Because you can observe a lot just by watching.
Law of probability: The probability of being watched is directly proportional to the stupidity of your act.
Law of the Telephone: When you dial a wrong number, you never get a busy signal.
Law of the Alibi: If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the very next morning you will have a flat tire.
Law of Mechanical Repair: After your hands become coated with grease your nose will begin to itch or you’ll have to pee.
New Security Volunteer Plan
(Beginning Saturday, April 1, 2006)
Sometimes we forget about the many people who are interested in being involved with the ministries of the church as volunteers simply because they love to serve. We get accustomed to thinking that people will only be involved if we hire them on as staff.
While most other areas of the church ministry involve many volunteers I have taken note of the lack of official volunteer positions in the security work of the church. Over the past year it has been common for people to just step in and help out. They have informed the security staff of open doors, suspicious visitors, and other potential security issues. This has always happened in an informal manner, but beginning this Saturday, April 1, we will begin plans to formalize the Security Volunteer Ministry.
The Security Volunteers will serve as sort of Plain Clothes Detail in that they will not be issued uniforms. This will enable them to easily mix into the activities and gather intelligence on potential security issues. The security team leaders will be issued 2-way radios, baseball bats, and heavy duty tape (to hog-tie the suspect) in the case of a Security Event.
This model has already been put into practice in a limited manner and with some success at the Church of the Nazarene in West Palm Beach, FL.
In case you are wondering, you have reached the punch line (no pun intended) of this joke. The opportunity of this news item coming so close to April 1 was too good to pass up. I am sure this plan would have received at least a few volunteers, especially from the high school youth.
(This email was sent to the church staff just before April Fool’s Day. So far, only good responses have come back.)
A few days ago I cried out because the DCS-900w was discontinued. I decided to go ahead and order a different model from our regular supplier yesterday and while checking to see its status I found that as of today they are no longer selling inside the United States.
They have had great shipping. Even with the lowest level ground shipping we would often get our orders the next morning if we ordered by noon. They have regularly been $20 to $30 dollars cheaper than their closest competitors (some competitors were off by $100 - $300), and the shipping price was very low.
Our DCS-950g is with FedEx right now, but this means I will need a new supplier for future cameras and equipment.
Those astronauts have all the fun. While I was sleeping (force of habit) this morning there was a solar eclipse. While part of the world was experiencing the moon’s shadow as it occulted the Sun in one of the remarkable moves of the celestial dance I was experiencing the typical shadow I get every night when the Earth passes between me and the Sun.
The inhabitants of the International Space station, however, got to see this view of the moon’s shadow from space (this and other neat stuff in a recent post from Robert Scoble).
I did see the eclipse later in the day. Check it out from Side, Turkey (located between the leg and wing). May 29, 2006 Eclipse
And so goes Sun-Earth Day 2006
One thing that has bugged me with Firefox extensions is that there has not been an easy way to list them straight from Firefox if someone wants to know what you are using (whether for curiousity or troubleshooting) until Listzilla. It outputs your extensions with links to their homepages, descriptive text, and version number. It will save the list as plain text, html, or vB script.
I installed it and figured I would share the list of extensions I have on my home computer. I will check out my other computers over the next few days and report their extensions here as well.
Continue reading ‘Listzilla: For when you need your Zilla Listed’
I logged onto http://ebuyer.com this morning to purchase a stack of DCS-900w cameras only to find out that they are out of stock as of this morning. I contacted support and found that they don’t believe they will be getting any more in. 2 out of their 3 suppliers are no longer carrying it.
I did some searches around and it appears that it has been discontinued. I have been having difficulty finding trustworthy looking suppliers, and I am not willing to go to ebay.
I guess this means it is time to either look at the DCS-G900 which shares the body style and has the same mounting features or go to the DCS-950g which has different mounting, but offers audio. The audio option probably means that it does not provide a Java method for viewing video through the web. I most likely means it uses ActiveX which I dislike using.
I believe we will order a DCS-950g to try it out. If we don’t like it then we will grab on to the g900’s.
Today I downloaded and installed AjaxPortal to take it on a test drive.
I am looking for a homepage program for our church web site. I would like to have a portal type page with church news and other items set up so that people can visit and keep up with what is happening more easily.
I mentioned in a previous entry that I am impressed with AJAX based homepage portals, but I am not impressed with AjaxPortal itself.
I have several issues with it. The first is the quality of grammar and spelling throughout the script. The It is obvious that there was not much care put into the program’s presentation by the numerous spelling errors. Simple words like “visual” and “easy” (esay) are messed up throughout the script and their site. I understand that the writers may not be native English speakers, but it is still sloppy.
The site says that AjaxPortal is free, but I believe I was testing a demo. I hope it was a demo since it was lacking in function and usability. Stuff moved around and things were editable, but there were no real tools to make it a useful system.
One of the greatest faaults is that it runs as one page. Everything you do is in one page, as long as you are on the site all content changes happen on the one loaded page. At first this sounds nifty. After all, that is the purpose of AJAX. The site ofr AjaxPortal refers to that as the wounder [sic] of AJAX. But being one page means that there is no “Back Button.” I used “Backspace” at one point and ended up at the page I was on before visiting the portal, and trying the forward button brought me to the starting page of the portal.
I am still looking. If anyone knows of a good system for this I would be glad to hear about it.
Grazr is providing a “browser within a browser” that lets you look at RSS feeds and the entries associated with them.
I placed it at http://osministry.com/index.htm and linked it to the rss feed from the blog here. I had wanted to place it in this post here, but Wordpress didn’t like it.
If you don’t see it on the page linked above then this is an old post and I have removed it, but I am glad you found this old post anyway.
The Open Source Ministry Forum has a forum about blogging already, and we do count Podcasts in that, but I don’t want to monopolize it with my comments on podcasting so I will do it here. That is “My Prorogative” or something.
I carry an mp3 player around with me most of the time, but I have not yet downloaded any songs. It typically has about 300MB of talk content from podcasts I listen to. I am constantly listening to educational and entertaining content, it really is an addiction. It is almost like being able to plug my ears into the Internet even when I am not near my computer.
At the same time I have been doing some podcasting of my own. I am using Loudblog for sermons and other audio and video content produced at the church. We also plan on adding a podcast aimed at the youth in our church and our community.
Due to these situations I find myself thinking about podcasting a lot and hopefully my thoughts and the issues we deal with will help other ministries interested in podcasting get their programs running.
Via Gizmodo
AOpen has not only created a truly obnoxious web site, they have released a small form factor PC as well.
A few companies (linked in the Gizmodo article) are providing these with Linux or Windows XP. According to this old Linspire press release, you can get one of these with Linspire for $399 or one with Windows XP for $499. System 76 is selling the Koala Mini (targeting the coveted Australian market no doubt) with Ubuntu Linux for $499. It seems odd that Linspire would charge $100 less for its operating system which it sells while the other comes with Ubuntu which you can grab for free.
I don’t really need the small form factor, when I need portable I need my laptop. On top of that, it would be cheaper to just put together an old standard box. But, this is a bit of equipment to give a little stylin’ pride to us non-Maccers. Ipress your friend swith some stylish Linux.
If you do check out the A Day in the Life link at AOpen don’t pay attention to the weak grammar, it will only slow down your reading and they are too fast for slow readers.
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A Church Ombudsman
A Church Ombudsman
DCS-5300 Pan / Tilt / Digital Zoom Network Camera
DCS-5300 Pan / Tilt / Digital Zoom Network Camera
Follow-Up On Yesterday’s Dreamhost Post