Online backups
Over the past couple of months, I've seen articles written by people who have lost - or have come close to losing - serious amounts of data from the hard drives. I've got a service that costs about $16/month that backs up everything on my hard disk that changes every night. If they transmit more than a certain amount of data per month, though, my cost goes up.
A few days ago, my wife told me that the Dec 28 All Things Considered on NPR mentioned a new service called Carbonite. It costs $5/month, backs up files over the Internet when they change, and has no limit on the amount you can back up. She's checking it out with their 15 day free trial. Seems like a great service.
The Cambridge Platform
Adam Tierney-Eliot, in a discussion on
Congregationalism,
makes reference to
The Cambridge Platform, a 1648 document which is a common heritage for the Unitarian Universalist Association, the United Church of Christ, and two other associations of congregations.
Very interesting. I had never heard of it.
Historic UCC/UUA Dialogue Video Now Online
On Wednesday evening October 25th, Andover Newton Theological School (ANTS) hosted an historic dialogue between Rev. John Thomas, General Minister and President of the United church of Christ (UCC) and Rev. William Sinkford, President, of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA).
If you weren't there, here's the video.
A tip of the hat to UU Enforcer.
Rockridge Nation
The Rockridge Institute has announced the formation of
Rockridge Nation, which they describe as "an online community of progressives working together to advance our values and vision more effectively."
Doing Good
I wrote the following for a weekly newsletter called "Thoughts About Life" that goes out to people at my company ...
I’m a member of an organization (note I’m deliberately not using the “r” word here. …) which tends to consider doing Socially Good Things to be high on the list of Importance. As do many other organizations of the same type as mine, we have a Social Concerns chairperson whose role it is to encourage us by giving suggestions and organizing Socially Good Activities.
Problem is, many of the Good Things we’re encouraged to work towards tend to be … well … too cosmic for me. World Peace, for instance. There’s a Saturday morning demonstration across from our organization’s building in favor of world peace. Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m in favor of world peace. Isn’t everyone? (At least everyone I know). So spending time telling people I’m in favor of world peace is sort of like telling people I’m in favor of a certain amount of oxygen in the air.
So, what to do. Homelessness is one of those problems that strikes me as being particularly important, so I make some contributions to an organization in Quincy called Father Bill’s Place. But to me, giving money isn’t really *doing* something. It’s a little bit of a cop-out, so I could feel guilty that I don’t do more. Members of my organization help out at an English as a Second Language class on a regular basis – I don’t. I think it has something to do with not wanting to commit the time on a regular basis. Something like that. I guess I must have a lot more important stuff to do.
Thankfully, some years ago, I came up with a solution to feeling guilty about not doing any Socially Good Things. There’s one that I do, and I do it almost every day:
When I’m driving, I let people merge in front of me.
For those of you reading this from outside of the Boston area, I can see you either mentally or physically scratching your heads. Isn’t that what I’m *supposed* to do? Isn’t that what *any good driver* would do? Yep, sure is. But the key is: I drive in Boston. Letting people freely merge here only serves to identify me as a Wimpy Driver. But maybe, just maybe, the person who I allowed to merge in front of me smiled ever so slightly. And that’s a Socially Good Thing.
My Socially Good Things, then, tend to be really really small things. If I see a paper cup on a sidewalk, I’ll often pick it up and hope there’s a trash container nearby. The fact that the cup isn’t there anymore won’t cause a smile (who knew it was there in the first place?) , but it might prevent a frown. I try to smile at other people, because they’ll usually smile back. (Even more interesting, they’ll probably wonder why I’m smiling.)
Maybe, if I’m lucky, all these tiny Good Things might add up to being the equivalent of one Larger Good Thing. One never knows how this works.
Too much consumption
There are so many article this time of year about how we've warped the idea of Christmas that most of us have probably tuned them out. But I happened to run across an article in the Dec/Jan issue of Fast Company called "Feeding the Beast - Sustainability is about more than eco-friendly burger boxes". It doesn't relate to Christmas specifically, but it comments on consumption (albeit from a business's point of view) by saying this:
And the problem for business is, in fact, systemic. It has less to do with what we toss out than with what we consume, which is why it's so difficult to fix. Simply put, we buy and use too much; consumption has become a form of cultural addiction -- and it's that addiction that has the most profound impact on the environment. All of their well-intentioned programs to reduce waste notwithstanding, most companies are just feeding the beast.
Certainly a different way of looking at how we deal with our environment. Instead of spending so much time thinking of ecologically friendly ways of disposing of all of our waste, perhaps we should think more about not creating some of it in the first place.
Jim Wallis Delivers the Democratic Radio Address
Jim Wallis, author of
God's Politics author and editor of
Sojourners magazine, recently delivered the
Democratic Radio Address.
You can read the text and, by clicking on a link, listen to the address.
Boston Globe: Faith groups urge cuts to AIDS fund
Stories like this in the Boston Globe bother me so much ...
Some leading Christian conservatives, angry over the Global Fund to Fight AIDS's promotion of condoms and its perceived lack of support for faith-based programs, are pushing Congress to cut US support for the AIDS initiative, which was initiated by President Bush in a Rose Garden ceremony five years ago with a $200 million commitment. ...
