Archive for June, 2009

Jun200929

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links for 2009-06-28

Jun200924

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Jun200923

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Jun200922

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Jun200921

Mr K

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Change in the church?

This year has been … is being … an interesting year for me. At the turn of 08 to 09 I knew that this year held so much promise, so much potential. The media was hyping the year up in the negative sense, doom and gloom, financial ruin on every corner. Yet in the midst of this noise I heard something different, a message of change, a message of power, a message of freedom.

It didn’t come from one place, it didn’t come from the media but all of a sudden 5 or 6 different pastors that I, from time to time, listen too all started talking about a change in the church. This year I’ve explored a little of what that means, but I’ll be honest – I can be pretty lazy at times. I can get quite fired up about something but then wane off and .. well all the huff and puff goes.

So why am I writing this here, on my blog of all places. I need to be a little more on-to-it, to keep myself in line and push forward. See yesterday I was involved with the team helping for a day seminar with John Burke (from Gateway Church) – I was doing some techy stuff. It meant I had the opportunity to talk with John and to spend the day listening to him. For those of you who don’t know, John is Snr Pastor at Gateway a church with this catch phrase:

No Perfect People Allowed – Come As You Are

Tradition & the church

I decided yesterday to send out a tweet asking those who were around “what stops YOU from going to church?” … I was expecting all sorts of answers, the answer I got back (I should have expected) threw me, made me really sad and then really angry.

The People – that’s what stops me

What the … ?. How utterly messed up is that? WE – those who are supposed to be Christ like, WE are the reason people don’t come to church. And it’s little friggin’ wonder really. Too many churches (people) have forgotten what it is to be followers of Christ, and have simply become followers of tradition. For example … show me where in the bible it talks about:

  • infant baptism
  • a church leader having the right to absolve sins
  • to hate gays, lesbians or smokers
  • to act piously, superior
  • to have only 1 person in the faith who can talk to God on your behalf

It doesn’t .. God doesn’t. These are things that the church has piled on top of faith to make “religion”, to build up something that people can kind of hold onto, but can never really be free of. I hate to say it, but the churches of yesterday (and many today stuck in yesterday) have probably done MORE damage, to the true faith, than good.

Talk to ANYONE who grew up in a Catholic church, Anglican, Baptist or Presbyterian – many of these faiths/denominations crippled people with rules, with crap that the seniors in the church deemed as right.

The real faith

It’s because of this model, because the church has been rocked time and time again by scandal, by fights between churches about gays in church, about infant baptism about. ….. about CRAP, that people want nothing to do with Jesus. Why can’t churches just drop all this pretense and get back to the gospel? Where is the truth, where is the helping? Where is Christ??

I was listening to Rob Bell from Mars Hill Bible Church talk about this, he shared a story that goes like this. His friend was an alcoholic, who joined AA to help recover. His friend invited him along. Sitting in this AA meeting Rob suddenly realised “THIS, is church”. There was no preaching, no drums, no band, no singing, no prayer and no religious crap.

So why was that church? Rob friend said to him “where else can I get 5 phone numbers of people who I can call, 24/7 and say ‘HELP’ and I know there will be a voice on the phone, with no condemnation, no judgment .. instead with love, understanding and compassion”

We got it wrong

How did we as “the church” get it so $%&^#ing wrong?? How can an AA group be more like the church of Christ than the baptist church down the road? How can we, ‘the people of the church’ be the reason people don’t want to come to church?

I know that there are many many people out there desperately looking for the answer, a solution to their problems. They are lonely and looking for friendship, they are stoned and looking for support, they are drunk and need help, they are in financial trouble but they don’t come to the church – why would they. ‘We’ just judge them, or we try to change them into cookie cutter templates of what is “right”.

Lets read the bible for a second if we may:

“Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death”

For those wanting check that, it’s in Romans Chapter 8, verse 1 and 2.

What if …. ?

What if you knew you could come and talk to me about anything, and know that I wasn’t going to judge you. Instead you were met with love, compassion and a honest frank discussion? What if there was a place you could go to where you didn’t have to pretend, you can come – long hair, tattoo’s, piercings and all. A place where you could meet with other people and talk about the things you face in life.

What if you could meet with a bunch of people where the statements like “I watch too much porn”, “I had an affair”, “I was abused as a kid”, “I am broke” or “I shoot up just to get through the day” were not only allowed but were …. addressed, talked about. A place where you were given the tools & friendships to help.

What about a place where you can come together with others to enjoy life, to share the ups and downs and to just get on and live.

You … today

What’s your church like? (and by church I mean, church, soccer club, pub, darts team, bowling alley) Do you have a group around you where you can be you? Does this group allow you to let it all out? Does this group encourage you in your life?

If not, why not? Because maybe, just maybe a Jesus who encourages this, is a Jesus people might just want to know. Forget the religion, get rid of the tradition – let’s find the Jesus of the bible & see where He takes us.

Me?

I’m still exploring but I’m starting to see more and more what this is about – I’m on a journey, to drop the pretense of being a ‘christian’ (which growing up in the church, is something that can come naturally) and find out what it means to be ‘a Child of God’, a ‘follower of Christ’.

For those of you reading this, that know me well, those I work with or hang out with, or go on bagel runs with – I challenge you to challenge me. Go on, ask me the hard questions, tell me what you think of … well this post, my story etc. I’m not perfect, I make mistakes and you are the people who’ll see them … but I want to be real, I want to be honest.

I’m not ABOUT to become a bible ‘basher’ – don’t worry, I’m not into that & don’t think it works, but if you are up for a coffee & a chat, then lets talk, I might even shout you the coffee

Challenge me, ask me, push me – but be prepared to answer this question for me “what stops you from knowing Jesus?”

Jun200919

Mr K

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links for 2009-06-18

Jun200917

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Jun200916

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Jun200915

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Jun200913

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Jun200911

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Jun200910

Mr K

2

To video or not to video?

I only need to cast my mind back a day or two in my web history to remember the web the way it was. Way back in 1994 I tried to start a music sharing website for christian music – I even had some chats with big radio stations and such like, but the web then just wasn’t ready.

Fast forward a few years (dang is it 15 years already?) and the web is a fundamentally different place and rich media has taken on a whole new meaning.

Tonight on Twitter @CoryOBrien sent out the following tweet

Safari 4 has a video intro similar to the vid that plays the first time you start your Mac. Slick! http://www.apple.com/safari/welcome/

I took a look (I’ll pause here while those of you with Safari 4 go take a look at the link) and thought, you know what … yeah that’s kinda neat. But then it dawned on me, something wasn’t quite right. So I took a look a little deeper and discovered it wasn’t actually a video, but rather a collection of media and some very subtle use of HTML5 and CSS3.

But more on that in a second.

Cory then pointed me to an article he’d written about the Honda Let it Shine commercial on Vimeo – which if you haven’t seen you should take a look on Vimeo, go on, we’ll wait for you ….. Cory talks in his post about how this advert breaks past the traditional video box to take ownership of the screen to really draw the user in.

We started to wonder how they both did what they did, which might be better and which if either we might use.

So how do they do it?

I was simply going to explore the Safari 4 ‘video’ when Cory suggested a comparison of the two techniques. Now I’d love to spend a few hours and dig around work up some examples etc – but someone else can do that, I’m sure someone really smart will write some tutorial about it too. Me however, I was up at 4:30am this morning getting ready for a code release, so my brain blurry good it not is ….. STILL, I did want to explore a couple of things.

Fundamentally these two systems use the same idea – that is Javascript to place content into an existing or create a new HTML element. What they do with those elements is … well where the magic lies.

Vimeo & Honda

Lets look at this one first as it’s shall we say, the more traditional of the two. The way they do this is they’ve allowed the Vimeo player to have an extra attribute set ‘allowScriptAccess’ is set to always. This means their video controller can now interact with javascript on the page.

So when you click the PLAY button, it doesn’t play, instead it triggers a bit of Javascript that writes into the page a new SWF object that overlays the entire page. This object is full screen, set to scale and has some trickery around it to make sure it lines up with the Vimeo page.

Combine the line up magic and some nice masking and transparency in the now full screen (not full page, if you scroll down far enough the effect falls off), and theillusion to be complete – making it look like a set of different movies working together when it’s simply one overlay. For example, the “avatar” icon suddenly is a live and is an animated version of the insight logo – the background is alive with animation. No not really it’s one big animation, it’s just got some masking and animated transparency allowing you to see (or not) the HTML underneath.

Safari 4

This one is a little more clever, and only works in Safari 4. Actually technically speaking it probably could work in Firefox 3.5 and Opera – although you’d have to hack the JS a little. There is nothing (that I can see) that is particularly Safari 4 specific.

Okay in a nut shell this is what they do: They have an HTML page, with some empty DIV tags, they have an AUDIO tag and a VIDEO tag – these are both new to HTML5. The audio is an MP4 that plays in the browser and the video is an MOV that again just plays in the browser – no plugins needed and controllable by CSS. The Audio is hidden by the CSS – yet the audio still plays. The video (a small compass with the needle moving) has no controllers either.

There is some Javascript that sets up a CANPLAY function – used to test if this is Safari 4 a WELCOME MESSAGE function and a couple of other things – nothing overly complex really – other than some language stuff. Without looking too deep the WELCOME MESSAGE bit swaps out the welcome image based on your language settings.

The CSS is where it gets a bit funky. They make use of some really nice CSS features and this really shows the POWER of where the web is going. The ENTIRE animation is done with CSS, including the timings. Okay that’s a lie, the JS does a little of the timing work to ensure it’s all loaded before starting (I think) .. but CSS pretty much does it all.

Sure they have chosen to use CSS such as -webkit-animation-delay, however according to the working draft for CSS3 the code animation-delay css tag should work. (When I’m awake – I’ll work up some examples)

Which would I use

Right now I’d have to say – reluctantly – that if I was building something like this I’d have to go down the JS & Flash path. Why? Well because we have a lovely browser called IE – the bane of the interwebs. We have older browsers etc etc. However having said that, I’m currently building a site and am using CSS3 in it a fair bit.

Which is better?

The Safari 4 model is better! It’s faster to load, faster to build, it requires NO plugins, it’s … elegant. It’s great from an SEO point of view, your content is still your content in an open HTML format, your JS is light and your CSS simply does what CSS does – tells the browser put this here, now, do this with it.

Digging Deeper

Want to take a look for yourself try these:

With this collection of media – just jpg’s png’s and mp4’s Apple web designers have built what looks to be a high end video with HTML5 and CSS3

Summary

The reality is most of this is nothing new, and yet at the same time it’s brand new. Finally with HTML5 and CSS3 we have browsers that remove the barrier to content, we don’t need to rely on 3rd party stuff. Flash can do what it was designed to do – be a PART of the web, not be the web. Although having just said that – is this the beginning of the end for Flash & Silverlight? I mean why would you even bother to invest time and effort into developing these rich media “videos” when a few isolated elements whipped up in Photoshop with some CSS can do such rich content? Ajax, HTML5 & CSS3 could well spell the END of an area for Flash & Silverlight

My last comment – I love that CSS & the browser can do all the animation, timing and scaling not just of graphics but also of Video. If you haven’t seen it yet, grab Firefox 3.5 Preview and check this link out demoing some of the video ability in Firefox 3.5. This will show you some of the true power of a REAL modern web browser.

Links

» Safari 4 welcome ‘video’ – only works in Safari 4
» Honda Insight advert on Vimeo – click play to see effect
» Cory O’Brien looks at the future of adverts
» Download the latest Safari 4
» Download the latest Firefox 3.5 beta

Jun200910

Mr K

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links for 2009-06-09

Jun200909

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links for 2009-06-08

Jun200908

Mr K

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links for 2009-06-07