I was approached today in church by one of the Stake High Councilors.  He asked me to be his companion next week in one of the Moscow wards.  I’m not a huge fan of speaking in any ward.  Anyway, my topic is Uplifting Media.  He asked if I would cover Internet and computer media specifically.  I guess I have some expertise in that area but I still don’t know exactly what I want to say.

I think I want to focus on the uplifting side of it since the focus in General Conference is usually on the evils of the internet.  Not that I will avoid that completely but I think a lot of people are scared of the technology and expect to be bombarded with pornography the instant they open a web browser.

An example of this is, this last week an elderly woman in the Ward called me to see if I could setup her internet and and new computer.  She’s been asking me for a few weeks but things have been pretty hectic lately with the play and such.  Anyway, she called and I thought I better just go and do it.  So I went and got her all connected.  Her first question when I was done was.  “This will block all the pornography, right?”  I politely told her that it would not and that you would typically buy some other software if you wanted to do that.  She was mostly concerned about her teenage granddaughter.  I told her to just not let her use the computer alone.  I also showed her Google and let her know that they do a pretty good job of filtering results so you don’t accidentally find things you shouldn’t.

I wouldn’t mind any other ideas you might have that I might bring up.

I just realized I didn’t post any of my links.  Here’s where you can find more information.

openid.net – Official site
openid.org – Get your own Open ID
openiddirectory.com – Sites using Open IDs

I recently came across a cool technology.  I saw on someones blog a field for entering my Open ID to login.  I did a little research and it looked pretty neat.  Basically you tie a specific URL to your self.  Since I have been running my own server for quite sometime I thought it would work well for me.  I found an easy implementation so that I could install it on my server.  Now I can authenticate on sites that use Open ID by entering my web address, notsopc.com.

It seems to work pretty well, I installed it so that people with Open IDs can use them here.  I haven’t really used it on a site for real but I have it when I need it.  Now I just need more sites to support Open ID.  It’s a cool idea.  Anyway, that’s my cool technology of the week.