Its not a Grammy or a Webby but the statue comes to us from the same folks who carve the gold for the Oscar and the Emmy. I must admit I hadn’t known much about the Telly until I was told a few weeks ago that we won the award due to the awesome work of our PR director at It Is Written who submitted the My Place With Jesus website to the judging panel last fall (I wrote a little about the hard work we put into My Place With Jesus and the role I had the opportunity to play in making it, here - http://yostevo.com/blog/?p=159).

The official Telly website says that the award was established to “honor the very best local, regional, and cable television commercials and programs, as well as the finest video and film productions, and work created for the web”. The Telly offers two tiers of prizes - bronze and silver, silver being the highest honor. Apparently the Telly is somewhat different from other awards in that the applicants aren’t pitted against each other, but rather each winner receives an award based on its own merit. According to stats from Wikipedia the Telly receives approximately  13,000 applicants each year, 7-10% of applicants are awarded the Silver statue and 18-25% or applicants receive the bronze statue. Some of the Telly’s past applicants and winners include Universal Studios, Microsoft, Walt Disney Studios, Sony BMG, PBS, ESPN, and Harpo Studios to name a pretty few.

My Place With Jesus was awarded two Silver Tellys in the categories of “Children” and “Religion/ Spirituality”. Receiving two of these awards for the same project is a first for us at It Is Written. We’ve collected quite a few bronze statues over the years for our exceptional TV programming (browse some of that programming here in our newly designed media browser - http://itiswritten.com/television). In 2006 we won the silver Telly for the first and only time till now, receiving two of them for two of our programs - “Fingerprints of God” and “All These Things”. Check out our listing on the Telly Award website and some of the pics of the awards below.

“Inseverable” is defined in Stevo’s World Dictionary as “something that can’t be severed” (a game of Scrabble anyone?). “Inseverable Love” is a song I wrote with my buddy Ean in high school, it later became a favorite among the original song repertoire of my high school male vocal group (learn about that here - The Last Chapter Files).  Last year I met up with Ean and he hastily recorded to my computer via the “line in” the piano parts to a couple of the songs we wrote in high school, the first one I posted here - An Original Rendition (…alas), “Inseverable Love” is the second and in the track above you’ll hear Ean’s playing along with the vocal parts that I just finished recording. This version of the song is much more to the point than when we originally sang it in a group setting, so it clocks in at just under 3 minutes long.

Like the other songs on this blog that I recorded in my room, expect to hear all the marks of a recording put together by someone who doesn’t have a clue what he is doing - sound distortion, background noise, pops, uneven levels, and a few out of pitch notes (which I guess I really can’t blame on my technical recording naiveté … oh well). Yet my hope is that you’ll get the idea and hopefully be blessed by the message of the song. Here are the lyrics to the chorus:

“If God be for us, who can be against us?
Tell me what might can separate us —
Not height, not depth, nor life or death
can sever the love of Jesus from His people.”

Over the past decade Apple has emerged as perhaps the undisputed champion of delicious technology engineering. More than this it seems to hold true that once you go “App” you won’t want to go back, because Apple products tend to maintain a high level of user satisfaction in comparison with the competition.

I love Apple’s stuff. I wrote this blog post on an Apple laptop, which I’ve had for the past 2 years and I’m almost just as satisfied now with it as when I first got it. I also own an iPhone which I also acquired 2 years ago, and for the most part I am still very happy with the technology, it has been a great source of blessing to me. Apple’s computers are the bomb, and if you regularly do your computing on something other than a Mac then you mostly likely need to switch.

Notwithstanding I haven’t bought into Apples marketing campaign strategy which seems to say, “If you don’t buy our latest product then you are an uncool miserable wretch who wears a goofy brown suit.” Here are 5 reasons why this is especially the case with me concerning Apple’s newest technology - the iPad.

1. Cheese

Shortly after the keynote speech introducing the iPad was over, I was instant messaging with a friend about Apple’s new latest and greatest. My buddy’s first response to the contagious yawn I shared with him over the release was that the name was kinda cheesy. I immediately dittoed the sentiment. I feel like Apple is getting carried away; sticking a lowercase “i” in front of any random name to make sound cool, just feels so 2005. I truly believe this is a convention Apple needs to reevaluate heading into the new decade, especially now that they’ve given to one of their most impressive pieces of hardware technology a name that could easily suit a random 3rd party freeware application that wouldn’t even be worthy of sitting on my OSX dashboard.

2. Superfluous

As I’ve mentioned before I already own an iPhone and a Macbook Pro, and between those two I have the portable means to suit all my digital needs. Steve Jobs foresaw that folks like me would grumbling along these lines so he tried to get around it by arguing that we needed something better to browse the web, do email, watch video, eBooks etc - but it didn’t work for me. The iPad pretty much is nothing more to me than a portable TV / ebook reader. Email looks far more inconvenient to do on an iPad than on a laptop or even an iPhone. Actually its the worst of both worlds. Like a laptop it has to rely on some sort of surface under it to complete the task and like a smart phone you have to bend your head over the strictly horizontal setup to get it done. Its not small enough for my portable music needs, and the list goes on. I may even argue that a laptop would better suit the traveling video needs of people like me. Say I’m traveling and watching a video with friend on a Wifi enabled plane, and while the video is playing I get an instant message from another friend. On a laptop I can just make the video window smaller, and without stopping the video I can type a quick message to my buddy telling him to leave me alone and then maximize the video window again. Its called “multitasking”, and it appears to be missing from the iPad as it has been on all of the iPhone OS releases. I’m no market prophet but still my hunch is that one day Apple’s attitude of “we don’t care, we’re going to do it our way because you can’t live without us” is going to catch up with them which brings me to my next point.

3. No Adobe Flash

Rahr! This is the point that pushes my feelings concerning the iPad’s release beyond apathy into feverish irritation since Apple is pushing it as the best web experience. Engaget posted this picture from the keynote screen during Steve Job’s demo which seems to be an omen of no Flash support.

The whole thing feels like overtly deliberate attempt at strong arming us web developers away from Flash so that the millions of future iPad owners can have a complete experience on the websites we create. But here’s a question to all those mulling the purchase of an iPad based on its web browsing capabilities: How can you have the best web browsing experience “hands down” using a browser that doesn’t support a basic technology that is found on 99% of internet enabled computers in western nations, which as a result makes this browser incapable of accessing “over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web“? Apple has been saying a lot about how the iPad is so magical, I think this to mean they invited Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and all of your favorite characters from the Magical World of Disney into iPad’s web technology committee.

4. They Forgot a Built-In iSight Cam

5. Can’t Afford One Right Now

I’m very, very happy with the fact that Apple seems to be seeking to make their technology more affordable. The iPad’s pricing is another excellent step in that direction. Yet we’re in recession right now, and in the coming months if I find myself with some extra cash I’m going to stick with some cheaper forms of entertainment that is compatible with my current digital duo (or perhaps with living people) and try to send a few extra bucks to help the folks who will be suffering in Haiti for many years to come. If you feel I’m being flamboyantly pious on this point then I invite to join in with me, the hurting people down there will certainly be thankful for whatever type of goodwill they can get — modest or ostentatious.

So there you have it. The top 5 reasons you won’t see me with an iPad anytime soon. Again I’d like to reiterate I’m still a really huge Apple fan, so I’d like to request that someone wake me up when the iPad craze is over and Apple is ready to release their next iPhone model. Good Night!

Its been almost a year and a half now since the launch of the biggest web project that I’ve ever worked on in my infant career of digital design. In 2007 It Is Written (IIW - the Bible teaching, philanthropic, television ministry that employs me full time) set out to create an interactive website intended to teach children (ages 5-12) the basic tenets of Christian faith from the Bible in a few lessons — like a year of virtual Sunday school condensed into a few hours. I was fortunate to be given the task of designing and providing the creative direction for the project. Almost a year and a half later we’ve been fairly happy with the results. My Place With Jesus has accrued nearly 166,500 visits from 77,600 unique visitors in 187 countries/territories who spent an average of 19 and a half minutes on the site. We’ve also acquired a not so shabby bounce rate of 24.17%.

Upon first visiting MyPlaceWithJesus.com kids are taken through an account creation process which allows them to later login and continue from the last lesson they completed during their previous visit. After creating an account they are welcomed and given an introduction to the website by the My Place With Jesus host / instructor Jean Boonstra, the Children’s Ministry Coordinator for It Is Written. You can watch that introduction here -

The vision we casted for this project required me to employ a large deal of my arsenal of technical know-how. Notwithstanding I had a lot of help from our web developers who customized the open-source CMS Drupal to handle all backend management of My Place With Jesus and from our graphic artist who modeled the 3D objects in the project in Alias Maya. We also had huge contributions from the folks at Curious Media who spearheaded the bulk of Flash development, and my buddy at Hood Production who handled much of the video editing.

All of Jean's footage was shot on a green background

We removed the green in post production and placed her into the illustrated world of Paradise Valley using After Effects and Flash

Perhaps some of the most interesting help I got was from my younger brother, Philip, who illustrated all of the animated characters and coloring pages for the lessons. One of the highlights from my collaboration with my brother was the making of “Dexter” the stray dog who makes an appearance in Lesson 3. Philip drew all the primary key frames of Dexter where perspective changes, we scanned them in and digitized them using the worthy industry standards Photoshop and Illustrator, and I organized the digitized illustrations and animated Dexter throughout the lesson with the help of 3 different animations softwares, Adobe Flash, Anime Studio Pro, and After Effects. When it was all said and done we like Dexter so much at IIW that we brought him into reality by making him a stuffed animal.

Philip Illustrated My Place With Jesus's animated characters. Here he's fooling around in the office where we did most of our work together.

Click to enlarge - Philip's drawing's that we scanned in.

Click to enlarge - Digitized and colored versions of the illustrations.

A screen shot of Anime Studio pro where some of Dexter's movements were created

Me with Dexter the stuffed dog

Making My Place With Jesus was a fun and challenging task that was quite educational, and if I’m fortunate enough I’ll have other opportunities to help bring to life more large scale interactive dreams.

A little over a year ago when I first downloaded this song I had it on repeat for a couple of days because of how comforting it was to me for whatever reason at that time in my life. I was pleased to find the original accompaniment track also available for purchase, so I snagged it immediately and began learning it myself. The track above is a live recording of my singing at a memorial service of a young man who died this year in his early 40s of an illness. I never knew this man personally, but I do stand at the threshold of a new year with some sorrow because the new year offers no further promise of the comradely I once enjoyed with my good friend Joshua Hodges, a young man in his 20s that also passed away this year.

Other than the loss of Joshua, many other special friends of mine have suffered the loss this year of very important people in their lives. It is my hope that the message of this song can bring comfort in the new year to those who are entering it with some some sorrow or discouragement. Perhaps one of the most significant (and most observable) benefits of faith in God is the comfort He brings to us during our times of sadness and trouble. “Blessed be… the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in trouble, with the comfort with which we are ourselves are comforted by God. For as the sufferings of Christ abounds in us so our consolation also abounds through Christ.” (1 Corinthians 1:3-5)

The original artist who sings this song, David Phelps, has a voice and vocal abilities that perhaps is one of the closest examples we’ll have to angelic singing on this side of eternity.

You can download the original song from iTunes here - http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-voice/id290073485

I would also highly recommend you check out his rendition of “No More Night” by watching it here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vX3HHtytDo

Here is a refreshingly frank message from Pastor Shawn Boonstra addressing the rather increasingly violent and intolerant behavior of some Christians toward others who don’t see things the exact same way they do. You can catch more Pastor Boonstra action on TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network) at 10:30 a.m. every Sunday, or by visiting itiswritten.com.

I figured the Christmas season might be the perfect time to put an end to my long blog posting drought this year. For my resurrection post I’ve decided to share a novel idea for Christmas that a coworker shared with me a couple of years ago and would perhaps be particularly handy during a holiday season mired in a tough global recession. This idea is from the folks at Adventist Conspiracy, and what they’re suggesting is this: instead of participating in another round of the bankrupt/break-your-bank-account consumerism X-mas tradition, why not start celebrating CHRISTmas by participating in the tradition that Christ has left for us, i.e. giving to those in need?

“Then Jesus said to His host, ‘When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.’ ” (Luke 14:12-14)

Although this passage is referring to “banquets” I’m sure you, like I, can see how easily the principle Jesus is teaching here translates into the modern day Christmas gift giving ritual. Here are 3 videos from Advent Conspiracy, the first one is the video I saw for the first time 2 years ago, the second is the 2009 update, and the third provides a snapshot of how rewarding the practice of this idea can be. I’d also consider it a shame for me not to tip my hat to the clever typographic animation and design used in the promo videos; so yah here…

So why not be proactive this Christmas in participating in a cause worthy of our money, especially during a time when we don’t have a lot of it to waste?

The month of May this year was quite an eventful one for me. I paid my first visit to Jamaica to celebrate the union of two college friends (one of the two I’ve known since grade school. I mentioned a bit about them here: http://yostevo.com/blog/?p=54 ). After returning from my exciting caribbean excursion with old friends, I again repacked my bags a week later and made a trip north to my former place of abode in Washington State, where I again participated in the marriage ceremony of two other good friends of mine. Before the month was done I also manage to hit the quarter century milestone in years of life (I now have one year to figure out how I can prevent the aging processes from continuing and thus effectively freeze age at 25 for the rest of my life. I’ll certainly accept any ideas/help I can get to accomplish this).

The month of May also happened to be a busy time at work as well. Beyond having to meet a couple project deadlines, as I could while I was around I participated in a prophecy seminar effort that the non-profit ministry I work for was hosting in downtown Los Angeles during the entire the month of May. The series was well attended and well received throughout, and it turned out to be quite an exiting and successful endeavor overall. Beside featuring logically sequenced and riveting Bible prophecy presentations, each night of the meetings also featured musical selections from various musicians and vocalists, and I found it pretty awesome when I was asked for a few nights to be among those vocalists that provided a number to open up the lecture. I ended up providing five songs on four different nights in this way during the course of the campaign. On a few nights they managed digitally capture a recording of some of my performances. My boss (our executive creative director) was nice enough to rummage through the clips and fix up the audio files that contained my performances. I’ve posted above a couple of the tracks he gave me. They’re entitled “My Tribute” and He Loved Me With The Cross” respectively.

Last week the temperatures in the portion of Southern California where I live breached the 100 degree mark. I understand that this type of heat attack during the middle of spring was unusual even for Southern Cali. I loved it. But I also experienced the major downfall of this type of climate behavior when I realized that I could no longer cover myself with my fluffy down comforter at night without waking up the next morning in a sweaty mess. As I was pondering a solution to this “dire perplexity”, I considered blasting on the AC at night (despite the additional expense) so that I might once again have cause to reunite with my fluffy warm down comforter. Although I ultimately decided to “sweat it out” for the next couple of nights until the temperature dropped again and just open up my window in the mean time, I shared a chuckle with myself as I realized that despite the reality of living amidst a withering global economy many us will not be giving up our front row seats in the lap of luxury anytime soon.

However do not now brace your self for guilt trip. My purpose here is not at all to knock the pleasantries that accompany postmodern Western hemisphere living that many of us now enjoy. Nevertheless, shouldn’t we fortunate westerners as common members of the human race (and most particularly those of us that consider ourselves followers of Jesus) be ever seeking to relieve the suffering endured by the unfortunate members of our race who have feelings just like us and yet spend much of their existence battling disease while gasping for the basic necessities of survival?

If you’ve paid the slightest bit of attention to the news concerning the boiling economic crisis taking place in our country, you’ve heard and read how our government has felt compelled — even amidst a tight budget (i.e. billions of dollars in debt) — to bail out with billions of tax dollars banks, lenders, investors, and even automobile businesses. Many of the executives who managed these bailout beneficiaries are among the wealthiest in our wealthy nation. They are now in need of government intervention to stay afloat because many of them ran their company and their trade under a policy of greed and excess. It just makes laugh to watch how desperately greedy these cats are, who after having their greed and mismanagement exposed are yet not embarrassed to scramble for undeserving multi-million dollar bonuses despite being under the most intense public scrutiny. Who can say this global economic evil is not rooted in the love of money?

Notwithstanding, I think we (the grassroots citizens) could glean some principles for action from our government’s bailout response to this economic crisis by casting our vote for a new generation of “bailout bills”. While being on a tight “recession budget” we could yet allocate some of our funds to necessary bailout endeavors, but these bailouts will not serve the squandering opulent, but rather the desperately needy population, the majority of whom were dealt a bad hand in life to begin with and live from day to day seeing no way out. This new kind of “legislation” will be in line with the plan that our Divinely elected heavenly Commander-in-Cheif has outlined for lasting change 2,000 years ago. The foundational tenants of His plan reads “love your neighbor as yourself” and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.

The video below is the latest proposal I have come across of such a “bill”. I first saw this presentation and met some of the medical students behind this idea a week ago while participation in a small conference on the campus of Loma Linda University. I was moved to say the least. Have a look:

Now more than ever is the admonition of the apostle relevant to us today. “Teach those who are rich in this world not to be proud and not to trust in their money, which is so unreliable. Their trust should be in God, who richly gives us all we need for our enjoyment. Tell them to use their money to do good. They should be rich in good works and generous to those in need, always being ready to share with others. By doing this they will be storing up their treasure as a good foundation for the future so that they may lay hold on eternal life” (1 Timothy 6:17-19). While we witness a weakening dollar, cash strapped banks, and the values of so many investments plummeting let us invest in endeavors which will pay off both in this present age and in the age to come. I hope in the future to continue to bring to our attention other fruitful and worthy projects that could use our help, so stay on the look out.

Click here to visit the LLU Haiti Mission Project website to learn more.