Published December 29th, 2006
in Arena, Religion and Techie.
We had a presentation from Arena several weeks ago and I never got around to posting about it. Since I need to clean out my queue and their official release is just a few short days away I thought I should post what I have.
Have you wondered just what Arena ChMS is? As far as I can tell, it is really a container for nuts. Well, at least that is what they sent us. They were some very large cashews, and my daughter thought they were yummy. I took a picture to commemorate the nearly empty container.
Continue reading ‘Arena ChMS: A Container for Nuts’
Published December 28th, 2006
in Misc Othr Stuf and fun.
I have several posts that never quite made it out over the past year, so I am going to use between now and December 31, 2006 to clear them out starting with this post.
These are portions of several items which should have just been deleted when they originally became out of date, but I didn’t.
Continue reading ‘Post Cleanup’
Published December 23rd, 2006
in Misc Othr Stuf.
Guy Kawasaki is an evangelist. I know this because he said it himself. While he worked for Apple in the late 90’s his job was to “was to maintain and rejuvenate the Macintosh cult” (see the link above).
Guy Kamasaki is also involved in Christian ministry. He is on the board of Hawaiian Islands Ministry. He doesn’t make a big deal out of this, after all the point of his blog is business promotion, but he did refer to this in a recent item about effective evangelistic communicators (Evangelism: Eternal Life, Forgiveness, and Operating Systems).
The item reminded me of my post a couple months ago on Used Car Salesmen and Your Church.
The comments occasionally broke down into the usual “Hey, cool, you’re a Christian” and “I don’t like Christian’s” tangents, but it has held together quite well.
I have been reading his blog for a long time. I don’t check it every day, but I do keep up on it since I like to read level headed people with good thoughts.
Published December 22nd, 2006
in Religion.
This is a good viral video. It is creative, inventive, surprising, and uplifting.
You can see it at the GCCWired site: The Truth Upside Down.
It isn’t original, I believe this was done originally by Lopez Murphy down in Argentina: The Truth.
Still, this is a great meme if you get it out to your community before they are exposed to it from somewhere else. Once everyone starts doing it.
- This is the truth
- If we turn things upside down
- We can’t have the best operating system in the world
- I would be lying to you if I said that
- Windows Vista has a great future ahead
- That your business will improve
- That your computer will be free of viruses and malware
- Before anything you should know
- You do not deserve such things
- And I am convinced of this because I know the code
- Bad design and weak security are inherent problems
- I refuse to believe under any circumstances that
- We will have the best operating system in the coming years
- Thanks to the work of the Developers Developers Developers Developers
- We have sunk to horrible levels of integrity but
- There are even more surprises to come
- Microsoft has only one destiny
- and whether you like it or not
- this is what is real
- I’m Bill Gates
- and you should know I believe exactly the opposite.
GCCwired video found via Arron Chamber’s My Lord and My Blog.
Published December 21st, 2006
in Religion.
We have a Celebrate Recovery program at Christ’s Church, and I know it does a lot of good for a lot of people. I am the person in charge of “Babysitting the Building” on Saturday nights during the main CR gathering and locking the building up as the last custodian heads out. I am also the lucky person who buys the food for their weekly meal. I care a lot personally for many of the individuals in the program so this is in no way making fun of them or the program.
However, today while driving down the road I saw signs nearly identical to the ones we use at CC. Several churches advertising the exact program. Our Non-Denominational Christian Church / Church of Christ congregation is doing the same thing as the Methodists, Baptists, and others.
One of the reasons we stopped doing VBS at the small church I used to work with was that no matter how much work we put into our program it was always going to be outdone by the congregation with 60 times as many people down the road which did the exact same program 1 week before ours. I know they did it better because all the kids who were sent around on the yearly VBS tours by their parents told us so.
I was thinking “How in the world can a church distinguish themselves when they are doing the same genericized program created by a church in another state as everyone else is doing?” Then I realized, “Hey, we all use the same Bible (more or less) and yet churches still distinguish themselves.”
The point is that no matter what programs we buy from other people, or the technology we use, the church and its success come down to the people there in the room with you and the personal connection to God you develop together with them.
Now for the reason I wrote this off-track post. I finally had my camera with me and had an opportunity to stop and take the following picture.
This is an old church building that was bought by an antique furniture store. I don’t know the history of the congregation that was formerly there, but the banner out front is hilarious to me. It seems like the ultimate in surrendering to secularized marketing tactics. We are now open to the public and salvation is going at 50% off!
Published December 20th, 2006
in Misc Othr Stuf, Techie and fun.
Lifehacker has a post on sticking an image inside a URL.
I posted the following image using the data in the img url. I had to disable the rich text editor to do it, but it works for me.
If you don’t see it then that means you are probably using Internet Explorer. It may be that they just never got around to adding it or they thought it was a useless feature. It supports something similar in its use of mhtml so the ability is there but not the desire.
There are some good reasons:
In the old days of slow connections for everyone it was good to break up pages into small pieces. If you wrote your html right then the page would load and render quickly. After that the images would come in and fill everything out. Netscape would not render tables until it knew the sizes for everything or it would guess and then have to render again if there was an error. The trick was to get the top part of the page to load quickly and then while that content was being read you had time for the lower portions to fill out.
The other reason is that this trick uses base64 encoding. Base 64 (aka. quadrosexagesimal) uses A-Z, a-z, and 0-9 along with + and / to express binary data in ascii. While it does allow data to be carried in a different manner it is not efficient. It can take up as much as 33% more space to store something as Base64 than as pure binary data.
The encoding is used in email attachments, but even there it is better to just link to images rather than to include them.
I have also used this to encode a full page with graphics into 1 php file. It just takes some creativity and understanding of the header() and base64_decode() functions.
Anyway, if you are interested in trying out the data in a URL trick you can generate one yourself here: Data URL Maker.
Published December 19th, 2006
in Security and Techie.
Warning: the following post was written in several odd sittings and may seem a bit disjointed. If you are not interested in this camera then you will want to skip this item. If you are interested this will serve as an intro to hacking its controls to make it work the way you need it to work.
I recently installed a DCS-5300 in the Worship Center and I thought I would share information on it with others.
Continue reading ‘DCS-5300 Pan / Tilt / Digital Zoom Network Camera’
Published December 11th, 2006
in Techie.
I’m not sure where I came across this image, but it serves as a great illustration should you ever need to explain RAID to someone who is not technically inclined.
It might be a good idea to cut the images apart and just show the ones necessary for them to compare. Otherwise they will get the idea that clustering is always the best option.
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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