February 2010 Please note that some links may have expired due to the ever-changing nature of the Internet. Let us know if you find anything unexpected or offensive so we can remove or change a link. Youthwork magazine and CCP ltd are not responsible for the content of external sites accessed from youthwork.co.uk In search of space Do you need unlimited space to download, store files and create archives that won’t slow your computer down? Look no further, John Allan has been searching... Times change. Somewhere in the loft, I still have the first mini-computer I ever bought. I used to take it everywhere. It wrote letters, kept my diary, calculated my finances, stored addresses and sermon notes. Loads of Youthwork articles have been written on it too. All my friends admired it and wanted one; somebody I knew even went out and ordered six for his company. You could just do so much with it, because the memory was massive! 132 kilobytes! Well, today the cheapest refurbished laptop you can buy at PC World has 524,288,000 kilobytes of memory inside it (I just checked). I must be getting old (yes, the policemen look younger too). But don’t miss the point: in youth work these days, with movie files, digital music and complicated Powerpoints moving around the Internet all the time, we’re all humping massive stacks of gigabytes from Point A to Point B without really thinking about it. So it’s important that you can do this efficiently. We’ve all suffered the experience of sitting for hours waiting for a vital movie clip to download, or trying to cram an essential presentation on to a flash drive only to see the dread message ‘Destination file full...’ But fortunately, there’s an Internet solution to just about every file-shifting problem you might ever confront. For example: sometimes you need to transfer files to your mobile phone. How do you do it? Filetac is the easiest answer; upload the file to their site, and then transferring it to your phone is lightning fast. And that’s not all: you can also store stuff permanently on Filetac too, sending automatic e-mails to your young people or team members to tell them how to find it, and you can shrink up to thirty files into a zip for people to download. All the pictures and sounds of last year’s youth group programme in one handy file! Suppose you want to send your file to several different storage points, so that people can download it from various places? After all, you don’t want too many querulous ‘I tried your link but it didn’t work’ replies. Well, UploadGround will send your file off to twelve different filesharing networks at once, so one of them should work! Also, if you want to store a really, really massive file, Upit.to has no storage limits, allowing a whopping 5 Gb per file. So does File Dropper. What if you want to begin an online storage dump called ‘Youth group History’ or ‘All my talks’, which you can add to (or subtract from) over time? That’s so easy with Drop.io, which we’ve mentioned before. Admittedly, you have only 100 Mb per drop... but you can create an infinite number of them. And every single one will hold 776 times as much as my ‘really big’ mini-computer. Times change. YOUTUBE PARABLES The film The Soloist is a brilliant true-story parable of grace in action. (Except there are differences from the Jesus story too: human acts of grace aren’t totally effective!) See what I mean by reading the synopsis, playing the trailer, then showing your group the real life’ story as told by 60 Minutes. Hook it in to Psalm 40, 2 Samuel 9, or Romans 5:1-6. EFFICIENCY EXPERT Are you good at making rapid, accurate decisions? If it took you more than five seconds to answer... probably not. Try Hunch.com, where you ask a question and the website shoots questions back at you, gradually refining your thinking until you’re ready to consider a range of options. Might just help you bite the bullet and make that big decision you’ve been putting off all year. The advice can be pretty varied and unexpected... but it’ll shock you into thinking for yourself. (When I asked ‘What things should I do before I die?’ one answer was: ‘Get baptised. Just in case... it can’t hurt...’) TEACH IT Latest author to cash in on Easter is Philip Pullman, whose new book reportedly ‘strips Christianity bare’ (according to the publishers anyway) by exposing the Jesus of Scripture as a distortion invented by (yes, you’ve guessed) the wicked Apostle Paul. Prepare your group for the inevitable outpouring of media rubbish by teaching them the facts. Did Paul change the Jesus story? Tom Wright sums it the defence argument tersely on Beliefnet. If you want heavyweight, older stuff, J Gresham Machen’s brilliant, classic Jesus and Paul is online in its entirety. CARM supply a helpful list of quotations from both to show Paul distorted nothing Jesus said. There’s a detailed rebuttal of Hyam Maccoby – one of the leading ‘Paul-changed-Jesus’ voices – at Debate.org.uk. Finally, for positive evidence that Jesus wasn’t just a good man turned into an evil Christ, try Mark Roberts’ crisp summary, ‘How Can We Know Anything About the Real Jesus?’ Video? Illustrate your teaching with excerpts from ‘The Story of the Apostle Paul’, which you’ll find in sections on YouTube. John Allan is based at Belmont Chapel, Exeter, UK, and is a regular contributor to Youthwork magazine. Back to main page