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Archive for March, 2013

Bored or Scared? The Call to Adventure

19 Mar

Years ago, Brad Widstrom of Denver Seminary was volunteering alongside us in a youth ministry while we were in the process of becoming certified to adopt. He shared the story of someone who left a secure and well paying job for a life in full-time ministry. When asked why, he said something along the lines of:

It came down to the choice: would we rather be bored or scared?

Doing the right thing is often scary, uncomfortable, and risky. The choice is the Call to Adventure, which Joseph Campbell pointed out in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is the first real step of the hero’s journey.

The Call to Adventure, which happens at about the 10 percent point in movies and anywhere from the 10 to 25 percent point in novels, which can be more loosely structured than movies, is what jars the Hero out of his everyday world and ultimately gets him to cross the Threshold into the Mythological Woods and Initiation and onto the Journey proper.

It’s the red pill or the blue pill in the Matrix, the storm of letters for Harry Potter (and there’s a call to adventure in the other 6 books as well), the electronic help message in The Incredibles, and the death of Peter Parker’s uncle. It’s the conductor calling in the Polar Express, and the open Wardrobe to Narnia.

The Call to Adventure is there every time you read the Bible. You’ll be surprised if you’re open to seeing it, it’s everywhere. Try reading the Sermon on the Mount and looking for the Call to Adventure. It’s full of invitations to reconsider what you believe and how you live – invitations to change everything, and embark on the adventure.

People tend to ignore the Call to Adventure because the prospect of everything changing is uncomfortable, which is why the hero is rare – not everyone accepts the call. Yet we’ve found that the choice of doing the right thing is often a Call to Adventure, a choice with the potential to change the course of our lives and how we live in the world. God is constantly offering us the choice to join into an adventure, large or small.

Today, look for the call to adventure. Look for the choice to do something different, to change your actions and change everything. Even if it’s scary. Doing the right thing often is.

 

J River Media Center 18: Streaming Web Radio via DLNA

01 Mar

Today I turned on a talk radio station and momentarily heard a friend of my calling into the Dennis Prager show.

I recently started using J River Media Center 18. The capabilities are great, but the documentation is sometimes unhelpful.

On my Android phone I can listen to streaming radio via apps like TuneIn, but it would have been great if in a few taps on my phone I could have pushed the streaming radio to our DLNA-enabled TV or Blu-Ray player to go through the sound system connected to them.  I searched the web and didn’t find any answers, but I did get a very fast response on their web forum that sent me in the right direction.

Here’s a tutorial on how to get streaming web resources like Internet Radio available to play on Gizmo or to send to different Zones or DLNA devices.

 

1. Go to thestreamcenter.com and find the Web Radio streaming URL. Right click on the link and select Copy Link Location.

2. JRiver In Media Center 18, click File, Open URL…

3. Paste the station URL and check the box to “Show web media options…”

4. Check the “Add stream to web media” checkbox, and you may want to check “Keep using this answer.”

5.After a moment the station will begin to play and you’ll see the station listed in the library under Audio > Connected Media > My Connected Media. Right click and click Tag or just Alt+Enter to rename the stream.

6. Right click and send to a playlist. The first time I clicked “Create Playlist” and created one called “Streaming Radio.” You can also click and drag the item to your playlist.

7.On Gizmo, connect to the server and select the playback zone. My playback zone was my Panasonic Viera UT50 tv as you can see from my screenshot. Tap Playlists.

8. Tap your new playlist (mine is Streaming Radio)

9.Select your station

10. After a moment the Gizmo app will show the Playing Now Screen

11. Enjoy the streaming radio on your DLNA device.