While I'm on the subject of mobile web pages, I should mention that Bloglines.com has a mobile version. If I had an internet ready mobile phone, that would be a very cool way to keep track of blogs. Right now I'm thinking that I won't bother with a cell phone or a new PDA until the merger of those gadget types is complete. Current phones aren't PDAish enough for me, and most PDAs really aren't phone-y enough just yet.

I fixed the mobile version of this site. If you have an internet phone or PDA, point your browser to danny.brendoman.com/mobile.html.

Mike and I just finished a few games of Starcraft. I installed Win98 on one of the old computers I have so we could play some games. I installed Gunbound, but the graphics card (4 MB) in this thing is too puny. Starcraft works fine on the computer and on my network. It is such a great game. Even though it's been around for a while, I think it's still one of my favorite strategy games. When we first got Ethernet in the dorms at Truman we used to play this game until my eyes hurt.

If you haven't switched to Firefox yet, it's even easier now with version 0.9. It imports all of your settings from whatever browser you're using now. There are some really cool extensions available, too. I'm going to start using one called Adblock. It blocks ads from web pages. I don't mean pop-up ads; Firefox already takes care of those, I mean regular image and text ads, even the Google text ads you see everywhere. The new extension manager makes it easier to customize your browser. And the download size for Firefox keeps getting smaller, too. It's down to 4.7 MB. Go ahead, give it a try.

Well, I survived a week with 80 jr. high students. I made some new friends, too. I played drums in the band and the woman who was leading worship turns out to be someone who has read my blog. Jen is Kansaswolf and her blog is hosted on ebrandon.net. She went to school with Brendoman. She saw me reading some comments here on the Blog Cabin and she said, "You're Danny dot Brendoman dot com?" Once she told me her nick I remembered seeing her comment on Brendoman.com. Read this post for some funny stories from camp.

How Religious Parents Royally Screw Up Their Children

Good stuff for me to think about as a parent and youth minister. Let me know what you think. (from The Internet Monk)

Cory Doctorow, author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Boing Boing Blog recently gave a speech to Microsoft about digital rights management (DRM). DRM is the little bits of tech that keep you from copying DVDs, moving ripped music to several computers and changing the format of eBooks. Tampering with DRM is illegal, even if you're doing it to make a legal copy of a product you own (like backing up a DVD or printing off an eBook that you bought.) Doctorow's speech does a good job of explaining the problems with DRM, to a company that needs to hear it. MS is planning on making an mp3 player soon and their WMA format has some of the most restrictive DRM there is.

I recently read another book on my PDA. A few weeks ago I told you about Free Culture. I enjoyed reading that one, I enjoyed the fact that it was free, I recommended it to people and I ended up buying a hard copy. In what I hope becomes a major trend, sci-fi author and author Cory Doctorow released his novel for free online. You can still buy a copy of the book, but this lets you at least check it out for free (and read the whole thing if your eyes can stand it). The book is called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I liked it. It's set in the not-so-distant future, when the human consciousness has been ported to the computer so that if you die, you only have to restore from your latest back-up. I probably would have liked the book better if I knew anything about Disney World, since a lot of the story revolves around the changes that the tech brings to the Magic Kingdom. It looks like Doctorow has recently released his second novel Eastern Standard Tribe. I may have to download that and give it a try. If you know of any other good books that are being published this way, let me know.

I just got some Gmail invites. If anyone wants a Gmail account, email me.

It's Monday night of my second week of camp. I'm staying up playing Risk with some of the camp faculty. Camp has been fun so far. I've been playing drums in the praise band here and otherwise just trying to do what I can to help. We've played some fun games with the kids (see photo) and since I'm co-dean of the camp, I haven't had to mess with trying to get them to shut up and go to sleep.