Society of Friends every 50 years. He believes that the spark of the initial vision and passion of religious groups only survives for about 50 years before developing structures start to choke the movement of the Spirit.
It’s been about eighteen months since I was sidelined from the professional Quaker world (I work for some Quakers now, but on a contract basis and the relationship is much different). A year or two before this, my monthly meeting melted down and more or less devolved into a worship group and while I’ve found a more active meeting to attend, it’s not particularly close and I haven’t joined.
The result of these two changes is that I haven’t sat in a staff meeting for over a year; I don’t attend business meetings; I don’t belong to any committees; I don’t represent any group at conferences. After years of being what Evan Welkin called an uberQuaker, I’m an uninvolved slacker. Bad Martin, right?
Except I’m not uninvolved of course. I feel I’m doing as much now to help people find and grow into Quakerism than I did when I was paid to do this. I don’t spend much time with that 2% skim of Quaker elite who attend all the same conferences and appoint each other to all the same committees, but then catering to their needs was pretty high maintenance and was never something I thought of as the real mission.
Suzanne talks about the “Sabbatical Year” meme, and of course lots of electrons fly about the blogosphere about the possibilities of the Emerging Church movement. There’s a hunger for a different way of being a Friend. I know one Quaker who threatens to burn down the famous meetinghouse he worships in because he feels that the building has become an empty icon, a weight of bricks upon the Spirit (I’ll leave him anonymous in case something mysterious happens to the meetinghouse tonight!). How tragic would it be, really, if some of institutional baggage was laid down and we had to find other ways to confirm and support one another’s ministries?
I love teaching Quakerism, I love helping Quakers use the internet for outreach and I love reaching out to potential Friends with my writing. I’m doing all that without committees or staff meetings. No budgets to fight over, no mission statements to write.
Half a decade ago now I wrote about the “lost Quaker generation,” active and visionary Gen X Friends who seemed to be dropping out in droves. We’re all keeping in better touch now via Facebook but I haven’t noticed much jumping back into the fray. What I have noticed is a phenomenon where Friends half a generation older are taking on Quaker responsibilities only to drop away from active meeting involvement when their terms ended.
If we could pull together all of the dropouts together and start meetings that focused on worship, religious education and deep-community activities, I think we’d see something interesting. I envy those with less-musty, Gen‑X heavy meetings nearby (Robin M showcased her meeting recently). And don’t get me wrong: I also love the old Quaker ideal of the strong local Quaker community and the bonds of the community on the individual, etc., etc. But I don’t see meetings like that anywhere nearby and the only clear leading I really have is to continue this “freelance” teaching, writing and organizing. It’s not the situation I want but it’s the situation I have and at this point I have to just trust the leadings as they come step by step and have faith they’re going somewhere. Boy though, I wish I knew where all this was heading sometimes!