James 1:2-15

Today has been a day that started with wonderful Christmas celebration at my parents house and ended at the hospital after a call to 911.

God’s providence was clearly shown to me this week. Spending the majority of last Sunday and Monday with my life-long best friend Aaron, who has lost both of his parents at such an early age. At that time, I saw and felt first-hand pain and grieving over a son loosing his idol, his Father. Monday night, heavy conviction to be with my family this Christmas Eve forced me to step down from serving at my church’s Christmas Eve service, last minute.

After exchanging gifts and enjoying wonderful family time. My dad begun to feel sharp pain in his chest, we called 911 and in minutes I could hear sirens. As I went to check on my dad, Mom was hugging him and I was able to pray over them both, asking God to glorify himself in this scary time and, of course, heal my dad immediately.

Thus far, the doctors are not certain what is causing the chest pain. He will need blood work every 8 hrs and hopefully he will be able to have a stress test done tomorrow. Even though we will look at this and say, “what a Christmas this has turned out to be?”, we MUST say, “what a Christmas this has turned out to be!” God has given us breath and life, he has allowed us to celebrate the birthday of his son, Jesus, the Christ. The one who’s blood work is everlasting and turns failing hearts into loving, perfect hearts. I pray this trial will be a reflection of faith in Jesus, by grace alone, have we been given this opportunity to bow in reverence to the one who does hold each and every life in the palm of his hand.

We continue to pray for clarity for the doctors and healing of his heart, that God would graciously give my dad to us for 30+ years, to continue to show his son how to love and lead.

This graphic I created tonight to help get my mind off of things and give praise to the newborn king, Jesus.

This video I produced for last year’s Christmas Eve service at church. Its message is relevant every year at this time. We should always be Astonished.

Music by Justin Durban.

The opensource web kiosk!

This ISO will boot you straight to a Firefox browser and that’s all you get. Flash works too! Download the ISO images.

I downloaded the ISO, burned to a CD, stuck it in a Dell Optiplex 745 and booted to the live CD option. Bam, there we had it.. Firefox Only with Flash! And after idle time or a log out all the cached data is deleted for security reasons.

Next step, customize the Firefox homepage.

I opened the ISO image in MagicISO and browsed to /boot/grub.
Extracted the file menu.lst to my computer, edited homepage= parameter to my kiosk homepage that I created.

kernel /live/vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-486 boot=live quiet homepage=http://kiosk.mydomain.com/ nonetworking nosudo splash vga=791 username=webc hostname=webconverger union=aufs http_proxy=http://10.10.20.7:3128

For my network, I also had to append a proxy parameter to each line:

http_proxy=http://10.10.20.7:3128

Deleted menu.lst from ISO and re-imported my edited menu.lst. Then burned the ISO to a CD and its ready to go. We also pulled the hard drives out of the computers so it boots to the live CD and there’s no chance of any monkey business with the kiosk computers.

These customizations can also be done at boot up if you plan to install it to the hard drive with Grub, here’s the how-to.

Thank you Webconverger, this has saved us a lot of time and given us exactly what we needed in a web kiosk computer!

Art inspires me. And, oh how this fine art from Mark Mabry will inspire passion for Christ. This project he calls, “Reflections of Christ“, is simply beautiful. Watch this video to see some of the photography from “Reflections of Christ” and you can also order prints, video, music and book from this collection. What a great gift this would be!

Thank you Mark, incredible work, simply speechless!

We watched this video as a family with our two young boys, which led to great questions and teaching about the life of Jesus.

Here is the comment I left for Mark on his blog:

I would like to commend you on following a passion and seeing it through to fruition. The artistic culture needs more artists who create from their soul, from their inner being and not just recreations. As the Christ is superior to anything a human could even try to portray in any kind of art, you have done a great job to portray Christ as you can through the artistic talent he has granted you. Giving the viewer a place to go in thought, simply initiating thoughts of Jesus’ life as well as capturing it with incredible photography, video, and music.

May God bless this project that glorifies Him and inspires others to follow suit. Keep us posted on your next journey!

Reaching the world and restoring the church by restoring the family”.

Again, check out the website, subscribe to the rss feeds and look for new videos and posts.

FUSE for Windows

All you need to do is download and install these two apps, DokanLibrary + SSHFS. Once its installed run DokanSSHFS.  Enter a name of your connection, your host, user credentials which can either be by password or shared key.  For my webserver its username and password.  Next select your root directory, mine is /home/basher/. Other servers, for example, may be /www/ or /var/www/.  Finally, choose a drive letter you would like to mount to.  Now click ‘Save’ and then ‘Connect’

Within seconds you’ll see a system tray icon and a new drive N:\ that can be accessed just like a locally mapped drive. If you don’t see the drive in Explorer, simply do a Start - Run - N:\ and hit Enter.  This is huge and such a time saver for me.  I hope it helps others out there and its FREE!

ESV Online Study Bible

Hope over to Amazon and pick up The Courage to Be Protestant. It is a great read.

Please read this post, especially if you, too, are a photographer.  My condolences to you and your family, Zack.

If you haven’t gotten the audio or watched the video, I highly advise doing so NOW!  Here’s the link to the media files.

You can download a zip file of all the mp3’s here. (160Mb)