Tuesday, July 27, 2010

My First YouTube Video- An Original Song: New Day



At last, my first YouTube video. My friend Jim recorded me over at his house last Saturday while I sang and played an original tune, New Day. I've been meaning to record my songs and put them up on YouTube since...well, since the beginning of time itself. But I've hesitated because I wanted to make sure the video would have decent sound. Jim's Nikon seems to have recorded the sound quite nicely, so I'm pretty happy with that aspect.

Also, he simply recorded it and immediately uploaded to YouTube. Like, it was all over in 10 minutes! I nearly fainted (Really? No, not really). But, left to myself, I probably would have edited the video; I would have procrastinated and tinkered with it endlessly and most likely, would never have uploaded it. But Jim got me up and on there, just pushed me right in the water, so to speak. And now that I've got my feet wet, to continue the water metaphor, I need to keep swimming. So hopefully I'll record more songs, sooner rather than later, and get them uploaded via my own YouTube account. Now, I may labor over them a wee little bit, but the idea will be to just continue to get them recorded relatively quickly and put them out there, without driving myself mad with insane perfectionism, as I'm wont to do. Yes, I love to torture myself. Now if you don't see any videos in the near future, feel free to contact me and give me grief. Thank you in advance.

Anyhow, I do hope the song blesses somebody.

Monday, May 10, 2010

Facelift for Jordan's View

UPDATE: May 12, 2010-- I've been working on adding a functional horizontal menu near the top of the blog but I don't really know how to do it. Please be patient if you click on something and it doesn't work...


Well I just couldn't take it anymore. I was looking at my old blog layout and I just couldn't stand looking at it for even another minute and I had to change it. So I used the "blogger in draft" template designer to find a new template and installed it. I'm quite happy with the results of just a few hours work. And it didn't even take that long to actually apply the changes, it was more previewing various templates and deciding which one to go with that took up the time.

What I like about this particular design is that it will be easy to modify in the future using the template designer in blogger draft. I can just select a different background picture, tweak some elements, click apply to blog and I'm done.

So I plan to update periodically, whenever I'm getting bored with looking at the same old layout... and next time, will not wait till I can't stand to look at it anymore and I'm just going to puke from looking at it.

OK. Well now that I have got that off my chest I do hope you like the new look. And I think that the blog will hopefully open up more quickly since I've discarded some of the old widgets that made it so slow to open and was probably torturing anyone visiting the blog. But you'll still find most of the resource links -- some of the best sidebars in the East.

Still quite busy with seminary and over the next few weeks will be finishing up work for two courses. Yet it is still my hope that I can get back to more regular blogging, one of these days.

So welcome to the new Jordan's View. Hope you like the new view.

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Happy New Year 2010...Belated

Greetings to everyone in 2010!

I've not been posting here on Jordan's View lately and I'm quite frustrated about that. But I can say that one of the reasons behind my lack of posting is very good news-- I was accepted to the distance Masters of Religion (MAR) degree at Reformed Theological Seminary and officially began my studies a few weeks ago. So this has been keeping me quite busy. I think I've mentioned here a few times that I was contemplating going to seminary and I had been doing research on possible seminaries for several years. Although it was my desire to get the best possible education and therefore I considered the top reformed schools such as SBTS, RTS or Covenant, all seemed prohibitively expensive. But God worked that out now, and I am happy to studying at a very fine and well-regarded school.

In other good news, my wife and I officially became members of the very solid reformed Baptist church we've been attending. We're now part of a church discipleship group that includes three other couples, and we're reading and studying through a book called "The Love Dare". It's related to the recent movie "Fireproof" that starred Kirk Cameron as a firefighter with a failing marriage, and how he was helped to save his marriage by applying Christian principles.

So good things are happening but at the same time I do get frustrated in not being able to spend time doing everything I'd like to do-- including working on my music and writing on this blog. I am hoping to develop a routine where I somehow fit all these things into my schedule on a daily basis, but it will require a discipline that I admit has eluded me in the past.

Also, get this-- I have to memorize portions of the Westminster Shorter Catechism for an upcoming quiz, and to get credit you have to be spelling and punctuation perfect! Pray for me!

But I do want to say I am thankful for progress-- I never would have thought a few years ago that I'd be calling myself reformed in theology and studying at a reformed seminary now. Yet I believe that the truths I am learning in seminary will be be of great value to my spiritual life and ministerial goals, both now and into the future. I just have to try to be patient-- four years of school (which is what I'm anticipating) seems like a very long time.

My wife seems to making progress with her health and vitality also, thank God! So I am encouraged by that and hoping that if it is God's will that we should have children that she'll be well enough to pursue the vocation of motherhood and that I will have the faith to believe that we'll have all the resources necessary to raise a family.

So Happy New year to you all... sorry it's already February.