Keith Seabourn

The experience of my relationship with Bill Bright has taught me much about the promise and power of reconciliation. I will never again deny the prospect of coming together with those with whom I disagree. It is indeed the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ to break down the walls between us. Sojourners Magazine, 11/2004

The U.S. News and World Report cover story for this week is The Deep Divide: Why voters for both sides are so angry. This touches something that concerns me.

Having lived for 15 years in an African country that went through periods of democratic elections and military coups, I was always amazed at how few countries can go through a polarizing election then everyone works together following the election. The African country I resided in could not do that. After an election, people were left polarized. To the point of killing one another. Or plotting military coups because their party did not win.

I felt that it had something to do with the strong Christian heritage that still had residual influence in the U.S.

Today, I read an amazing article that spread hope. The November issue of Sojourners Magazine, which I rarely read, had an article by Jim Wallis on The Power of Reconciliation.

Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourner’s Magazine, and Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, found themselves on opposite sides of the political process many years ago. This is the story of their reconciliation. Amazing.

I love it when something I wanted to read or see is published on the Internet!

A few weeks ago, I was travelling in Ohio and unable to watch a PBS program that I really wanted to see. Then I received Christian Leadership Ministries’ excellent The Real Issue ezine. I followed the URL there to order the PBS program DVD. I really wanted to see this program.

Probing around the PBS site, I found all the video segments online! So I was able to watch this program.

The recent PBS special was based on a popular course at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Armand Nicholi has taught a course comparing the worldviews of Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis. The Real Issue, a publication by Christian Leadership Ministries for university professors, published a two-part article by Dr. Nicholi.

I recommend this to anyone. It follows two of the most influential men of recent history through their lives. It documents two different worldviews, and shows how each man lived out his worldview, with dramatically different results.

Good stuff.

I don’t really intend to turn this into a tech-geek discussion, but I have found another tool that is pretty cool. It’s designed for those of us using LCD screens (that’s what is in your notebook computer). ClearType Tuner is the name. It’s part of Microsoft’s semi-official Power Toys.

I read about it in Woody’s Office Watch.

Note: partial results only. One-time indexing in progress. Indexing is only done when your computer is idle. Outlook email is only indexed when Outlook is open.

This message greeted me this morning. I excitedly opened up Google’s desktop search to test some searches. Having left my computer running all night, setting the power options to never shut it down, I expected Google’s desktop search to have completed indexing my notebook computer.

“Partial results” means it didn’t finish. Then I read the entire message and realized that I would have to leave Outlook open AND my notebook running in order to index everything. Oh well! I’ll try again tonight!

I’m still trying out Google’s desktop search, and comparing it with Copernic’s desktop search. I blogged about this yesterday. Copernic’s solution will index Outlook files even if Outlook is closed. This is nice, but is a security risk, I guess. Google must take a safer approach. If I reboot my notebook and do not open Outlook, Copernic will try to open Outlook mail files. This causes Outlook’s username/password login box to appear just like when I normally open Outlook (I’m on a network and my Outlook is set to synchronize with an Exchange server.)

Some differences I’ve noticed:

1. Copernic will index Outlook mail stores even when Outlook is not open. Google will only index Outlook mail stores while Outlook is open.

2. Both Copernic and Google will index all my Outlook mail stores. I have 3 — the normal Outlook offline mail store, a personal store, and an archive store. This is great! I like being able to search all my mail store files at once since the purpose of search is to not know where something is stored! However, Copernic tells me which mail store a message is found in. Google doesn’t seem to tell me where the message is stored. Maybe this doesn’t matter, since the message is found. But I like knowing where it found the message!

Time to quit typing and let Google continue indexing my stuff.

Do you hate the lousy search capability in Outlook as much as I do? Do you feel it’s a waste of time to wait while Windows scans your entire 40Mb hard disk looking for a file you used 2 days ago but cannot now find?

I sure do.

Enter… Copernic Desktop Search

A few weeks ago, I installed Copernic Desktop Search, a free search utility. It searches my Outlook emails including attachments, files like Word or Excel or Adobe PDF, and more. I’ve only used it for email and file searches. It indexes whenever there is 30 seconds of inactivity to keep my indexes updated.

And now… Google Desktop Search

Today, I installed Google Desktop Search, another free search utility. I’m indexing my files now, so don’t have much usability experience. If it works as well as Google’s web search, I may switch. Google Desktop Search does not index PDF files (bummer!), but it does thread email messages like gmail. It is also supposed to remember webpages you’ve read recently and include them in the search. That will be great!

There are a few obvious differences in the two solutions. Copernic is a stand-alone program in the traditional Windows style. Google runs in a web browser with the url http://127.0.0.1:4664/ (running on the localhost with port number 4664).

Sometimes I run a local webserver (Apache) on port 80, so I don’t know if this will interfere. More on that after I use it.

I have had some additional crashes in my Windows XP system since installing Copernic. It seems that sometimes Outlook and Copernic are fighting over my mail files. The system locks up and killing the processes is the only way out.

My friend Rob has blogged about Google’s desktop search on his blog.

We’ll see how Google works.

Well, I need to quite typing so Google can resume indexing my email and desktop files.