intersections

Can art change the world?

This is a question I've been wrestling with for the past three weeks. As I mentioned before, I'm speaking this Saturday at the SONscreen Film Festival. So, I've been reading and researching as much as I can about this question. I've been asking, WDJT? (What does Jesus think? - sorry, I couldn't resist).

If you come to SONscreen on Sabbath you'll hear the full scoop - and I'll probably post my message online when it's done - but here's the short version.

I think some art can change the world. In the specific case of storytelling - some stories can change the world. The mere act of hearing someone's story can affect change, plant new possibilities, create a new imagination. Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so. In my research this week, while cruising around the TED website (looking at Al Gore's new presentation) I ran across Pangea Day - a worldwide film festival on May 10, 2008. This is the creation of Jehane Noujaim, the writer and director of the documentary, Control Room, and the winner of the 2006 TED Prize. You can hear her talk about her vision for Pangea Day here.

Anyway, this is an incredible convergence of things for me, and I'll definitely be using this as an example of the way that film - the craft of visual storytelling - can affect change in our world. But people must engage, and I guess that's the point. Film can connect people and those relationships can change the world.

Keep reading to view the Pangea Day trailer.

My Delicious Library

For just less than a year I've been using Delicious Library to catalogue my books and it's really wonderful. If you use a Mac and love books, this is definitely the software for you. Recently, thanks to my friend Johnny Ramirez, I was introduced to a small (free) program that will make a webpage out of your Delicious Library catalogue. It's called DeliciWeb and you can download it here. It takes a while if you have a lot of books in your library, but it does make your library available for others to look at online.

You can connect to my library by clicking here. There are some 560 book in there, so it will take a bit to load. There's a link to request to borrow a book which sends an email to the owner of the library. It's not perfect. As best I can tell it's listing my books in random order in spite of the fact that I've check the "sort by author's name" checkbox in the Preferences. If anyone has any tips I'm all ears!

Mac OS X Leopard - I've got problems...

Okay, so I just upgraded my Mac PowerBook G4 to Leopard. It's very cool in many ways. My favorite upgrades are in Mail. "Data detectors" are really awesome. Mail automatically detects dates, addresses, phone numbers, etc and with a couple of clicks you can add people to your Address Book and dates to iCal.

However, I have some very annoying problems. Anyone who cares to chime in, I could use some help with these things (and yes, I downloaded the most recent patch, so I'm running 10.5.1).

1. My computer no longer detects my external hard drive.

2. I had to reinstall all my printers and now the print options are different on my copy machine/printer at work.

3. Mail is having a real hard time with SMTP servers. At work I can barely send email. Every email has a problem and after trying several times a few of them will sometimes go through. I don't have the same problem at home. I haven't changed any of the settings.

4. iCal is running REALLY SLOW. When I try to do anything I get the dreaded pinwheel. It sometimes takes 15-20 seconds between every action.

5. On top of everything else, I have less than 1 GB left on my 80 GB hard drive. Any ideas how to reduce the stuff on my hard drive. I've figured out the easy stuff, like moving data files to an external drive, but it makes a minimal impact. There's got to be something else eating up all my space.

6. And while I'm at it, does anyone else notice that Firefox totally consumes the CPU. Does that happen with other browsers?

Bottom line, my machine is completely maxed out. I've got to free up some resources. I'm already running the max memory (2 GB) so there's not a lot more upgrading I can do.