Happy New Year!
I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and a Merry Christmas. I did. It was nice to take some time off from the regular routine of work and blogging. I’ll try to catch up with this rambling post.
I had the honor of preaching at Pilmoor Memorial UMC on the Sunday after Christmas. You can listen to sermon here. It took me a while to get familiar with the Web-Empowered Church software but I did finally get the audio and the text of a poem I used, posted.
My brother came to visit last week from Raleigh and it was nice having him here. We were fortunate to be able to see almost all of the relatives over the holidays. I enjoyed visiting with them, and with friends. I also enjoyed cooking.
Our regular routine is for Beth to cook during the week because she generally gets home from work before I do. I do more of the cooking on the weekends. With the last week or so off of work, it has been like one long weekend. I cooked a big pot of Brunswick Stew for our holiday gathering with Beth’s family. I cooked Scottish Stew for our Christmas Day meal. Yesterday I cooked the traditional black-eyed peas and collards with cured county ham. I think tomorrow we are trying a Cuban pork chop recipe and plantains. It remains to be seen if the local Food Lion will have plantains.
I’ve also enjoyed playing with my Christmas gift from the family, an ipod Touch. This is one cool device. I’ve had an ipod for a couple of years and love to listen to audio books on it. I’m currently listening to “The Graveyard Book” by Neil Gaiman. The Ipod touch brings the added benefit of wifi and thousands of applications to choose from. I have been playing with applications that me post to this blog, to Facebook, and Twitter, from the Ipod. I can check email and surf the web. I’m also playing with some fun games on the Ipod.
I wonder how teens, tweens, and younger, got an ipod Touch device for Christmas. I wonder how many parents understand this ipod has wifi, and therefore access to the Internet. If the wifi connection is unfiltered, you can access all kinds of inappropriate content from the ipod. Many pornography sites have “mobile” sites specifically formatted to work with the ipod and web enabled phones.
The ipod Touch does have parental control capability although I can’t find this information on the Apple website. To enable restrictions on the ipod Touch, you must first set a passcode. Go to Settings, General, Passcode Lock, and enter a four-digit passcode. This passcode prevents someone from changing the restrictions if they don’t know the passcode. To set the restrictions select Settings, General, Restrictions. You can restrict access to iTunes, to the Safari web browser, to YouTube, to installing new Applications, and/or to explict content.
A company named Mobicip is currently working on a full featured content filtering solution for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but the software is still in beta.
