I just read a really great book.  It is called No More Christian Nice Guy - When being nice instead of good hurts men, women, and children.  I think there is a real problem in the Church with men being men or even knowing what it is to be a good man.  Do yourself a favor and pick up this book.   Take a look at the excerpt from the website below or download the first chapter for free to see if you like it.  There is also a test on the website just incase you don’t think you have a problem.  ;). 

• Free PDF of the first chapter.
• Free online test.
• Buy the book at Amazon.

This is an excerpt from the website: 

You can live with purpose, meaning, integrity, honesty, love, and faith. It's time to be who you were meant to be.

Paul Coughlin lived the nice guy lifestyle—until it blew up in his face. He wishes now it would have blown up sooner. Less damage would have been done.

He calls himself a "former Christian nice guy," someone who hid behind popular Christianity with its incomplete and dangerous caricature of "gentle Jesus meek and mild."

His book, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice—Instead of Good—Hurts Men, Women, and Children, exposes three common forces that encourage passivity in men:

1. A cultural prejudice that shames men for being men.
2. An incomplete portrayal of Jesus as passive and weak.
3. Childhood difficulties that create a passive mindset that are brought into adult life, often undetected.

These forces conspire against men and ruin their lives. The psychology of passivity leads to a life controlled by fear, which shuts down our emotions. When your life is controlled by fear, you can forget about obtaining a purpose-driven life and the abundant life Jesus has to offer. Fear saps you of emotional energy and power, the very qualities necessary for romantic love, successful careers, healthy parenting, and loving God and your neighbor as yourself.

"Nice guys," he says, are often secretive and manipulative in order to avoid conflict. Christian nice guys are pleasant, not because they care about others, but because they want others to leave them alone. Nice guys are often fearful and selfish, he says.

Our society mistakes niceness for goodness and kindness, and this is a big mistake, he says. Think of the nice people in your life? Do they do anything meaningful? They are far more interested in avoiding conflict than actually being good and helpful to others. And such people aren’t honest. When life has them down, they hide behind a deceptive smile.

No where in this book will men find an excuse to be a jerk, he says.

Though No More Christian Nice Guy is written for men, women find the topic arresting and extremely helpful.

• Thank you for your words of encouragement...I appreciate that someone finally put this issue into words!!! I knew and saw things, but couldn't explain it. My husband tells me all the time he is just a Nice Guy. He isn't, and he isn't nice to be married to either.
• Thanks! It's great to find men speaking out and talking about real godly manhood, not just the soft, passive counterfeit we're offered all to often in the Church...
• My husband is weak. It is hard to respect him, he has no backbone. Why can't men see this in themselves? Why can't they be protective?
• My single Christian girlfriends and I believe that the ideal Christian man to marry has only been in the church two years. This way he'll still have some of his masculinity left.

If what you just read rings true for your life or someone you love, don't hesitate. Pick up a copy and read it right away. It may be one of the most important decisions you'll ever make.

If you have Xbox 360 then you need to go get this game.  If you don’t have one it is a real good reason to get one.  I normally have not enjoyed these games in the past.  Usually to many button combos to remember.  I don’t have the chance to play games every day.  Some times for weeks at a time.  Games like Halo are great for that reason, you pick up the controller and that one button will always fire the gun and so on.  In Ghost Recon pushing combos of buttons do different things.  With that aside I have managed to get in enough time in to not forget what the buttons do on this game.  The game is very immersive and the graphics are beautiful.  It looks like this game was made for the 360.  Not a port of a old Xbox game or PS2 game.  If you have a nice sound system crank it up.  The are some great explosions in this game, but what is more helpful with the sound cranked up is you can hear when a grenade lands next to you.  Most games let you know with a onscreen icon or something.  Not this one.  Don't hear or seen that grenade land next to you and boom your dead.  The action is non stop.  You are always on edge and instead of load screens between levels a helicopter pics you up and flies you to the next objective.  Its little touches like that which make this game stand out next to the others.   The only bummer I would say about this game and it goes back to what I started to talk about earlier.  There is a real learning curve to the game.  If you can hardly hold your own in something like Halo I would say stay away from this game.  You will get to frustrated.  It takes time to learn all that you need to.  Once you have it down it just becomes second nature on how you should take enemies out.  For more information there is a great review over at Team Xbox.  Team Xbox review.

It is rumored that Apple is working on a virtual machine for running Windows along with Mac OS X for the next version of OS X due out early next year.  The just released boot camp from Apple is a step in the right direction.  A virtual machine lets two or more operating systems run at the same time using the hardware natively.  Virtual PC or other solutions in the past have emulated another chip which seriously undermined performance.  This would not be the case with virtualization.  The guest OS would run at near native speeds as if it was running all by itself on the hardware.  This is exciting because you could run Mac OS X and then run say Microsoft Project or Visio with out rebooting into Windows.

Well it looks like company call Parallels is already working on a virtualization machine for the Mac.  We may not have to wait for Apple.  Their virtualization machine will also run Linux , Microsoft’s Windows and Sun’s Solaris .  Wow.  For more information go check out Parallels website.  The beta is free and will be $50 when the product is done.