Aliyah insight ...

The Lord has blessed Jews with amazing minds ... and when combined with frank humility ... the whole world benefits.

This week's audio blog by Brian Blum, for example, is stunningly refreshing (The Jerusalem Post broke the link, imagine that ... they don't want people to read their stuff).

But, I'd wager that more folks have been touched by this testimony. And a few of us who heard it were not only refreshed, but invigorated by the unmatchable power of the Holy Spirit.

If you have not read Aviad Cohen's testimony, you should probably first read one of the many pejorative articles and blogs published about him recently. That should set the tone for you to better appreciate Aviad Cohen as the underdog. You'll understand after reading or hearing his testimony how clearly he knows what the results of his belief in Jesus will be ... he knows what the results of his aliyah will be. May the Lord bless him and all of the spiritual descendants of Abraham.

Unreal numa numa-ness ...

Just in case some of you have missed this ...
It is the original numa numa lip sync that became famous on the net
before folks started editing, immitating, etc ...

Here are some more numa numa versions which are fun to watch ...

American Idol parody ...

Lego Numa Numa ...

The Sims numa numa (long and not so good ... but still amazing how folks have that kind of time)

Strongbad numa numa

Whole other collections of Numa numaness

Various goofballs, like myself, making daemon possesed numa numa fools of themselves

Beautiful Israelis with a Hebrew video numa numa ...

And yes, kimpossible, even the ...
Napoleon Dynamite Numa ...

"That's what I'm talk'n about." -- Kip from "Napoleon Dynamite"

Most of this came from the wikipedia entry on numa numa ... sigh

Black vs. white

Clay Shirky's keen and brief note on blacklists vs. whitelists:

... the blacklist/filter out strategy: "Exclude the unwanted down to a manageable S/N" -- disadvantage being frequent pruning and increasingly baroque strategies. Advantage being preservation of serendipity.

... the whitelist/filter in strategy: "Include only the obviously relevant people and tags" -- disadvantage being loss of serendipity, advantage being great stability in set up over longer time periods.

The hotdog Church

I should be blogging about JavaOne, since that is my reason for coming here to San Francisco, but it may be more appropriate to mention one of the Lord's reasons for bringing me here ... plenty of other folks are blogging about JavaOne.

Providence Care Ministry is the in the heart of SanFrancisco's tenderloin district, and it targets outreach to some of the poorer folks who live there by serving food after each Sunday service. Apparently, one day, an invitee asked, "Where?", and the inviter answered, "You know ... the hotdog Church", and the name must have stuck.

Despite the neighborhood, the congregation was extremely friendly and their new location was very clean and well kept. Their web site said that prayer started at 8:30 am, but the Associate Pastor, Eric, kindly let me in at that time anyway, and noted that the website just needed to be updated.

Instead of prayer we had a great chat about the Church, and how it has shifted locations around the tenderloin district over the past few years. I mentioned that a lady named Crystal had mentioned the church to me on my flight to San Francisco. She was on the plane planning a discussion for a women's retreat with her church, and I told her that when I saw her carrying a large bible onto the plane, it reminded me of a video which I linked to a while back.

Eric was quite a motivating speaker, and made a great introduction to worship. He loves the folks in his congregation, and they love him. He has what I'd call, God-given street smarts. It cannot go without mentioning that God had me meeting Eric at the Hotdog church on the same day as another well publicized event with lots of media coverage, which was set to commence as soon as our service let out at noon. The parade was to be conducted right along the edge of the tenderloin district only two blocks from us, between the Church service and my hotel room. So, yes, I had to avert my eyes as I went back to my room after the service. Eric was careful to note that God's Church does not go in with the "God hates fags" banners which also show up at such events. He said that they greet homosexuals just the same as any other person who comes to their Church, that is, with love, admonishment, and the offer of Christ's free gift.

Later, the Hotdog Church made the mistake of inviting me to play the ukulele, and were even kind enough to clap to the rhythm of one of the songs I was having trouble with.

No spoilers here about their senior Pastor, suffice to say that he brought me to tears several times, loves the people that attend his sermons, and God is with him.

Why Babble, why?

Social bookmarking is not too deep, in and of itself, but taken in its context it is a biblically frightening notion ... to quickly give you an idea of the scope ... group weblogs, design patterns, site summaries, memes, peer 2 peer networks, taxonomies, virtualization, conversations, templates, flamewars, Usenet, portals, newsfeeds, syndication, agreements, extensible markup, markdown, detailed pings, communities, wikis, Linux, aggregators, live bookmarks, instant messaging, open source, tagging, trackbacks, resource description frameworks, and folksonomies are a few of the ideas that come to mind when thinking about the context of social bookmarking.

In brief ... after reading my Bible ... it strikes me that social software is trying to deal with this part.