A coworker of mine and I were discussing today movies that are appropriate, and more importantly not appropriate, for our children. He had referred me to a website before (Kids-in-mind) that reviews movies and applies a three-pronged rating to them. Each prong represents a category: sex & nudity, violence & gore, and profanity. It also gives scene-by-scene details of why a particular movie is receiving a given rating in a category. This allows you, as the parent, to decide if a profanity rating of 4 is too high by reading what specifics led to the rating, rather than just arbitrarily restricting your child from any movie higher than a 3-4-2 (for example). They review all new movies, not just ones targeted at children, so it is a good site for your teenagers, not just the toddlers that I currently have.
The tour came to Salem for its penultimate stop on the Passion Conferences Six Steps Records tour. It included music from Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman, and a presentation by Louis Giglio. Wow, Louis is an excellent speaker and his presentation was very awe inspiring. After listening to Chris and Matt sing, and anyone who listens to CCM has no doubt heard songs written or sung by both of them, I had to get some CDs. So I picked up Chris’ Arriving, Matt’s Blessed Be Your Name, and Passion’s How Great Is Our God.
I was expecting to enjoy Matt’s album more since I am more of a fan of his music versus Chris’, but I was surprised to “hear” how much I liked the album. One of the reasons I got it is because it contains my favorite CCM song of all, How Great Is Our God. The rest of the album is excellent, so I recommend it.Â
I was not as impressed with Matt’s album, notably because it contains only live music. I am a fan of studio recordings first, and then only live recordings if I like the song in the first place. The album still has some really good songs, notably Blessed Be Your Name and Undignified, the latter which I could play over and over. But I think I will have to get his albums that have studio recordings of these to really appreciate the songs.Â
The same applies to the Passion CD; live music from the Passion ‘05 tour. It’s a good album if it has a bunch of songs you want all together on one CD, but otherwise I recommend picking up the individual artists’ CDs.
My wife and friends say I go too far (though not quite Chevy Chase too far) simply because I have an inflatable penguin in my front yard, a couple lighted reindeer that always get, uh, “rearranged” by neighborhood teens every year, and lights around the house. I think it’s the fact that they are connected individually to X10 that pushes me into geek territory. But I am put to shame with this find, courtesy of Engadget. It is a fuzzy home video of Deerfield Township, Ohio resident Carson Williams’ Christmas lights synchronized to “Wizards of Winter” by Trans-Siberian Orchestra. You can download it directly from the link Engadget has on their site, but I have also embedded it:
Holiday Lights Video
I apologize for the site outage that occured the last couple of days. I think it was caused when I was trying to test a site searching tool. It involved registering DLLs and granting permissions, etc. But somehwere along the way I broke the site. And my attempts to fix it only made it worse. After spending hours and hours trolling the Net via Google to try and fix it, I resorted to help from the source: Microsoft. It took a couple of hours, but we were able to track down the permissions that were incorrect. So everything appears to be back online, but I think I will have to visit all the pages to be sure.
Comments (0) 
Themocracy