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You might have missed the HTC Droid Eris in all the commotion over the Motorola Droid. Despite both being "Droids" and both landing at Verizon on the same November day, the Droid Eris comes from a different manufacturer, offers different features and comes at a lower price.

Stopping Jerks from Abusing the Church

By Eduardo Sánchez | Feb 3, 2010 at 20:9:23

In my last piece, I examined how there is a species of creature known as the jerk, someone inclined to grab power at organizations with no regard to the cost meted out to other people. Churches, unfortunately, are often the targets of these people. In this essay, I want to consider historical approaches to balancing power in the church and how they may grant insight into protecting churches from jerks.

The View from Mudsock Heights: A Tiny Plastic Rectangle Reminds Me What Terrible Futurists We Are

By Dennis E. Powell | Feb 2, 2010 at 0:50:59

For some reason, talk turned to the 1964 New York World’s Fair. You may remember the remnants of that event, especially if you saw the movie, “Men In Black.” The centerpiece of the fair was a huge, skeletonized globe, called the “Unisphere,” and there were two tall, modern-looking observatory towers that in the movie were actually captured flying saucers. My favorite line of the movie has to do with the fair having disguised an alien invasion: “Why else would they hold it in Queens?”

A Month In, How Are Those Resolution Going?

By Timothy R. Butler | Feb 1, 2010 at 15:44:50

It is February, believe it or not. Just a month ago was that time many of us would like to forget when we made hopeful resolutions about things we needed to accomplish this year. How are your resolutions working out? If you are thinking perhaps you could use some help with them or perhaps need a new resolution or two, a handful of mobile apps and a good smartphone might actually be your ticket to success.

The Missing Screen

By Timothy R. Butler | Jan 26, 2010 at 20:57:9

While the January 2007 unveiling of the iPhone was over a year prior to the App Store launch, the iPhone was already stunning at its initial unveiling despite its limitations. I suspect if a nearly empty app store had been unveiled at the same time, if anything, it would have merely been a negative distraction to the overwhelmingly positive points of the device. The lack gave time for the iPhone’s merits to build up a market for the store that in some ways felt like it should have been there from the beginning. The iPhone and, eventually, its app store, also helped create the market for the tablet, and, I’ll up the ante, the product after it.

The View from Mudsock Heights: The Haitian Earthquake Brings Thoughts of Midwestern History

By Dennis E. Powell | Jan 21, 2010 at 17:13:48

The sheer vastness of the devastation in Haiti, a nation that was not a garden spot to begin with, is such that it is almost impossible to grasp. It appears that at least as many people as populate all of my county — every man, woman, child, and out-of-town college student — were killed. The mind lacks perspective for such things, even as a phrase like “a trillion dollars” is so big as to be meaningless.

The Danger of Peacemaker

By Timothy R. Butler

Here is a story. The leaders of a church have a personal agenda against someone and want to quiet him, exact revenge or what have you. They not only come at him within their church, they continue by following him outside of that church to any other church he seeks refuge at and any place he works, making a wreck of his life in the process. That is the sort of thing that only happened in the past, in dusty tales of witch-hunts in Salem or the Inquisition in Spain, right? Wrong: it is happening today, perhaps at a seemingly normal church near you.

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Tap the Power of
Snow Leopard

Looking to get acquainted with Apple's latest operating system? Mac OS X Snow Leopard Bible, the definitive Mac OS X reference, features OFB's own Timothy R. Butler alongside Galen Gruman and Mark Hattersley.