We just got back from a week of vacation at the beach in Wildwood, NJ. Very nice time. I've been pretty absent lately for that reason, but I hope to talk to you all soon. 

Brian

They do a good job with this. 

This is funny, because if there was a swear word/racial slur/insult I couldn't stand, why oh why would I want to type it into my blog?!

Come on, Xanga! You've got to think through these things without our help!

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

Best Out-of-Office Automatic E-Mail Replies

1. I am currently out of the office at a job interview and will reply to you if I fail to get the position. Please be prepared for my mood.
2. You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn't have received anything at all.
3. Sorry to have missed you, but I'm at the doctor's having my brain and heart removed so I can be promoted to our management team.
4. I will be unable to delete all the e-mails you send me until I return from vacation. Please be patient, and your mail will be deleted in the order it was received.
5. Thank you for your e-mail. Your credit card has been charged $5.99 for the first 10 words and $1.99 for each additional word in your message.
6. The e-mail server is unable to verify your server connection. Your message has not been delivered. Please restart your computer and try sending again. (The beauty of this is that when you return, you can see who did this over and over and over....)
7. Thank you for your message, which has been added to a queuing system. You are currently in 352nd place, and can expect to receive a reply in approximately 19 weeks.
8. Hi, I'm thinking about what you've just sent me. Please wait by your PC for my response.
9. I've run away to join a different circus.
10. I will be out of the office for the next two weeks for medical reasons. When I return, please refer to me as Lucille instead of Steve.

From www.mikeysfunnies.com

I asked this the other day and got a few pretty good comments. If you want my opinion, download the mp3 and check it out. This is the sermon I preached on Father's/Fathers'/Fathers Day. If you want to hear any of the other messages, you can go here.

I'll give you a hint. It's me. 

Here are two questions related to what I'll  be preaching about tomorrow (Fathers' Day):

1. Are men and women really different, or is it just culture and environment that make them seem that way?
2. The Bible refers to God as "Father", "He", etc. Is God male, or does He have female characteristics as well?

I'll be interested to hear your answers to either or both these questions.

Please don't take this to be real advice. I thought it to be very funny when I saw it. 

I hope that's not in poor taste (another bad joke!).

Here are some links to things I've recently discovered that were helpful. Maybe they'll help someone else.

1. If you have a Sandisk Cruzer flash drive, you may have noticed that when you plug it in, it actually loads two drives: one that is the actual data drive and one that is an unchangeable, undeletable partition. It also autoloads a utility with a bunch of other programs. You can remove that partition with the utility found here. You need to have the drive plugged in and the U3 Launchpad running. After running this utility, your flash drive will behave like a regular flash drive. Be sure you've backed your data up first!
2. If you've ever wanted to edit your mp3 files, WavePad is a great utility. It's free to try and easy  to use. You can do some cool things with your files. It will install other programs to do some other stuff if you want. It also easily uninstalls and doesn't load a bunch of spyware and junk. I use this to edit our church's mp3 sermon files before putting them on the website.
3. One of the best applications out there is OpenOffice. This is a free office suite that is very similar to Microsoft Office. It doesn't cost any money at all. You can open MS Office files and save in Office formats. It can do most of what MS Office does, and a lot of things that Office can't. If you didn't know better, you'd think you were using Word or Excel. It doesn't really have an equivalent application to Publisher (but I don't like Publisher much anyway). Here is the link. Did I mention that it's completely free?
4. Speaking of Publisher, I've used a desktop publishing package from Serif called PagePlus. Nice program. Serif offers free versions of most of their software here. These are previous versions of their software, but they aren't timebombed (where they stop working after a certain time), nor are they missing any of the features. Serif offers these with the hope that you'll like them enough to buy the current version. I've bought stuff from Serif for years, and they're a good company.
5. If you would like some free Bible study software, try the Online Bible. It's a great Bible study package in which you can do searches, word studies, look up definitions and almost anything else you need to do to study the Scriptures. Again, I've used this for years and it is free! I haven't really seen anything that you can buy that's better.

Ok, those will do for now. Let me know if you check any of those out. Hope they help someone!