Have you heard someone say they’re “living in” a book? Maybe it was before a test. Maybe it was book on marriage for an engaged couple. Maybe it was a work of fiction that was written so well that it feels like a real world.

I’ve been living in a book. The funny thing is it’s not the way a person normally “lives in” a book. I’m looking at my life and noticing things that really remind me of a book I’ve read most of my life. They say “history repeats itself” and it seems true to me.

About 2000 years ago, a doctor named Luke set pen to paper and recorded what he’d seen and heard either directly or through the voices of eye witnesses. I remember reading this book in the ’80’s and thinking that I wished I was alive in that time. My heart broke for the chance to be there to see lives and eternities changed forever.

Seven years ago I started going to a church where my perspective changed. I’d been in places where an occasional life would change where an eternity would be impacted, but that was the exception not the rule. I started to believe that it wasn’t possible anymore. Not long after starting to go to Quest I noticed that some families were starting to come to know Christ together. I’d never seen anything like that except in Acts.

The people coming to know Jesus were then a couple a month. This was about 24 times more than I’d ever known. It was then that I started to pray a bold prayer. I asked for the verse “and the Lord added to their number daily those being saved” to be something that I’d get to see. It happened. I couldn’t believe it. In the last couple of years, people are coming to know Jesus in huge numbers.

I should say that I don’t care about numbers. It’s people that matter, really matter. Each number is a person. A number is just a quick way to say that. I could list names, and we often do at my church, but it’s easier to talk about the 6 who came to know Jesus today than say that 2 of the 6 were named Josh and Christina.

Then I started praying another bold prayer. Questapalooza 2008 saw hundreds of people make that decision. I started to hope that it was possible. Could thousands come to know Him in a single day like in Acts 2:41?

This weekend I saw the impossible. My pastor spoke at Ichthus, Christian music festival that was founded in reaction to Woodstock 40 years ago. Today there are about 20,000 people who participated in this festival. Before he finished speaking I tweeted, “At #ichthus. Listening to my pastor speaking to 20,000 people. What if 5-10% of them really get it? Praying hard.” Sometimes prayers are answered no matter how impossible. Sometimes a couple thousand people’s lives and eternities are forever changed.

Other than Questapalooza and a Pastors’ conference we put on, I’ve never felt both so tired and so alive. How can I feel this way after a night of 2 hours of sleep? It’s a gift. It’s a gift to me that I get to live in Acts.

Paul

At work our IT guy doesn’t want us to watch streaming video. We’ve got finite web resources so I understand not wanting to use our connection for non-business things, but I was curious why downloading a video was fine, but streaming it wasn’t.

Enter our friends at Stanford on iTunesU. I love all things technical, so since it was free, I downloaded the course “The Future of the Internet”. It’s a great primer on some basic internet issues.

In this course, the teacher talked about the difference between a couple of protocols. TCP/IP is the basic protocol on the internet. It provides reliable transmission of data and is “polite” about it. It takes available bandwidth, but throttles back as bandwidth becomes congested. It’s used for most traffic on-line including web and ftp.

UDP is different. It cares more about getting more most of the data from point a to point b than about getting it all there. VOIP and streaming video use UDP. UDP also just uses all available bandwidth and only scales back if the bandwidth isn’t available at all. It’s clueless about other traffic.

Fast forward to today. I’m ftp’ing a file from our main campus at 8:30. All is well and even though service starts at 9:30, the file should be done by 9:15. All is well until about 9:00. At that point, the main campus starts their first service and also starts streaming video to the world. I notice that my connection starts getting slower and slower. I do a speed test and all is well on my end. No one in Lexington is noticing the problem as they watch video, but my connection keeps getting slower and slower. Ninety minutes later my download (which should have taken fifteen) is done. The last few bits came in at dial-up speeds.

Then, I realize what happened. It’s a function of the network. I’ve experienced why I shouldn’t do streaming video at work. It hogs bandwidth. Now it’s clear and I’ve got a story to tell in the morning.

Paul

I used to blog weekly, at least. I haven’t put finger to keyboard much lately for two reason:

First, I twitter a lot. My twitter name is “sempei13“, so check that out.

Secondly, I haven’t been happy with my blog for some time. I use a free webhost called 000webhost.com. For some time now, I’ve blamed them for a little problem I’ve had. It’s time to eat crow because it was me that was to blame. As it turns out, I didn’t add the correct info to my .htaccess file. Happily now individual articles and pages go to the right places and all is well.

Now, all I need to do is move my podcast files to Amazon S3 and tweak my logo and layout. I might just relaunch “Tech, No Babel”, too.

Paul