Still, Josh, I appreciate your explanation. I was beginning to be afraid I might be responsible for your absence from your blog. After all, I said to myself, put yourself in his shoes. Here you are in the seminary and this wacko Protestant beatnik shows up on your blog, and you think ‘Well, cool!” After all, you’re in the seminary, you’re tasting some unusual intellectual approaches, having some brain-storming with your buddies about esoteric ideas. Maybe in the seminary there’s room for an occasional wack job.

But then the day of reckoning finally arrives, and you emerge as an authentic, genuine priest of the church. And who shows up as your biggest cyber-fan? The same old Protestant from down in Redneck Hicksville with his heretical ideas. Under those circumstances I can see how a priest might start avoiding his blog and considering giving the Internet an exorcism.

But think about how I feel. When I ran across your blog, I thought it was one of the most interesting points of view on the Internet. Where am I going to find a blog that takes religion seriously, has a background in philosophy, and thinks highly of Cthulhu, the Second Amendment, and an appreciation for The Great Labowski? What’s that, you say? Look around in Protestant circles? LOL Try talking about Cthulhu with your average Baptist minister, and you’re more likely to get him to redeem you from the hands of Satan. So I guess I’m stuck with you, Josh, if you would just post something once in a while.

Anyway, you want theology? I’ll give you theology. How about a little editorial comment on the statement made by Christ Matthews (a Catholic) about Newt Gingrich (also a Catholic) in reference to the Manichean argument (Didn’t we solve this with the Nicene Creed?):

“Do you believe in it, do you believe that we’re all a mixed bag, or do you believe that there’s some people like Newt Gingrich who personify one side of this Manichean struggle in our life?Do you believe in it, do you believe that we’re all a mixed bag, or do you believe that there’s some people like Newt Gingrich who personify one side of this Manichean struggle in our life?”

Then I read on and saw that you were talking about movies. I’ll have to check out some of these flicks. (I still think your title would be a good characterization of the modern world.)

Right now, my wife and I are into the last season of Friday Night Lights, which is of particular interest to us because this is where we grew up. Although we were a lot younger and there was very little fooling around, and of course, people had yet to discover drugs. George Bush was in one junior high school, Laura Bush was in another, and I was in a third. There was only one high school.

How would you say that this Conan the Barbarian stacks up against the one that Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in?

Thank you and God Bless,
Kelly Kracht

Thank you and God Bless,
Kelly Kracht

Dropbox is really powerful but you have to set stuff up initially to work with it. What I’ve done is create a sym link in my “my documents” that points to my dropbox. Then I have word and all my doc programs (pdf creator, excel, etc…) automatically save to that sym link. Now you are no longer using it as a glorified flash drive.

Then I get the same functionality by just hitting the dropbox website when I am not on one of my PCs. I can access all my documents similar to gdocs.

But again, that’s why I’d never go with a cloud anything as my primary or secondary computer.

I’m not so concerned with security as I should be, perhaps, because basically the only thing I store on the cloud are basic documents: homilies, ideas for homilies, PDF’s I need to hang on to, etc. My financial information and a written log I keep on appointments, what I need to talk about with couple x, etc. — all that I keep on an IronKey. Now there’s security .

We’re definitely not at a point where the cloud allows us to break free from normal computing. Until I can encrypt somehow (encryption has been a hobby of mine since I discovered command-line PGP in something like 1995), I also won’t be trusting everything to the cloud.

Google’s stuff does go down sometimes, so it’s a possibility for us all. The uptime is pretty good, though, so I’m not hesitant to throw my hat in the ring.

Dropbox is good; I use it to carry PDF’s with me from the office onto the iPhone. It just seems more appealing to me to be able to click a browser window and see the same thing every time — the same format synced across Google, with my documents saved in one place automatically where I don’t have to remember to drop them back in the box. So it’s an option for me, but one that is only slightly more convenient than throwing it on one my thumbdrives shackled to my keyring.