IT-nglish

I'll take anyone out for a coffee if they can explain to me what the following means (it was an invite to a conference)*:

Deliver in a dynamic world through end-to-end virtualisation
Virtualisation is recognised as the most transformative IT technology of the next decade.
To truly impact the business, server virtualisation is not enough. – IT needs the power of virtualisation from the datacentre for servers and applications all the way to the desktop.
An end-to-end application delivery solution where IT can control applications, desktops and the server infrastructure that supports them from the datacentre.

* NB I have to understand your explanation.

Hats Off to Burtynsky

Silver Lake Operations #1, Lake Lefroy,
Western Australia, 2007 © Edward Burtynsky

On Friday afternoon, my wife and I went mooching around Fremantle. The Maritime Museum and some FotoFreo exhibitions were our two chief destinations; neither disappointed.

A standout was the exhibition Australian Minescapes, by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky.

To paraphrase Burtynsky, his work looks at how we (aka humans) modify natural landscapes to extract the raw materials we use to make the stuff of modern life -- i.e. cars, fridges, houses, factories and, probably, the seat you're sitting on. By natural landscapes, Burtynsky isn't on about the holes in the ground we plant veggies in; as the photo above shows, he's on about Grand-Canyon-like chasms--and shifting entire towns--to get minerals out of the ground.

Burtynsky's photos have a painterly quality, as though he's layered oils on a canvas; the thicker 'layers' are like nodules and ridges. I wanted to touch them. Yet, of course, this 3D-effect is an illusion: he is a photographer not a painter.

The scale of the photos is breathtaking, as though entire skies and pockets of Western Australian earth are stuffed into single photographs. In a triptych of the Super Pit mine in Kalgoorlie, each haulpack is about the size of half a thumb-drive.

If you're in Perth and can get to the Maritime Museum (where the exhibition is showing) before 4th June, do so. You'll be amazed.

Street Corner Advice

Don't take life too seriously,
It's not permanent...

The blackboard in front of the hairdresser's shop told me. Thanks hairdresser. I mentally erased this message and replaced it with:

Take life very seriously;
it stretches forward into eternity.

Not quite the feel-good message that would make passers-by want to enter your shop:
"Come in, take a seat, grab a coffee. Let's talk about eternity, while I set your perm."

God's thoughts and ours

What follows is the first one-and-a-half paragraphs from a short piece, written by John Piper, primarily for people who teach and preach the Bible. It's entitled, "Preaching as Concept Creation, Not Just Contextualization" (Thanks Chris B.).

At the end of the article, Piper lists ten God-given truths that would seem ludicrous to some. I'd add to Piper's ten -- for example, that into this distorted, frustrated world, God's new creation has been brought by Jesus and now exists within it. Nevertheless, I find his main point helpful and suggestive.

As we think seriously about contextualizing the message of the Bible, let’s remember that we must also labor to bring about, in the minds of our listeners, conceptual categories that may be missing from their mental framework. If we only use the thought structures they already have, some crucial biblical truths will remain unintelligible, no matter how much contextualizing we do. This work of concept creation is harder than contextualization, but just as important.

We must pray and preach so that a new mental framework is created for seeing the world. Ultimately, this is not our doing. God must do it. Read rest of article (Desiring God Ministries).

If Piper is on to something, questions like the following could help us think about sermons -- before, during and after them: How might God be stretching or overturning the ways in which we think about the world? Or, more to the point, what entirely new ways of thinking might He be suggesting?

Overheard

A boy, about eight years old, riding his bike, his mother riding behind him, bumped up over a raised and rather rough kerb on to the cycle path and came to a slow halt: "I'll talk to The Government about that!" he said to his mother in an earnest, adult-like tone. (In our neighbourhood, most of the other kerbs that lead to cycle paths are smooth, which the boy obviously knew.)

Mother, stopping behind him: "Yes, you'll have to write them a letter."

I couldn't see whether she was smiling wryly, but my wife and I had a great laugh.