Hi. I’m Josh, Ken’s son, and Emily (my sister) and I wrote this together.

She and I are two of only three people in the world today who can claim to have lived with Ken Lewis for two or more decades. What that means is that I’m a member of a small, elite crew of Ken Lewis experts who know what he’s really like, in all circumstances.

I’ve read Exodus 20 and I know there’s no command to “tease thy parents”, but I just know so many things about him that you probably don’t know, I have to share. For instance:

• I know what he’s like while travelling for days on end across the country in a Volkswagen Jetta. 46 of the 50 states, and parts of Canada and Mexico. Because of that, I also know that the very first thing he does when he gets into a motel room is turn on the air conditioner under the window. Full blast!
• I know he’s a late laugher. It’s not that he gets the joke later. I think it’s that he enjoys it along with everyone else, and then goes back one more time to savor it a little more.
• I know more about jazz than almost anyone else my age, all due to him. I’ve spent hours with him listening to all the greats.
• I know how frugal he is. I’ve watched him laying on his back under one of those aforementioned Volkswagen Jettas in the garage, doing who knows what to save a few bucks on a mechanic while an AM radio on a nearby shelf plays a barely-decipherable baseball game. Probably the Reds.
• I know one of his most-used phrases is “C’mere, let me show you something.” He is constantly sharing what he loves.
• I know how much he loves to whistle. In the late 80s, during a road trip, Emily and I conspired to see if we could trick him into whistling a song he would otherwise hate, without realizing what he was whistling. So we started humming Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”. He couldn’t stand Madonna, but he didn’t know the tune. So we hummed for a few minutes, and pretty soon he was whistling right along, totally unaware.
• I know he loves recording important events, just like my mom does. When Emily and I were young, they had an actual Super-8 silent movie camera, and in order to get enough light for this thing to record well indoors, he had a set of intense white floodlights. So every Christmas when it was time to unwrap the presents, before the camera came out, this blinding array of floodlights would come out and get set on a stand, casting shadows as deep as astronauts on the moon, and smoke would rise slowly off of them and float up to the ceiling as we opened our gifts in a brilliant flood of pure white light. Christmas doesn’t feel the same once you get used to those, and then more modern cameras come out.
• I know something scandalous about his toaster. It’s a Sunbeam, and it has a high wattage they can’t sell anymore. But because of that, the toast it makes is perfect. He has actually made a multi-toaster comparative chart demonstrating his Sunbeam’s unique qualities.
• I know how he preaches. I’ve seen about a thousand Ken Lewis sermons live and in person.

So given how much I know about Ken Lewis, and how much experience I have in this particular subject area, I hope what I’m about to tell you holds extra weight. You may already know, but I want to confirm it. It’s just this: Ken Lewis is who he appears to be. He’s a man of great integrity.

It seems simple, and it kind of is, but it’s also extremely rare. I’ve spoken to so many pastors’ kids who are disillusioned in their faith, or left the faith completely once they got into their 20s, and you can usually trace their lack of faith back to the hypocrisy of their fathers.

But not my father.

It’s the faith that I saw every single day in him and in my mom that has kept pulling me back towards Christ over and over again, making me want to enjoy what he’s enjoying.

And what he’s enjoying is Jesus.

So I want you all to know without a doubt that the love Dad gave to you when he served you is completely real. 100%. He’s not perfect, but he is who he says he is. He’s the same guy at home that he is behind the pulpit. His passion for Jesus is gigantic and authentic, and Jesus’ love for him shows through in what he does and says, and it’s beautiful. I’d guess we’re all here, in part, because we’re glad we got to see that love and experience it in person.

Dad, thank you for your humor. Thank you for your integrity. Thank you for your love and your passion for Christ and His bride.

Jason liked it, so the recording ended up on the Table Project’s blog. Check it out:

The Table Project: We are all in ministry now

Hey Josh,

I was looking through the internet to try to find the best way to submit an idea for an iPhone/iPod accessory that has not yet been available and I stumbled upon your blog. A little about me: My name is [redacted] and I am currently attending (an American university) and I am a double major in Accounting and Finance. It’s a long-shot but I was just curious if you had any ideas or recommendations, advice, contacts, etc. that could help me in finding a way to get this idea to the right people in order for me to make some money to be able to pay off college. Thank you for your help and any further help would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

[Redacted]

Here’s my response:

[Redacted],

Since I don’t know you and I’ve only got one paragraph of (kinda vague) information here, I’m going to make some assumptions, and they might be wrong assumptions. Please forgive me if that’s the case.

Turning an idea into money is extremely hard. In this industry, people don’t pay for ideas. Even good ones. They might pay when all the details (and I mean all the tiny, tiny details) are fleshed out, and they’re holding something in their hand. But there are thousands of people who are out there saying “I’ve got this great idea. Let me just find some people to work for free and make it reality and I’ll just take 10% of the profits and leave the rest to them as payment for their work.” Those folks go nowhere.

If you want to go that route, I’m not sure what to tell you. Ask for help on Craigslist or on a local university message board and see if someone will have coffee with you, I suppose. If money is the final goal, you’ll learn a lot less, have little to be proud of and little to build from.

The category you want to be in is the group of people who are passionate (obsessed?) enough about their idea to build a team, get into the details, learn a lot, work extremely hard, and probably even build a prototype. Or a hundred iterations of a prototype. It turns out you have to put your own life into the thing to make it really worth something. And when you work hard, get into the details and learn a lot, even if your whole project ends up failing, you come out the other side wiser and more able to succeed next time. That’s something no one can take away from you. If you can find a team of people who see it the same way, no one will be able to stop you. You don’t need any of my connections, you just need to find those people.

If you want to go the better, harder route, it might look a lot like the shorter, weaker one in the very beginning, but after a lot of hard work it’ll eventually lead to places like Kickstarter. You can check out the Elevation Dock for an example of a well-done idea (where the details really mattered and the hard work was easily evident) that actually led to a real working product and clearly quite a lot of money. (Almost $1.5M in that case.) Another such case is the Recoil Winder. You can tell when you listen to the video that David Alden spent a lot of time working on the idea before he ever went to Kickstarter.

I hope that’s helpful, [Redacted]. Good luck pursuing your idea!

Josh

Steve Jobs died today. I got involved in technology because of him. I moved across the country thousands of miles from family to work for his company for six years. He changed my life. And tonight, it really makes me think.

I’m left contemplating the fact that two of the men I admire most are dead. Initially, I was confused about what to do about this. Despair? No. Apathy? Absolutely not. But it seems clearer now after some thought. What we’re witnessing is a changing of the guard. As the man said himself, death “clears out the old to make way for the new.” The older generation is passing away.

But what are they making way for?

Even without the answer to that question, here we are, walking forward. Those who went ahead of us are passing beyond the veil. And it should strike us now that we’re standing at the front of the line. Here we are. We’re standing right where they were only a little while ago. There’s no need to get scared. That’s pointless. We just got here, we’re not done.

And now the spotlight swings back from the veil and onto our faces. No one is in our way now.

It’s our turn to create. It’s our turn to inspire. It’s our turn to push the human race forward.

It’s our turn. Let’s go.

But why? It’s not just that everything is a remix (although that’s true). It’s that when a creator catches a glimpse of beauty, despair, passion, joy, it makes the labor of their next creation a little easier for them. We learn how to create by taking in the creations of others. We learn how to shape an experience for someone else by having experiences of our own. So, you want to know how to make someone weep for joy? Have someone make you weep for joy. Even if you can’t quite grasp the whole picture having wept for joy just once, you’re a little closer to understanding how it might work than you were before it became a personal experience.

To that end, I take in a lot of created things, and it’s my goal to try to be an appreciator. And not just an appreciator of created things, but also of the people who created them. When I think about my heroes, they’re all people who create things. Jim Henson, Steve Jobs, Jason Fried. These guys are some of my heroes. And they all know how to deeply study and appreciate the things they see. Things regular people routinely look past.

Take Jim, for instance. He once wrote this:

“I find that it’s very important for me to stop every now and then and get recharged and reinspired. The beauty of nature has been one of the great inspirations in my life. Growing up as an artist, I’ve always been in awe of the incredible beauty of every last bit of design in nature. The wonderful color schemes of nature, which always work harmoniously, are particularly dazzling to me… Working as I do with the movement of puppet creatures, I’m always struck by the feebleness of our efforts to achieve naturalistic movement. Just looking at the incredible movement of a lizard or bird, or even the smallest insect, can be a very humbling experience.”

There are several categories of things that often inspire me, and several companies that regularly create things I deeply appreciate. I’m lucky enough to have worked for Apple on the Mac OS X team for about six years, and Apple is easily at the top of my list. But in addition to Apple, I’m constantly inspired by the guys at Penny Arcade, by Valve Software, by Nintendo, and as cliché as it sounds, by Pixar.

This weekend, I was really struck by the ending of Portal 2 (a game made by the aforementioned Valve Software). It’s an amazing game, but something surprised me about the end because it contained an echo of all the other companies in my list. It was a hint, if you will, about one of the ingredients in a masterful creation.

In a nutshell, it’s this: love your creation.

I’ll try to avoid spoilers, but the ending of Portal 2 brings shocking clarity to Valve’s passion for the universe and characters they’ve created. Put another way, if the folks at Valve weren’t deeply in love with (dare we say obsessed with?) these characters, the bittersweet elements of the ending they created would never have occurred to them. Because something lesser would’ve been acceptable. Still, through the final sequences in the game, I could see the expression on their faces as they looked into mine: “We are so proud of this. We hope you love this deeply, because we love it so, so much that we can hardly bear to say goodbye to it.”

It was like watching a father walk his daughter down the aisle.

To say it was emotionally resonant would be an understatement. And that’s what we’re after, isn’t it? Portal 2 was a fantastic puzzle game, sure, but it was more than that. The thing you remember when you walk away is how it felt to be in that universe, to meet those characters and interact with them, and get to know them and love them within their reality. And that’s the thing that will make you come back next time, not the enticement of more surfaces onto which you can place portals. (Though that’s certainly attractive.)

Then I thought of Pixar. Toy Story 3. Could it have been any clearer how much Pixar loves Woody and Buzz than what we saw at the end of Toy Story 3? It’s not possible to take your characters any more seriously than that. To respect them any more deeply. They went out with unprecedented sweetness, and it was sad and perfectly beautiful.

Apple? Wow. They’re obsessed in a way the rest of their industry can barely tolerate, let alone understand. Exhibit A, the phrase “There’s not a straight piece of glass on this building.” They take what they do seriously and they love it deeply, down to a level of detail others can’t even fathom. In some ways, it almost works against them. People think of buying an Apple device like it’s tantamount to joining a cult. Why? Because the use of something Apple has made contains the emotion of those who made it, and you feel that when you use it. That is, unless you realize you’d prefer to resist it.

But back to creation.

Something interesting happens when you really love the thing you’re creating. When you love it deeply enough, it teaches you how to improve it and make it better. More useful, more beautiful, more resonant. And when you learn those lessons and apply them, you love the creation even more, which then leads you to even more lessons. It’s a spiral that continues upward, and I have no idea where it stops.

So let’s find out. Love your creation.

Yes, it’s me.

Listen, I know we don’t talk as often as we used to, and I regret that. I’m sorry. But I want to introduce you to the reason I’ve been so quiet. It’s something beautiful. Something graceful and seamless. Something with massive potential. Something that has taken most of my energy for the last two years of my life. Something I’ve been actively prepared for by much more than the last two years.

Tomorrow, it’s no longer a test. It becomes real. Tomorrow is a day so many have prayed for, maybe without even realizing it.

It’s called The Table.

Have you ever wanted a place where you could be real? Where you could drop the mask, drop your personal brand for a second, stop talking about skin-deep topics and show the fractures in your skeleton? We’re in pain, right? Some days are bad, some are better. And yet we know we can’t get away with much more than hinting about our pain when we’re broadcasting to the world. So many people don’t get it. So many don’t want to.

I’ve always thought the place to do that stuff was at my church. These are the people who are there to walk with you through the slime, the fear, the hurt, the ugliness. These are the people who are humble enough to serve you when you’re down, and tough enough to not wimp out on you when you’re defiant and running for the cliff. And you don’t just receive that. You give it, too.

I want to be honest with you: if your church hasn’t done that for you, maybe you haven’t been to church.

Ask your church to sign up (don’t go alone) and start loving and serving each other in a way you may have never done.

Get real. Pull up a seat.

Consider, agree or disagree, and enjoy either way.

1. Everything in life that you truly need, in the deepest sense of “need”, has been and will continue to be given to you by God.
2. If God intends for you to have something, no one can take it away from you.
3. Therefore, anything you do not have, you do not truly need.

I have a deep desire to be a person who makes real things that are useful and delightful. I’ve been working really hard at The Table Project for many months, and I’ve been learning a lot about hard work and how to sustain it. I’ve also learned that the work affects me just as I affect the work. I’ve changed because of my work.

One of the main things that has changed within me is the heightened value I place on silence. Silence of many kinds.

When I’m making something, I’m deeply motivated by the anticipation of discovery on the part of the person that will receive my creation. Will it help them? Will it make them smile? Have I thought through all the ways they’ll use it and considered everything from their perspective? I can’t see their reaction if I don’t finish what I’m making. They won’t benefit unless I do a great job. I create with those thoughts in my mind. But it’s not as simple as that. You may not agree with what I’m about to say, but stick with me.

I’m learning about the demotivational power of talking.

There is a vast, gaping difference between talking about doing a thing and really doing it. I have been the crowned and reigning king of “talking about doing a thing” in the past, and this blog stands as a testament to that.

On the simplest level, talking is demotivational because great creation comes from a quiet, solitary place, not from meetings and committees. On a deeper level, talking about what you’re doing and giving people a preview of the future is demotivational because you may be receiving praise which you haven’t yet earned. That’s extremely dangerous. When you go back to your quiet, solitary place to finish that cool thing you just told your friend about, their praise is still ringing in your ears, reducing the reward that is still beyond your reach, and slowing you down. You can’t afford that tradeoff. It would’ve been better to not tell them what you had done until it was ready. And at that point, there’s less need to tell, because you can show.

This newfound belief affects me in a few ways. You’ll notice, for instance, that this is only the 6th blog entry I’ve posted this year, and the year is half over. Last year, I had written 15 entries in the same amount of time.

And it’s not due to Twitter. This graph of my tweets per month, particularly since last July, will tell you a strange little story as well.

I’m not doing this on purpose. It’s a habit that has naturally evolved. I’m no longer the guy who tweets 500+ times each month because I now realize I don’t have 500+ worthwhile things to say to that audience each month. It’s not censorship, it’s editorial and it’s filtering. It’s respect for the listener, I hope.

Speaking of listeners, they’re also at risk in this problem. I’m growing tired of bloggers and content producers of all kinds that don’t know when to shut up and reflect. My apologies if that seems rude, but if you’re publishing to meet a weekly quota, you’re doing it wrong. Don’t game the crowd; make something of quality. If you have a lot to say, that’s fine (look at the length of this entry), but please don’t assume you can take our attention 9 times a week because your analytics tell you that’s your ideal posting frequency to generate higher traffic and ad revenue.

But if you happen to make 9 quality things that week, by all means, share them all. Show me what you’ve done. My favorite blog, Daring Fireball, is quite noisy, and I’ve never regretted reading it. The content is good. It earns its place.

This all relates to the reason that I rarely if ever go to the Social Media Breakfasts anymore (although I really like many of the people), but I participated in the Overnight Website Challenge this year and found it very rewarding. I hope to do it again.

Less talk, more rock. Fewer conferences and meetings, more product and creativity.

There are downsides for me and others in this change, too. In the midst of focusing constantly on creating The Table, it’s become harder for me to carry on conversations in general, and it’s nearly impossible now for me to be in the moment completely. My mind has become so focused that I’ve caught myself thinking things like, “How can this conversation/situation benefit The Table?” even while spending time with family and friends. It’s pretty weird, and it’s something I’m trying to address. Focus shouldn’t have to lead to workaholism or personal narrowness.

Because of all these thoughts and some conversations I’ve seen on the web lately, I’ve decided it would make sense to disable comments on this blog for the foreseeable future. I want it to be really clear that I still deeply treasure all your past comments, and I haven’t removed the ones that have been made. They are a part of a permanent record and a precious heirloom to me. Many of you have corrected me and changed my mind on various topics, or made me laugh, or warmed my heart, and the evidence is right there in the thread.

I still want to hear from you in almost any way you’d like to have a conversation with me. If you want to contact me, you can do so in any number of ways, including directly from this blog. If you want to just say you liked what I wrote, there’s a little Facebook “Like” button at the bottom of each post, even in the RSS feed. I’d love a click. If you want to respond publicly to what I’ve said, making your own blog entry and linking back to this one would be the best way to do that for many reasons. Creating a blog has become so wonderfully, deliciously simple that there’s no reason anymore not to have one if you want one. Go for it! I might even write a public response if you’re making good stuff.

I hope that the lack of comments here allows you to focus a little more on your own work, say what you wanted to say a little more quickly (perhaps with a single button click) and even consider whether certain things need to be said at all.

Now, go to your quiet, solitary place and make something.

It’s really a never-ending journey. I imagine I could do another one of these retrospectives in 2019, and track another ten years of progression. The secret is to hate yourself and the work you produce. If everything you make is trash, then you’ll continually push yourself to produce something that won’t fill you with shame. If you’re lucky, after a lifetime of self-doubt, maybe you’ll produce something you can be proud of before you fall over dead.

It may be hilarious, but it’s not a joke. That right there is pure gold creative wisdom. And a little close-to-home for me, personally.

Thank you, Gabe.

I’m still trying to figure out what the pinch point between my love affair with The Cardigans and Anamanaguchi a month ago (yes, those are Amazon Affiliate links) and the explosion of a mostly new set of artists means. My theory: I’ve been extremely heavy on one particular (mostly unchanging) playlist in February 2010.

If you use last.fm to track your music listening habits, you can use LastGraph too.

Read it.

There’s one reaction that has been repeated by countless friends that I’d like to write about and analyze more deeply. The reaction generally involves a mix of anger and dismissal of the product for multiple reasons. You’ll hear things like…

• What’s the big deal? It’s just a big iPhone.
• I can’t use something that doesn’t do multitasking / background processes.
• It doesn’t support Flash? How can that be?
• It doesn’t have a camera? It needs to have a camera! It’s useless without one.
• My laptop is more flexible and powerful. Why do I need this?

The list is much longer than that, but you get the idea. The central theme in this school of thought is that the person wanted it to have X, and it doesn’t have X, and it must therefore be a low-quality, worthless product. These folks spend a lot of time explaining why they won’t be buying one, as if it’s interesting news. They often blame Steve’s Reality Distortion Field when others defend it as a good product.

You’ll recognize the thought pattern from the discussions they were having when the first iPhone was released. It had a low-quality camera, it didn’t have GPS, it needed to run 3rd-party applications, it needed more storage space, it was too expensive, blah, blah, blah. What these people mean to say is, “I have a checklist in my head! Design according to my checklist or your product isn’t worth praise!”

I’d like to tell you why they’re wrong, and why their checklists don’t matter. In a word: focus.

Let me introduce you to a user. We’ll call her Jane. She didn’t follow the Apple announcement today because she’s not a geek. In fact, she won’t hear about the iPad for another week or two. She has an Internet connection at home, and she just uses it with her old Windows machine. She’ll go home tonight, check her email and a couple of her favorite websites on it. She likes Facebook, too. Beyond that, she’ll use her PC to write her Christmas letter every December, or play Solitaire, but that’s really all the machine is for. Tonight, she’ll curse at it softly because it’s been slowing down a lot lately. She can’t figure out why, and she doesn’t want to pay someone to fix the problem. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t use the computer that much anyway. She has other hobbies, and other things to do, and she’s not really into technology.

Because of the kind of content on this blog, most of my readers are not Jane. But Jane is everywhere. Jane is the most common computer user in the world. And the fact is, Jane doesn’t need a computer. She needs something less than a computer. She needs something she can type on, and play a few games on. Is she going to be doing a lot of audio and video editing? No. Desktop publishing? No. Does she care that she can’t run such-and-such as a background process? No way. She needs something that can get online easily without a lot of weird configuration options and hullabaloo. She needs a device that knows how to focus. A device that knows how to be less.

But she doesn’t want to spend, like, $1000 and end up getting more than she needs. We’ve already seen she doesn’t need much. Should we give her a netbook, so she can have all the inherent complexities of Windows with a user interface originally designed for a screen twice that size and a finger-achingly miniaturized keyboard and mousing surface and a million options in a nested-folder file system? Should we?!

You hate Jane, don’t you. Just say it. Go ahead, give her that netbook and slap her in the face. You jerk.

Jane needs the iPad. Jane would fall in love with the iPad. You may not be Jane, and that’s OK. I’m not Jane either. But let’s not insult Jane’s iPad. It’s focused, and it’s beautiful, and it’s good at what Jane wants to do. Maybe some day they’ll come out with an iPad that meets the checklist in your head. Until then, let’s show some respect for Jane.

On December 9th, 2009 at 9:09pm, my dear son Jack Edward Lewis came into the world. Some of the official paperwork says 9:10pm, but I was watching the clock. Also, 9:10pm has one less “9″ in it. C’mon.

We took his first name from his great-grandfather Jack Hastings, who passed away in the Spring of 2009 and is greatly missed. Grandpa’s first name was actually John, but everyone called him Jack. (The fact that C.S. Lewis’s nickname was “Jack” is a coincidence. We like C.S. Lewis, but maybe not that much.)

Jack Edward’s middle name is from my dearest friend Eddie Oroyan, whose passion for Christ and totally unbridled energy through creativity are an inspiration to me. I am lucky to call him my friend.

I’d like to tell you a bit about Jack’s labor story, and also about his personality, now that we’ve had the chance to get to know him a little.

Our labor story starts late at night on December 7th. I didn’t tweet about this at the time. (See? You guys don’t just get all the same information later and longer than Twitter. This is new stuff.) Steph began having very regular contractions 5 or 6 minutes apart, and we did the classic drive-85-down-the-highway rush to the hospital at 10pm. But the contractions slowed down and stopped after about an hour, so by 2:30am on the 8th, we were sent back home. No baby.

Early on the 9th, Steph started having more contractions and pains of other sorts, and we thought it would be wise to go in again, so we did. The doctors decided that because Steph was already dilated to 5 or 6 centimeters (!) she was already technically in labor, and since we were in the midst of a blizzard, they would rather start a pitocin drip and get the boy out than send us home. So that’s what we did. And there was much rejoicing.

The pitocin started at 2pm, and things were actually quite calm and pleasant until around 7pm. We watched most of Live Free or Die Hard, which happened to be on TV at the moment. We chatted casually on the phone with family. At around 8:30pm, labor became intensely painful for Steph, for about 25 minutes. Half way through that time, one of the less-experienced delivery nurses made the silly mistake of thinking she would encourage Steph by saying, “Oh, don’t worry sweetie, we think we can have him out by 11 ‘o clock!” Meanwhile, Steph was thinking she could handle 10 or 15 more minutes of that kind of pain before losing it. Note to nurses: when you’re making crazy, baseless guesses within earshot of your patient, make them encouraging guesses, or don’t make them at all.

At about 9pm, everything calmed down, the pain dropped significantly, and Steph knew it was time for Jack to enter our world. I remember the doctor who was to deliver Jack getting to our room only moments before delivery, frantically stretching her blue nitrile gloves over her fingers while the nurses scurried around the bed. She was the voice of calm wisdom Steph needed at the end of the bed, and she performed perfectly. Jack arrived without issue, almost easily. Steph described it later as “peaceful,” which is mind-blowing if you consider what was actually happening.

During the last few minutes of birth, I had my iPhone start recording audio, and I set it on a table beside the birthing bed. I’ve trimmed the recording a bit for time, and Steph has very graciously given me permission to share this audio with you. These are the actual moments leading up to Jack’s birth, and you’ll hear his very first cry here. I like to think of this as a little gift of a magical moment that we can share with friends and readers.

Jack’s Birth by joshlewis

I want to describe Jack’s personality and my and Steph’s experience of Jack to you, but I’ve found it’s difficult to describe a person without describing them in relative terms. So I hope you’ll forgive me if, at least in this entry, I describe Jack as a series of contrasts with Caleb.

Steph’s recovery from Jack’s birth was extremely easy compared to her recovery from Caleb’s birth. After Caleb’s birth, we were in the hospital for 5 days, the first two of which Steph was a little incoherent and extremely physically weakened due to a magnesium sulfate IV. (You do not want to have magnesium sulfate running through your veins unless the other option is likely death.) Steph was hooked up to cables and wires and tubes for several days, and she required constant supervision. It was honestly scary, and we were without family, living in California. With Jack, Steph’s minimal IVs were removed almost immediately after birth, and she was able to get up, walk around, talk to people, whatever. Pretty simple! We used to think nice births were the exception and Caleb’s was more normal. It turns out Caleb’s was a rare exception, and many births are as simple as Jack’s was. Whadda ya know!

That parallel continues in their early personalities, too. Caleb was a screamer, and an incredibly loud one at that. Jack, on the other hand, is really quiet. He cries a little, but not loudly. He quiets down quickly when you give him what he needs. He is generally very calm. We haven’t gotten him to smile very often yet, but I’m sure that will change.

There is just one funny little way in which Jack’s noise exceeds that of Caleb. When Jack is asleep, he often has little bouts of all kinds of noise. He’ll grunt and squeak and strain, perhaps even cry a little. But he doesn’t wake up during the whole thing. Well, heck, we’ve already gone crazy with audio in this entry. What’s a little more going to hurt? OK. Here.

Jack, Asleep by joshlewis

We hear sounds like this throughout the night. Thankfully, it’s become less frequent as he has gained a few weeks of age, but he’s not a silent sleeper by any means. Sometimes, as I lay there in the dark, I imagine him with a tiny weight set, benching iron the size of a drinking straw piercing bagel halves, doing reps in the quiet of the morning. Feel the burn, little one!

The passage from the Bible we chose for Jack’s “life verse” is Jeremiah 17:5-8. It reads like this in the ESV:

Thus says the Lord: Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come. He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.

Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.

Jack, in your life there will be many things competing for your ultimate trust and reliance. For the affections of your heart. You could choose to trust yourself. You could trust money. You could put your trust in other people. But you’ll notice the Bible doesn’t say “if heat comes,” it says “when heat comes.” It’s a guarantee. But there’s another guarantee to match it. Drink deeply of the Water of Life. His streams will never run out, and you will prosper from root to fruit. Trust Him!

I suppose methods used to measure the quality of a playlist are a much-debated thing. We could get into deep aesthetic discussions about how one song can lead into the next and bring the listener through “arcs”, and there’s nothing wrong with seeing playlists that way. But to me, there’s a simple beauty in playing the hits, straight up, without any pretentiousness to it. We got pretty close to that here. I really love about 20 of these 25 songs, even if most of them hail from deep throwback territory.

• White Town – “Your Woman”
• Cake – “Never There”
• The Cardigans – “Lovefool”
• EMF – “Unbelievable”
• Junior Senior – “Move Your Feet (Radio Edit)”
• Beck – “Where It’s At”
• U2 – “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”
• Thomas Dolby – “She Blinded Me With Science”
• Cut Copy – “Lights & Music”
• Cake – “Short Skirt/Long Jacket”
• They Might Be Giants – “Birdhouse in Your Soul”
• Simple Minds – “Don’t You Forget About Me”
• Cold War Kids – “Hang Me Up to Dry”
• Phoenix – “Everything Is Everything”
• Shannon – “Let the Music Play (David Delano, Dirty Lou & Swedish Egil Remix)”
• Hot Chip – “Over and Over”
• Yello – “Oh Yeah”
• Beck – “Devils Haircut”
• Scissor Sisters – “Take Your Mama”
• Madonna – “Beautiful Stranger (William Orbit Radio Edit Version)”
• Radiohead – “Karma Police”
• Gorillaz – “19-2000″
• Cut Copy – “Hearts On Fire”
• The White Stripes – “My Doorbell”
• The B-52′s – “Rock Lobster”

Perhaps the perfect playlist would use the Genius feature as a starting point, and then take manual tweaking and editing to bring it to perfection.

Caleb, Steph and I were in Caleb’s room with the lights off, playing with one of Caleb’s baby toys we had just brought out from storage. Caleb laid under it as its lights flashed quickly to music. Then:

Josh: “Boy, I hope he’s not epileptic. This would be a bad toy in the dark.”
Steph: “Well, if he is, he’s already laying on the floor, so that’s good.”

For the record, I like Steph’s method better.

Trouble seeing this video? Watch it on YouTube

(via Your Tech Weblog)

I will say this: it is my personal opinion that the writing of John Piper may be considerably thicker than the writing to which many people are acclimated. Thicker theologically, thicker in structure, etc. Having said that, the reward of understanding this writing is easily worth the additional effort, even if you are not a “religious person.” Consider it seriously. His words have changed my life, and I want to share them with you whatever your religious background might be.

John Piper’s most widely recognized book is Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. And to the end of sharing these precious words with you, I’m happy to pass on the information that christianaudio.com is offering the unabridged audiobook of Desiring God for free for the next two weeks! Just follow that link, set up your account on the site, use the coupon code shown on that page, and you’re done without paying a cent. No tricks.

Enjoy! Let me know what you think of the book. I’m about 80 minutes in right now, and really enjoying it so far.

A few stats:

• We had over 1000 tweets during the event itself, not to mention several hundred before and after the official start and end times.
• 133 people tweeted about Cthalloween in total.
• Our top-volume tweeter was @JimGleeson with 255 tweets! What can I say? Wow. That’s 4.5 times more tweets than the #2 in volume.
• The top five in volume after Jim were @Servantofproces, @officergleason, @falconesse, @theatermonkey, and @wordwill. Nice work, guys.
• @arstechnica was kind enough to tweet about our game and give us a few more players.

If you had a favorite tweet, a good link, or an observation about the event, post it in the comments and enlighten us all!

Update: It is crucial to mention that our event’s fantastic, green-tentacled “Twitterthulhu” icon was created by none other than John Kovalic of Dork Tower fame, and sponsored by gameplaywright.net. Many thanks!

If you find yourself craving raw data (and c’mon, who doesn’t?) we have some good news for you! Download this zip file to get a raw SQLite and MySQL dump of every Cthalloween-related tweet. Pick your database flavor and have a swim in the data. Hooray!

Last year, we orchestrated War of the Worlds 2.0 on Twitter. Many people had fun, and Wired wrote about it.

You didn’t think we’d stop there, did you? No, of course not. You’re a reasonable person.

I know many of you may be unfamiliar with the work of H.P. Lovecraft. That’s perfectly OK. In fact, here, let me help you.

This weird fiction author created many strange and frightening things. And amongst them, a horrible creature that has taken the world of sci-fi horror by storm. This creature’s name is Cthulhu. This Halloween, Cthulhu and his evil buddies are coming back, and you can play along at home. We’re calling this open-ended fiction game “Cthalloween.”

If you’d like to participate or follow along, you’ll find the Cthalloween wiki and @cthalloween on Twitter to be of great service in your endeavors.

Enjoy! And… do try to stay sane, OK?