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Perhaps some of you wish you could fly more. Anyone who has travelled much by air has had some unpleasant experiences of delays, but not many of us have video evidence to prove that much of the time airlines tell us what we want to hear to keep us quiet. Thanks to Jeff at Missionary Geek for pointing out this nice mockumentary of one poor guy's miserable experience. It's a bit long and slow moving but that helps you join the fun. I wonder how he managed to have his recording every time there was an announcement.
{mosmodule video=http://www.youtube.com/v/R06dAgpmmbg}
 Social networking sites up to this point seemed to be either full of Brazilians (Orkut), people trying to get headhunted for a new job (LinkedIn) or 13 year old girls with awful camera phone pictures and a talent for writing with non-alphabetic symbols (Bebo/MySpace). You may have gladly let those pass you by, but if you haven’t joined Facebook already then perhaps it’s time to jump on to its massive wave. For me at least Facebook seems to be somewhat less of a place for meeting new people than restoring a loose link with friends I had almost lost touch with. The statistics on FB are phenomenal – these are from Trendcatching last month:
- 25m users, growing 3% per week, which is 100,000 new users per
day (up from 7.5m users in July 2006), projected to reach 50m by end of
2007
- The fastest growing demographic is the 25 and over age group
- 1% of all time spent on the internet is facebook
- 50% of registered users come back to the site every day.
- 60 billion page views per month, 50 pages per user every day
- 6th most trafficked site in the U.S
- 1 bn photos hosted on the site, 6m uploaded each deay, 70k photos
served per second, making facebook the biggest photo sharing site on
the web
- 1-2 m people are on facebook simultaneously at any one time
- $100m per year advertising deal with Microsoft
- Internal valuation of $8bn, based on projected revenues of $1bn p.a. by 2015
If you have already jumped on, let’s reconnect .
{mosimage}Before getting to the review of this astonishing film, let me tell you about how I came to see it. On my way back from the States last Wednesday I had a seven hour layover in Newark. I don't much enjoy hanging around airports for hours, so I took the 30 minute train ride into Manhattan. Wandering up the road from Maddison Square Gardens I heard a smart-suited African speaking French into his 'cellulaire'. Wondering if he was from Côte d'Ivoire where we used to live, I followed him through a shop doorway. As my eyes adjusted to the rather greasy gloom, I noted that I had entered a little Caribbean bakery/restaurant full of black faces. I forced back the temptation to make a quick exit and joined him at the back of the queue at the counter. He turned out to be Senegalese rather than Ivorian, but was very pleased to have another chance to talk French…
After a tasty $7 lunch of 'stew chicken with rice & beans' and a
portion of fried plantains, I headed on up 8th Avenue. A few blocks
further on I came to a cinema and decided that it would be great to see
a 'movie' on a real big screen rather than the way I see most films
these days through the distinctly low-def screen built into the back of
the airline seat in front of me.
I was just in time to buy tickets for La Vie en Rose which was
starting right away. Entering the big 'movie theater' I was shocked
that at four on a Wednesday afternoon the place was packed solid. As
my eyes adjusted and hunted for an empty seat I observed that I was
once again the stranger – almost everyone there appeared to be over
sixty. Perhaps it was the cheap day for seniors or the fact that La Vie
en Rose had only opened a few days earlier but the film definitely
merits a wide audience.
Perhaps
you are put off by foreign language films with subtitles, but to have
dubbed this from French would have been a crime. It is a biopic of the
life of Edith Piaf whose theme song was La Vie en Rose – literally
'Life in Pink' but more idiomatically 'The Rose-tinted Life'. Edith
Piaf's gravelly voice and melodramatic life is superbly portrayed by
Marion Cotillard as the film works its way through her life to the
accompaniment of her distinctive songs. Of course, as in all French
films which make it to the anglophone world, there is a role for THE French Actor as
we like to call Gerard Depardieu; he is the impressario who literally
discovers 'the Little Sparrow' singing in the backstreets of
Montmartre.
It was quite a puzzle to place each scene in
chronological order as the film jumps around through more flashbacks
and flash forwards than an entire season of Lost. Apart from
that though, La Vie en Rose is an absolute triumph, rich with the
colours of Piaf's tragic life. The entire audience stuffed damp
handkerchiefs into their pockets, rose to their feet and applauded this guaranteed
oscar winner. Piaf finished her career singing a song which she felt
summed up her life – Non je ne regrette rien! Take your friends to see this classic film and you'll have no regrets either.
We used to live in Africa and were known to lots of people as 'missionaries' though our contacts there were almost all Christians. We now live in the Bristol suburbs a long way from what many think of as the 'mission field', yet Bradley Stoke is probably more pagan than Abidjan. I work in an office staffed entirely by Christians. My work is focussed on mission in Africa, but my role in IT often seems quite far removed from reaching people with the good news of Jesus Christ. Although we now live in the UK, we are grateful to the Lord for those who have continued to give financially and pray for us. But the nagging question is still there – are we 'real missionaries'? Sadly I can go days or even weeks without really talking in any depth to someone who isn't yet a Christian. Margo at least gets to meet lots of not-yet-Christian mums every week at toddler group. How can we be real missionaries here in Bristol? Being real missionaries probably shouldn't mean spending more time at church or even more time at work. I preach evangelistic sermons sometimes, but mostly to the converted. Perhaps you who pray for us and give to our support are the real missionaries and we should be spending more time praying for you! We'd love it if you could update us on your situation and the not-yet-Christians you rub shoulders with every day in your mission field.
{mosimage} One of the presentations here at ICCM was on the mission mapping project based at www.worldmap.org
. Hidden a little more deeply in the site is an interactve map which
can have various layers switched on and zoomed in and out like Google
Earth. For example start here,
tick the box for the Bible Translation Status layer and zoom in to Côte
d'Ivoire. The data you see is in the maps contributed by many different
mission organisations. Organisations with accounts can store lots and
lots of data and make public or share with other organisations as
appropriate.
I've just watched an cool demo of the power of Tiddlywikis,which build an entire wiki system (think wikipaedia) into a single file. If you have ever felt the need to encapsulate knowledge in a set of hyperlinked documents, but didn't know how to go about bulding something like a website or needed it to be easily portable and distributable, here is what you need. No database or web server is required, everything is already built in. The range of possible applications is mind boggling
- It's really easy to get started on your own TiddlyWikis by downloading an empty one from tiddlywiki.com and following the instructions
I'm now at ICCM sitting in a room full of mission IT people introducing themselves, describing their expertise and things they are interested in. I'm used to people looking to me as an IT expert, but this conference is a good opportunity for me to learn some humility and learn about some cool stuff. However the coolest thing I've heard about so far in the last couple of days was given in a different conference. If you want to be wowed by an amazing software demo watch this video demo of Seadragon & Photosynth HT Simon Buckler
{mosimage}
Next Tuesday (5th June), I will be heading out to the States for a week or so. On Wednesday and Thursday I will be chairing a meeting with colleagues from AIM's US and Canadian offices to discuss current issues and strategy for Information Systems. On Friday I will be flying on to Indianapolis for the annual gathering of missions technologists known as the ICCM . The great thing about working in mission is that other organizations doing similar work are not our competitors but our allies, so we can use this kind of opportunity to share ideas and resources for the greater advancement of God's kingdom. I will probably be blogging some of the interesting things I hear about on this website, so either check back or sign up to the news feed. If you haven't yet worked out how to use news feeds, then let me encourage you to read on and learn more…
News feeds enable you to track new information on blogs and other websites without revisiting the site all the time. There is a good introduction to using feeds on the BBC website. Once you have worked it out please add our feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/shaddick/frontpage.
We will continue to send out missives by email but the feed will keep
you right up to date with the things we are interested in.
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