Archive for April, 2006
I must admit that while I like some of Hillsong United’s songs, their CDs have usually left me with the uneasy feeling that something was missing and when they led worship at Soul Survivor last year, they didn’t manage to capture me the way that some of the other worship leaders did. Having said that, I think that “United We Stand” is the best recording they’ve ever produced.
Actually, I need to go further than that – it’s the best worship CD I have bought in a very, very long time… and I have bought a lot. What can I say, it’s just perfect. The moment I popped it into the CD player for the first time (in the car, in England, on the way over to a friend’s house), I was hooked. The two minute instrumental intro that seamlessly blends into the first song “The time has come”… and then it just never stops. 75 minutes of pure perfection, each song leading to the next, with occasional instrumental interludes. It all makes sense, the songs lead to each other both musically and lyrically. And as always with Hillsong songs, they are incredibly easy to learn, so even when listening to the CD for the first time, I found myself singing along after having heard the first half of the song. I really like how they manage to keep the songs simple, but don’t compromise on depth.
If I had to pick a favorite song, that would be a hard decision to make. “From the inside out” is one of the candidates, I had heard that one before on the acoustic “preview” CD that Hillsong releases three times a year and it’s a captivating song that immediately made it to the top of my “songs I sing in the shower” list. But there are so many others as well… I have to mention “The stand”, simply because we sang the chorus last year at Soul Survivor and now it’s a finished song that surprises me again and again. And “Take it all” – high powered, edgy, with those trademark sing-along lyrics – “… Jesus, we’re living for Your name, we’ll never be ashamed of You!”
Hillsong United: United We Stand, 15 Tracks, 75 minutes playing time, plus a 30 minute bonus DVD… money well spent.
Technorati : Hillsong, Jesus, christian music, review
April 20th, 2006
We’re back from London – too sad, we had such a great time and it would have been nice to stay a little longer. But all good things must come to an end, so did this trip. We met some friends and colleagues of mine and we did take a few pictures, which also show that we had reasonably good weather. In fact, despite the rumours, London weather is usually better than the weather where I live in Germany. Anyway, you can find the latest pictures in the gallery on this site – here’s the quick link.
Technorati : London, holiday, personal, pictures
April 17th, 2006
Well, the last few days were quite busy, so I still didn’t get to finish that article I promised on DRM. And now I’m going away again – for the first time in quite a long time, it’s not a business trip, instead I’m going on holiday for a week. London is calling… my favourite city in the world. I’ll spend a couple of days there with a friend, enjoying the sights and attractions (and I can assure you the real attractions are not the usual tourist things) and probably meeting a few friends from my London days.
This means that you’ll have to wait a bit longer for that article – I will deliberately stay away from the Internet while I’m away, just so that it becomes a real holiday. But I can now already promise you what’s next after that DRM article. I just finished an antispam gateway project for a regional ISP here in Germany, so the plan is to provide a little paper on how I did it and how it works – it’s all based on Open Source Software, so there are no trade secrets to hide from anyone, except maybe the few little extensions I made to the software that might come in handy if you’re trying to give your users more control over what the filter does. So stay tuned and come back soon… so will I.
Technorati : DRM, London, spamfilter
April 7th, 2006
While I’m still working on the promised DRM article and too busy to write anything else, I surfed to some blogs and my annoyance level grew high enough for this little rant. Why on earth do some bloggers think it’s a good idea to load music with their page? I mean, it’s great that they like it, so I’m happy for them to listen to it. Hey, they can even post a link for me to click on if I thin I might want to check it out as well. But *forcing* me to listen to it by loading it as part of the page? I don’t have the choice of switching off sound on my computer – I extensively use instant messaging for work and just need to hear the notifications. So the only choice I have is to keep a list of blogs I will never visit again… they may be informative, but they just can’t keep quiet.
By the way, the same thing seemed to be happening a while ago (at least in Europe) with some advertising banners on certain popular news pages. The first time it happened, I nearly had a heart attack… the second time it happened, I wrote a friendly letter to the editor. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one and I’m thankful that that kind of intrusive advertising seems to have pretty much disappeared. Hopefully, the same thing will happen to those noisy blogs…
Technorati : annoyance, blogging, music, noise
April 3rd, 2006