Hello.

How'd I Get Here?

Every now and then I am acutely aware of what a surreal life I lead. Just now was one of those moments. I am answering email and I start replying to my friend Baldur from Iceland and we are talking about our up coming trip to teach a Prophetic School there. I was talking to him about what we are doing this weekend - teaching a Father’s Love seminar here in Auckland - and it dawns on me; I’m in New Zealand. The other side of the world from where I normally live.

Today I had to complete a whole load of forms and one of the questions I was asked was to list my last two employers (not including my current employer) and the countries I have visited in the last 10 years. The first question brought to mind the “normalness” of my old lifestyle - you know had a regular job, lived in a house, went to work each day - might have left the country perhaps once a year for vacation. The latter question prompted my current thinking - what a bizarre life I have. I haven’t done the tally of countries visited but it brought home what a wonderful job I have. What an amazing privilege to travel to the nations of the world and proclaim the good news of Jesus! What an outstanding thing it is to watch the Holy Spirit move and heal the sick and bring revelation to people, to churches and to families. What incredible fun to have my family with me 24 hours a day. What excitement it is to constantly meet new people and visit old friends. I love it.

On iTunes Album Art

I’m one of those people who shudder when I browse other people’s iTunes library and find all their tags all over the place. You know people have albums by Delirious, but they’ve entered some as Delirious, some as Delirious? and yet others as Delirious with such and such (or worse still the tags are missing…) I’ve lost count the number of iTunes libraries I’ve “fixed” over the years. The point being, I like my iTunes library neat and in place.

Last week, Apple released iTunes 8.0 as a free download, so naturally I downloaded it. One of the nice changes is the default view is now grid view, but the downside is it revealed that some of my albums were missing album artwork. Not normally a problem, but if you play your music on your iPhone or iPod it’s nice to have the album artwork there - especially if browsing via Coverflow… and if you play stuff through your Apple TV, there’s nothing worse than that glaring “missing artwork” icon staring back at you.

So tonight was my night to fix it. My procedure was thus:

1. Use the iTunes built in “Get Album Artwork” option. If the album is sold on iTunes, a few seconds later your album cover has just been pimped.
2. Use Google. The images section of google is now your friend, drag and drop and your done.
3. Delete the album. I’ll admit it, if I can’t find the album artwork and I haven’t listened to it in a while, it’s dropped like first period french. Some of the albums I didn’t have artwork for, but do listen to often (like some sermons or teachings) I just made my own album covers, but it was quite refreshing to delete the old stuff.

Now I’m pleased to say I have a library to be proud of. There, what did you do tonight?