The Button Down Blog

Wow, it’s been well over a month since I posted a new entry here. Sorry about that. I have a feeling that updates here will be sparse for the foreseeable future. Politics has taken a necessary front seat in my blogging endeavors. If you’re interested in reading my yammering on about that, please go over here. I’m currently publishing a new post at least several times a week.

For now, though, I leave you with a picture of something I found at my grocery store. The product is commonly known as “Shit on a Shingle”, and the fact that someone’s marketing an instant version of it as a delicious meal is downright insipid.

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I’ve been a pretty big fan of Andrew Peterson for awhile now, previously commenting here on his book. But it’s his day job as a singer/songwriter that originally pulled me in. The honesty in his lyrics is such a refreshing change from the run-of-the-mill bad Christianity-and-water soft rock that radio stations like K-LOVE play. It’s not just the lyrics that set him apart, though. There’s an artfulness in his music that has become rare in standard mass-produced radio-ready three-chord Christian music.

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Well, Peterson has a new album out. Resurrection Letters: Volume II is a loosely connected collection of songs about sacrifice. (Volume I is tentatively set to release sometime in 2009 and will focus specifically on Holy Week and Easter.)

Rather than yammering on about each track, I’ve decided to crib episode 5 of the Rabbit Room podcast, in which Peterson plays an edited version of each track, adding commentary on each. It’s 35 minutes long, so get a cupajoe, plug in your headphones, and give it a listen.

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Probably my favorite track on Resurrection Letters: Volume II is the second. When I got the album, I was especially struck by the arrangement of Hosanna (Thanks to Ben Shive for writing those strings!). It was only five or six weeks later that I really listened to the words. This excerpt is a great example of Andrew Peterson lyrics.

I have struggled to remove this raiment,
Tried to hide every shimmering strand.
I contend with these ghosts and these hosts of bright angels.
Hosanna.

I have cursed the man that you have made me.
I have nursed the beast that bays for my blood.
Oh, I have run from the one who would save me.
Save me, Hosanna.

You can purchase Resurrection Letters: Volume II from any major music retailer such as amazon.com or over at the Rabbit Room store (CD or download).

Remember back in June when I talked about how remarkably awesome Neil Patrick Harris is? Remember Dr. Horrible, the internet sensation starring Neil Patrick Harris? Ooh, and what about the 75% real / 25% scary-put-on internet crush that I have on him?

Wanna say "Love your hair" Here I go...mumbling

Yeah, well he’s still great. So great, in fact, that Entertainment Weekly just put him on their list of 2008 Entertainers of the Year. While I raise an eyebrow to his spot on the list and that terrible picture they used, the fact that he’s on the list at all is tremendous and well deserved. The fact that they never mentioned that Neil is gay is pretty darn cool. He’s popular, he’s mainstream, and he’s gay. Here’s a video he made for Entertainment Weekly.

We'll make time stand still

So great that he’s certain to make the Out100. (Images in this post are from the photo shoot Neil did for Out magazine earlier this year. Click them to embiggen.) The ceremony is Friday night, and I’ll be updating this post once his place on the list is released.

Update: Well, the Out100 came out and Neil’s not on the list. Why, I don’t know. I also don’t know why Kate friggin’ Perry would top the list. But never mind. EW beats OUT any day.

As promised in June, I’ve start catching up on How I Met Your Mother, and I’m currently one DVD away from finishing Season 2. It’s not a perfect show, but it’s certainly better than much of the current crop of sitcoms. Surprising no one, the best part of the show is Neil Patrick Harris. (Pay no attention to my bias.)

I’m sure he won’t manage by some freak of happenstance make it to my tiny blog twice, but just in case:

Neil? Keep standing tall. You make us proud.

I’m biased, but I think these images capture the essence of the candidates pretty well:

I need more "prune juice".

Let's get to work.

Bonus Image:

Bye Sarah!

I posted last September about a trip to King’s Island (an amusement park in Cincinnati, Ohio), and included a picture of me scared out of my wits on a children’s roller coaster. It’s a trip my sisters and I take our nephews on every year. Our oldest sister had to leave with her son home before the picture was taken last year. (He was a half inch too short anyway.)

This year, the three of us with all of the boys were able to ride the Fairly Odd Coaster together, and through the magic of overpriced amusement park ride portraits we have a picture of all six of us in one shot.

Repeating what I said last year: It’s a really, really scary ride. Swear to gald.

click image to WHEEEEE--

Okay, maybe that’s overstating it a little bit, but I’ve had my LG Dare ¹ for a couple months now, and I’m still digging it.

Overall, the design is well executed with the necessary buttons placed intuitively. From what I understand the Dare is a bit thicker than the iPhone, but that’s not a major concern for me. There’s a nice weight to the phone, which is one of the things I’ve always loved about LG products. My last phone felt like a toy, so this is a nice change.

Measuring 3″ diagonally and 240×400 pixels, the Dare’s touch screen is exceptionally responsive. Initially, I was concerned about not having an actual bank of buttons other than the virtual ones, but LG has offset that with vibratory feedback with each screen touch. The vibration strength is customizable, allowing me to set it where I need it. They’ve also given the option of audible response, but after a few days getting used to the phone, I found that unnecessary. Another nice feature is the virtual QWERTY keyboard that pops up when you turn the phone horizontally. It’s a must for texting or browsing online.

One of the major draws of the LG Dare is the phone’s phenomenal digital camera. It comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera complete with a Schneider-Kreutznach certified lens ², face detection, flash, optional manual ISO adjustment, face detection, multi-shot mode, and Smart Pic technology. The maximum image size is a whopping 2048×1536. The most disappointing surprise, considering all these features, is the lack of a simple lens cover. I’m not sure why that was omitted, but it’s a major error.

The Dare also comes with some fairly advanced on-board image editing capabilities, but I found them unnecessary, and have only used the feature a couple times. It’s much easier to download the image to a PC and edit there.

My sad little corner. (Click to zoom)

The most glaring feature omission is the lack of access to Verizon’s Mobile TV service. Rumor is that there was a design problem with the touch-only interface, but Motorola’s release of a touch-only phone that does include optional mobile TV capabilities would seem to indicate that the problem has been overcome. Hopefully we’ll see a software update in the near future to correct the lack of access.

While the phone can’t get Mobile TV, it does allow access to Verizon’s V-Cast pre-recorded video service. I’ve found the feature quite helpful, though the quality of video is understandably low. That said, V-Cast’s video quality is miles ahead of the quality from Youtube. It’s nice to have some access to video content, but holy cow is it ever low quality. (Part of the problem, of course, may be my location. I’m hardly in a major metropolitan area.)

The biggest problem I have with my LG Dare is the browser. It flat out sucks. I don’t expect PC capabilities, but the internet experience is dismal. Verizon only permits firmware on their phones (though that’s scheduled to change next year), so the we’re stuck with the Teleca Obigo Q7.0-1.3. It’s technically a full HTML browser, but response time and scrolling capabilities are unimpressive at best. The phone’s capable of aping the iPhone’s ‘flicking’ response in other programs (address book, V-Cast), so why isn’t that possible within the browser? Especially on longer pages, the endless inch-by-inch scrolling is maddening. And for some reason LG has included a standard font that doesn’t render properly. Apostrophes, quotation marks, and sometimes colons are rendered as spaces.

The other major aggravation with the phone’s browser is the handling of cookies and browser history, and to be honest, I don’t know if it’s a fault of the browser or the phone. All I know is that if I log in to a message board I register as logged out within three clicks. Same goes for other functions that require a log in, though rendering in mobile mode rather than full HTML seem to work better, presumably since the page isn’t using as much memory. I’ve seen several hacks to get around the deficiency, but honestly, I don’t trust myself to make them. One that I was surprised to find out isn’t possible is to reroute the cookie handling and browser history to an sd chip that could handle the amount of data.

Finally, some blessed soul’s put up an LG Dare icon-based homepage creator, and I’ve found that to be a nice alternative from the Favorites list that isn’t customizable or re-orderable. Find it here. He gets you started with over a hundred common preset icons , but you could always make your own.

The LG Dare is a darn good phone, even with my complaints. From what I’ve heard, it’s no iPhone killer, but for my money it’s a good substitute. If they’d work out these flaws, LG’d have a true winner on their hands.

Oh, and you can use it to call people, too.

Isn't she lovely?

¹ Before anybody asks, yes, I wanted an iPhone, but I needed to switch to Verizon to take advantage of an employee discount. ⇧
² They tell me that’s good. ⇧