With such prices skyrocketing out of control, where is the legislation and the assistance to the poor and single mothers of America? Will Obama be able to save us all from the evil Frap making empire of money-hungry executives hunkered down in the luxury of the north-west?

Maybe we should seek alternative Fraps… Like Tofucinos or FrappuSoy or Mocha FrappuCorn. And maybe we should seek government assistance to force those evil coffee geniuses to share their obscene windfall profits with those who just sit at home watching Oprah.

We must all join together and get back to the simpler and more affordable glory days of instant coffee. Mmmm, I think I’ll go ponder this global revolution over my Triple-Venti-Extra-Hot-Hold-the-Whip-Mocha.

You get into your teens, now they can’t hold you back. You jump to the next number. How old are you? “I’m gonna be 16.” You could be 12, but you’re gonna be 16. And then the greatest day of your life happens… you become 21.

Even the words sound like a ceremony: you BECOME 21… YES! But then you turn 30… Ooh! What happened there? Makes you sound like bad milk. “He TURNED, we had to throw him out.” There’s no fun now.

What changed? You BECOME 21, you TURN 30, then you’re PUSHING 40, you REACH 50… and your dreams are gone.

Then you MAKE IT to 60 (you didn’t think you’d make it!). So you BECOME 21, you TURN 30, you’re PUSHING 40, you REACH 50, you MAKE IT to 60… then you build up so much speed you HIT 70! After that, it’s a day by day thing: you HIT Wednesday… You get into your 80’s, you HIT lunch. You TURN 4:30pm; my grandmother won’t even buy green bananas… it’s an investment you know, and maybe a bad one.

And it doesn’t end there. Into the 90’s, you start going backwards: I was JUST 92… Then a strange thing happens. If you make it over 100, you become a little kid again: “I’m 100 and a half!”

Craigslist - Craigslist is a free, online classifieds service that’s localized by geography. Do you need to sell that old refrigerator this weekend? Put it on Craigslist. Users can post items they want to sell and get responses by telephone or e-mail from people who live around them. It cuts out the middleman and often results in quicker sales than you’d get with other services such as eBay or your local newspaper.

In addition to a free-for-all buyers-and-sellers market, there’s also a job board that’s populated by many employers who agree to pay the $75 per category to list their openings. There are also house and apartment listings, personal ads, and an active user forum where people can talk about whatever they want.

Etsy - Etsy is an online marketplace for buying and selling handmade goods. Users can create their own virtual shop fronts to sell almost anything they’d want. Etsy has an integrated search tool that lets anyone search the site for goods and services out of a centralized directory. Users can also get into the nitty-gritty and design the specific look and feel of their own shops.

The site is a wonderful place to find the kind of crafts or goods you’d find at a local market–items that are often overlooked or simply diluted in the avalanche of consumer products that make their way onto other classified and auction sites such as eBay. It’s also a great place for people to sell their stuff without having to buy a special domain, write code, or hire someone to build a Web site, and pay for the hosting.

Kayak - Kayak is like Google for travel sites. Its search engine scours the Web to help you find the cheapest deals on travel services around the world. It searches more than 140 travel sites and lets you sort and customize the data. You don’t actually purchase the tickets or hotel bookings through Kayak, it simply directs you to the purchase page.

Some of its most useful features are the Buzz and Fare Alert planning pages. Buzz shows you the cheapest deals as discovered by other Kayak users in their searches. These prices are aggregated from historical data and listed when you do a search from your city. The Fare Alert service will send you an e-mail when a trip from one city to another becomes available at a low price, letting you pick when you’re going to travel by the cheapest price.

Woot! - Woot is an online retailer of goods. Most of the items sold are electronics, although you never know what will be next. The site sells a new product every night at midnight Central time and will keep it available until the next night or until it sells out. Unsold goods are then later sold (usually at a discount) in what’s called a Woot-off, where the retailer continues to sell new or previously listed goods until they run out of stock, replacing it with other items. Woot offs are well known for ending with the notorious “bag of crap” which contains a random grouping of items that are undisclosed to the buyer until it arrives in the mail. Bags of crap have been known to randomly contain high value items such as big-screen TVs and popular electronics.

Besides its standard store, Woot has three other variants that use the same, or a similar sales model. Wine.woot.com sells a new selection of wine or alcoholic items each week, while Shirt.woot.com sells a new user-created T-shirt every day. Woot’s other site Sellout.woot.com is a partnership with Yahoo’s Shopping site, and usually sells the second string items from Woot.com.

Zillow - Zillow is an online house-buying service. Instead of having to go visit houses in person you can do so online, browsing by neighborhood and narrowing down what you’re looking for based on a variety of parameters. It’ll do some of the legwork for you by figuring out how your house stacks up against other houses in the area, including how much it is per square foot and how much other houses sold for that were in your area.

One of the neatest features, however, is the option to ask a question to the sellers or the real estate agents. You can do so without even having to register. In turn, the service has effectively created a very large directory of real estate agents whose entire properties can be browsed, including houses they’ve sold in the past.

I find it hard to believe that it has been 15 years since I initially left to go overseas on the mission field with Operation Mobilization as a young and naive 18-year-old. When I returned to the United States, I was filled with such zeal and desire to go right back out onto the mission field. But I knew in my heart that God had called me back home to strengthen my faith and finish my education. It has been a wild roller-coaster ride these past few years. It’s taken me from serving as an associate and youth pastor in culturally diverse south Miami to traveling through Asia as the International Business Development Director for a major video game studio. Serving as a stable boy taking care of several fox-hunting horses in order to defray some of the costs of Gordon-Conwell Seminary has been part of this journey; to working through the hurdles and life changes that are brought about through marriage has also been part of this ride. (Yes, I married a wonderful woman, Cara Transtrom. In August, it will be 6 years.) Through all of these job changes and spiritual challenges, God brought me back to the East Coast last year for my biggest life change yet.

WHAT??? No, there’s no baby on the way! (Though we did adopt a great little rescue pug/beagle. His name is Pugsley and he’d love to meet everyone.) The big life change was going back into ministry and specifically missions. But this new chapter in my life is unlike any type of missionary venture I have taken part in before. I am now working with Oakseed Ministries International, the ministry that my father started 20 years ago. I was given the unique challenge of bringing my skill sets from the corporate tech world and converting them back into a missional focus that would better enable Oakseed Ministries’ partners in their support and communication with one another. One example would be the Oakseed website (www.oakseed.org). Before I joined Oakseed Ministries, the website was lucky to see 25 visitors a month; and during this first quarter of 2008, we have had the privilege of welcoming more than 1.3 million visitors to interact and participate in Oakseed’s web-based events.

Oakseed Ministries is not a sending agency. In fact, there are only 3 of us here in the office. Oakseed Ministries comes alongside and partners with indigenous national ministries that have the potential to be model ministries in their own country. Oakseed’s partners are focused in the mega-cities of the third-world working with homeless street kids, the disenfranchized poor and those that are denied the basic human rights and support. And in order for me to continue working in support of children around the world, I need to boost my prayer and financial support to a point where we can viably live and work in this area.

But before I tell you of the needs, I thought I would share with you what God has been doing through my work.

• Through the growing web presence, I am able to tell the stories of those with no voice.
• Through our partners, I am able to touch the lives of over 340,000 homeless kids around the world each year.
• Through our partners, I am able to be a support to one of the most vibrant microfinance outreaches focused on the poor in India. (This ministry is continually recognized at an international level as a model outreach.)
• Through our partners, I am able to impact the hearts of women in closed countries who have been cast out and abandoned by family and see no hope for the future.
• Through our partners, I am able to comfort the tears of a disabled child who has been cast out on the street.
• Through my work, I am able to connect you, my family, friends and supporters, with amazingly gifted and godly ministers who are having an impact in the major cities of the world. This connection enables you to pray and intercede for those who are on the front lines of the mission field on a daily basis.

I would personally like to challenge each and everyone of you to prayerfully consider partnering with me this upcoming year. This partnership would be focused on spurring one another on in prayer for the outcasts in the mega-cities of the third world and those that work with them. There are several ways you can parter with me:

1. Commit to pray for me and the work I’m doing supporting these ministries.
2. Receive my monthly prayer letter and our organization’s monthly prayer guide. You can use both these publications to lead your personal prayer time, family devotional times, and even your church small groups.
3. Commit to supporting me financially through a tax-deductible contribution monthly, quarterly, annually, or through a one-time gift.
4. Introduce me to other missions-minded people with whom I can share what God is doing so they might also join in prayer.

To learn more about what Oakseed Ministries is doing, please visit us at www.oakseed.org. I also invite you to get in contact with me at 1-877-876-9020 (toll-free), email me at benjamin@oakseed.org or visit my personal website at www.benjaminbradley.com.

I look forward to hearing from all of you and learning more about what God is doing in your lives.

Lifting His Name Up,

Benjamin Bradley

Google Reader - Google Reader is a Web-based RSS feed reader. Users can subscribe to as many RSS feeds as they want, then browse them in a lean and simplistic two-pane story browser that feels a little bit like Gmail. RSS feeds give users a visually simplified version of Web content. In addition to photos and text, Google Reader will also display embedded video clips from several popular services.

In addition to reading stories yourself, you can share them with others. Google Reader gives users the option to create sharable feeds of subscribed stories, including the ones they mark as being interesting. In 2007, Google expanded the sharing feature by integrating your list of shared stories with buddies on Google’s IM network Google Talk.

Google Reader works on any browser; there are also versions for mobile phones, the iPhone, and the Nintendo Wii.

iGoogle - iGoogle is Google’s customizable start page. Users can add any number of gadgets to their page that can be custom-tailored to link up with all sorts of Web services and serve as mini applications or newsfeeds. One of the features that makes iGoogle especially neat is it can be customized with different themes that change by what time of day you’re looking at the page. Users can create their own themes that go into the same directory that houses the thousands of developer-created gadgets.

Last year, Google also launched the capability to create your own gadgets with no coding knowledge required. Users simply plug in the datafeed and customize the shape, size, and coloring–the service does the rest. There are seven gadget presets to choose from, and using the same technology, you’re able to customize many preexisting gadgets created by others to fit the look and feel of your iGoogle page.

Maxathon - Maxthon has been downloaded more than 140 million times and is one of the few browsers to have mouse gestures as a standard feature. Users can hold the right mouse button and use a variety of motions to emulate clicking navigation buttons. It’s also got a built-in RSS reader and a screen-capture utility. Its development started when the creator, fed up with the lack of customization in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, decided to make his own browser.

While Maxthon doesn’t show up as a major contender in most market share reports, it’s worth noting it’s the second-most popular browser in China and holds 30 percent of the market there as of late April 2008.

AmazonMP3 - Amazon’s MP3 store has had a banner year. The service sells DRM-free MP3s of entire musical albums, ripped at a very high bitrate and with digital copies of the cover art. The service offers over 2 million tracks that are available for sale individually or by the album. In order to download albums, users must install a small helper program that lets you download several tracks at the same time. It will also automatically take the tracks and add them to your iTunes and/or Windows Media Player libraries.

Because there’s no DRM, the files can be played on any portable media player, which has helped Amazon jump to within the top five music sellers worldwide. Also, starting in January, Amazon signed a deal with Sony BMG that gave the music store access to all four major record labels, bringing it up to spec with its competitor, Apple’s iTunes.

Last.FM - Last.fm is a music discovery and listening service owned by CBS Interactive. It’s got a wide range of tracks users can listen to and share with others. It also has a handy recommendation engine that will give you a list of artists it thinks you’ll like, based your personal favorites. Users can make their own playlists and even share them with friends using the service’s widget-making tool or Facebook application.

One of its more helpful services for music junkies is Scrobbling, which tracks the music you’re listening to on your computer and sends the information to Last.fm. From there, everyone can look at what you’ve been listening to, how often you’ve listened to it, and give it a go themselves. Users also can have their own blogs where they can write about and reference music they’re listening to, or just write about whatever they want.

In early 2008 Last.fm finally got licensed, full-length tracks to stream as part of a deal with all four of the major record labels. The tracks are supported by ads, although users are now also getting the added benefit of some of CBS’ 140-plus radio stations that shuffle up their catalogs.

Apple’s iTunes - iTunes is Apple’s software jukebox. It started out as a Mac-only app before making its way to Windows users in late 2003. The software will let you manage photos, videos, and music files on your computer, then sync them up with Apple’s array of portable media players.

People have mixed opinions of iTunes since it’s only been open to Apple branded devices like the iPod and iPhone instead of being open to many competing devices as a platform. Despite this, it was one of the first mainstream programs to offer Internet radio and CD-ripping free of charge in a time while other jukebox software providers were not.

One of the reasons it’s free is the inclusion of the iTunes Store, which lets users buy music, TV shows, audio books and movies, as well as subscribe and browse podcasts. This year, Apple unveiled the iTunes rental store, which forgoes the usual $10 purchase fees for films and lets users rent them for a limited period of time for about a third of the cost.