Blog Just a few thoughts

My aunt, Melinda Bush, is developmentally disabled. She is intelligent, but not fully independent. She has a variety of psychological disorders, one of which is Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. One symptom of OCD is the tendency to follow routines—routines that become very difficult to break.

My aunt’s most obvious routine is reading the encyclopedia.

She prefers the CD and DVD versions of encyclopedias. The sole purpose of her computer is to read these encyclopedias. Notice encyclopedias is plural - one part of her routine is she must have a new one every year for Christmas. And every year for Christmas she gets a new Britannica or Groliers or Comptons or Encarta or Worldbook - whatever she wants that year - and every year she reads them. From the beginning.

It takes a while to get through those articles. I think in a year she gets to around the mid-Cs.

And then the next year, she starts over.

My mother, her legal guardian, has suggestied on multiple occasions that maybe she just pick up where she left off. Perhaps keep the 2008 Encarta and pick up at Dauchshunds instead of beginning again with 2009 Britannica. But no, she says, she’ll have the new one.

My aunt is an expert on aardvarks, airplanes, and Bejing. If there were an A-C edition of Jeopardy, she could . Ask her about the Geneva Conventions though and she’ll be at a loss recollecting her high school history classes (some forty years ago).

(This is an adaptation of an email I wrote in 2009 to AJ Jacobs after hearing about his book The Know-it-All.)

I spent the summers of 2007 and 2008 serving on the leadership team at the Warren W. Willis United Methodist Camp in Fruitland Park, Florida. At its core, the job of a camp counselor is simple: to engage in relational ministry with fourth through twelfth graders. Or, perhaps even more simply: to love the campers.

As Stephen Colbert said in his commencement speech at my school last year: “Service is love made visible.” In practice, loving campers means serving them.

Christ calls us to serve, to put the needs of another person or community before our own. At camp, service is leading a middle school small group, teaching archery, and dancing with fourth graders at praise time. At camp, service is plunging toilets, calming bed wetters, and consoling homesick campers. At camp, service is spending the entire summer after graduating high school away from your friends, giving up the freedom of setting your own schedule (and sleep schedule), and doing basically the same thing week after week while trying to make it fresh and exciting for the kids. At camp, service is love made visible.

The success of the ministry of the Warren W. Willis United Methodist Camp depends on willingness of the leadership team to serve. Likewise, the success of the ministries of the First United Methodist Church of Orlando as well as the greater United Methodist Church, depend on our service, which we pledged in our membership vows. So go out, serve, and make visible Christ’s radically inclusive love in our church and our community.

The value of Google Docs is often judged in comparison to Microsoft Office. I find that the places where Google Docs really excels are the features that are unique to a cloud-based solution. The obvious feature of this sort is the flagship feature of Google Docs: collaborative editing.

Another cloud-unique feature that I find very useful is Google Spreadsheets’ =GoogleLookup("entity"; "attribute") function. This function, in Google’s words, “attempts to find the values for straightforward facts about specific things.”

To better showcase the feature, I’d like to explain how I used it last night. For my astronomy homework, I wanted to do some spreadsheet operations involving the atomic mass of elements present in our sun.

Instead of typing out all of those atomic weights myself—and risking typing errors by doing so—I simply wrote the equation =GoogleLookup(B2, "Atomic weight"). For this sort of simple factual lookup, Google was literally able to fill in the blanks for me.

GoogleLookup is good for many situations where the answers are clear and simple. I’ve also found it useful for applications involving zip codes. It can definitely be a time saver.