Ministers and Money??

I thought of a deep theological question the other day. I'm honestly not sure the answer, but I still thought it was quite interesting. Is it ok for people in ministry to make insanely huge salaries? I'm not talking about average middle class incomes, I'm talking about an income that would put somebody in a life of luxury. In other words, hundreds of thousands of dollars a years or more. I could only think of two New Testament examples that could even come close to addressing this issue. The first is when Paul wrote that he strived to become like all people so that he could reach all people. The other example I thought of was the church in Acts where all the believers would bring their possessions to one place and the apostles would then distribute it where it was needed. So in light of those two things, what do you think?

RSS Owl

I just downloaded and tried out RSS Owl. It's a nice reader for rss feeds. Basically any news site that someone is interested in can be read through this application. I remember when I first started using google reader a few months ago. It's nice not having to go through all the bookmarks to get my daily news. For somebody who only has one computer they read their new on, rss owl is great, however, for me, I use more than one, so I need a way for my feed readers to sync on more than one machine. There's no obvious way to do this with rss owl. That doesn't mean it can't be done, but I haven't found a way just yet. I'll be looking because I do like the idea of having all my feeds stored offline in a way similar to how imap based email works. Google reader with gears is nice, but I would prefer a standalone client. I'll play some more and then decide what I like better.

Interesting Middle of the Week

It's been an interesting middle of the week at school. I had on student come up to me with trouble breathing, and another that cussed at me! Wow. How exciting. Oh well, it's still a great job. It doesn't feel like we just got back either. It feels like we've been going to school all along. In this case it's a good thing. It means that the last two days went extremely smooth. We'll just have to wait and see what tomorrow brings.

I've been doing more playing and exploring with what's available as free tools online for use with websites. Today I added a wiki to our church website. I've opted not to add one to my personal site just because I think a simple website is plenty. For the church, a wiki can be a wonderful thing. I was just talking to a friend from church about posting some essays of his to the church blog. I think what he was going for would be much better suited for a church wiki. I'm excited with the possibilities. I even added a "Tim's made-up words" section. It should be lots of fun.

• Ben

Back to Work

I started back at school today. Things were slow, but that's a good thing. As always, it was the calm before the storm. Today was just a work day. Tomorrow, the kids come back. It should be fun. I've had my stuff ready to go for the kids since before the break. I basically spent today doing day-to-day things like making copies and sharpening pencils. Nothing too complicated, but at least there was enough to do. Well, tomorrow should be fun.

• Ben

Weebly

I've been playing with a web app called weebly (www.weebly.com). It's a nice and extremely capable website creator. So far I've created 3 different sites with it. A personal site, www.ifoxxy.net, a church site, currently vcftampa.weebly.com, and a worship team site, worship.vcftampa.com. It offers all kinds of blocks based site construction and the use of templates. The templates aren't terrible, but they aren't stellar either. I would say they are about average, but, when you consider that it is a free template based site creator, that's pretty good. The two most useful widgets in my opinion are the columns and html. With columns you can do exactly what it says, create columns. I just wish you could change it to three columns instead of two, but there are workarounds. The other nice widget is the one for raw html. With this one, you can add customized html code. On my pages, I used this to link to picasaweb albums and videos from youtube and google. Even though weebly includes the ability to add google and youtube video natively, I like the results much better when they are added with raw html. All this is a free service. If you want a custom domain, you can buy one through weebly. If you already have a custom domain, you have two incredible options. You can change your dns settings to point to weebly and use it as your host, or if you already have a host, you can download your site once its built and then upload it to your own host. The second option not only allows you to use your own host, but you can make the base site, download it, and then edit it in your favorite website software to further customize it. The only drawback I have found to weebly is that there is no way to create a secure area on your site. Other than that, weebly is a great tool that I look forward to using quite frequently in the future.

• Ben
  

Blogging and Word 2007

I just discovered the blog feature that is part of Word 2007. Wow! Every time I find a new feature in Office 2007 I am amazed. It's strange how Microsoft can do such a great job with Office, but then they turn around and release something as terrible as Vista. What's even more strange about the situation is how the two were released at basically the same time. Oh well, at they released something that can be considered useful. I guess I can uninstall the blogger for word add-in that never really worked. Now I know why.