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Just a quick post in my continuing series of free (or cheap) and useful services for your one-person home office. 

Ta-da Lists, by 37signals, is a 100% free list service.  If you can list it, you can put it on Ta-da Lists: to-do items, shopping lists, things to pack, etc. It’s very simple to use, which is one of my primary concerns with software like this.  I’m not talking rocket science here - I just want to make a list! 

Some screen shots after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, while my wife and I were getting to know our new son, a group of prominent evangelical leaders released “An Evangelical Manifesto,” which issues to evangelical Christians (or “Evangelical” with a capital “e,” as the document recommends)

an urgent challenge to reaffirm Evangelical identity, to reform Evangelical behavior, to reposition Evangelicals in public life, and so rededicate ourselves to the high calling of being Evangelical followers of Jesus Christ.

There is much to commend in this document, and the signatories are some pretty heavy hitters in the Evangelical world. Since this is an election year, it touches on the issue of religion and politics.  Here’s GetReligion’s take on one aspect: 

Granted, “An Evangelical Manifesto” lacks specific examples of evangelical political misbehavior. It urges an “expansion of concern beyond single-issue politics,” but fails to sketch out how this might be accomplished or what form this would take. A Communist Manifesto this is not.

Here is the section from the manifesto itself:

We call for an expansion of our concern beyond single-issue politics, such as abortion and marriage, and a fuller recognition of the comprehensive causes and concerns of the Gospel, and of all the human issues that must be engaged in public life.  Although we cannot back away from our biblically rooted commitment to the sanctity of every human life, including those unborn, nor can we deny the holiness of marriage as instituted by God between one man and one woman, we must follow the model of Jesus, the Prince of Peace,  engaging the global giants of conflict, racism, corruption, poverty, pandemic diseases, illiteracy, ignorance, and spiritual emptiness, by promoting reconciliation, encouraging ethical servant leadership, assisting the poor, caring for the sick, and educating the next generation.  We believe it is our calling to be good stewards of all God has entrusted to our care so that it may be passed on to generations yet to be born.  (”An Evangelical Manifesto, 13-14)

Nothing I particularly disagree with here, but I am puzzled by the hand-wringing over “single issue politics.” If our goal is to be obedient to Biblical truth, and to call both major political parties to a deeper faithfulness to Biblical truth, then I’m not sure that accepting abortion rights - or, at least, accepting an acceptance of abortion rights - is all that good of an idea.  Abortion is a “hot button” issue precisely because it is an important issue, just as slavery, suffrage for women, and civil rights have been “hot button” issues in our country.  

Neither political party fully embraces God’s desire for our nation or our world.  We should never expect them to.  But when we vote, we’re faced with an imperfect choice.  We can’t say “I’ll vote for Candidate A on Issues X, Y, and Z, and Candidate B on Issues T, U, and V.” If, as this manifesto suggests, voting based on the issue we consider most important is not acceptable, what, then, is the right way for a Christian to vote in America? 

[I've been away from the computer for about a week because of the birth of our third child.  Hurrah!  I put those hours of waiting in the hospital to good use by reading a book that had been on my shelf for a couple of months.]

I’m a bit late to the table with The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman.  It was published in 2005, to many rave reviews (here’s one from the New York Times Book Review by Fareed Zakaria) and brisk sales (it was a #1 bestseller, and is still #160 at Amazon.com 3 years after its publication).  Friedman uses the term “flat world” to describe the new era of globalization, in which I can visit a California-based website, order a computer assembled in Taiwan, call customer support when it breaks in India, and then return it to a store half-a-mile from my house.  Friedman credits a number of “flatteners” for creating this new world, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the growth of the Internet, new software that lets people work from home, and the “just in time” global supply chain.  The book not only looks at the causes of this newly flat world, but also takes time to consider both the positive (cheaper goods, rising standards of living in China and India) and the negative (loss of jobs in the U.S.) - including the most negative development of all, the creation of Al-Qaeda, the “global supply chain” of terrorism. 

This flat world also explains my job.  I work from home via computer and phone lines with a small team of people from around the country, ministering to an international network of students and faculty.  (We recently gained our first international ESN mentor, a philosophy and religion scholar from New Zealand.) My job would probably have been possible in the 19th century, more likely in the form of something like the original National Geographic Society, but in this flat world, my work is much more effective. 

How should American Christians regard this newly flat world? To many of us, “globalization” means losing our jobs to India and China, losing America’s importance in the world, and watching out-of-control capitalism trump issues of justice and community.  Friedman, however, makes a compelling case that globalization can be a powerful force for justice, if it harnessed correctly.  For Christians - especially American Christians - I think that the flat world can heighten our sense of the communion of the saints.  For example, a family from my church recently moved to Kosovo, to assist with the creation of an American-style high school.  We’ve been able to follow their story and pray for them through their blog. Many more examples could be outlined. 

Friedman doesn’t sugarcoat the flat world: he is the first to point out that we now must compete for our jobs with people around the world, and threats to our national security are created in caves halfway around the world.  At the same time, we (as a global community) have an unprecedented opportunity to increase standards of living, international peace, and individual opportunity in places where peace and prosperity have rarely been see before.  Friendman has also led me to consider the current presidential race in a new light.  Which president is best suited to lead America in the flat world? I worry that the all three leading contenders may take the easy, short-sighted path, and fail to challenge Americans to accept the hard work ahead.  

In my post about free books, I mentioned the incredible Christian Classics Ethereal Library, which offers thousands of public domain versions of Christian writings from the early church up through the 19th century. Here’s another great resource: the CCEL is collaborating with the Calvin Institute for Worship to offer the Calvin Hymnary Project, with full or partial texts of over 14,000 hymns, over 7,000 hymn tunes, 27 complete hymnals…I could go on, because I’m pretty excited about hymns.  Here’s just one cool item: the complete text and tunes of the influential shape-note hymnal, William Walker’s Southern Harmony , an 1835 hymnal that became one of the most important hymnals of the American Southern church (and which was sung from at the annual Big Singing in my hometown of Benton, KY.)  If you know the hymn “What Wondrous Love is This,” then you know Southern Harmony.  

I’m a nut about hymns and hymnals, but this is a great resource for any Christian whose looking for a particular hymn, or even just wanting to explore the great tradition of hymns. 

Link: The Calvin Hymnary Project

This December, as a special day-ahead event at Following Christ 2008, we will hold the first ever national gathering of the Emerging Scholars Network!  ”Flourishing in the Academy,” December 27-28, will help ESN puzzle out what it means to be called to the academy and how to follow Christ faithfully in this environment.  You can read more about at the official announcement on EmergingScholars.org. 

There are also four other day-ahead events - here is the information about them.  I expect all will be absolutely wonderful. 

The next couple of OneManOffice posts are going to describe products from a great company, 37signals.  If you want to know more about their philosophy for building simple, useful, elegant web-based applications, check out their book, Getting Real. 

Backpack is an online organizational tool, a place to keep your notes, lists, ideas, events, photos, files — basically, any bits of information that you would want to keep track of.  You can create separate pages based on whatever categories you feel are useful, and then fill those pages with your notes, lists, photos, etc. (Full disclosure: If you sign up using the link I provided, I’ll get discounts to my own Backpack account.) 

Here are some pictures that might help make more sense. 

Backpack is based around pages.  You create these pages based on whatever categories you want.  They are listed in a sidebar, generally in alphabetical order, but you can “cheat” on that order by adding numbers or blank spaces to the front of a page name. 

Once you’ve made a page, you can add your content - text notes, lists, photos, even dividers so that you can further organize your life. Here’s the top of my home page, where you can see the different items you can add.  As you can also see, Backpack includes a calendar feature (which can read Google calendars), a reminders function that will email you one-time or repeating reminders, and integration with 37signals’ Writeboard, an online document creator. 

Then, you just start adding!  Here’s a page that I create to help me keep track of books that I want to read. 

(iBackpack is a little snippet of code so that I can use Backpack on my iPhone - cool, eh?) 

What makes Backpack so great, as opposed to say, oh, any of the other organizational tools out there? 

• It’s free.  Actually it’s free for your first 5 pages, but that’s very useful in and of itself. That’s how I got started - created a free account and set up a few pages.  I used the free account for months before I upgraded.  And the upgrades are not expensive.  The lowest level upgrade is $7 per month. (All of 37signals’ products are based on monthly subscription rates.) 
• It’s easy. It’s very intuitive, and there’s really nothing to learn.  There are certainly some tricks that you can pick up from the user forums, but you can start using Backpack out of the gate without any kind of learning curve. 

Is there anything else you need to know other than it’s free and easy to use? There is one more cool feature that will make it very useful to anyone who has to share information with colleagues in other offices.  Recently, Backpack added a multi-user feature, so that it can act like an intranet for files, notes, or other things you need to share.  You can also make Backpack pages public, making it a very easy way to create simple webpages.  Here’s a public copy of my reading list, so that you can see exactly how behind I am. 

Well, this is quite possibly our final Monday as a family with two kids.  Elizabeth is due to give birth to our son this Friday, May 2 (which is also my mother’s birthday).  Agatha was right on time - born at 8:00 am on her due date - while Ginger was two weeks late.  Just about everything is ready - we have a name picked out (it’s a secret), a crib, a freshly painted pirate-themed nursery.  Not everyone is ready, though: Elizabeth asked Ginger what she thought of baby brother.  She shook her head and said, “No like!”

In other news, we received yet another free television, this time an HDTV from Elizabeth’s aunt!  While there, we also received several family heirlooms that had belonged to Elizabeth’s grandmother.  I claimed this incredible Gillette Aristocrat safety razor.  Elizabeth insists that I not use it, but, if I did, it came with several dozen extra razors.  

If I did decide to convert to “wet shaving,” at least I have some good guidance from Andy Crouch. 

With all the hubbub over college rankings each year, wouldn’t it be great if there was a simpler way? Looks like Google has figured it out.  When you search for a business on Google Maps, you can rank it - ostensibly so that you can say, “Wow, great pizza!” or “Don’t use this plumber!”  I am amused that Google Maps lets you rank universities in the same way.  Sorry, UC - looks like you only got 3 stars out of 5. 

Note that you can order the search results by ranking.  I would NOT recommend this as a way of picking a college. 

Occasionally, I talk to people who are a little put off by the name of the Emerging Scholars Network.  ”I’m not a scholar!” they say, and they don’t think of their children in that way either. 

But an interesting study was just released by the Dept. of Education, entitled “Parent Expectations and Student Achievement.”  Here’s how the Chronicle of Higher Education ($) summarized it:

The Education Department released a report on Tuesday that offers new insights into the factors influencing whether parents expect their children to enroll at four-year colleges, and suggests that many young people who could succeed at such institutions are not being encouraged by their families or schools to apply.

The study found that parental expectations vary widely between different races and income levels, and that many parents think their children won’t be able to finish college when their grades suggest otherwise. 

I had a professor in college who was an incredible teacher.  It made sense, because educational theory was one of his specialties!  He freely admitted that he was not a good student in either high school or college - he had a 2.7 GPA as an undergrad - and he applied to grad school almost on a whim. Once in grad school, though, when he was able to focus on a subject that he was truly interested in, his grades took off.  He earned a PhD and is now a tenured professor.  He also taught me one of my first lessons in academic grace, but that’s a story for another time. 

What are your expectations, either for yourself or your children? 

A continuing series on free or low-cost tools for the one person office. 

Office suites - not physical offices, but stuff like word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software, etc. - are necessary for conducting business.  Microsoft Office dominates this field, but can be expensive ($150 for the most basic package, $400 or more in other incarnations).  Fortunately, there are some excellent free alternatives.

OpenOffice/NeoOffice

OpenOffice is an open-source office suite (NeoOffice is a version for Macs).  It’s similar to Microsoft Office, but 100% free.  If you’re accustomed to using Word or Excel, then it will not take you long to get used to OpenOffice.  

The next two options are both based online - they are great options if you have a good internet connection or need to collaborate with others, but maybe not so great if you are still using dial-up or tend to edit documents while out and about. 

Google Docs

If you have a Google account, then you already have access to Google Docs, their free, online office suite.  Google Docs includes a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation creator.  Its interface is simple and easy to use.  While it doesn’t include as many options as Microsoft Office or OpenOffice, it will be sufficient for most users. 

Zoho

Zoho is not as well-known as Google Docs, but offers an incredible array of software options.  I use Google Docs because the rest of my team uses it.  However, if I were starting from scratch, I might use Zoho instead.  It offers the same word processor/spreadsheet/presentation trio as Google, and then adds an note taking program, database,  project management, CRM software, online meeting software, invoicing and more.  All of Zoho’s products are free to start using.  The business-oriented products - like CRM, invoiving, project management - start off free, then add fees if you increase your usage.  

Both Google Docs and Zoho are web-based, but Zoho added offline access and syncing in 2007, and Google introduced offline access earlier this year and is in the process of rolling it out to its users. 

Since all of these are free, I actually use a combination of Google Docs and NeoOffice.  When I have documents I need to share with my team, I use Google Docs, but use NeoOffice if I’m editing, say, a Microsoft Word doc or Excel spreadsheet that someone emailed me.  I use Apple’s iWork for presentations and for “nicer” publications (like my prayer letter).  iWork is not free, but is still much cheaper than Microsoft Office ($79, $99 for a family pack to run it on up to 5 computers in the same house).