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Ahh...

J. P. — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:22:00 +0000

My family and I have been very, very sick with colds since Saturday. Today, even with a lingering cough and some heaviness in my head, I feel significantly lighter in spirit. For I needed this painful reminder to see more clearly what really matters.

Welcome, iPad.

J. P. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:37:00 +0000

The iPad is the internet appliance par excellence. It'll be fascinating to see how software will adapt to the new form factor.

Panthera uncia, week one

J. P. — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:35:24 +0000

In no particular order, my impressions after half a week of using Snow Leopard: 1. The user interface feels far more "instant" than even Leopard's. I love that menus finally seem to render as smoothly as they did under OS 9 and that opening and navigating folders is nigh instantaneous. Makes my trusty 2006-vintage MacBook Pro feel like a new machine! 2. I appreciate that the Time Machine menu bar icon is gray when it is off. I think the MobileMe icon should also follow suit when it is not set to sync automatically. 3. I discovered the new Input Source HUD by accident (and appreciate the after-the-fact illumination by Joe Weaks), which appears when you linger on the "Select the previous input source" shortcut (default shortcut: option-space, defined in the Keyboard preference pane). It seems like it'll be quicker and more accurate to pick from that list than the roulette-style repetitive cmd-opt-space that I ordinarily use. But I'll have to think of another shortcut, since I sometimes need to type sticky spaces. 4. Address Book can now export vCards with notes and photos. 5. I saw a black and white beachball cursor once!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Snow Leopard, UI

Pre-order Snow Leopard

J. P. — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 14:37:13 +0000

Two years in the works, you can now pre-order OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard from Amazon for (probable) September delivery, starting at $29 with free shipping: Things to note: 1. Intel Macs only (e.g., Macs with "Power" in their names are excluded. The transition from PowerPC- to Intel-based Macs happened in 2006). 2. Single user and family pack (five-seat) versions require an existing installation of OS X 10.5 Leopard. 3. Mac Box Set single and family pack versions include full Snow Leopard installers and also include the iLife and iWork suites. 4. Snow Leopard Server requirements I fully expect Snow Leopard's many enhancements and refinements will translate into greater speed, stability, efficiency, and elegance. Pre-order today!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Snow Leopard, Upgrade, Amazon

Ordination

J. P. — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:20:17 +0000

As I come to the end of my journey of preparation for the ministry of Word and Sacrament, it seems appropriate to reflect on a quote that has stayed with me since 1991 when I first read it:

Today hardly one in a hundred considers how difficult and arduous it is faithfully to discharge the office of pastor. Hence many are led into it as something trivial and not serious; and afterwards experience teaches them, too late, how foolishly they aspired to the unknown. Others think themselves endowed with great skill and intelligence and promise themselves great things from their talent, learning, and judgment; but afterwards they experience too late how limited their equipment is, for their powers fail them at the outset. Others, while knowing there will be many serious battles, have no fear, as though they were born for contention, and put on an iron front. Still others who want to be ministers are mercenaries. We know indeed that all God's servants are wretched in the eyes of the world and common sense, for they must make war on the passions of all and thus displease men in order to please God.

—William J. Bouwsma's John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Biography, p. 220

I guess you could say I had about eighteen years of reflection to prepare for my final examination yesterday by the Presbytery of Seattle (conducted on behalf of the Presbytery of New Brunswick). With thanksgiving to God, family, friends, and other advocates, I confess:

So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. (1 Corinthians 3.7 NRSV)

Grocery list

J. P. — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 02:21:07 +0000

Who needs an iPhone app for keeping track of lists when you have an eager five-year-old who loves to write? As it happens, this list was enumerated by Keren and written by Amanda employing a mixture of dictated and phonetic spelling!

Posted via email from jpkang's posterous

Snow Leopard highlights

J. P. — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:03:31 +0000

Photo credit: flickr/Tricia Shears

Apple is not known for detailed release notes (in fact, they are quite often brief to the point of being useless). So it is quite welcome that after yesterday's WWDC keynote, Apple posted a long list of "Enhancements and refinements" providing quite a bit of detail on what to expect this September, when Snow Leopard is uncaged.

Forthwith, the features I am personally most looking forward to in Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard":

Finder

More and better Spotlight search intelligence!

More reliable disk eject.

Core system services such as Spotlight indexing and file system events will intelligently stop their work so you can remove your drive. And improved dialogs tell you which applications are using the drive so you know what to close in order to safely disconnect your drive.

Removable sidebar headers.

If you remove the items under the Devices, Places, or Search For header in the sidebar, the header will disappear, too. To add it back, simply drag an item into the sidebar.

Dock

Activate Exposé from the Dock. It sounds useful, but I will have to see it in action to know how it actually works.

System Wide

Faster shutdown and wake-up.

Automatic updates for printer drivers.

Redesigned Services menu.

The Services menu has been streamlined, displaying only the services relevant to the application or content you're using. You can customize the Services menu, and you can create your own services using Automator.

Bidirectional text. This I have to see!

For languages that are written right to left, such as Hebrew and Arabic, Snow Leopard now elegantly handles mixing in left-to-right text. It also has a split-cursor option that shows the appropriate cursor direction at the boundary between right-to-left and left-to-right text.

AirPort menu signal strength.

The AirPort item in the menu bar now includes signal strength for all available wireless networks, so you can see which access point has the best signal before selecting it.

All-new thesaurus.

Snow Leopard includes the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus second edition.

QuickTime X

QuickTime sure has come a long way since I first saw it in beta in 1991.

Mail and iCal

Reorderable Mail sidebar. So you can choose the order in which accounts appear.

Automatic setup (of Google and Yahoo calendars) in iCal

Omnipresent inspector in iCal.

System Preferences

Multi-Touch gestures in older Mac models. Here's one where I wish I had more information about which models have "Multi-Touch"; my 2006-era MacBook Pro supports two-finger scrolling, but I'm not sure yet that it will automagically gain new powers under Snow Leopard.

Installation

Faster, more reliable installer.

Smaller footprint. Additionally, new apps requiring 10.6 should generally shrink, since they will no longer include PowerPC code.

Again, these are just things that I'm especially interested in—there are many, many more major features (especially under the hood) and usability enhancements that I'm not even mentioning here.

In conclusion, I expect Snow Leopard to be both noticeably faster, more stable, and yes, more fun and productive to use. We Mac OS X users have been repeatedly spoiled by software releases that make our computers faster than when we first bought them!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Snow Leopard

Bulgogi (Korean-style BBQ)

J. P. — Sun, 17 May 2009 01:34:32 +0000

A brief interruption to our irregularly scheduled programming: Ingredients Per pound of thinly sliced, lean beef—

2 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp rice wine (I use Kikkoman Aji-Mirin)
2.5 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp water
1 clove crushed garlic
2 medium green onions, finely chopped
1 tsp sesame seed
1/8 tsp ground black pepper

Instructions

0. Wash hands well!
1. In a bowl, mix the sugar with the liquid ingredients until dissolved. Then mix in the garlic, green onion slices, sesame seeds, and black pepper.
2. Take a slice at a time of the beef and pat it into the marinade, mixing the sauce and the meat evenly.
3. Cover and refrigerate several hours or overnight.
4. Pan fry, optionally with sliced mushrooms, which soak up the juices!
5. Enjoy with rice, kimchi, and your favorite beverages!

Here is the recipe in plain text format for easy import into some database-type app (I actually keep it as a "Company"-style card in my Address Book with the recipe details in the Note field).

Technorati Tags: recipe, how-to, korean

Spring cleaning

J. P. — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:39:39 +0000

I just saw an ad a couple days ago for a 1.5 terabyte drive for $115, which works out to over eight gigabytes per dollar (approximately the amount of storage you get in a free Google Mail account). I paid about $170 for a drive half that size two Black Fridays ago. Twenty years ago, it was inconceivable that ordinary people would have access to anything resembling a gigabyte of hard disk storage. For many of us, though, our digital data (primarily text documents, images, audio, and video) has ballooned to fill up the hard drives in our computers, requiring the purchase of extra drives for storage and backup. If you find your Mac is starting to get dramatically sluggish and even giving you dire warnings about low disk space, it's time to do some spring cleaning. You can start by archiving data (e.g., burning it to a CD or DVD), moving data to another storage device, or simply deleting it if you truly don't need it any more. These operations, especially when they involve many gigabytes of data, can take time to do and may sometimes require making difficult decisions, so if you need to defer them, here are some suggestions for freeing up space posthaste. I would start by downloading and running a utility like the shareware Cocktail (run its default "Pilot" script) or freeware Onyx (execute the default "Automation" script) to clean your system caches and reboot. This will often free up several hundred megabytes or more of space and is the equivalent of a tune-up or oil change. I do this myself about once a month or so. Several other utilities that can help with removing unnecessary files: Monolingual [freeware] deletes unused foreign language resources (but doesn't affect display of foreign scripts). Depending on the software you have installed, it will save you several hundred megabytes up to several gigabytes. YMMV. Grand Perspective [freeware] lets you see visually which folders/files take up the most space. This one should be used with caution, or not at all. Similar utilities which present size data in different ways include WhatSize [shareware] and the recently emancipated OmniDiskSweeper. For finding and processing duplicates of all kinds, I've found nothing better than Tidy Up! (currently $30 for the just-released version 2), but you will probably need to read the manual since what it is doing is not trivial. If you only need iTunes duplicates processing, check out the $15 utility Dupin. In any case, don't wait too long to address the primary causes of your low drive space syndrome!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Tips, Storage

". . . for they were afraid."

J. P. — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:38:10 +0000

So they went out and fled from the tomb,
for terror and amazement had seized them;
and they said nothing to anyone,
for they were afraid. [ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ.]
Mark 16.8

Look, I have set before you an open door,
which no one is able to shut.
Revelation 3.8

in memory of a beloved teacher,
Donald Harrisville Juel
1942–2003