Burning Ones

Posts tagged with ‘soleil’

• My Life Band

  From February 08, 2010 @ 6:00 am

  

  That’s my life band.

  It’s actually hard to think about how long ago that was, considering all that’s happened in my life since then. Since I got the band, I’ve married, moved to Norristown, had 3 jobs, had one child and am now awaiting the birth of a second. It’s just crazy.

  I was at the OneThing Conference in ‘04 when a man that I at the time hadn’t even heard of came on stage at the end of the conference. It was the first year that I’d been there when the conference wasn’t held in Bartle Hall and it had been, as usual, a complete whirlwind of a time. They pack so much information into those 4 days and your mind just ends up being blown by the end of it. When we had gotten there, we noticed this new organization that we hadn’t heard of before had a booth up. That organization was Bound4Life. It was headed, at the time, by a man name Lou Engle who my wife had heard of because of the famous 1999 Call D.C. (which apparently isn’t very famous on the web… here’s a clip from that day with Jesse Engle praying for the Nazirites) where 400,000 young people came to pray for the elections that year. Lou was like no one I’d ever seen. He spoke with such prophetic unction, shuckling in place and then stopping with his neck out like a huge overgrown turtle every time he’d made a point he really wanted you to get. His voice seemed to perpetually be lost, I assumed because of how passionately he spoke and cried out all the time.

  What he spoke about that day was the massive outcry of blood that our nation has in its soil. 50 million babies have been aborted in our country since Roe vs. Wade. Despite the consistent claim that abortion rights are in place to protect the health of the mother, some estimate that over 95% of these children were murdered for reasons of inconvenience or unwantedness. I get these and other statistics from Bound4Life, a biased source no doubt but honestly, no one really disputes these claims. Lou Engle pronounced the urgent desperation of our position before God. We have legally sanctioned for over 30 years the unquestioned destruction of the most helpless and defenseless people group in the world: unborn children. And worse, we’ve done it in the name of choice.

  God is not okay with that.

  In response, he called for a massive prayer movement to begin in the United States and around the world to see abortion as an inalienable human right end, for adoption of children to be taken up in earnest by those rightfully responsible for it, the church, and for a great turning of the hearts of the Church towards mercy for those women who had received an abortion and who’s hearts were broken because of it. He wanted to encourage this by giving Life Bands to people and having those people commit to, whenever they saw that band, pray a simple 22 word prayer, “Jesus, I plead your blood over my sins and the sins of my nation. God, end abortion and send revival to America.” His hope and prayer was that that simple prayer would be prayed 50 million times every day to God.

  And so I wore it ever since. I can’t say I’ve prayed that prayer every time I’ve seen the band; I can’t say I’ve been as active as I could have been in opposing abortion, in pursuing unwanted children, or in participating in acts of mercy towards hurting women who didn’t know what they were doing. But I haven’t forgotten Lou’s call, and I still tremble when I think of the guilt America is building as we daily sacrifice our children on the altar of our convenience.

  

  And then the other day, after over 5 years of wearing it, my beautiful little girl woke me up by pulling on it and it snapped. We had another one that fit me but it just doesn’t feel the same. It’s kind of like the end of some sort of era. I was unmarried, childless, and young(er) when that thing went on my wrist for the first time. It snapped off after having remained there for all of the past 5 years and I’m not any of that any more. What a ride God has brought me on. And still, abortion runs free in America.

  God is still not okay with this, and we will answer for our crimes. May he have mercy on us when that day comes.

  So, in memoriam of my Life Band:

  “Jesus, I plead your blood over my sins and the sins of my nation. God, end abortion and send revival to America.”

• DJ Baby

  From December 25, 2009 @ 12:00 pm

  This is the project that I did for my Illustrator class. While I’m not terribly proud of how the actual artwork came out, I’m fairly happy with how the screen cast ended up.

  I used Telestream’s ScreenFlow which I bought by the end of this project. Compared to SnapzProX from Ambrosia Software, I was floored by this product. I was able to record both the video and the audio from my computer at full resolution on a 24″ Cinema display while playing Pandora and using Illustrator with no really noticeable slow down. And the fact that I could then do call outs for different elements of the screen including the mouse and the different windows as well as speeding up the larger video clips a dizzying amount (3,707%, thank you very much) blew me away. I’ve done much smaller screen captures of areas of the screen using SnapzPro and my computer has literally almost choked even at smaller frame rates. I don’t know what jujujuice they’re drinking, but I want some too.

  Two complaints that I had are:

  1. This may or may not be ScreenFlow’s fault, but while I had all of my peripherals connected (4 External Disks, 2 USB/Card Hubs, 24″ Cinema Display, Keyboard, Mouse, LaCie DVD Writer, Soundsticks), ScreenFlow couldn’t quite make it through the export of the full project. I could export samples but once I tried to do the whole project it consistently failed right near the end. I tried this multiple times with multiple encode settings. I eventually found that the only way I could make it work was to unplug all of my peripherals. I’m beginning to suspect that SanDisk’s godawful U3 Software has been to blame for an assorted list of stability issues I’ve been having of late, although another likely culprit is a recently tricked out edition of Quicksilver (enabling the stuff I did actually says that it’ll make it less stable…). Despite that, no other program was crashing like ScreenFlow was…

  2. Despite the amazing job it did of allowing me to speed up the clips a ridiculous amount, the program did have a little bit of a melt down trying to do anything with them once they were sped up. I couldn’t copy and paste them anywhere. I couldn’t hear audio that was playing near them. I couldn’t get sections of them out. To do any of that I had to undo their speed change and then make whatever edits I wanted, and then redo the speed change and drop them back into place. A small price to pay for the functionality, but it would be useful for them to possibly experiment with what their upper bounds are for clip speedup.

  To create the loop for the opening narration and to grab the last clip for the credits, I used that fantastic piece of open source software, Audacity. This software has just gotten better and better since I started using it ~2001. I’m not a power user of it by any stretch of the imagination, but for what I was trying to accomplish it did it and then got out of my way. This marks the first time I’ve tried to create a loop at all. I enjoyed it at least as much as I enjoy creating pictorial patterns. Trying to find the correct repeat point and then refining it little by little so that it sounds like it was recorded that way is a lot of fun.

  I used Garage Band, of course, to record the opening narration. While I’m sure I could’ve used Audacity for that as well, I wanted the quick EQ settings and the easy ability to punch in on a track as I knew I’d be refining the opening quite a bit. I started out with roughly 5 minutes which was far too long and in the end I got it down to around 2:15. Garage Band is just nice to work with. Period.

  That’s everything. Thanks again to La Blogotheque, Mogwai, and The Album Leaf. Click through to Vimeo to watch in HD. Recommended….