Nowadays, I do most if not all of my reading electronically or online. And sometimes this makes it difficult when I want to go back and reference something I have read previously, whether it is an article, website or book.

The simple method of using a browsers built-in bookmarking doesn’t provide enough context and accessibility. And so I’ve been using web-based bookmarking resources for a couple of years now. But I have run into some limitations that has caused me to update the tools I use and how I use them.

For normal bookmarking, I am still using Delicious which gives me the tagging and cloud-based access tools. But since Google Buzz has come out, I have started using that for more miscellaneous bookmarks that I just want to record having visited but not necessarily to keep for future reference.

I have been using Google Reader pretty extensively in keeping up with different news and information sources. And while starring works to mark articles for future action as I am scanning feeds, I have found that I needed a more mid-term “bucket” for those articles that take more time to catch-up on. This is where Read it Later has come in handy. With the Firefox add-on, I can mark articles for later reading directly in Google Reader, and read them offline or even on my Android phone via Paperdroid.

For more serious web research, I continue to use Diigo for online highlighting and archiving, including snapshots which comes in handy as websites change their access policies to older articles. (update: unfortunately, Diigo has started charging for the snapshot function)

Posted from Irvine, California, United States.

I started out reading on my Windows Mobile device and continue to do so because the one thing I have with me all the time is my phone. The e-reader software that I used back then was Peanut Press, which was later bought buy Palm, and then bought again by Barnes & Noble.

Lately, I have been testing a free program called Freda, which uses the increasingly more common and popular ePUB format [wikipedia]. With all the e-reader and tablet talk these days, there are a lot more options for accessing ebooks and ebook libraries as well as new hardware form factors.

For now, I’ve settled on managing my ebooks locally (rather than in a proprietary marketplace). I have found a couple tools that help make this easier. The first is a desktop e-reader application called Stanza which can also do some basic format conversion. They have since been bought by Amazon (you see the M&A theme going on in this marketspace) and development seems to have stalled since the Big A have their own Kindle platform to promote.

The other application that I have been making good use out of is Calibre which is a library management application. The real power of Calibre is its ability to convert ebook formats intelligently with pretty good results. It is also able to sync and manage all your ebooks, but I haven’t really gotten into those functions yet.

I was reading Bruce Sterling’s The Zenith Angle and at the very end came upon this quote that totally blew me away:

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. [wikiquote]

This quote came from a book titled Disturbing the Peace written by the last President of Czechoslovakia Vaclav Havel. The quote comes specifically from the chapter “The Politics of Hope”.

At first I struggled with what the quote was saying exactly. I grasped the first part about what hope was not, but where it said “the certainty that something makes sense”, I would try to substitute “the certainty that what I am doing is right”. This was definitely my own mind twisting the quote to meet my own personal assertions. After I realized and acknowledged my mistake, Havel’s intended meaning began to settle in my mind.

It is rather comforting to me that hope is based on rationality, since I am all about things making sense. The flip side that hope is not optimism is equally true and reassuring. Hope is not limited to the outcome but based on the certainty of reason.

While thinking about hope, I remembered a verse in the Bible at the beginning of “The Faith Chapter”:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. [Hebrews 11:1]

This verse makes the connection between faith and hope. At first it seems kind of circular in its certainty. But I guess this brings up the ultimate question as to what exactly am I placing my hope in. If hope is “the certainty that somethings makes sense”, then that something better be something that is going to last and that is worth living and dying for.

I am going to have to read Havel’s book to find out more of what he meant.

As one of my takeaways from attending the Willow Creek Leadership Conference last month, I am going to change up my Bible reading schedule. I’ve been pretty consistent with my latest plan for the past few months, but I think that I encountered a couple of drawbacks. The first was that I didn’t always get the daily reading at the same time throughout the day, so I wasn’t able to setup a regular rhythm of reading at a set time. The second is that by reading short passages everyday, I wasn’t able to find a consistent application throughout the week.

Bill Hybels in the first session of the conference shared about how he would read through the same Bible passage everyday until it became like a mantra. I think that might help me to get more out of my daily reading and also delve a little deeper into these set passages.

The idea of reading the Bible as a mantra reminded me of when we did Lectio Divina [wikipedia] in our church plant a few years back. I think I could try to incorporate that into some of my Bible reading, maybe not everyday, but at least once a week.

I recently finished a Bible reading schedule that we were going through in my men’s group, so now I was looking for something to keep up the discipline of reading the Bible on a daily basis.

Initially, I was looking for some way to create a customized reading schedule that I could receive automatically through an RSS feed, but unfortunately, that doesn’t exist just yet. an idea ahead of its time, possibly.

In the course of my search, I discovered that the International Bible Society, sends out a daily Bible passage called Daily Manna through an RSS feed, which I can get automatically. These are the guys who came up with the famous New International Version and their more contemporary translation, Today’s New International Version. This is great because it also gives me a chance to read through their new translation.

So, until something better or more definite comes along, I will try this out as part of my daily reading plan.

Quite a few friends and even my Microeconomics professor recommended that I read this book. It turned out to be an easy and fairly quick read considering how long I take on some other books. The main thing that I really gained was a better understanding of what economics is all about and how it can be observed and even used in daily life:

Economics is, at root, the study of incentives…. An incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation…. There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral.

The majority of the book is observations that the author uses to bring out the reality of economics in our daily lives. Through this, he identifies certain key points in which economics can actually help us to understand the world around us.

One point that he brought out and is particularly relevant to the Information Age we live in today:

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent, depending on who wields it and how. Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not actually exist, can have a sobering effect.

And the effect of the Internet:

The Internet has accomplished what no consumer advocate could: it has vastly shrunk the gap between the experts and the public.

Of course, the one illustration that the book is most famous for is the one about the decrease in crime being correlated to the legalization of abortion. The author does qualify his observation with a nod towards one of my favorite authors:

To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history is, needless to say, jarring. It feels less Darwinian than Swiftian; it calls to mind a long ago dart attributed to G.K. Chesterton: when there aren’t enough hats to go around, the problem isn’t solved by lopping off some heads…. But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a public good.

The author ends the book with an epilogue in which he repeats his assertion that economics is the observation of the real world, whereas morality is a representation of the ideal. As a personal reflection then, in learning to observe the real world, I am learning to reconcile those morals that I hold to be true with the actuality of how I act in, within and upon the real world.

I found a couple of online resources in order to follow along in the authors’ continuing development of his ideas:

• New York Times Magazine: Freakonomics Column
• Freakonomics Blog

Good thing she said “Yes!”. Because I don’t know what I would do if I had to go find another book to read before finishing this one .

In the interview, Wang presents a historical and intellectual explanation of Christianity’s effect on the those within the democracy movement.

These last few years intellectuals on the mainland, especially those in pursuit of a free democracy, appear to be taking up the trend of believing in Christ. Many intellectuals have begun becoming Christians, novelists Bei Cun and Yu Jie for example, and from within the group of civil rights lawyers are Li Baiguang and Gao Zhisheng, among others. Many people have begun becoming more intimate with Christianity, including Jiao Guobiao who just recently has been reborn a Christian. Being reborn in my mind definitely needs this kind of belief. We must let the son of God be the lord of our lives and open our mouths in prayer and admit that belief is in our hearts. Only then can one undergo the baptism ceremony.

And here is an excerpt of Wang’s personal conversion:

There�s one very dramatic event which led to my believing. In June last year I was atop a ladder in my home, looking for a book on the highest shelf of my bookcase and not being careful I lost my balance and fell. That time I had to get nine stitches and lay in bed for a month. After falling, while I was laying on the floor unable to move, at that moment I began to sing hymns and began to pray.

This was my first time to open my mouth in prayer. I feel this was a very symbolic and significant experience for me. That enormous bookcase of mine represents intellectuals� knowledge, rationalism and conceit. We rely on knowledge and rationalism to seek truth. You feel as though you have grasped the truth, struggled against a despotic regime. You are standing on the side of justice, on the pinnacle of morality.

As a result I tumbled down from the highest place. At that moment I felt as though I had reached the extent of rationalism, I felt that intellectuals relying on their own strength have no way to arrive at the truth. Emptyhanded, I began to accept the revelation from above. To do so is to have a peaceful and joyous state of mind. This event had a very important significance in my believing.

I realize the English translation is not perfect, but it’s pretty good and once I get into a mindset that I am reading an English translation from a Chinese intellectual, I can get a pretty good understanding of what Wang meant to say. I’m sure that reading it in the original Chinese text would be even more accurate and meaningful.

At a time when the international English-language media ignores many things that are important to large numbers of the world�s citizens, Global Voices aims to redress some of the inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens� media. We�re using a wide variety of technologies – weblogs, wikis, podcasts, tags, aggregators and online chats – to call attention to conversations and points of view that we hope will help shed new light on the nature of our inter-connected world.

This is a great resource to expand my own personal understanding of individual perspectives from around the world. They do a pretty good job of providing English translations (for the linguistically challenged / limited) of highlighted posts. You can even choose rss feeds focused on particular regions or countries depending upon your interest.

I enjoyed reading through the Chronicles again and this time as an adult. I think I also had additional insight after having read The Narnian as to what Lewis had gone through in his life and what he was going through as he wrote the Chronicles. They really are great stories, and I can’t wait to introduce them to my daughters…that is once they learn how to read .

I had forgotten about Lewis’ reference to the ‘shadowlands’ and it is such a powerful visualization of the world that we are living in now in contrast to the JOY that God has in store for us. There’s even a movie by the name Shadowlands which is a biography of Lewis and how he came to meet his wife Joy (now that’s a curious and appropriate name). But I think I would want to read Lewis’ autobiography Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life before watching the movie. Unfortunately, Surprised by Joy only comes in an analog format, so it will require some extra effort on my part.