:: View on Viddler

(taken on my Treo 650)

I don’t often write about personal things here but I thought I would share a bit from this past weekend. My Son Josh was in his 2nd ever house leauge hockey tournament this past weekend. His team (Bradford Home Hardware) has been doing very well all season and we were hoping for a win. With his team putting forth some great effort and some awesome team work they did not disapoint.

They took the first game with a strong 10-0 win getting them in great spirits. Josh was covering defence (ususally forward) for most of the game for one of our players who was sick. As the game wenton the coach decided he would let Josh play forward – Josh really wanted to score. He scored his first goal on a breakaway and his second from a rebound in front of the net giving his team their 9th and 10th goals. At the end of this game the caoches from each team picked a MVP from the other team. Joshua was picked and given a great plaque. Both he and I were just a little excited

The second and third games were a little tougher but they were victoriuos winning 8-4 and 8-1 repectively. Josh scored 2 goals in game two to bring his tournament goals up to 4.

The championship game was played against another team from Bradford – their arch rivals – Bradford Audiotronics. Bradford seems to produce some great hockey players and was well represented at this tournameent. All year it has been a battle between these two teams. They have tied two games and Bradford Home Hardware has won all the rest – they have always been hard fought games. This final game was no different with some nail biting moments throughout. We had a couple of hit posts/crossbars – some great saves from our star goalie – in the end they came up on top: 5-3

I am really proud of Joshua and how he played – he gave 100% every game. Joshua finished the tournament with 4 goals, 3 assists and a huge smile. I want to thank his coaching staff for always doing a great job and working hard with these boys!

I have had a number of conversations about Facebook over the last couple of weeks. Facebook is a social networking web site – it is similar to MySpace or Xanga – but I think it is better.

I have used many other social networking type web sites in the past – most often as a tools to keep in touch with the youth that I work with at church. I started off with Live Journal – that is what all the kids were on – moved to Xanga – to MySpace – to Facebook…

I think I am at Facebook to stay! The web site is less about doing it your way and more about doing it the right way – don’t get me wrong – you have some control over how you would like to do stuff but it really doesn’t hinder how things should work in order to have a good user experience. In contrast – MySpace allows people to totally customize how their site looks – the majority of them (I visit) have broken every good design rule which makes their sites almost unusable – definitely not pleasant to use.

So here are my top 5 reasons to use Facebook instead of MySpace

1. The information comes to me.
In MySpace I have to poke around to all my “Friendsâ€? sites to see what they are up to – if I don’t I just don’t know. Facebook brings it all to me – it is telling me who is doing what – which groups people are joining – who has added new pictures… and so on.

2. Privacy
Facebook by default is more private – no one can see your account until you have labeled them as a friend – and even then you can choose for that person to see only your limited profile. In MySPace people can see a whole lot about you as the default setting.

3. Poking
Yup that is right – you can poke people in Facebook – still not sure why but I have to admit – it’s fun

4. Notes/Blog
In MySpace you can keep a blog – that is great but I already have a blog and don’t want to do it all over again somewhere else. Facebook allows you to pull an RSS feed of your blog right into your Notes in Facebook. What this basically means is that it automatically picks up what I write in my blog and presents it on my Facebook notes!

5. Groups
There is groups both in MySpace and in Facebook – I just like the way Facebook manages groups – they are easy to setup and manage – they are easy to invite people into and as mentioned earlier – the information about who is joining what groups comes to you – a great way to find out what groups your friends are in and what ones might interest you!

There are more things I love about Facebook – but these are my top 5 for now. If you don’t have an account – swing by the web site today and sign up – it’s free!

A quick note about the title – Hope in Facebook – this is a great success story for groups in Facebook. My friend’s sister – Hope – was in a brutal car accident about a week and a half ago – Jeff (my friend) setup a Facebook group to give updates called “Pray for Hope Wargaâ€?. Within just days the word had spread friend to friend and now there is almost 600 people in this group! If you want more information about Hope and her progress please feel free to join the group.

On Tuesday January 16th Hans Peter Royer spoke at the Tyndale community chapel. I enjoyed it quite a bit a thought you may like to hear it. You can listen to other Tyndale chapels here:

www.tyndale.ca/tucs/chapelaudio.php

Download audio: http://www.tyndale.ca/tucs/chapelaudio/2007-01-16.mp3

LISTEN:

I found this link via Nancy E. Schwartz’s blog post – Hook Your Audiences by Learning More about Learning Styles. It is a great online test to help you determine your learning style. Taking the test is easy and it will only take a few minutes. After you take the test you will get a link with explanations of the scales and the implications of your preference.

So what is your style?

My brother Tom passed this link off to me today and I thought it was rather interesting. This site host many free classic audio books – books like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain or Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. They are available in MP3 or M4B (for iPod). Here is a short clip from their web site

Welcome to the Free Classic Audio Books site where you can download free audio books in either mp3 format or m4b audio book format for iTunes and the iPod. Some of our audio books are human narrated Librivox recordings and others are narrated using the latest high quality text to speech voices.

Swing by and download some classics!

Here is a sample of the audio:
(Pilgrim’s Progress part 1)