My new Wiki web site

I have established a new personal web site at PBWiki. I shall use that site to develop pages and thoughts about my interests, and move some content from this site to that. I shall use this blog site as more of a journal with links to that site.

DSL at home!

Wow! I finally have BellSouth FastAccess DSL at home. I can now play around with the internet at home without having to go out to a coffee shop to get a wireless connection. Going to the coffee shop was fun, and I may still do it occasionally. But it cost money: over two dollars for a large cup of tea, over four for a large but really not-so-large smoothie. So even though DSL costs, it will save me money in the long run over the coffee shop.

I used to have free dialup connection through the University of Memphis when I taught there. They let it stay active for a while after I stopped, but they finally purged the old accounts and I lost the access. Now I'm on again.

The DSL modem came with a setup CD that I was supposed to run on my computer. A friend at work told me to try just hooking the modem up to the computer through an ethernet cable, and it should work out of the box. It did! When I got on Firefox the first time, a page came up asking me to do some kind of configuration on the modem, which I did. It asked me to restart Firefox, and voila! I was on the internet without ever running the startup CD.

My next step will be to get a wireless router and see if I can set up a wireless network including my other computers. This will allow me to use them for something other than expensive doorstops. It will also allow my wife and me to get on the internet at the same time!

Spiritual Formation Conference

This past weekend, Linda and I went to a spiritual formation conference at Union Avenue Baptist Church in Memphis. Dr. Don Whitney from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville was the speaker. The seminar focused on personal spiritual disciplines for Christian growth. The central disciplines were Bible study and prayer. Also mentioned were meditation, fasting, silence and solitude, journaling, and learning.

The conference was quite thought-provoking. The main statement was probably, get going and do it! Most of us stay so busy that we do not think that have time to pursue spiritual disciplines.

Dr. Whitney presented an approach to prayer called praying through the Scripture. The idea is to take a passage of Scripture, such as a Psalm or a teaching passage, and look at each phrase individually, letting it suggest thoughts to your mind, and praying about them. For example, Psalm 79, beginning "O God, the nations have come into your inheritance," forcefully reminded me to pray for the peace and security of Israel.

The challenge to me will be to organize my life to find time to do these disciplines and to pray, meditate, and journal each day. A blog can be a form of journal, so we shall see how successful the attempt will be.