you know, stuff i write about
Internet Explorer recently launched a new ad campaign (which I just came across on YouTube by accident) called “Children of the 90s”. The nostalgia is strong in this one.
I tried to find a vintage Internet Explorer ad, but couldn’t, so here are some similar videos for a few other companies.
I took the “Bing It On” challenge last night. After 15 search terms (three rounds), Google won two out of three rounds. Google appears to win on abstract terms and general searches. Bing won when I searched for specific people. The people search only won because there we more pictures at the top of the results. Overall, these 15 searches were nearly identical. Continue Reading…
I realized today that the new Album view in iTunes 11 picks up on the colors in the album art to use as the background and font colors when displaying the album. I have no idea if this was mentioned when iTunes 11 was released or not, but it’s another example of how Apple pays attention to a lot of otherwise trivial details that make the experience better. Continue Reading…
One of the very first things I do with a new Mac is get rid of the 3D dock styling. I think it’s cheese looking and rather ugly. Fortunately there is a really simply command you can run in Terminal that gets rid of this design.
You will need to go to your Applications folder on your Mac, open the Utilities folder, and launch Terminal. When it opens, you will see a window similar to the one shown below.
Instagram has responded to everyone’s fears that they were going to start selling user photos and violating everyone’s personal freedoms on the Internet. Click the link to read their official response.
Google recently introduced 2-step verification to all of its services, including Google Apps. As far as I know, I’ve never had any security issues with my accounts, but I decided to give it a whirl to see how it works.
I have a complicated history with Google products and have come and gone from Google Apps a couple of times in the past. Setting up 2-step verification is no different. I set it up, tried it, and decided I didn’t like it in about 10 minutes. Undoing the set up took longer. Since Google doesn’t have a clear guide for doing this, I had to dig through a few different support articles to figure everything out. This post puts all of those steps in one place.
Lies from the IT side can be fun. For example, if a user calls and complains about something and you see that you can fix it from the server side without them having to do anything, have them perform a set of actions that makes no sense, but when they’re done, it fixes the problem.
You: OK, I’m going to need you to open up Firefox and type in ‘www.google.com‘.”
User: OK, it’s loaded.
You: I didn’t say to hit ‘Enter’.
User: Sorry
You: OK, close Firefox. Now, which side of the monitor seems warmer?
User: Umm…it’s LCD, so both are pretty cool.
You: Yes, but which one is warmer? Or perhaps ‘Not as cool’ if that helps you.
User: Umm….OK, the left side.
You: OK, put your face near the left side and say, ‘I love you computer. You make me sunshine happy rainbows and I’m sorry.’
User: OK, did that.
You: No you didn’t. I couldn’t hear it.
User: (whispers).
You: If you want this computer fixed, say it louder. I don’t care if you’re in a cubicle farm.
User: I love you computer. You make me sunshine happy rainbows and I’m sorry.
You: OK, now hit ‘Refresh’.
User: (shocked). Umm….it’s working.
You: Of course. What did you expect?
From the comments on Jon Acuff’s post: “Dear IT, I owe you an apology.“
Disclaimer: I personally know Luke McElroy (Orange Thread Media), Stephen Proctor (WorshipVJ) and Camron Ware (VisualWorshiper). I don’t know that that really changes anything about this review, but I just wanted to get that out there. In fact, I had dinner with Luke earlier tonight and had my PBHD hand-delivered by him.
So here we go! A quick review about the PBHD, but first, a short video featuring the unboxing of my PBHD:
Source: “Red Box by .stocker, on Flickr”
Earlier tonight I tweeted the following:
Do churches try to “think outside the box” because they are dissatisfied with the box God gave them?
This thought was sparked during a conversation with Stephen Proctor (@worshipVJ, WorshipVJ blog) over dinner. We got around to this question after talking about using technology in church, what does “excellence” mean, and a variety of other topics. Before I put this question in context, here are the Twitter replies that were sparked by my question:
(via @glohiatt) do you think God put us in a box?
(via @brianfalexander) @glohiatt what I think @chrisrouse is referring to is the life that God has given them, not sure though. God does give us restrictions..
(via @glohiatt) well if we are in a box, then so is the whole world. we were sent out to all corners of the earth, right?
Here is the context: a couple of months ago Church Production Magazine published an article on Elevation Church in Charlotte, NC. In the article, Wes Watson, Elevation’s lead producer, is quoted as saying:
“Pastor [Furtick] leads us to think inside the box vs. outside the box. We’ve learned that as we think inside the box, it forces the box to get bigger. Let’s be honest, the box is there (nothing is free), so quit thinking outside the box and get creative on what the inside of your box looks like.
So now you have the context of my tweet. It has nothing to do with the life we as Christians live or anything like that. It has to do with how the church responds creatively to technology and physical things. Sure, there may be a church down the street that is bigger and has fancy lights and concert-quality production, and your church may have some conventional light fixtures and a single projector.
We’re trained out whole lives to “think outside the box”. To do something no one else has thought of. In marketing, it’s referred to as “guerrilla marketing.” In the church, thinking outside the box tends to mean doing something that your individual church hasn’t done, but that has been done by other churches. Many churches defer to Willow Creek, North Point, LifeChurch.tv, Saddleback, etc for their ideas.
(I’m struggling to keep this topic focused already. I want to go some many directions with it, but I don’t have time.)
When we think inside the box, inside the restrictive budgets we’ve been given, inside the style of worship our church has, inside the spiritual and emotional space our church members are living in, we learn to do more with less. And as we learn to do more with less, we realize how to expand what we can do.
Think about it, Jesus fed a lot of people on some fish and bread. Small box, big results. Granted, He did have a bit of a bonus on His side being God and all, but still, the lesson exhibited in that story is to trust God to do more with what we have. He didn’t have any doubt that the small ration he had would go a long way. He knew it would.
The same goes for the church. Proctor expanded on my initial thought by asking if the reason we try to think outside the box so often is because we are dissatisfied with the box God has given us to work in. But I think if we constantly strive to think outside the box, we’ll never get there. We’ll always want bigger and better and shinier. If we think INSIDE the box, we find creative ways to use our limited resources to create environments and experiences far greater than we imagined. If we simply trust God to do more with what He has given us, our box will grow. If we try to force the box to grow by thinking outside of it all the time, the box will eventually catch up to our great ideas and suddenly be inside the box again.
Don’t be so concerned about being better than “that” church. Focus on being the best church for your members and guests. Church is not a competition. We’re all in this together. God never called us to do more than we can. He called us to do more with what He has given us. And what He has given us fits into a pretty spectacular box.
The box is a test of faith. Trust God inside the box and He’ll provide you with the resources to have a bigger box when you need it. Just don’t put God in the box.
On January 1 2010, I signed up for Twitter. If you haven’t heard of Twitter by now, there’s a good chance you have never heard of the Internet, Facebook, cable TV or people. I lurked on Twitter for a while before I actually posted something–I wanted to see if I could determine a value of this new medium before jumping on board. Now, I’ve passed the 2000 tweets mark recently.
Since my first tweet, I’ve covered a mission trip, birthday wishes, musical selections, food options, random updates, replies to people, re-tweets of others, made general observations, promoted things, attacked things, and recently started looking for a job.
The beauty of Twitter is that it allows networking to happen with virtually no effort on ones part. I attended a conference a couple weeks ago for church tech people and I met a couple dozen new people and added many of them as followers/people I follow on Twitter. Since then I have had a national network of people keeping their ears and eyes open helping me job hunt.
While at the conference I got to meet someone that I connected with during the summer over wireless RF issues while in San Diego (@rfninja). He works for Shure Microphones. He also recommended me for a job opening at a pretty well known company in the church production world. As I write this, I’m currently “It” in a game of phone tag with the president of that company.
Twitter also helped me get some temporary work at a local church here in Nashville so that I can make a little extra money and help them out where I can.
Tonight I opened up TweetDeck and I had an @reply from someone that is connected to me on Twitter via a few other connections with a job offer for a part-time sound tech position at his church.
Before I give too much credit to Twitter, I haven’t officially gotten a “real” job out of any of this yet, just a couple of offers. However, I haven’t received any offers via Facebook or LinkedIn, nor are either of those are easy to network on.
I prefer to network via Twitter because it allows for rapid communication with people and instant connections and there is minimal personal information involved. Granted, anyone following me, or who looks me up on Twitter, can see my 2000+ posts, they are only able to see one side of the conversation (unless they follow the people I follow or do a general search for my name) which allows for some privacy in a very public forum.
I’ve also made a few real-life connections with people I’ve met via Twitter, and there are still several more that I look forward to getting to meet one day.
All in all, for as narcissistic as Twitter can be, it can be an incredibly practical networking tool. Here’s hoping to landing a job via @twitter connections.
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Update: Since posting this, I have started working at a church in Nashville, Long Hollow Baptist Church, part time. While I didn’t get this job directly thanks to being on Twitter and talking about needing a job, it didn’t hurt. I was able to stay connected to a guy I knew there and talked about a possible future job opening there. Then I connected with the FOH guy via email, then Facebook, then Twitter, and filled in a couple of times mixing monitors at the main campus and FOH at one of the satellite campuses. And after a few dozen tweets about looking for work, I finally got offered a part-time job at the church.
