Onine church calendar

I was asked to look at online calendars for church this month. I spent a few hours on it and came up with three: Calendars Net, Super Calendar, and Hunt Calendars. The most important thing I think I found is that there wasn't a whole heck of a lot of distinguishing features. To write up a report for the church, I checked prices, and tried to compare ease-of-use and reliability. But I don't think I did it right, because my recommendation actually was questioned because I'd rated the only calendar that wasn't free highest :) Super Calendar costs $20 a year. But I recommended Calendars Net, mostly because it was free and allowed sending reminders for free, the only one of the three that did that. But maybe I missed something...if you know of a better online calendar or a better idea for calendars in general, post it in the comments.

How To Blog by Tony Pierce

Keepin' it real here. My only issue is, I searched all over the site and never found the bloody RSS or Atom feeds. What am I supposed to do, read it in my browser or something? (Thanks Hugh)

Mt. Rainier is in sight

That's right, I'm in Seattle today. Flew in for a two-day conference at Microsoft. It's really cool that both Microsoft and my hotel have wireless access; I like being able to turn on my laptop just about anywhere and have access. Cathy would have liked to make it a family trip, but that would have meant Jesse not going to Vacation Bible School, and I really can't conceive of six hours in an airplane with a two-year-old. Maybe next year. I can't decide if I made the right decision not to rent a car. Cab ride to the hotel was $35, and $35 back again of course, but I think finding a very easy bus route to Microsoft was the clincher. A buck fifty for a four-mile ride, and I imagine renting a car would have been more than $100, plus all the parking headaches.

I subscribe to Dana Epp's blog. Can't believe they're scheduling a dinner just a few days after I leave!

Evangelism and IT lessons from a church

Scoble is one of the most-read bloggers around, so I don't know why I'm linking to him. Good article though, and good reading if you are - like me - on a church's Outreach committee.

Rough day today

Rough day today. After an extra-long church service with Communion and new church members, went downstairs for a potluck dinner and baby shower, and the little one got his fingers caught in the door. Off we went to the health clinic, where we proceeded to wait. And wait. Eventually I went off to McDonalds to feed the troops, ignoring the comment in the room saying "No food allowed!" Finally we did get the fingers X-rayed, and it looks like there are no breaks, so Jesse gets lots of Advil and some very sore fingers for the next few days.

My pastor has started a blog! I've been encouraging lots of people to blog; the CEO of my company, my dad, the pastor. It's bad form, they say, to make your first entry about blogging itself, and Annette avoided that error - unlike me - but the art form is new enough to be interesting, and widespread enough to be a real social phenomenon. What does it mean when this many people can post their thoughts, publicly, and be widely read by even more? It is, in a lot of ways, the way that Americans can stop Bowling Alone, and reconnect with their communities, and it seems to me that religious leaders should be in the forefront of that movement.

I sent a message to the webmaster of the local paper this week, saying, "Are you offering RSS feeds? If not, when will you start?"

Got a message back a couple of hours later saying, "Sounds like a good idea - try this feed out and see if it works."

It didn't at the time, but a couple of iterations later the local paper is now offering RSS feeds! How cool is that?

Herald-Times RSS feed

The major topic of discussion on the news this morning was the gay marriages taking place in Massachusetts.

There's a lot going on in the world today. A disastrous war in Iraq, leading to massive federal budget deficits. Gas prices spiking to record levels. Torture and abuse of prisoners, in Iraq for sure and probably at Guantanamo. Afghanistan is still a mess; so is most of Africa, and the Palestinians and Israelis are no nearer peace than ever.

In all this, is it really important who got married today?

There was an article in the local paper today - I'll add a link, but I bet it's not permanent - about electronic voting. The author, who claims to have a PhD in computer science, is pretty hard against any kind of computer based voting. I don't understand why. The arguments are all correct, of course - poor programming or malicious programmers could cause votes not to be counted or even recorded differently from what the voter intended - but in conjunction with a printed ballot, I see very little possibility of serious problems. The nice thing about a computer-printed ballot is this: it doesn't need to be human-readable. Wouldn't it be cool if each ballot printed out to an inch-high bar code on a standard piece of paper? You could fit 10 votes or so on a page, and create software to scan the ballot back if required. This way, each voter could have his ballot scanned for accuracy even before leaving the polling place, and recounts would be an easy job. Why is this so difficult?

Meme via Burning Bird: From "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty". "According to his son Bucky, he never spoke about them later in life." Instructions: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, and post its text along with these instructions. I would add to the instructions: point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads. I got the idea from Ongoing. When I opened the book I thought I'd be out of luck, but luckily there were exactly five full sentences on the page :)

Went to Columbus, OH this week on a spur-of-the-moment thing - the Indiana University soccer team was playing an exhibition game before the Columbus Crew Major League Soccer opener, so we thought we'd drive over and see what it was like. We picked up my dad and stepmom on the way too. It started out pretty nice, fairly warm temperatures and bright sunshine, and we got to see IU beat Maryland in a goal in the last couple of minutes. But things went downhill fast - there was a two hour wait before the Crew game, the wind picked up, temperature dropped, it started to rain...a pretty miserable experience. My stepmom leaned over to me and said, "At least it's not hailing!" A good sport - she only came along since we all did. We bailed out at halftime - dropped off the 'rents at their house and got back to Bloomington at about two in the morning. It's kind of a bummer for Jesse - the two-year-old - since it really disrupts his schedule, but man, I love to do that sort of thing.

I joined Gasbuddy tonight. Driving between Indianapolis and Bloomington as much as I do, I think I can use it just as a personal record of gas prices even if no one else ever enters a thing.

Haven't slept well all this week. Is it just me, or does everybody go on these binges when new stuff is going on, where you just lie in bed and look at the ceiling and think about them? I'm looking forward to having some exciting new tasks at work, but I suspect I will have to work to get them assigned to me officially. So I think about what how I should do them, and will people approve of them, and am I doing them the best way possible, and things like that.

I'm playing indoor soccer twice a week as well. I'm a lousy soccer player - never really played as a kid. At least the indoor season is coming to an end soon, and my shins will be thankful for that. But as I play more, and figure out how to do more things, I lie in bed and think about what I SHOULD be doing, and what I SHOULD have done last time I played. So I'm in bed usually around 11, and up around 3 or 4, with nothing to distract my attention until 5 when the news comes on the radio.

The soccer relevation that I had this week came from an experienced player who tried to show me how you make a cut as a forward, involving cutting to the inside of the defending player towards the middle area of the field. That's fine and I certainly see why you'd WANT to do that; the problem from my perspective is that if I get the ball in the right area, I certainly won't be able to do anything with it :) So I'm thinking what I need to do is get some practice in, stopping the ball, turning around with it, and taking a shot, all without losing it to the defender next to me. Unfortunately, in the pickup games I play in, we don't ever do anything like drills, it's all scrimmaging. I spent some time doing an Internet search to see if there were any classes available locally for adult beginners, but it appears we're a really left-out group. I'm thinking about asking an ace 16-year-old at church to do some workouts with me.

Got my wife her first digital camera today, a Kodak DX4530. She's never that excited about going digital for anything, but I happened to mention a few weeks ago that Kodak was quitting making film cameras, and that freaked her out enough that she decided it was time to join the revolution :) She did all the research on it herself, and it seems like a really nice camera for non-professionals like us. I like that it was less than $400, and that it does 5MP. Once she goes digital for something, she's usually pretty happy with it - does most of her communication by email, and does some instant messaging too. The other day the cable modem went down, and she called the support people herself, waited 40 minutes on hold, and with their help managed to fix the problem - a loose cable going to the router - by herself. I was pretty impressed. Ask her to her face, though, and she'll tell you she's a confirmed Luddite.

Finally got back to working on the church web page. I'm far from an expert in FrontPage yet, so I set it up as its own site on my computer, which I intended to publish to a subdirectory of my site on my provider. FrontPage didn't like that at all! I tried to hack around it by putting the whole site into a single directory that represented the subdir, but apparently it was still not happy with things like the themes directory. It still doesn't look the same on my computer as it does on the web, but it's getting closer. On the agenda: A privacy policy, and ways to register multiple kids at once for Vacation Bible School.

I also agreed to take over data entry for the church address book. This might have been a mistake. They are using an old program named Day-Timer that is no longer supported, and I couldn't even get it to install on my laptop! So we'll be looking to upgrade sometime soon, I hope. It's interesting that what the church really needs is an IT guy. Don't think I can volunteer since I'm already stretched pretty thin, but it's looking like a pretty important step to me.

My wife is a deacon at our church. I wonder if that makes me a deaconess? The pastor's husband told her the other day that she was the best deacon they'd ever had. I believe it. She's very responsible, as well as being very giving. I can't imagine another two traits that would combine for good deacon-hood.

What do deacons do? I suppose the role is different from church to church. Our church divides the congregants into "families", so each deacon is responsible for a subset of the church. Our pastor, I think, has a tendency to take too much on herself, so it's important for the deacons to step up and take some of the burden off her shoulders. Cathy is very good at that.

Just so I don't forget, a link to my site. I started building my site with Trellix many years ago, and it was ok, but then I got a copy of M$ FrontPage. So that's what I use now, but there are still many remnants of Trellix floating around. I really ought to just yank it all out and start over.

I was also asked to do publicity for Vacation Bible School this year; what's the best way for a geek to do that? A web site!

Wow. A blog.

The first thing that strikes me, is that this must be the most narcissistic form of computer interaction since, well, ever. Back in the early 90's there were already public mailing lists floating around to join, and a lot of people would join a mailing list on, say, Indiana University basketball, and immediately send out a sixty line email on their life. As if we cared. We were only worried about Alan Henderson's knee.

But apparently enough people did, and do, that reading about someone else's life has become the big internet thing. It seems a lot like Reality TV, except with worse editing.

On the other hand, the only way to have something really excellent is to take the chance on having something really lousy. So here I am.

Now what?