Wednesday, August 15, 2007

The Jesus you never knew...maybe...

..except those of you who grew up in Sunday School, you might recognize him:



Julie and I are going to the Acts 29 Network Boot Camp in Raleigh, North Carolina in September. I have been going through their assessment process to become a church planter with their organization, the boot camp is where we will get to meet other church planters, learn a whole bunch about planting a church, and we will also get our final assessment as to whether we will be a part of their organization. We are planning now on planting a church right here in Elk City. The assessment process has been very meticulous and I appreciate that as it has helped me to focus on what God is calling me to do, and it has helped to confirm that call within me.

For a time this summer I was very aggressively considering moving to another city and getting another job, but God has put a stop to that. I decided that I was sinning by constantly looking to the next thing thing to do in life instead of being who I was where I was. I was lacking integrity.

I was reminded of this one day when we took our kids to the duck park. We went to ride the train, and the whole time they were on the train the kids kept complaining about wanting to ride the carousel, and then we went to ride the carousel and the whole time they complained about wanting to putt-putt, and then we went to putt-putt and they kept talking about wanting a snack. By the end of the evening they said "Man we didn't get to do anything!". It struck me that this was how I was living my life and I needed to stop.

The video above is from an Act 29 church plant in Raleigh, vintage21 church. This is were we will be going for the boot camp. We can't wait!

Friday, August 3, 2007

Securing Gmail on unsecure networks

I found this article disturbing, and helpful:

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/33207/108/

This article shows a hack that if you are on a unsecured network where the packets can be sniffed, like an ethernet network or unsecured wireless network, then your gmail could be easily compromised as the hacker can easily sniff your session id out of the data stream and then basically clone your session on the gmail server using your session id and then having full access to your email account.

This pertains to other webmail applications as well and other general web applications that rely on session ids (which is almost all of them now)

To protect yourself from this (with gmail anyway) simply goto https://mail.google.com instead of http://mail.google.com (notice the https://) when logging into your gmail, if you are using google to host your email domain then you'll need to go to https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com.

Doing this (adding the https://) will make it so that your entire session is encrypted with SSL making it such that someone sniffing your traffic won't be able to get your session id's. As for you out there who don't believe that this really solves the problem, then you don't understand SSL, and that's ok just trust me.

You should get in the habit of doing this especially when you are using public wifi hotspots, or even if you are on an ethernet network where you don't know what else is on the network (like a sniffing computer or even a wireless access point connected to the ethernet network). Hotels would be a perfect example of a place where it would be easy to sniff out this kind of information.

Anyway, as an avid gmail user I found this helpful, and I thought I would pass it along.