Fat 'n Happy the Rooster Off We Go

Just Another Jim
Links &
Resources



 Wanna see my web cam?
(actually they aren't mine)
Web cam links to eyeball the current conditions at some of my favorite places:
Fairbanks, Alaska, News-Miner newspaper’s Arctic Cam..
Montana Dept of Transportation. Bozeman Pass Web Cam.
Sioux City from the top of the Woodbury County Courthouse.


 Music links:

I prefer low-production style music (garage bands, if you will) over high-production commercial music. That’s why I like the following.

SongPlanet.com - The new standard in Indy music on the net, since the demise of Mp3.com (in my opinion). The site is still under development. One weakness is that it is difficult to browse artists and listen to their music. They also don't have a very robust genre search engine to find music you like, but I am confident they will get that fixed. My site at SongPlanet is http://www.songplanet.com/artists/bands/751/.

SoundClick.com - mostly unsigned artists from the very bad to the surprisingly good. And of course the home of “Just Another Jim.” (Unfortunately this site is not nearly the quality of the old MP3.com, so the majority of music is on the “very bad” end of the spectrum.)

PasteMusic.com - a wonderfully eclectic collection of indy artists.

TuneVault.com - similar to the two sites above. Great music you’ve never heard of before.

I've even got a presence over at MySpace.com. Although it's a much bigger forum with a much different purpose, it functions a lot like the old mp3.com did for bands and musicians.
 Eastern Orthodoxy

So what is Eastern Orthodoxy? How is it different than other Christian Communions? Although getting much better known, the Eastern Orthodox Church remains a mystery to many folks. Here are some links to introduce you to Orthodoxy

St. Thomas Antiochian Orthodox Church - This is the web site of the church to which Brenda and I belong.

Antiochian Orthodox Church - St. Thomas is Antiochian (or Syrian) Orthodox, in contrast to Russian Orthodox or Greek Orthodox, etc. This is the web site of the Antiochian Archdiocese in North America.

While there is one Orthodox Church and the worship service at any Orthodox Church will be almost exactly the same as the worship service at every other Orthodox Church, there are five historic Patriarchates: Jerusalem, Antioch (Syria), Alexandria (Egypt), Constantinople (ie, Istanbul, Turkey), and Moscow, which rose to prominence after Rome broke away from the other Patriarchates. Churches associated with the different Patriarchates display cultural differences. In North America some of the major Orthodox groups are the Antiochians (listed above), the Greek Orthodox Church (related to the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople), the Orthodox Church in America, with connections to the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Serbian Orthodox Church. These links will give you a bit of the cultural flavor of Orthodoxy in America.

So, how come there's all these different ethnic groups? Why isn't there a single American Orthodox Church? The answer is rediculously complicated and no one does a better job of answering that question than Frederica Matthews Green, a convert to Orthodoxy and popular speaker and writer on a whole variety of Orthodox topics. Her web site, frederica.com has links to many of her writings. This article in particular helps answer the specific question of why there are so many flavors of Orthodoxy in America instead o a single Orthodox voice

Ancient Faith Radio is a web based radio station with an interesting mix of Orthodox music and programming, including a number of Orthodox teaching programs.

Dynamis! is sort of like, Our Daily Bread or Guideposts for the Orthodox community. Dynamis! is published by the Education Committee of St. George Orthodox Christian Cathedral (the home of Bishop BASIL of the Antiochian Archdiocese). It includes Bible readings from the daily lectionary as well as a meditation associated with the readings.

I got acquainted with Eighth Day Books two decades ago. At the time I thought they were merely a wonderfully quirky Christian bookstore in Wichita, KS. They had (and have) an eclectic mix of Christian and secular, ancient and modern books. Only recently did I discover that Eighth Day Books was an Orthodox bookstore. Their mix of books is a wonderful picture of the nature of Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy, at its best, is not self-consciously Orthodox (in a sectarian sense) but simply Christian. It also embraces all the best that creation has to offer, whether sacred or secular, because Christ has embraced the whole world.


 Open Source Resources

The concept of open source software goes back to the early days of softare development and the idealism of the 60s. People who want to make money from their software (ie, the evil corporations and all the liberal  60s b.s.) keep their source code secret. The alternative to profit is the utoptian world of open source, where everyone can contribute to the source code. Software then becomes a community project.

In practice, open source software tends to be very geeky with bad interfaces because only geeky people contribute to the software. My favorite example of open source geekiness is the fact that in the language translation module of Mozilla, one of the options is to translate pages into Klingon. In spite of these caveats, the simple fact is that I'm really cheap, and the reality is that open source software is free. I therefore use it occasionally. The following are my favorite open source resources.

OpenOffice.org is the open source version of Sun Microsystem's Star Office. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation creator, and html editor. The suite saves documents in an XML based format (which is a web language that can be used across a variety of platforms). That makes Open Office docs very portable. It is also a great platform for building web documents. Much of this web site was built using the Open Office html editor. The downside is that it is the worst resource hog on my system. That makes it slow and bulky.

Mozilla.org are the open source guys that make the Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client. It wasn't very long ago that they were the best product out there. From a development side, I hate Firefox because it doesn't follow the standards very well and I'm always having to write workarounds for Firefox's bad behavior. Quite honestly, Opera is the best browser out there at the moment and Internet Explorer 7 is every bit as good as Firefox, but Firefox is open source--that means everyone can keep an eye on what it's doing and if they're doing anything un-neighborly (IE has had a long history of that). Neither IE nor Opera are open source. So even though I'm not convinced Firefox is the best browser out there, I still use it.

Finally, I have recently changed my ftp client. My previous client, FileZilla, is a good tool, but I don't care for the login dialog and its security features aren't as robust as some of the other programs. Because of that I have changed to another open source ftp client called WinSCP3. Both have security built in. (If you use FileZilla, make sure you use the current version 2.2.15 because FileZilla has added security just recently.)
UPDATE: In 2006 I switched back to FileZilla. Their new version is very robust. Since software is always evolving, I imagine programs like this will continue to change and get better. Both are good.