Monthly Archives: May 2008

This American Life “The Giant Pool of Money”

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I listen to a lot of podcasts in the course of a week. One of the regular shows I listen to is This American Life. This week’s show is entitled “The Giant Pool of Money” and spends the hour talking about housing crisis in the United States of America. It does a great job of explaining how screwed up this whole problem is. It’s worth the listen.

My father-in-law is in the real estate business and certainly benefited on the rise in the early 2000′s. But nothing is moving now. The effect on the rest of the world is not fully known yet but the credit crunch and unstable housing market in the USA is bound to have ramifications that we have not fully realized yet.

Understanding how we got here is pretty interesting!

Open DNS

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I’ve been using OpenDNS on my router at home for just about three months now. OpenDNS is a free service that claims to be smarter, faster, and offer more protection from evil on the internet than your ISP’s typical DNS service. If you don’t know what DNS (short for Domain Name Service) then do some reading before you try OpenDNS. Be sure you know what you are doing.

Anyway, the OpenDNS features I was interested in playing with were the phishing protection and the content filtering. I have a four year old at home who is learning more and more about the many things on the internet. There are some things that I’m not ready to explain and I didn’t want her to discover an adult site or a dangerous site accidentally. OpenDNS has many categories to filter by. OpenDNS makes me feel better knowing that it is far less likely my daughter will stumble upon some of the evil and ugliness of the internet.

Filters go beyond the adult only sort of thing I am trying to protect my daughter from if you need to block other sites. Also allows for blacklists and whitelists if you need to block or allow a specific site. It all depends on how draconian and involved you wish to be.

I can’t say I noticed it being faster than other local DNS’s I’ve hit. But it was reliable. I only had one issue and I was able to explain that as not an OpenDNS issue. I had my laptop setup for a while to use the OpenDNS servers but I ran into some problems with an intranet at work. Since my laptop was only looking at OpenDNS and OpenDNS not aware of the local network then some in-house servers required additional changes for me to get to. There are ways to work around this. It was just easier to run OpenDNS only on my home router and not on my laptop

OpenDNS is not hard to setup but you do need to be comfortable editing your computers network settings or your router.

So it is a small piece of comfort for me. If you are considering filtering in your house then you should check out OpenDNS.

WWJP – Social Impact of Ice Cream Trucks

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What Would Jesus Podcast is talking about “The Social Impact of Ice Cream Trucks” tonight.

Scott Wilder and myself will be talking about ice cream trucks. Yes that’s right. We are not afraid to take on the hard hitting issues of our time. What do you think of the ice cream truck in your neighborhood? Have you ever heard the tune of the Good Humor truck and rushed from your house half dressed with a handful of change? Is this a zoning issue? A commercial business on wheels in a residential zone?

Tune in to TalkShoe, LIVE, on Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 9:30PM EDT(-4UTC) and find out what Scott and I think! I’m looking forward to you joining us for this discussion!
http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/30633

If you can’t join us LIVE then be sure to listen to a recording. It should show up overnight or into Friday morning.

5 Links for Friday #2

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I’m following up my 5 links post from two weeks ago with another 5 links. I took a look at my Delicious list and found I have not bookmarked much lately. I know I’ve been busy but didn’t realize I’ve been quite so busy. So I’ll pull a couple of oldies but goodies to go with some new finds.

  • Heal Your Church WebSite – Dean Peters always has good stuff about web design and good management behavior to consider. I’ve been following his articles for a couple of years now. I usually find a morsel or two of value everytime.
  • OpenID – The buzz around OpenID is growing. The idea is simple. One username and password that will authenticate you onto many accounts and services across the Internet. I’ve started using it for any site that will accept it. I even have delegation setup for my website. Much more cooperation between big players is needed for this to succeed but the ground swell is well underway and it’s all good!
  • Yuda Freedom – I’m not sure I will find myself using this service often. But I will definitely be suggesting it to others who need to publish a document but might not be very web-savvy or are in a hurry to display their work in an easy to use format. That’s what Yuda does. You turn your work into a PDF file and upload it to Yuda. Yuda makes the document interactive.
  • Teens Today with Vanessa Van Petten – I first heard of Vanessa Van Petten on Jumping Monkeys 43. Since then I have read some of her articles and am really enjoying her work. She tries to connect parents and teens together. I’m still a long way from being the parent of a teenager. But I work with teens everyday and any advise is helpful. Listen to Jumping Monkeys and then add her to your RSS reader.

That’s all for today. What neat new place on the Internet have you discovered this week? I would love to see your link in the comments!