Because you can observe a lot just by watching.
Well, the hat has been on my shelf for about a year, but it is now official.
We are going to Arena!
Unfortunately, our Shelby database was corrupted two weeks ago and the most recent “good” backup we could find was September (oops). Fortunately the Arena announcement softened the bad news.
I am registered on the ArenaCHMS.com forum and ready to go. There is also a new Arena posting category here, so I need to tag previous Arena posts tonight.
I am writing this while I am trying to remember what I was doing before the last 4 interruptions.
Right now I am considering plans for an audio DVR type thing to constantly record audio in my office. Then I need to get into the habit of talking to myself. Once a distracting phone call is over I can then rewind to hear what I was mumbling before I answered the phone.
Last week we had a conference call which I recorded with my mp3 player. The 5 minutes at the end of the recording was filled with the sounds of cell phones, desk phones, email dings, equipment alarms (minor power issue caused UPS backups to briefly activate), and someone at the door.
3 hours later . . . CD duplicator fixed, scheduling issues handled, bleachers in gym taken care of, kitchen stovetop hastily reassembled, and a brief discussion on why gumballs should not be used are decorations.
Where was I again?
You are looking at a picture of the Samsung sph-z400. Yes it is homely, but my current Motorola i530 ain’t pretty neither. Ever since my old phone came off my pocket while coming down the caged ladder in the Attic catwalk and had its screen hinge blasted apart after several collisions on its way down to the concrete I have been waiting for the new Nextel Direct Connect phones to come out. I am currently using a revived i530 that had been left for dead, but I want something better.
The phone matches some of what I want: no antenna sticking up out of the top, clamshell design, camera, works with Nextel Direct Connect. However, it is missing wifi. I really want a device I can use for accessing network data and security camera images.
This is exciting since Sprint has been killing off Nextel for a while now. They are losing much of the spectrum that the Nextel Direct Connect iDEN network runs on. Sprint wants to move all their users to the same system, but Sprint users cannot currently do Direct Connect with Nextel users. Since is used heavily by companies or extended organizations it is difficult to move a few people over at a time. Now Qualcomm’s QChat has the ability to do direct connect over CDMA and reach all Sprint/Nextel subscribers. Since Sprint has been killing off the old system, nobody has been making really good Nextel phones for a while. Hopefully that will change soon. After all, as of right now the clock on QChat runs out in January 2009.
Information found via PhoneScoop.com. For some real excitement, check out the FCC filing.
I felt another “Ten List” coming along, so here it is.
10 ways to make Church MORE eXciting
I am looking at this from a pure administration mindset, but I am sure that if we took what we budgeted for Christmas programs this past year we could purchase a robot to it all automatically. Less hassle and stress, something not being done by every other church in town (nobody will hurry out of our service saying “Hurry, the robot show at the Baptist church starts in 20 minutes”), and we could even do a wax-drip free candle lighting service.
Just check out this video:
And for all you trying to recruit volunteers for the tech oriented parts of your ministries, just think of the geeks this will bring in. Not to mention the fun you will have making use of this investment throughout the year to come.
This is a follow-up on yesterday’s post about Dreamhost. You can skip this, it is just a lot of blah, blah, blah. I’ll post something with a useful application to it later.
Anyway . . .
There is a Dreamhost blog post entitled “Um, Whoops.” which further explains the problem and has reactions. Some are positive in response while others are very negative.
“…and i am now aware that this company is ran by a whole bunch of kids, and the affordable just became plain cheap. Making childish decisions with no executive control. In many aspects, GROW UP! this is so dumb.”
“I’m going to agree with some of the people on here–the flippant attitude probably wasn’t the best choice for a blog post about something this serious.”
“I have to echo the sentiment that your flippant tone isn’t appreciated, Josh.”
How much trouble did the mistake cause me? None. Well, unless you count the time I have spent following up on it out of curiosity. I don’t believe my sites were suspended, I know that my credit card was able to handle the $119.40 charge, and I didn’t have any client issues with it. So, it is understandable that I am not mad.
The problem I have is with some of the responses.
There is a reason why I consider Dreamhost to be the place for bulk hosting and got-hosting.com as the place for more reliable hosting. The church sites are hosted with this service while the gigabytes of audio and video for podcasts and the like are stored at Dreamhost.
I haven’t seen this big of a fight over since hosting at McHost.com. The difference there was that while servers were hacked or crashing and billing was being mishandled the owner was uncooperative and secretive. Honesty was not part of the policy. More time was put toward deleting forum posts than explaining the situation.
Does anybody reading this use Dreamhost?
Today I received 2 corrections in my email. One was to something sent in a newsletter earlier in the day while the other was a billing error from DreamHost (I host some separate sites over there). The newsletter correction was very factual, yet lifeless while the other made me smile. There are so many ways in which the following issue could have been handled badly, I like the way they did it.
Hi Robert!
Ack. Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we’ve accidentally attemptedto charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY(it was all due to a fat finger)!
We’re really really realllly embarassed about this, but you have nothing to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have received recently; we’ve already removed all those bum future charges on your account (#******) and already refunded the $119.4 charge on your credit card.
You should get the money back on almost immediately, within a day or two max, and there’s no need to contact your credit card company or bank for the refund.
Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE this won’t happen again. There’s no need to reply to this message unless of course you have any other questions at all!
Sincerely,
The Foolish DreamHost Billing Team!
Isn’t that great? It is apologetic yet neither sniveling nor lifelessly corporatized. I don’t think thir platform is anywhere near the quality of the host I use for this site, but I like their attitude. As a trailing edge Gen Xer yet not quite Gen Y (or whatever) I appreciate the newer manner as something very different from what has been around before. I am, after all, a loyal Wooter and one who enjoys the read if not the product each day.
Last Wednesday I stopped into CompUSA.com jsut to see what is going on. I was hoping they would have a list of stores bought out by Systemax (aka. Tigerdirect) and the local CompUSA would be on the list. Instead, I saw that someone on the CompUSA web team had been having some fun. This image contains some of what I saw:
If you would like to see the full context I printed the page to PDF: CompUSA.com’s Modified Monitors. Do note that I created the image above using their monitor images. The logo is from their site, but the “MONITOR MANIA” was added by me (Futura Extra Bold Oblique).
I would love to know the story behind this. It’s just great that they got their faces into the site at the last minute.
I am leaving the following search bait for others searching on this topic:
ViewSonic VA2026w 20-inch LCD Monitor, Black/Silver
AL2216Wbd 22-inch LCD Monitor, Black
H190L 19-inch LCD Monitor, Silver/Black – Product Number: 342045 – Brand: Envision
Years ago, a friend of mine inexplicably went country. Soon after that bizarre event, the song High Tech Redneck came out (*gasp* ~14 years ago) and she claimed it reminded her of me. For the record, nothing in the song was anything like me, but you know how confused women can get.
Anyway, as soon as I saw the Popdrive 1GBUSB Flash drive and bottle opener that is what immediately popped into mind. Being a teetotaler, I cannot remember the last time I needed to use a bottle opener such as this, but can still picture the niche market for this. After all, the number of rednecks here in Northeast Florida with Borg-style bluetooth ear pieces is amazing.
Some off rambling here, but this did remind me of a friend of mine who recently had a computer question and I explained that “hackers” are people who figure out how systems work and how to work within the systems while “crackers” are people who try to compromise systems for the sake of breaking in. I saw a confused look on his face and then once I explained again that the term comes from cracking into something he started laughing. He said that for a moment he was quite impressed that his fellow “Crackers” would be that good with computers.
