Now that Christmas Day has gone and the Holiday Season is coming to a close, I would like to send out a call to all the pop musicians of the world as they contemplate their projects for 2007. If you are the sort of artist who likes your new releases to be bound by some unifying conceptual theme, then good on you. Better to be packaging songs together on the basis of some grand idea your heart yearns to express than just to knock out a bunch of disconnected, crass, three-and-a-half-minute attempts to monetize your personal brand. You’ve got all these deep ideas welling up in your soul, and you have to get them out somehow, right? We know how it is. Go to town! Put out those topical projects like the heavy, deeply affected artist that you are.

Just let me make one request of you: please don’t make a Christmas CD. I know you believe at the bottom of your heart—you just know it to be true—that what some of those dusty old carols need is a hip new treatment by your favorite musician. The real problem, you catch yourself thinking, is that Hark! The Herald Angels Sing lacks syncopation and an awesome clarinet solo. Or you wonder aloud whether what O Little Town of Bethlehem has been waiting for all these years is your deep, lusty vocals and a disco beat in the bridge.

Oh, and a bridge. It never did have much of a bridge, did it?

I urge you not to do it. I know you, and possibly the market with you, are very impressed with your talents. Maybe you sell a lot of music. Maybe, if you’re a Christian musician (a group for whom the Christmas CD temptation must be particularly difficult to withstand), people tell you how significant your Music Ministry is through all of the conversions, re-dedications, and heartfelt moments of authentic worship it fosters. But think for a moment what you’re up against. I really don’t mean to be all Dickensian about this, but Christmas is a pretty big holiday. Do you really think you, even in your most pensive Piano Solo mood, can possibly capture the significance the day holds to most of us?

Forget the theological import of the season. Your chosen musical form is more or less unable to meet the demands asked of it by serious meditation on the doctrine of the incarnation, which is fine as far as it goes. The problem is that even mere family gatherings, decorations, gifts, cookies-like-mom-used-to-make, parties, memories, and ubiquitous good cheer will probably price you out of the market. You are simply bound to sound cheesy.

And whatever you do, please don’t write anything original. If overdriven guitars are bad for Good Christian Men, Rejoice, then whatever ditty you were contemplating about How Much Christmas Means To You is pretty much guaranteed to be worse. Nothing personal.

Are you discouraged yet? Good. But don’t give up hope! Keep on planning your next project, and be sure to make it something to which you can do some justice. There are lots of topics. Just pick one, as long as it’s not Christmas. Maybe how you felt about your last boyfriend or girlfriend. Anything.

Of course there are a few of you who are actually talented enough to pull it off. Some of you actually can shepherd a classic Christmas carol into the contemporary context with true freshness, sensitivity to tradition, and a hint of transcendence, or maybe even write a new song that hits the mark as well as the existing ones have. But then, if you’re one of those people, it never would have occurred to you to take my advice anyway.

Normally it gets to be late January before I realize that I am rapidly running out of lagering season, and I end up in a rush to get them finished before the weather warms up. Lager yeasts need low temperatures and a couple of months of time to do their work, so absent a specialized freezer, it has to be Adeodatus’ crawlspace in January, February, and early March. This year I’m ahead of the game: he may be storing my carboys before the New Year.

This year’s light lager is very similar to the recipe I’ve used in the past, except this year I used White Labs Copenhagen Lager Yeast (at Adeodatus’ suggestion) and clover honey instead of wildflower (because they were out of wildflower):

I elected to do the amber lager again this year, not being overwhelmed with affection for the dunkel I did last winter. This too is derivative of previous works, but with the same yeast change and a touch more Saaz hops than in the past. I’m thinking of dry-hopping it, too, but that is yet to come:

UPDATE (12/28/06): After two full days of inactivity, I bought an extra couple of vials of White Labs German Lager yeast, since the store was out of Copenhagen. It’s been way too long for me to wait any longer. Beer at Home treated me better than right, charging me for only one of the replacements. Way to go, guys!

When I was ten years old, Denver got three feet of snow on Christmas Eve. I remember not being able to see much outside that was more than 50 feet or so away from the house, and I remember having a whole lot of fun in the snow the next few days. Never was a Christmas so white.

Three years ago, the last few days of Denver’s winter were marked by about 30″ of snowfall. Businesses closed, kids played, neighbors dug each other out, chili and cocoa were made. But not by me, because I was on vacation in Florida at the time, sweating in 85 degree heat and humidity. Bummer for a guy who loves the snow.

This one I didn’t miss. The storm is of course national news, and it has meant a lot of inconvenience for a lot of people, but for us it was just plain fun. We hunkered down on Wednesday and enjoyed being inside (remember, I work at home, so commuting was not an issue), and today we got up early and spent a few hours shoveling out as a family. The kids proceeded to sled and dig snow caves almost until it was dark. They’re sleeping well right now. I’m about to be.

Kari took pictures, which I’ve uploaded to my Flickr account. (Why am I taking credit for them by putting them in my account, you wonder? Because she told me to. The site she prefers for online photo archiving is more about print-making than photo-sharing, so there you go.)

I know a lot of people were badly put out by this storm, and I bet if I were a retailer I’d be mad, but this really was a good time for us. Life will be mostly back to normal in the morning, but this Christmas will be white indeed. Enjoy the pictures if you’re so inclined.

UPDATE (12/22/06): link to the pictures is fixed now.

UPDATE (12/26/06): I did some clean-up shoveling today to get the patches of ice that had formed in the driveway and to remove a good six inches of snow that had reappeared on the sidewalk. (It always gets re-covered with snow and slush by cars cutting the corner too closely.) There’s still plenty of white on the ground, but the kids’ tunnel had collapsed, and overall the otherworldly fun of last Thursday had quite left the yard and neighborhood. It was sad. Last week the blizzard was all fun and magic, but what about next time? Storms like this don’t happen every year. The next time it snows like this, will my kids even want to play in it? I mean, the nest starts to empty out in six years.

Try shoveling that into the street.

They’re edgy and authentic, because they cuss: the son of Jim Bakker and a programmer with messy hair want to know how it’s all gone so terribly wrong:

What the hell happened? Where did we go wrong? How was Christianity co-opted by a political party? Why are Christians supporting laws that force others to live by their standards? The answers to these questions are integral to the survival of Christianity.

I bet you’ve never heard this one before: it seems that Conservative Christianity has been co-opted by the Republican party, which has drained it of the pure, unadorned Message of Jesus. No, for real:

His parables and lessons were focused on love and forgiveness, a message of “come as you are, not as you should be.” The bulk of his time was spent preaching about helping the poor and those who are unable to help themselves. At the very least, Christians should be counted on to lend a helping hand to the poor and others in need.

This brings us to the big issues of American Christianity: Abortion and gay marriage. These two highly debatable topics will not be going away anytime soon. Obviously, the discussion centers around whether they are right or wrong, but is the screaming really necessary? After years of witnessing the dark side of religion, Marc and I think not.

So Christians—by which I mean the dorky, untattooed, Republican kind—can’t be counted on to lend a helping hand to the poor. This would come as a surprise to Syracuse University professor of public administration Arthur Brooks, whose recent book argued at length that religious conservatives are in every measure more generous than secular liberals. Perhaps Jay means they can’t be counted on to disburse public funds for the benefit of the poor, which is much closer to the truth. I suppose if they were cool, tattooed, Democrat Christians, this failing would be remedied.

Moving on, surely we can agree that “the screaming” about abortion and gay marriage isn’t necessary. Surely Jay and Marc mean we should engage key aspects of Christian ethical orthodoxy in respectful, rational dialog, rather than the strident garbage that too often infects our discourse. Either that or they mean “Christians should be able to look past their differences and agree to disagree.” Which I take to mean keep abortion legal and enact marriage rights for all, just like you had coolness and tattoos of your own.

It is becoming a tired emergent trope that American Christianity (or Christ-following, or whatever you want to call it) has been wedded to conservative politics, and the answer, rather than dissolve that unholy union, is to get it hitched to liberal American politics. If they would merely say that the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of the United States are two separate entities never to be conflated, I would cheer them and their dangerous haircuts and their scary tattoos all day long. Many an American evangelical needs to hear this message. But they don’t stop there. When they say God isn’t a Republican, they really seem to mean that he is, in fact, a Democrat.

And it’s not just disaffected emergent youths. I’ll never forget a sermon I heard by a well-known and deservedly very respected leader in American urban ministry. He was talking about where we could expect to find the locus of truth, and ticking off various institutions that could be expected to turn up empty. “You won’t find it in the Republican Party!” he thundered at one point. “You won’t find it in the Dem—in the liberal Democratic party!”

Uh-huh. I guess that tells me where to look. Bakker and Brown seem to be pointing me there too. Thanks for disabusing me of my reactionary and unthoughtful politics, boys!

Check out Bakker’s church if you’re interested. The decade in which my son enters his teens will see television ministry by a man named Bakker, just like his old man.

I’ll leave you with this: RevolutionNYC.com uses table-based layout again, just like the Christ Follower people. Plus the DOCTYPE is jacked, so it renders in quirks mode. Hipness has a price, guys. The piper will invoice you, guaranteed.

Last Saturday morning I brewed beer and baked an apple pie. Inexplicably, I didn’t take pictures of the pie.

The recipe is Beer At Home’s IPA kit. It should ferment down to about 1.010 in another week. As long as there are no delays in bottling, it will be marginally ready to drink in time for New Year’s.

If you were concerned, the pie really turned out alright, even being gluten-free as it was. Presentation left something to be desired—I really need to work on the crust, gluten or no—but it has gone over well.

UPDATE (12/19/06): I bottled it this evening. It’s good an hoppy, so if it doesn’t mellow during conditioning, it will be a winner.

Yesterday afternoon we had the distinct pleasure of having lunch with some friends from The Netherlands. It’s always a treat for me to talk to people from other countries—a double treat, in the case of the warm hospitality of this particular family—if for no other reason than to have direct access to an outsider’s perspective on the affairs of my own people. Fortunately the man of that house is fairly astute in matters of public policy, so we had a good talk about politics.

The topic turned to the American system of public education. They expressed some surprise at the lack of stratification in our system: everybody is labeled a winner no matter what, and distinctions between high achievers and low achievers are considered embarrassing and improper to admit in polite company. You need outsiders to point this out to you? you’re wondering. Isn’t that a rather obvious pathology of American society? Well, no and yes, respectively. But point being that it’s painfully obvious to other parts of the world that in this department we’re not quite right in the head.

Then they went on to talk about their school experience in the 1980s. They said something about a “Reformed school” (meaning a parochial school of the Reformed theological tradition, not a Reform school), which led me to believe they meant a private school.

“No,” the man of the house explained. “In The Netherlands, there are all kinds of different schools, all paid for by tax dollars. Some are religious, some are not.”

“Ah,” I said, assuming he meant a school run by the state church. “We could never do that here because of the First Amendment.”

“No,” he said matter-of-factly. “It has nothing to do with freedom of religion.” He went on to explain that all you need to start a Dutch school is a certain number of students willing to attend the new institution, and you’ll get public funding for it. In his brief account, there was no single authority or central bureaucracy for administering education. Sure, the government imposes minimum requirements on what schools must do, but other than that there is substantial diversity. He was talking about this the way one would talk about having free elections or a publicly funded police force: like it was just the sensible way to organize this particular part of a free society.

This in a country where the left and center-left combined just won 62.4% of the popular vote and 96 of 150 seats in Parliament. And mind you, when I advocate vouchers here, I’m a Friedmanite zealot, probably a theocrat, and maybe even a racist.

So you’ll pardon me if I’m feeling just a bit off today.

ALLAHPUNDIT is surprised at the severity of the religious stereotyping in a set of four would-be uber-hip commercials for a church franchise in and around Naperville, Illinois. Tellingly, he says:

Their “Journey” page doesn’t say much but judging from the ads they’re not entirely comfortable being called “Christians,” at least in the cultural sense. Either that or they’re trying to convert unbelievers by first turning them into hip, laid-back “Christ-followers,” at which point they’ll proceed to what the CCC portrays as phase two: full-fledged dorkwad Christianity.

AllahPundit has been kind enough to put together a convenient playlist of the videos for us:

This is an interesting barometer of this kind of approach to church: hip, influential, culturally connected non-Christians are finding themselves unimpressed by the attempt of Christians to be hip, influential, and culturally connected. It continues mercilessly in the post’s comments:

“Christ-follower” sounds WAY dorkier than “Christian!”

This is a legitimate criticism with which fans of the former phrase will have to contend. Escaping the charge of dorkiness is hardly the highest calling of Christians (or even Christ followers, for that matter), but clearly the folks at Community Christian Church are trying hard enough to dodge it. Survey says they’re failing.

Next one “spamat” weighs in:

Oh goody. Muslims worldwide are returning to their roots while Christians are fighting over who can reject their past more strenuously.

“Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets.”

With any luck, the hipper-than-thou Christians will focus-group themselves into irrelevance, but I doubt it.

The seeker church might impress soccer moms, and the emergent church might impress disaffected artistic youths, but for whatever it’s worth, spamat isn’t buying any of it. I wonder how typical he is. I suspect more than some would like.

Speaking of the emergent church, one commenter suggested that this place is one, the implications of which he went on to explain patiently to the readership of the blog. Not likely. How can I tell? First of all, what would the Emergent Conversation say about a multi-campus congregation? Seems pretty Boomer to me. Second: the web site uses tables for layout. The thing has more td’s in its About page than a seeker megachurch has uncritically accepted modernist assumptions in a whole year’s preaching. And everybody knows emergent churches use valid XHTML 1.1—works better with screen readers, you understand—and CSS.

Yes, you had to be both an armchair theologian and a web designer to get that joke, but hey, this ain’t a general interest blog. And I’ve got the traffic stats to prove it!

The broader point concerns the virtues of rejecting the label “Christian” for cultural reasons. It’s not unusual for missionaries to Muslims to avoid this term because of its intractably negative historical and cultural associations in that context, and I think we can all give them a pass on that. It’s not like scripture gives us a certain label we are required to use for ourselves. “Christ follower” is surely a candidate, but personally I’m troubled by the emphasis it carries. I am, after all, a Christ believer before I am a Christ follower. Perhaps I spend more of my time following than believing, but the former is worse than useless without the latter.

I’m sure no simple label will be able to articulate the nuanced synthesis most Protestants make of the biblical teaching on faith and works. And it’s not like any label is going to do an adequate job distancing me from the various characters I’d rather avoid. Does “Christ follower” make it clear that I’m not emergent, not seeker-sensitive, not old-school fundamentalist Landmark Baptist, not contemporary-music-loving-program-driven-broadly-evangelical, not fire-breathing-exclusive-Psalmody-TR? Perhaps I could obsess less over the label and spend more time being friends with people, hopefully defusing their negative stereotypes in the process? That process doesn’t scale as well as mass media, but it just might work.

OOPS: Community Christian Church’s “Recommended Websites” page (calling it “Links” is so 1996) links to Leonard Sweet and The Ooze! I guess I’m wrong: emergent it is. In fairness, The message of the videos could as easily be seeker-driven as anything else, so it’s hard to say for sure from here.

P.S. If you don’t know who AllahPundit is from his previous blog, ask me in the comments and I’ll tell you. The name is odd enough to warrant explanation.

Chris Anderson bows the knee to homeschooled Christian kids in “I, for one, welcome our new Christian homeschooled Lego robotics overlords:”

This is a bit off topic, but my fondness for Lego robotics cannot be suppressed. Check out this video of a team of Christian home-schooled 9-14 year olds winning the New Hampshire FIRST Lego League Nano-Quest Challenge in a single autonomous outing. There are so many impressive things going one here that it’s hard to highlight just one, but the fact that the robot changes its own tools is unbelievable.

Ah, that video brings me back to the awkward days of eighth grade Olympics of the Mind (now called something that sounds dumb due to the objections of the International Olympic Committee) and our “Treasure Hunters” problem. It involved no robots, but it did require us to write a program that would automatically plot a path through a large 8×8 grid for two human actors to pick up three treasures each while avoiding three randomly-place hazards. And not walking on the same square twice. Way too hard for 13-year-olds using the programming tools of the day, but good memories were made my Dad, who provided copious programming help.

Seventh grade OM is where I met the girl who would later become my wife. There was no programming that year, although I did manage to get some electronics involved by making some little LED flashers for one of the space circus animals we constructed out of papier maché, chicken wire, wood, and canvas. But I digress.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Chris Anderson and Mindstorms. If you’re not familiar with Chris (he’s the editor-in-chief of Wired) and his recent book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, you’d be well served to read his brief introduction to the idea under the heading The Long Tail, In a Nutshell. It’s a compelling economic model that, while not without its critics, seems to do a good job explaining certain distribution models that have arisen in the Internet age.

As for Mindstorms, I’m more and more convinced that I need to part with $250 and get this product into my house. Programmable robots with sensors, for the kids? As I’m fond of saying (not entirely without irony): it’s a wonderful time to be alive.

Here’s a fun mashup of Google Maps: GeoGreeting. You type in a message, and the program matches each letter with an appropriate image of a building or other man-made structure somewhere in the Maps data. Propose marriage! Send endearing Christmas greeting to loved ones! Declare your 2008 presidential favorite! The possibilities are endless. (Well, not technically. There’s a 40-character limit, and you only get 53 characters at present, so the possibilities actually number 53⁴⁰. But you go ahead and tell me that’s not good enough for you, you prima donna.)

h/t O’Reilly Radar

Yesterday my family had the privilege of being publicly received into the membership of Skyview Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Highlands Ranch, CO. The children also received baptism, a game to which I could be accused of being a little bit late. (At your option you can read more on my extremely predictable conversion to paedobaptism. Also, for a limited time only, follow the riveting discussion of Presbyterian ecclesiology in the comments!)

Various grandmothers were in attendance. They had cameras and were not afraid to use them:

Both because I have not been blogging and because there are some things which one simply does not submit to Google for inclusion in the index, there is no linkable account of why this is such a big deal. But it is big. Big and good.

Josephy Cooney has written about avoiding the unfortunate “Developer UI” condition painfully known to software developers and users alike. His post focuses more on development process and the ad-hoc methods that can allow hastily conceived developer utilities to become a permanent part of shipping products. He gives some guidelines to help programmers avoid creating overly cumbersome user interface elements for their own strictly utilitarian purposes, lest these things grow malformed legs and end up half-ambulating around the application forever.

My own struggles with Developer UI are a bit different: I find that managing a group of only developers—myself included for our purposes here—makes user interface design difficult. We never have a problem exposing cobbled-together utility code and having people fall in love with it, but we do have fairly typical problems doing good interaction design, being too small of a shop to have a specialist UI designer on the payroll.

The problem is that good developers are trained to take the bewildering array of particulars in their problem domain and abstract them and systematize them into something simple and elegant. (Another good, if indirect, reason for developers to be realists: universals are your stock in trade.) This, combined with the typical developer bias towards utility over beauty, can create some pretty cumbersome human interfaces. My typical first pass will result in a UI that is beautifully abstracted to expose the deepest conceptual core components of the system in such a way as to be completely inaccessible to any normal person who has not thought about the product for as long as I have. Which is to say pretty much everybody else in the world is going to think it’s trash.

The trick is to design user interfaces to work in a way that most people will expect, rather than the way a developer would calculate. The application model—the view of the world exposed by the program, plus its relevant data—ought to coincide with the user model, or the view of the world and its relevant data that is natively and unreflectively assumed by the user. Hence deep knowledge of the application’s internal model is a huge barrier to effective UI design; it is a vast body of facts and mental habits which must nearly be forgotten in order to get oneself into the user’s mind and make a good guess about the model residing there. This involves some disciplines which, while not in any way antithetical to software development, are not really rewarded in the field either: things like the ability to see things through eyes that are very different from your own or the ability to step back, blur your vision, and get a good view of the big picture.

It’s like being a camera that can switch effortlessly between a macro lens and a fisheye lens. Anyone who can do this well has a shot at creating outstanding software which is both easy and pleasurable to use—which should be the among the highest aspirations of people in this profession. If you can only manage one of those lenses, you’re either stuck in a cube writing code or in a marketing department being enthusiastic for the rest of your career. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld said, but it’s nice to aim higher.

h/t Style Gala