Trying to follow

I don’t know for sure, but I think my hard drive is DEAD.

After a morning hanging out with Adria and helping her get ready to do her own podcast I couldn’t let her go with out you getting a chance to hear a little from her and some of the things she’s interested in. I hope you enjoy Adria’s podcasting debut and stay tuned for links to her upcoming podcasts.

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Shownotes:

• Adria went to Taylor University and majored in Bible
• She started drinking coffee at age 10
• She work’s at Bongo Java brewing coffee
• Adria is also the token Bible Scholar at Mosaic Nashville

• Adria shares her thoughts on fair trade coffee and Bongo Java’s story.
• You hear it hear first: Adria’s business venture
• Adria has a long line of entrepenuers in her family

Read more of Adria’s Thoughts, writings, and soon to be Podcast:

• The La Bodega Archives (old writings from Adria)
• Current Thoughts at Voxtropolis

Dorothy Day, declared a Servant of God by the Catholic Church, is well known for her Social Justice work and helping start the Catholic Worker Movement. She is truely a great leader both of her day and for us now. I couldn’t find a good collection of her powerful words so I thought I’d leave you with some here. I’ll write more of my thoughts later.

Quotes from Dorothy Day:

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.

The work is more important than the talking and the writing about the work.

I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions

Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.

The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.

Young people say, What is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at at time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action in the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.

The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?

Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up.

(The following are from a compilation by Robert Ellsberg as published in Geez Magazine)

Love of Brother means…non-participation in those comforts and luxuries which have been manufactured by the exploitation of others.

Poverty means having a bare minimum in the way of clothes and seeing to it that these are made under decent working conditions, proper wages and hours, etc. The union label tries to guarantee this.

Poverty means not riding on rubber while horrible working conditions prevail in the rubber industry. Poverty means not riding on rails while bad conditions exist in the coal mines and steel mills. Poverty means not accepting that courteous bribe from railroads, the clergy rate.

Of course, we are not all given the grace to do such things. But it is good to call to mind the vision. It is true, indeed, that until we begin to develop a few apostles along these lines, we will have no mass conversions, no social justice, no peace. We need saints. God, give us saints!

How far we all are from it! We do not even see our infirmities. Common sense tells us, “Why live in a slum? It is actually cheaper to live in a model housing project, have heat and hot water, a mauve or pink bath and toilet, etc. We can manage better; we have more time to pray to meditate, study….Yes, we will have more time with modern conveniences, but we will not have more love.

If you haven’t run across this icon in the last few months you probably haven’t been online period (or on my site since it’s sitting right over there on the sidebar). What is this funny orange symbol you ask? and why does it matter?

That my friend, is an icon indicating an RSS “feed” which is basically a neatly packaged format for the content from a website, blog and much more. The best analogy I can think of is like a customizable newspaper on speed. Before newspapers if you wanted to know anything you had to go out and see it yourself. You might hear about news from thirty different people throughout the day, which was fine, but it would have been nicer if you knew they would all just come and tell you the details when you where ready for them to. Thus, the newspaper was born: News about a wide range of topics delivered right to your doorstep for you to read when it’s convienent for you. That was all fine and dandy till the Internet came along. And for that we meet our friend RSS.

With RSS you can compile your own newspaper, exactly the way you like it. Want sports news? Pick just the authors you like to read, or just the teams you want to follow. Want the weather? Pick just your home town, and maybe the forcast in the town your roadtriping to. But it get’s better. Want to know when your the package you shipped or ordered is arriving? track it with RSS.
And then it get’s really specific. I have RSS for any comments anyone leaves on any of my blogs, so I don’t have to click around checking them each individually. I have RSS from all my friends blogs, so I know when they’ve posted without having to check their individual site. I also RSS searches on ebay and craigslist for items I’m looking for. Pretty specific, if you catch my drift.

Now, I’ve done a bit of looking around at different RSS readers and each one has their own unique features, so today I’ll just introduce you to the one I use: Bloglines.
There are a few features I really like about bloglines. One, they make it quite user friendly to subscribe to different RSS feeds for blogs, weather, package tracking, etc. Also, since a number of people use it I’ve found some nice hacks and userscripts to make it even easier to use. Another really great feature is that you can setup email accounts so that any email subscriptions you have can show up in your RSS reader rather then your email inbox. That’s one of my favorite features. You can catagorize things into sections and read everything in that section, or click on just that individual feed. All very nice.

Ready to get started? Here’s a step by step guide:
1. Register at Bloglines.
2. Subscribe to Trying to Follow with one click:

3. Be Happy.

Sidenote: I might be getting a little overly ambitious, but I think these sorts of weekly topical post might be just the ticket to keep my fingers rolling across these keys and sharing the latest info I can find with you.

Tech Friday’s will mostly be my attempt to update my readers in user friendly language, about the cool new things I’ve come across in my web searching and perusing online.
I won’t be talking about the new gadget to buy, but maybe the latest freeware to download. It might be a website to checkout or a piece of software that will make your life easier. It might be uncomputer related but “techie” nonetheless. I’ll try to walk you through a couple of useful things each week and hopefully one of them will peak your interest a little.

If you have a topic or area of things you’ve been looking for let me know and I’ll tell you what I find.

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