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I remember landing in Amsterdam on October 5, 2011 after being in the air for almost 10 hours. I turned on my iPhone and AP news alerts started pinging my phone as happens when a “world event” takes place. I read through the Fox News, CNN, Sky News alerts and articles, and read through my Twitter and Facebook feeds. As we pulled up to the gate I had already received the text below from Deborah (yes I have all my text messages from years ago), a message received in my hand sitting on a runway in the Netherlands thousands of miles away from Auburn, Alabama. As we pulled up to the gate I took the photo above of the Delta flight parked next to our gate, pulled it into my Camera+ app, put a boarder around it and posted it to Instagram. At this point I had already checked my email, responded to a few emails, and looked up our connecting flight information. All from a small piece of metal, glass, and plastic that didn’t exist a few years earlier.

This may sounds like a lot of poetic musings for a phone, but for some reason my mind wasn’t ready for this particular piece of news that morning, and it confused me. I was on my way to Africa, and the only reason I was going to have any personal connection with my wife halfway around the world was because Steve Jobs had decided he was going to invent and create what I was holding in my hand.

Here was a man who shared no convictions with my faith, a brilliant man who had no understanding beyond the pluralistic view of Christianity known for centuries mixed with his version of Buddhism. He just couldn’t go beyond his own understanding and even made this statement to Isaacson:

Yet I still felt some connection, even if a minor one, with Jobs, sitting on a runway in Europe, as if the plane full of people melted away leaving me and my connection with Jobs sitting in my hand. He shared none of my beliefs, yet he changed the world, my world, and still does on a daily basis. After I got home from Africa I read, back to back, the biography on Steve Jobs and the biography on Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Metaxas. What an amazing contrast of times and cultures, beliefs, and both had the ability to change the world. Ultimately in death, as we all will do some day, either looking to what lies ahead, one perhaps clinging to life here on earth, so did these two great men.

I boarded the plane to Africa, still thinking about Jobs’ fate and wrote this as we took off.

The biggest surprise to me so far [on this trip], was upon landing, finding out that Steve Jobs died. I was truly saddened to hear this. I know we are all temporary to this world, but this man, who for all accounts wasn’t a believer, changed the world. He forever changed the way the world communicates, how we are connected with each other, and the reason I can talk to Deborah from this plane in Europe while she is in Auburn.

He affected so many people through his innovations. How are we to greave his death? I’m saddened over his death as if he was someone I knew personally, and at the same time I really don’t know why either. Death seems so imminent for all of us, especially when you hear about Jobs dying at 59. I know why we die, the fall created this and Christ had to die for us, but it’s still so hard to understand. I didn’t even know Jobs, but I will miss him. The new iPhone announcement yesterday had people wanting to see Jobs at the event, people who never knew, other than God, that he would die the very next day. I pray for his soul.

I’m not even really sure why I write this today other than to acknowledge the gravity this one person had on our world. A person I vastly disagree with on almost all aspects of life, yet he was someone who had a positive impact on so many people.

Jobs once said “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” which really became his whole life philosophy, and was carried on today by Tim Cook and Apple with the video on their front page and the letter below. What other for-profit company would take down their entire front page just to show a 2 minute tribute video. Simplicity and sophistication.

It’s Not the Theme It’s the Content

The New Twenty Twelve WordPress Theme This Actually is My 20,000th Tweet

This post is actually going to mark my 20,000th tweet on Twitter since I joined back on November 1st, 2007. Over that period of 5 years I have tweeted approximately 10 times a day, from 3 different countries, on 3 different continents, posted approximately 1,000 original images, and 1,000 original blog posts, while following around 1,000 unique very specific individuals. In honor of this pointless historical marker I have published my next list, 50 Reasons Why I Still Love Twitter, and give you 5 examples of what makes up my favorite tweets below. By the way, the Twitter favorites (star) is the greatest ever feature of twitter, and you can even create your own rss feed for your favorites list.

Twitter as an Essential Tool

Twitter has become an essential tool of our culture, and that’s where Twitter gets it’s power, it’s a tool, and a useful one. My very first post about Twitter on my blog back in 2008 asked just that question, Is Twitter Really a Useful Tool for Your Business? While that post is now far outdated, at the time, I really didn’t know the answer to that question. Back then people would tell me I don’t want to know what you are having for lunch, but now Twitter can facilitate changes to governments like we saw in Egypt and elsewhere, it’s gone beyond expectations. Many still choose to ignore it’s significance, but the power of Twitter has an almost undeniable usefulness the world has never seen.

What Makes a Great Tweet

So what makes a great tweet? Harvard Business Review did this study on just that very subject, and provided their results in this superb graphic shown above on what makes a great tweet and what makes the worst tweet. Overall, their conclusions seem to be spot on, but it can also be summed up in saying the overall best tweet is one that leads to something else. It provides some useful piece of information, or some unique insight such as this post I came across yesterday, What Would Peter Tweet?, and then leads the reader to take some action. So here are five descriptions that makes an overall great tweet.

The worst tweets, totally not worth reading, are those that are complaining about something else or someone else. I personally can’t stand reading tweets from my followers who only say what’s wrong with this person or that (even if that actually is the case), and I will often quickly unfollow that user. Give us some insight into your life, in a positive way, and send us on our way better than when we came.

Some Recent Examples of Great Tweets

Three Leadership Traits that Never Go Out of Style - @HarvardBiz http://t.co/x4W9sgRI

— Jack Fisher (@jackfisher) August 21, 2012

Fascinating: “An In-Depth Look at the Science of Twitter Timing” http://t.co/wmEvsBfH (via @@KISSmetrics)

— Michael Hyatt (@MichaelHyatt) August 9, 2012

I have no review book copies left to give out but my offer for a FREE book and 2 FREE resources still stands. http://t.co/WHigwicA

— Tyler Braun (@tylerbraun) August 9, 2012

Gaming Portal Redefines "Classroom Learning" http://t.co/Fzpyqj3Z

— Leonard Sweet (@lensweet) July 30, 2012

"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions." G. K. Chesterton

— Leo Percer (@leopercer) July 30, 2012

Those are just a few examples of great tweets from my most recent favorites list, and there you have it. My 20,000th tweet 740 words instead of 140 characters. Coincidentally, much of what makes a great tweet also makes a great blog post as well, but that’s for another day. This was another very difficult topic this week from the Weekly Photo Challenge over at WordPress, and I decided to completely forgo the theological “wrong” since I covered one of those last week, and besides that topic is just too enormous to narrow down for this post. Since I’m such a huge fan of semiotics (not to be confused with the nonexistent signology, or the non-theological Sinology), I thought this whole week I would post one of the many “wrong” signs I came across. There were so many possibilities, like the photo of what to do when you get locked in a restaurant bathroom, or the creative porta-potty business owners here in Auburn, but I thought those just too tacky for the sophistication of this series.

If you are wondering why I’m even doing this Daily Post series called the Weekly Photo Challenge (which is actually part of the larger WordPress series called the Post a Day series), it is because it makes me think outside the box, and that helps me with almost everything I do. When doing some photographic research for an artistic interpretation of “wrong” you get some really weird stuff, like this not-so-innocent looking cat. That really makes a true photographic interpretation of wrong open to almost anything the heart desires, emulating our world today I might add.

In keeping with my desire to photograph something unique amongst all the other posts I tried to figure out what the stereotype photo of what “wrong” would be, and I have concluded there isn’t one. So instead, I chose the ultimate wrong of our technology culture today by using my iPad as an example, but it’s more like a Where’s Waldo wrong than a smack you in the face wrong.

It’s probably overly obvious to some, but I’m sure not to all. Anyone… ?

Related Posts of Wrong

This post serves a few different purposes, like Day 239 of my Project 365, but once in a while I like to get something up there for the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge, and since this week’s theme was inside, I thought this would make a great shot. I don’t spend all of my days inside one of these, but at least some part of each week is spent messing around on the inside of one of these machines. This one is the first generation aluminum MacBook 5,1 (before the MBP version). This is the entire mother board here, RAM at the top and most of the guts on the flip side of the circuit board. The MacBook5,1 as it is known was one of the first unibody frames, and made a great laptop for several years, and in the very center of this mother board you can see the words “Apple ©2008.” Things move fast in the world of laptops and tablets, and this machine is now almost a relic of its day, now designated as a “streaming machine” for videos.

I was trying to think back at how many laptops and desktop computers I have had over the past 20 years (including an actual IBM 5150 from the 1980’s), but there is just no way in the world to know. My first computers weren’t Gateway or Dell, but were hand built IBM machines where I picked out each RAM chip, video card, modem, the CPU chip and so on, each separately. Wow those were the days

You can get a lot of life out of old machines for secondary purposes, and sites like iFixit with their step by step teardown of almost every single Mac ever made is a great place for do easy repairs, even iFixit on this old MacBook5,1. More and more these once great laptops are being replaced by better and better tablets, like the iPad, and Nexus 7, I already wonder how we ever lugged around such a massive device. I didn’t just post a picture of a black square, this is actually my desktop. I love the clean, simple, and yet still very sophisticated… desktop, home screen, written code, verse, prose, lyric, file structure, office, room, company, house, life… etc (could be I like this so much because life in reality is actually very messy). This term, sophistication through simplicity, has come across my desk several times over the last few weeks, and it’s a phrase I have attempted to develop throughout every aspect of my life for years now. The main reason of course is that this really seems to be how Jesus lived out his earthly ministry. Scripture is so complex, packed full of highly technical arguments and situations, yet, the stories of Jesus’ life are simple enough for any child to understand. The verse on my various desktops in the graphic above about Jesus in John 1.14 is one of the most complex and sophisticated statements ever uttered, yet it’s so very simple.

There are so many ways I try to live this out, and one is being very aggressive at keeping my digital life organized, my desk clean, and to only allow those things which are most important to be most visible. That’s one reason why I really love using an Apple product over a Windows PC or an Android device (I have all the above and use all of them for different things, so I’m not totally Apple bias). Apple just makes it so easy to be digitally organized and in our modern day is a secular company that has spent 30 years perfecting sophistication through simplicity, something Steve Jobs took to its extreme. There are many different ways to achieve this, but a disorganized digital life (to me) is no different than a messy living room, or a house full of junk I don’t need.

I can’t think of a time in my life when I have ever been this busy, a time (or season if you will) when I am being pulled in so many different directions all at once. None of those directions are necessarily “bad” so to speak, but I find the busier I get, the more I have to simplify, organize, and focus on specifics. And that’s why I love the concept of sophistication through simplicity. It allows you to stay focused, remove distractions, and focus on what’s important. 

10 Reasons To Learn Social Media if You Are a Christian First of all, I’ll say right off, I’m not a big fan of blogging about blogging, but sometimes I do it just to organize things out in my own mind as well, that’s what this is then. I hear it all the time, if I get a better, newer, and more fresh looking design, I’ll blog more, but that rarely happens. It’s like waiting to do something until the circumstances are just right in your mind, and often times, they never will be. That said, I do think there is a hint of truth to those statements, so over the weekend, after (literally) years of searching, I found one of my favorite customizable WordPress.com designs called Portfolio. So I wanted to make three quick points below today about my world of blogging.

A Little About the Versatility of WordPress as a Platform

WordPress is such an extremely versatile platform. Over the course of 10+ years now, this site has developed into far more than a blog to me, and much of that has to do with the ability that WordPress.com and WordPress.org (there is a difference, see also WordPress Self Hosted vs WordPress.com Hosted Blog Pros Cons :: Review), gives its users. As I have said many times over the years, your blog can be far more than just a place to type a few sentences, you can do that on Facebook. I really have such a narrow view on digital world design and organization, much of which I actually owe to my son and his design abilities, that nothing really ever quite fit my perfect balance of minimalist design, good typography, ability to showcase photography and writing, and so on, but this finally comes close.

A Little About Blog Purpose and Site Organization

Over time, I have begun to heavily filter what I placed on my blog, and what I write on my blog, much to my own dismay. To keep this creative avenue alive in my mind, I actually went to a few anonymous blogs, which as of now, I have combined and imported into this blog, with the intention of continuing those posts alive over here, even if they are trivial, unpolished thought, or just a photo with some comments. These other two sites were specifically for unpolished writing and photos. The writing site was writing only, no photos, and was called Religitic Writing at Religitic.com, which can now be found here under the Religitic tag. The other was photos with only a caption, or a short story, and those are now located in my Gallery and Stories section.

With this new design, I have created a front “home page,” which is a landing page for some featured posts. The rest should be self explanatory by following the menu at the top, but I have a “blog” link now that takes you to the chronological list of posts on my site. I redesigned and updated the About Page and some other organizational things, which hopefully will make navigation cleaner.

A Little About My Intentions Moving Ahead

Throughout the time I have spent on my site I have tried to keep a consistent collection of content, or to remain true to my personal mission statement if you like, and my focus will continue to be for that end. I started this overhaul to my blog earlier in the year (sorry to my RSS readers who are constantly being bombarded with old post updates), and I now see it will probably take the rest of the year to complete. Because content is king, and always has been, that will be the other focus on the future of this site. This means I really hope to continue posting new stories, gallery items, and text only content on various topics that are a little less filtered.

I recently told someone that they really can’t personally create a blog or website anymore where the content was duplicated in another place, or worse yet, just repeat and repeat the same message yourself. So if you can’t be successful in creating content someone else hasn’t already created how can you create anything unique? The answer if you. You are the only you God created, and you are unique in the entire universe. So the only content that is truly unique, is content of your very own, content from your own life, your learning, and of course your own experiences (because they are always different than someone else). And that is what I intend to continue to do here on this site. Create unique original content from what I call life.

If you have a blog, send it my way, I love to read blogs that are personal, unique, and provide some type of value to the world by self expression in life.