Since January 1st, 2003, I have sent 4600 email messages. Is that a lot? It doesn’t come out to that many messages each day, anyhow.

My longest email (counting only words I actually typed, not cut-and-pasted, not quoted, not anything else) appears to be 1,663 words, sent to Kevin as part of a discussion we had on the subject of the role of government in relation to religion. My 2nd longest is 916 words, sent to… ummm… Kevin. On the subject of… the role of government in relation to religion. Maybe I email Kevin too much. OK. Those things sometimes took me several days to write. It was fun. I hope we don’t do it again soon. 🙂

My shortest email was sent to Stephanie, and it contained no text whatsoever, but the subject was “Come call me? n/t” For those of you who aren’t familiar with that abbreviation, “n/t” when used at the end of a subject means that the message contains No Text. So now you know.

How many emails have you all sent? You may have only saved the last couple months of email, so you’ll have to count the number of days and extrapolate, but I’d be interested to know how emaily (new word!) I am compared to the rest of you.

Well, there’s really no reason for me to repeat everything Kevin has already said so I’ll let his entry speak on what it does. But I’ll tell a little bit of the story from my perspective, because it was fun.

Neal and I were chatting about what game we would play in a few minutes when I got some emails from my blog (because my blog emails me when someone posts a comment). Kevin and Abby were at the Southdale Apple Store and were checking out the merchandise, as any sensible human would. I responded to their comments (as you can see in the previous post), and then realized, “Wait a minute, they’ve got iSights all over that store!” so I posted again, hoping that Kevin and Abby would know that I’m obsessive and had probably responded to their comments while they were still in the store. And they did! That’s what good friends are for.

So I posted my iChat name (since removed, because this is the Internet) and a few moments later, Kevin had signed on using one of the store’s login names and I had opened a video chat with him! And there we were.

I’ve read other posts from Mac users where they talk about how powerful iChat and an iSight can be to close the cross-country gap, but I just have to reiterate that. In addition, it’s one thing to see a “geek friend” on iChat (especially someone who is there all the time anyhow) and quite another thing to see someone that I haven’t seen for six months, even though I’ve been communicating quite often. It’s like that great feeling you get when you step off the airplane and your loved ones are waiting there by the gate with a little balloon and a hug for you. That’s the potential of iChat and iSight. It’s a digital hug.

Just thought you’d be interested to hear about it.

The young dog is snoring.

Seriously. He sometimes gets so loud he wakes me up. I digress.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, Stephanie and I became involved with the PBCC Jr. High group in late September, early October of this year. I recall the first Sunday Steph decided to go to Sunday school with the group, I told her I didn’t want to go. Then I said I would. Then I said I wouldn’t. Then I said, “OK, I’ll come with you, but I’m just there for this week. Just checking it out.” I’ve loved it ever since. I’ve never been someone who considers himself to have any gift with youth. I’ve never felt called to be a Youth Pastor (and I still don’t, for good cause). But I also never even thought I would fit in and find a place to serve with a group of Jr. High students and their leaders. And yet, I do fit in. I really like these people and these students. What an odd thing to have happened for a guy like me.

As you know, one of the ways I’ve found to help the JH group out is by being their webmaster. i @m +He W38M4S+3r! b0w b3Ph0R3 Me, MoR+@L$! Anyhow, I’ve been working on the site, and it’s coming along pretty well now, so check it out and let me know what you think. The CSS is a bit messy / redundant in places, but it’s working fairly well. I’m proud to say that IE 6 plays quite well with it. IE 5.5 even renders most things perfectly, with the only differences being that it doesn’t center the page correctly (yet?), and the grey background shows behind the blog entries instead of the proper white, in spite of a “clear” statement. But it works fine! It just looks slightly funny. Any help on that will be greatly appreciated.

Continue reading “It’s Raining. It’s Pouring.” →

I’ve neglected mentioning this before, but feel free to take a look now. The guys over at Penny Arcade have rallied the 150,000 readers at their disposal to raise $90,000 for toys to be donated to Seattle Children’s Hospital. That’s pretty sweet, in every sense of the word. I love the pithy quote from one of the PA guys: “They were right when they said video gamers would grow up abnormal. They did, in fact, grow up with big hearts.”

Zing! If you’d like to contribute to the Child’s Play effort, you can visit the site for more information.

The most interesting part, and the non–obvious part of the story, is that the media got the wrong idea about who runs the site. Mike “Gabe” Krahaulik is indeed one of the co-founders of the site, but Brad Walker (the only other Penny Arcade person mentioned in the article) was only brought on recently. Jerry “Tycho” Holkins has been Mike’s partner on that site since day one. And yet the news article makes absolutely no mention of him.

Jerry does make note on the PA site that he wasn’t around (or avoided the cameras), but you’d think that real journalists would be able to get a few simple facts straight, even if those facts were non-obvious at first glance. Who runs the site? It might sound mean to say it, but can you please get that fact for me and not screw it up before you report it? How hard can that be? The fact that most Americans rely on these people (or their cohorts) to get their information about the outside world sends chills down my spine. How misinformed have we already been without knowing it? If they don’t take care with the little stories, then I’m not going to trust them with the big ones.

Yes, I understand that there aren’t very many good alternatives (yet). I’m simply asking you, gentle reader, to take the local and national news with a larger grain of salt than you may currently be doing. When hearing the news, pretend that a 2nd-grader wrote the report, and that it is some kind of fuzzy, generalized re-representation of actual fact, sung to music. That will probably get you closer to truth than taking whatever they give you straight-up.

I’m a little bit more famous than I thought I was. I’ve known for awhile that if you Google for “Josh Lewis” that I’m the first entry you get. Actually, you get this page. I’m the most famous Josh Lewis there is! Forget that guy on Guiding Light.

But I found out today that I’m also the first entry you get when you Google for “blog” and for some reason that makes me a little nervous, and also excited. I mean… that’s a bit like Googling for “Internet,” so maybe people don’t do that very often, but it’s still interesting.

Update: See the comments for the real story. Oops. I should’ve tested a bit more.

I have always maintained that Henson is exceedingly cruel, but this seems a little ridiculous. We bought him a little plush monkey-friend. The monkey was about two inches high and very cute and squishy. We figured Henson would chew on it and carry it around for a few days, even weeks, before it eventually got worn out and was destroyed. The picture at left shows the state of the tiny cloth-and-stuffing monkey after spending only one hour in our house. Schadenfreude indeed. I think that’s hard proof that Dachshunds are German.

Well, I was out of the house for almost the entire day yesterday, and I didn’t have my friend’s CLIÉ to write from, so I was in between a rock and a hard place as far as making a blog entry was concerned. Hopefully two entries today will make up for it.

Yesterday was the day after Thanksgiving. For American consumers, that’s a holiday in and of itself, because it means one thing: bargains! Or at least we think it means bargains. Neither Steph nor I had previously gone shopping on the Shoppingest Day of the Year, so we decided to give it a shot and see what it was all about.

The first thing we learned is that if you can take public transportation to get there, do it. Getting to the mall took us at least two or three times longer than it would on any other normal day. Off-ramps from the highway were backed up at least half a mile into the highway itself. We went a roundabout way in hopes of saving time, and we might have saved a little, but not much. Once we got to the actual mall, the parking lots were blocked off here and there with orange cones, police were directing traffic, and it was chaos. They should have had a gigantic glowing neon sign that hung over the entire mall that said, “No parking here. Forget about it,” so everyone knew what they were getting into before they arrived. We parked a couple blocks away in a residential area (not a unique idea, judging by the number of cars parked in the otherwise-quiet neighborhood) and walked in.

Inside the mall it was equally as chaotic as it was outside. Everywhere you went, you were surrounded by the sound of people walking and talking and laughing. The sound of bags crinkling against other bags. The sound of cash registers. Honestly though, it wasn’t all that noticeable until you exited the mall again. Walking back to the car along a busy street (a busy street) I actually remarked, “Wow, it’s quiet out here.” That made me realize how loud it had been in the mall.

We got some good bargains at The Gap, and I got Steph’s gift for Christmas, so all went well in that regard. It seemed that nearly every store had a special deal going on, but I’m not sure the deal was exclusive to that particular day. I think most stores had deals that went at least to the 1st of December, so I’m not sure that there really was an advantage of going there on that particular day. But it was an experience.

Warning: I’m about to sound a lot like Kevin. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. 🙂

I think that the consumerism of America poses some problems. My dad and I were talking last week, and he mentioned a passage in Revelations 18 that reminds me all too much of America. The verses after the ones I’m quoting are also interesting, but they are another discussion altogether. Revelations 18:1 – 3 say this:

After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven. He had great authority, and the earth was illuminated by his splendor. With a mighty voice he shouted:
“Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!
She has become a home for demons
and a haunt for every evil spirit,
a haunt for every unclean and detestable bird.
For all the nations have drunk
the maddening wine of her adulteries.
The kings of the earth committed adultery with her,
and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.”

Honestly, if that’s not America, I don’t know what is. We are the only nation on Earth that could so effectively spend an entire day being thankful for what we have, and counting our blessings, and then go out the very next day and spend huge amounts of money because we simply don’t have enough. And I’m a part of that. And so are you.

Here’s where it becomes a sticky wicket. I’m often tempted to tell people not to celebrate Christmas. Not the people who believe it Christ. Obviously Christmas is nothing of not the celebration of the birth of Jesus. But the people who would answer “What is Christmas?” with something like, “It’s a time when we can get together and be thankful for our friends and family, and remember that it’s important to love one another.” I’m sorry, but that is not at all what Christmas is about. If you want a holiday for that, make a Thanksgiving II and be done with it. But don’t taint and water down my savior’s birthday.

PS> We’re keeping the Christmas tree. Those things are so cool!