Taking Care of Your Laptop Battery

My laptop has been a life saver but I have recently come to realise that I have no idea how to look after the battery to

I found the following on the zbattery website and wanted to share it. I hope that it's useful.

How do I extend the life of my laptop
battery?
A batter should last 2-4 years depending on how frequently you use and charge the battery. If you travel a lot and use and charge your battery frequently then you might only get a couple of years at the most out of your laptop battery.

So how can you care for your laptop battery to get the maximum life out of it?
1.) Always use your laptop on a hard surface - Using them in bed or on the sofa can cause them to overheat. Heat is one of the biggest obstacles to battery life longevity. Your laptop computer fan cannot circulate the air properly when your laptop is sitting on soft surface.

2.) Do not keep your laptop battery installed when you use your laptop on AC for an extended period of time - For best results, only charge your battery when you need to charge it, don't leave the laptop battery plugged in all the time.

3.) Use a full charge cycle before recharging

4.) Be careful where you store your laptop - is goes back to the heat issue. Batteries hate heat and your laptop battery will go on strike permenantly if you expose it to too much heat.

Holy Hush

I was fortunate enough to be invited to Holy Hush, a seminar on abuse within the church. The church being referred to is not the Adventist Church only but all churches, the wider body of Christ.

Abuse doesn't happen in my church? Well, when you consider the various ways in which abuse is committed, anyone would be pretty hard pressed to say that it doesn't happen in their local congregation let alone the wider body.

Verbal abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, financial abuse, spiritual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse and satanic abuse- you name it and it was discussed. We talked about the various ways in which we rationalise it, make excuses for it and even accept it. Think about the jokes we hear from all manner of comedians about the beatings they received (and that some of us received). We laugh about it and even reminisce about it saying, 'it didn't do us any harm'. The fact is, it has had an impact. The fact, is has left scares, but they are scares that no one ever talks about until an event such as Holy Hush.

Successive generations have beat their children and the consequences of violence are there for all to see. Gun and knife crime aren't just being increasingly reported in the press, they are happening more frequently and when we look at the legacy that has been left for our children, we shouldn't be surprised.

Then we talked about 'little wife', something practiced by married men in some African countries. It is a an unwritten protocol which allows a man to inappropriately touch and to also fondle the breasts of his wife's younger sister. It is done in the name of culture but it can lead to penetrative sex - usually without his wife's knowledge. It is sexual abuse in the name of culture but there are parameters which can be overstepped.

Culture should play no place in our religious practices but all to often it does. Should Pastors and members alike hold on to culture for culture's sake? Isn't God's culture more important? Aren't his expectations more important than the expectations of our cultural group?

It was a busy and long day and there was much to be discussed and some of it was a little lighter in nature. The practice of giving libation to the ancestors in return for their favour was also addressed. All of which is permitted even within Christian religions and is also carried out by church leaders and pastors. What cultural practices will I hold onto while telling members that they need to let go of their old practices, their life of sin and their old self? I hope none.

It is all too easy to point the finger from our hermetically sealed western environments and I had to consider how we too have our challenged within the church. What would you do if a young woman comes before you church board and she is grilled because she is pregnant and not yet married? Would you allow board members to ask her details of where and when she had sex, who she had sex with and, if you would permit such questioning, would you also require that the young man is also questioned? What if the child is stamp the Head Elder or one of one of the Deacons? All things that Systematic Theology, Hebrew or Biblical Studies fail to address and that is why I was fortunate to be at this meeting. It has given me the opportunity to reflect on what might be.

I was grateful to Womaash for puttingon Holy Hush, for allowing churches to come together to discuss abuse, for bringing it out in the open and giving me an opportunity for thinking about what I would need to do when in ministry.

I would be even more pleased for other students to havethe same opportunity to hear what I heard from the mouths of some who were brave enough to stand up and tell their personal stories or rape, sexual and physical abuse. Every ministerial student should consider what they would do and how they would tackle abuse within the church before going into ministry. We all need to be aware of the practices which perpetuate it and we should certainly know where to turn to so that members receive the professional care they need. All ministerial students need to think about how they might have to alter their ministerial practices to challenge beliefs, cultural practices and their own understanding which can inadvertently give rise to abuse.

The final question I will leave you with is, should time be set aside so that Womaash can come here to address the issue before we go offinto our churches in all the different countries which we represent and how best can that be facilitated?

Imagine the impact that it would have!

2007 MA Intake

We have just completed a two week intensive course for the Masters in Theology and I was so pleased to see that 11 out of the 28 students are women. We are from Finland, Iceland, UK, Nigeria, Sweden and a few other countries yet to be divulged.

I wonder what the impact is on the men giving lectures and how, over time, they have adapted their delivery style. I have been highly sensitive to the neutral language that has been used and am looking forward to see what other changes the gender balance brings to class, delivery and papers!

Good luck to all the women currently studying at seminary!

New Women's Ministry Website

The British Union Women's Ministry Department has launched a new website. It can be found here.

Ordination of Women

Apologies to readers over the past couple of months. Things have been pretty slow here at Ministry Sister but hopefully they will pick up again during the autumn semester. In the meantime, for anyone who hasn't yet seen it, here are the words of the GC President on the ordination of women.

To all Biblical Language Scholars

I know that I certainly wished that I had access to recordings of my Hebrew lectures so that I could go over those pesky rules that seem so hard at the beginning of the semester and which pale into insignificance when I started to learn verb weaknesses. Well, now that the semester is over I have finally located the universities pages on iTunes with a video podcast of Hebrew lessons at Concordia University. If you don't have iTunes, you can download them from the web

iTunes or podcasts of lessons at Adventists seminaries would be its own publicity and would certainly be welcomed by me. I hope that now we have started getting a presence on iTunes that our institutions take another small step.

Oh, so that I don’t leave Greek scholars out, there are also podcasts of elementary Greek available on the web and on iTunes.

I wish this had been there earlier but hope that it will be of help to others starting Hebrew in the Autumn.

Carole Williams

Quoting EG White

In the Review and Herald published on July 9, 1895 EG White made the following statement:

Women who are willing to consecrate some of their time to the service of the Lord should be appointed to visit the sick, look after the young, and minister to the necessities of the poor. They should be set apart to this work by prayer and laying on of hands. In some cases they will need to counsel with the [local] church officers or the [conference] minister; but if they are devoted women, maintaining a vital connection with God, they will be a power for good in the church. This is another means of strengthening and building up the church. We need to branch out more in our methods of labor. Not a hand should be bound, not a soul discouraged, not a voice should be hushed; let every individual labor; privately or publicly, to help forward this grand work.

Following this statement that three women were ordained in the early Adventist church.