Last month I wrote the Top 10 Signs Your Church is Geeky, but lately I have written some more.
Some of these show my web development tendencies, but hopefully they are enjoyable to other geeks as well. Remember, Google is your friend.
On Monday morning the preacher’s best illustrations have had bootlegs posted to YouTube
There are rumors that someone in the church is working on a way to have virtual reality services.
Your building decorations have rounded corners, the colors are all pastels or fruit colors in gradients, and the fonts are all sans-serif; but nobody complains because it is just so Web 2.0.
Tithes increase dramatically whenever GOOG announces higher than expected revenues.
Your songs are selected by your own PageRank algorithm.
The pulpit floats, dude, I’m not kidding.
It seems as though every fellowship dinner is interrupted by a Mentos and Diet Soda demonstration by one of the deacons.
Last year’s “candle light” service was done completely with rfid triggered LEDs.
You have been featured on Japanese television, and you aren’t in Japan.
The bulletin was hand coded in plain text as XHTML 1.0 strict with the proper doctype.
I hope you enjoyed them. Perhaps sometime in the future my mind will wander back to this.
I have long had a theory that there are three major producers of viruses: McAfee, Symantec, and Apple.
Well Apple tipped its hand the other day. Not only are they providing bad software under then names “Quicktime” and “iTunes” they are providing RavMonE.
I posted about networking video between venues and Streambox a while back, but we have changed our plans at the church. We are going to have a person at our second campus preaching live rather than just streaming video of the sermon at our main campus.
While thinking about the problem I considered Slingbox and I recently saw the video of the Slingbox on a Jumbotron.
Does this give good enough video to use for a sermon? I doubt it comes out as high-def, but at least standard definition with little compression junk would be good.
Microsoft has been purchasing some interesting software lately, and now they are integrating it into the Desktop Optimization Pack for Vista Enterprise. Some of the features answer needs that I, and probably you too, have been thinking about.
Microsoft SoftGrid “virtualizes†applications, meaning they can run on multiple PCs and other licensed desktops running Microsoft Windows without being locally installed. Instead, they run as individual networked services, enabling central deployment and management, minimizing compatibility problems and providing employees more ways to access applications.
Microsoft Asset Inventory Services is designed to analyze all programs on employee PCs, and provide the most current, accurate inventory.
Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management increases control over Group Policy Objects (GPOs) – the component rules within Windows’ administrative management system – and is intended to allow IT administrators to delegate or assign administrative control of specific tasks based on employees’ titles or roles.
Microsoft Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset makes it possible for the IT department to quickly pinpoint the causes of PC troubles, recover lost data and prevent future downtime with post-crash analysis.
Now, here is the nice thing about it. People outside Microsoft developed much of this, so it doesn’t require such an intimate knowledge of the code that other outsiders couldn’t figure it out again. Hopefully there will be some open source tools coming out to do the same things. If not open source, then at least inexpensive.
I meant to type up something bigger on this, but I got distracted and it has been on my drafts list for way too long now so I just need to publish it.
I cannot stand having Quicktime or RealPLayer on my computer (I hate obnoxious adware and nagware). In addition to that, it is tiring to get all the right codecs. Plus, we use a lot of flash video around here and I like having a viewer for it.
That is why I have installed the K-Lite mega-codec pack, and I love it.
Then, I was listening to a Mac user complaining that Mac’s have trouble playing certain video types. One of those is the type of avi created by our security camera system. I think I may recommend Perian for the Mac users. I just hope they can figure out how to install it themselves.
The average is a single white male who spends 30 hours a week online. That is a mere 4 hours, 16 minutes, and 7.5 seconds per day. Sounds pretty average to me.
Out of the 2,513 people surveyed (Was this an online survey, or did people have to get up from their computers to respond?) they found the following:
68.9% were regular Internet users (I’m not accustomed to being called regular anything). The remaining stats are from within this group.
13.7% had a hard time staying away from the Internet for more than a few days (that sounds scary)
12.4% said they stayed online longer than intended (what about those who intended to stay on all night?)
5.9% felt their Internet usage was hurting their “real-life” relationships (does that count IM?)
Elias Aboujaude, MD, a clinical assistant professor in psychiartry [sic] (redneck psychiatry, I assume) claimed that many people are seeing him about compulsive issues with checking email or online chatting. Knowing the single young white mail population we can only assume that for everyone going to the doctor for this there are thousands of others suffering silently, in a dark room, lit only with the glow of an LCD, and filled with the woedul sounds of cooling fans.
Sometimes I wonder if people like Madonna do things with great fanfare because it is impossible for them to do otherwise, or because they need attention. I have never doubted the attention hog tendencies of Madonna, so I find the former option to be unlikely in my opinion.
The sad story behind the child she is adopting brought me to an article that actually caught me by surprise for another reason. Yohane Banda, the father of the Malawain child being adopted, said he had planned to one day bring his son back home when he would be able to properly take care of him again. He decided to let Ms. Ciccone adopt the child becausehe was told that his son could be raised and educated so that he could come back to help his native people. He had not known that the person adopting would be the world famous pop star (it seems odd that it is highly likely that he knew who Madonna was). He had been told that his child would be adopted by a “nice Christian lady.”
I took a bit of offense to that, I’m not interested in having Madonna positively connected to Christianity, especially since she is a Kabbalist and notably opposed to Christianity. She is openly hostile and denigrating to the faith and those who believe in it.
We have enough immoral people claiming to be Christians that we don’t need the help of a non-Christian like Madonna to skew the general moral-meter.
But then, in some parts of the the world, to be white is to be identified as a Christian as a general ethnic group. Again, we have had enough bad people identifying themselves and their goals as Christian that we don’t need yet another muddying the water any more.