How can I share this valuable insight? Nothing to do with my books :-)

The Johannesburg water supply is bursting at its seams. The roads are running with the testimony and old buildings (like the one I live in, pipes leaking and bursting constantly.

Is it because, to reach more and more people, they push up the pressure instead of building a properly engineered infrastructure?

Anyway that's not my story today.

A geyser in our building which had a pressure reducing valve, but it burst.

So why did it burst?

Fact No 1: This was a new high quality geyser guaranteed up to 6 Bar.

Fact No 2: It still carried on leaking after someone turned off the geyser supply.

Fact No 3: Logical deduction - The cold water was feeding back into the geyser.

Fact No 4: The external supply from the council was over 7 Bar at the time.

Therefore the geyser burst.

Question: Why did the cold supply pressure force its way back through the hot water pipes?

Answer: Because of a partially closed hot/cold water mixer in the bathroom.

I am bursting to share this idea

I have written what I consider as books, more than 300 k words, at least. So yes, I have been writing for years.
However whenever I offer something for publication I am ignored. I know, I know; the easy part of writing a book is finishing the story. Getting it published is the hard part.
I am a computer programmer in real life. I guess that makes me a technician. I must think and write like one too.
This morning I awoke with a simple solution to my dilemma - make my latest book into a web site.
So here's the idea: Keep the story the same, but use illustrations in place of too much writing, but not quite a comic, (I am not artistic enough for that).
It is science fiction of course, but each time I get technical - which is quite often - replace it with a Flash movie explanation. I have the tools to do it.
So I must publish it on the web.
Three options to view:
• Free straight from the web site with a picture in place of a video and perhaps making only the first few chapters available.
• If the reader thinks the book looks good, then pay a reasonable (small) fee and download the full book with an option to view it off-line in PDF with videos in Adobe AIR.
• Alternatively use a PDF with an open Internet connection with videos in Flash.
Perhaps I might put some security check so it cannot be copied too easily.
Now most of the book is based largely on my own experience with huge injections of imagination. It is also classical Sci-fi, and set the in twenty first century so almost everything except the Sci-fi, is in today's world and illustrating that would be fairly easy using royalty free images - (Sci-fi in videos and everyday things in pictures).
So that's the idea - take a long time; yes - so what's new?
What do you think? Is it a good idea? Will it sell?

The March of Technology

Wow! I am playing 'Catchup' like crazy.
Of course I do computer programming for a living, so I have never been far from what is happening on the Web, but C++ (my language of choice and expertise) is not close to the languages used on the Web.
What has changed more than anything is the quality of the presentation. My web-sites of 10 years ago that look like newsprint compared to the glossy magazine sites of today.
I loaded some of my original work and shuddered when I saw it on the screen, but it was not so much the appearance that astonished me, but it was the speed of my old websites - they simply flashed up onto the screen, almost instantaneously.
So the great looks has come at a cost. I am confident that once this old dog learns the new tricks I will have something to share with my younger colleagues.
Performance is not the only sacrifice with the new technology, but the tools that are necessary to produce the magazine glossy pages are not cheap. Thankfully they are easy to use and learn.

GraceBook - A Showcase of Grace

I am putting my writing on hold while I get back to my old fascination with the Internet.
I am in the process of conceptualising a huge new idea. If you are familiar with FaceBook then you know what I am planning – except it will be for supporters of Christian's whose full-time occupation is related to the furtherance or the Gospel of Christ.

Thanks to a new initiative from Google, I can design a Web Site and host it on the Google Resources for low start-up cost (other than my time of course).

My plan is that I will design Web Sites for Christian workers. I want to link these and other web sites, blogs etc., that I or others could design into a loose network around my own central website to form a hub and I will support the web sites I designed, for a year or so, more or less if necessary until the owner can come up to speed to manage it alone.

OK I’m rambling. Here are the principles:

• The community of websites will link to back to the central GraceBook Site. This will have a Social Networking structure like facebook.com or maybe more like twitter.com where supporters can network with one another in a Christian atmosphere, share (or tweet about,) pictures and stories, celebrate birthdays of the Christian workers and discuss, vote, select or suggest which are the best of the photos / stories / articles from individual web sites to showcase.
  
• The individual web sites will be owned by the Christian Worker (or by their Support Group if politics require anonymity.)This is for donation collection purposes which will go straight to the owner or a delegate.
• Technical support for the Website is open for anyone and controlled by the owner who will have all source code.
• Ultimately the running of the Network can be done by the community if it gets to big for me alone.
• The latest newsletter, videos and photo's will be clicked open from the Home Page. Previous docs will be available in an archive. This will keep the web sites alive and interesting and we will have something to discuss in the GraceBook Site.
  
• The primary purpose of the individual sites will be as a Showcase of Grace.
• The secondary purposes will be:

1. To keep in touch with mission contacts
2. To give feed back to supporters.
3. To win new supporters.
4. To stay real to supporters by sharing family photos, videos and events.
5. To provide an easy access to make donations.
6. To incorporate (share) other forms of Internet communication – e-mail, newsletters, blogs, tweets and important links.There is an API (computer programmer mechanisms to connect to twitter.com and Google Gadgets and applications) for just about everything we need.
   

• The central GraceBook site may also collect donations – Initially I would support the under supported individual sites – and if I need the support one day, I’ll keep a tithe for myself and give the rest away.
• My aim will be to use the latest technology by keeping the whole thing powered by Google. There will be no limit to where it can go.
• Finally, thanks to Google, there will be no infrastructure costs to start-up and before any charges start to accrue the owner should be able easily meet them from the income that the community will provide or else decide to close the site.

Well that is the vision. Please let me have your comments. It is a big project. I may need to get the help of others but the beauty is that it can start small.

Beware the religious

Well do I remember an alcoholic friend. He was a member of same church as I after his wonderful conversion.
If pressed he would tell of those days when his wife would come to haul him home from the gutter after a drinking spree.
He finally found the power to say No to booze and the joined the church where he found that power.
However his wife left him. I have always thought that she was too blame. He was my friend after all, but this morning as I thought again of this friend of long ago perhaps it was she who found that it was impossible to live with a religious person. Living with an alcoholic may have been easy in comparison.
Religion has after all been too blame for war, strife and almost any of humanities woes.
Is this not the reason I wrote Adam's Clay, if not to show that true Christian faith is against religion?
Jesus seemed to go out of his way to show up the religious leaders of His day as frauds and liars, but are not faith and religion the same thing?
Never! Faith is in what God does and religion is what I have done. The two cannot be further apart and explains the problem with religion and why it has caused so much trouble.

Ockham's razor slashes again.

At first it horrified me. I used Ockham and his razor to slash away the story parts from Adam's Clay, leaving no more than the essential thought. I found that my book had reasoned away the need for God's design of the World.
Since the book is a allegory of the Spirit filled Christian life you can understand my panic.
In the story Sam Goma has learned how to time-travel, both forward and back in time and while he does this he can change things - to design and change the design, for better or for worse, and do it over and over until he creates the design with an acceptable outcome - something I would normally expect God to determine.
This strange turn of event was precipitated by Sam's converts burning churches, temples and mosques ( a la Martin Luther's followers) and he is considering his options. One is to go back in time and change things and prevent the disaster.
This is when I applied the razor, but is the thought not simply profound? That we as God's instruments - Spirit-filled Christians - must carry out God's Plan.
If by some 'miracle' we discover time travel, it is not so that we can 'fix' a flaw in the design?

Here's the challenge - even if we cannot travel through time, we can still change the future - to implement God's plan and design for the future, by fixing things distorted and damaged by the law of sin and death.
Maybe if we start doing things correctly we may yet experience the wonders of time-travel.

A Letter to the 21st Century Church - Chapter 1

I bring you good news. Jesus is alive. Through him, we too are alive, because Jesus defeated death for us and saved us from two things. Wonder of wonders he saved us from SIN and DEATH and from everything associated with these two curses on humankind.

You may say to me, "Geoff, what do you mean by that?"

We cannot separate the two concepts, sin and death, by much. Like the meaning of words soul and spirit, they are closely associated and often used interchangeably, but then perhaps incorrectly.

Preachers and bible teachers major on the thought that Jesus died for our sin. We understand how the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross is sufficient, and satisfactory to take away the penalty that we would otherwise need to bear.

They may go as far as to explain that part of the penalty for sin is death, but that is about as much as we learn about it

As a result, while we understand clearly that God has forgiven and forgotten our sin, we are not at all sure about what has God done with death?

It can only mean that God has forgiven and forgotten our death, right?

Our experience tells us something different, so we reason that we understand things incorrectly.

The 'death,' which the bible associates with sin, that is gone and past away, cannot mean what we read. Therefore, we invent something that fits. Something that we cannot experience, but something we can only accept by faith, so we reason it must mean 'spiritual' death.

This introduces my first point; we so readily accept things that bible scholars tell us from the pulpit without question. If it means spiritual death then surely it must also means 'spiritual' sin.

Spiritual sin is as meaningless as spiritual death.

Geoff, are you saying that death means death, the death that happens when someone dies?

Yes, but we cannot accept it. Therefore, we don't, and so we die. As I read the Acts of the Apostles, I get the distinct impression that they believed that death had passed away. It is what they believed, well until many of the flock actually started dying and then they started preaching that some other generation would be the one, never to die.

More and more, today we hear the question, "Is our generation, that generation?"

Many thanks to Prophet Kobus of Spirit Word Ministries for bring this thought to our attention. See the link to Spirit Word Ministries on the left panel.