Giant Cholula Bottle

I find it humorous that I go to IHOP about 3 times a week and I use enough Cholula on my meal that it costs at least half of the cost of my meal for the half bottle of Cholula required. I guess I have to just admit that eggs, hash browns, and grits are really just great ways to make it so that you don’t just drink the host sauce but get to hold it. They are the body of the hot sauce . Love the stuff!

Loverboy Concert

Our ride to the rodeo

We have tickets to go a couple more times this year so I’ll add some notes of those experiences.

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First Impressions:

This is a nice little machine with an Intel Atom processor, Full 802.11 a/b/g/n wireless networking, Bluetooth, a 1024×600 screen, 2.5″ 160GB hard drive, and a big battery. While setting it up I was able to do the whole thing without even plugging it in. I ran all day long on the one battery charge. The full size keyboard works pretty well. You can type on it just like its a regular keyboard except for the . key which I will list in the issues section below. It comes loaded up with Windows XP Home which is a far cry a better choice than Vista anyday.

This machine is primarily going to be used as an office machine to do Quickbooks, TurboTax, and some email. Though we are a mac shop around here we still find that QuickBooks is a lot more advanced on the PC than it is on the Mac. So we have this one machine that just runs that stuff for us. The current machine is a 3Ghz Celeron that I just recently upgraded with 1GB of RAM. Its been a great machine for doing what it does without any issue. But with the latest QB2009 and the newest TurboTax it suddenly started getting sluggish.

That is where I decided to take a chance on the new Netbook. And it seems to be working great! The 1.6Ghz Atom processor appears to be a little faster at the tasks that QB does. The 1GB or RAM is sufficient for what is needed as well.

Normally when I get in a machine, the first thing to do is clean off all the extra junk. I was able to clean off the install pretty well and remove just a little bit of crapware that was loaded onto the system. This is a far cry better than the amount I have to remove from a Dell or HP machine. Those have so much you might as well just reload the OS from scratch and go hunt down your drivers.

Next things that are needed are a few additional software pieces. I loaded up Firefox since I find that cures about 80% of all the spyware on its own. I then picked up Kapersky AntiVirus which will keep the other bad stuff away. Lastly I loaded up Mozy Backup. If you haven’t used Mozy before, I highly recommend it. iJustine has a referral code (iJustine if you dont’ want to look it up) that gets you 15% off the cost which is already pretty minimal. Simply put, $88 for 2 years of backup protection that I don’t really have to think about is just worth every penny! And by the way, shout out to iJustine. If you don’t check her blog and follow her on Twitter (@iJustine) you really shoot.

Issues:

1) The hard drive comes auto partitioned into two partitions. I don’t see any reason why it would be setup that way. So now I have a 30GB and a 130GB partitions. The larger partition isn’t even setup with anything on it by default. If this machine was going to be used for anything other than business, I’d probably use that for media files. But since this is strictly a work machine, I don’t think we’ll even need that other space.

2) Having no optical drive does make it more challenging to load software. This machine is specifically going to be running the accounting software my wife uses for managing our company. So those packages have to be loaded somehow. I found that I could pop the disc into my Mac, turn on sharing, do a Get Info on the CD and click Share, and its available as a share on the network. I just installed everything that way and it worked great.

3) Only 1GB of RAM. It seems that the big difference for the consumer to know about between the U100 and U120 models is that the U100 has a DIMM slot where you can put in a 512MB, 1024MB, or 2048MB RAM stick. So you can purchase it with 1GB but upgrade to 2GB. The U120 loses that slot in order to make room for the 3G wireless card to go in instead. Though I didn’t even order the 3G card, there is a spot for it and now I have 1GB of RAM soldered to the motherboard with no way to upgrade it. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be a problem here. I’m finding no need to go to 2GB at this point.

4) The , . and / keys are too close together on the keyboard. The keyboard is nicely sized and fits very well and seems to feel like a full sized keyboard with the exception of the , . / keys which are smaller than the rest and a little too close together. I cannot seem to hit the . key when I’m typing, I always get the / key. But again, this is going to be solved because this will be hooked up to a full sized keyboard, monitor, and mouse most of the time. It shouldn’t be a problem.

5) Poor instructions. There is a manual on the desktop in a billion languages. It is useful to have taken a look through it to find out that Fn-F11 is the key to toggle through various wireless modes. Hit it once to turn Wifi on, twice to turn Wifi and Bluetooth on, 3 times to turn Wifi off and Bluetooth on, and 4th to turn Bluetooth off and Wifi on. Once more turns them all off again. This wasn’t mentioned in the manual, just the label on the button. Had to figure out what it actually did and how. Same thing with Fn-F6 which turns on the camera.

6) No two finger trackpad. I am SOOO used to using multi-touch gestures on my MacBookPro that its hard to work with the one finger trackpad on here. Now this isn’t going to be an issue since this will be in the desk and hooked up like a desktop most of the time. But it sure was something I really missed. (I’m going to scroll down in this post with two fingers right now!)

Conclusion:

Man, this is an awesome little machine. I’m going to be recommending it around. I have someone who just asked about buying a new desktop for the kids at home. I think this would really fit. In addition, it seems to be a very good machine for building a Hackintosh. If you wanted to load up MacOS on something like this it is no problem. Last I saw, it appears everything is working great!

But for just doing regular web, email, and office work, this thing is awesome for very little money. However, I might go for the U100 next time just so that the ability to upgrade to 2GB of RAM if needed.

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So when I saw this info about Blockbuster changing the TOS, I found it a bit humorous. What it says is:

You’ll receive one free in-store movie rental for each online rental sealed in its return mailer, up to your plan’s limits. The maximum number of free in-store movie exchanges is based on the plan to which you subscribe. At participating stores, your free in-store exchanges will not have due dates. You can keep them as long as you want without incurring additional fees, as long as you remain a BLOCKBUSTER Total Access subscriber. However, in all cases, any free in-store movie exchanges will count towards how many online rentals you may have out under your plan. Your next online movie will ship after the in-store movie exchange has been returned to the store you rented it from.

The highlighted section is the big change here. It used to be that when you dropped off movies at the store your next movie in the queue was immediately released for shipment. No longer is that true. Now under the guise of “No More due dates for total access in store returns” they have reduced the amount of movies that you’ll have access to at one time or can get rented over the course of each month.

With Blockbuster planning to get into the DVD Kiosk business in a big way this year, I wonder how this will backlash against them.

From The Consumerist

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The New Urkel

Be sure to check out the post on Taxes and the Economy.

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Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100.
If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve.
‘Since you are all such good customers, he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20. Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free.
But what about the other six men – the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same way Tax Savings are dispersed, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free.

But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

‘I only got a dollar out of the $20,’declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,’ but he got $10!’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I!’

‘That’s true!!’ shouted the seventh man. ‘Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!’

‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor.’

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him.
But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important.
They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works.
The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction.
Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore.
In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

Author unknown…..

For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.

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But this time around I have decided I’d like to try to start a little cleaner in setting up the laptop. As I update every couple years I have moved the old garbage along with me each time. It is so easy to do so with the Apple Migration Assistant. This time, we are going to start over from scratch and see if we can get a clean start.

I keep backups running on the old MBP through Time Machine. What I will do is setup the new MBP manually and then just pull my data over from the old machine. The big difference is that I won’t be restoring the ~steve/Library directory with all my preferences, caches, license keys, etc. So it will be a long process to get things setup the way they need to go.

So step one is to install the Twhirl which is the twitter client I use. I need to talk about what I’m doing as I go and need that to start with. Now that I’m back up and running in the Twitterverse, I’ll start the software updates going so that it can get those downloaded in the background while I install and setup Firefox. Though some folks really like Safari, I still find that Firefox with some necessary extensions is the best solution. My big extensions I need to download are Power Twitter and DownloadThemAll!. Power Twitter adds a lot of functionality to the Twitter website and DTA adds the ability to download everything of certain content types from a web page. There are often times I’m pulling media for my production work that I’d have to right-click and download what seems like a bazillion things from one page. DTA makes that easy by downloading everything with an extension all at once. So you can pull all the soundtrack loops you just purchased at once by downloading any link with a *.mp3 in it. Very handy.

Next step is to get email going. I probably need to setup about 10 different email accounts to use here. I think I can probably cut out a few that I don’t need to get to often enough these days. Since I have my own businesses I have my own domains and my own hosting server so adding domains and email addresses happens pretty often for me. I also host other folks websites and email. If you find yourself in need of such service, just let me know!!

One thing I forgot about in setting up all this email again was how much I’d need to go in and put all of my rules back in place. I can pull that down off MobileMe where its sync’d but I think its time to make some refinements to them anyway. I probably spent over an hour putting rules back into place.

Next up is SpamSieve. This is an awesome tool that does a great job of getting the last little bits of spam that do make it through the filters on the server. It looks through the email and catches it and drops it into a spam folder. I’ll have to train it over again. Oops, that didn’t go very well. My mailboxes are pretty clean already. So when it trained itself it decided some large chunk of emails were actually spam and moved them into the spam folder. Now I have to train them all as good again. Sigh…now that they are marked as good, they didn’t all go back to the right accounts. So now a quick bit of sorting to find those messages that are in the wrong inboxes and move them to where they are supposed to go. I guess I should have imported the corpus for SpamSieve from the old machine. That would have been a better plan here.

Two other extensions that I find really useful for Apple Mail are Letterbox and Mail.Appetizer. Letterbox allows you to put the email list on the left or right and the message beside it. I don’t much care for the way that Apple Mail puts the email subjects list up at the top and the message below. I have a widescreen mac, I want to maximize that by having my email be wide. So that gets loaded on.

Next comes Mail.Appetizer. This little plug in pops up a little box on the screen that shows the email messages that just came in. Works kind of like Outlook does with that little pop-up in the corner. Very customizable and gives me a view of my email so I don’t have to switch to email to see what it was. I use Spaces a lot which means I’m on any of 6 virtual desktops working at any given moment. Mail.Appetizer pops up the message on whatever screen I’m on so I can continue writing my blog post for example and see that the message that just came in isn’t important right now.

The next utility that is important to me is Menu Meters. This puts little meter graphs up on the menu bar. I really like to see what my computer is up to so that I can keep things running the best I can. This shows me my network traffic, memory usage, disk activity and cpu usage. It really helps me to know when there is something unusual going on. I very often find I’ve left a window to some website with a bunch of flash ads running and its using 80%+ of my cpu. MySpace is a prime example of that with their ads showing the webcam girls. Or maybe it shows webcam guys for you girls that are on MySpace .

Next up its time to get my Instant Messengers setup. I keep iChat running all the time with connectivity to AIM, Bonjour (which is machines on your local LAN), and GoogleTalk. I then grab MSN Messenger from the Mactopia site at Microsoft to get that one going. Lastly I need to get Skype and get that setup.

Next I need to decide upon what to do about Office. I use iWork whenever I can and now with iWork 09 its even more likely. But there are times that I need to just use Office to make things easier as I work at a customer site. When you are doing a lot of collaboration on a document, its just the way still for me to go. But I have had a terrible time with office 2008. I bought it right after it came out and I’ve been sorely disappointed ever since. Functionality is great, but it just doesn’t play well with Spaces. Since Spaces is of particular importance to me, that’s been a big fight. Basically, you go to do something and Office will just kick you over into another space. What happens most of the time for me is that the Formatting Pallet gets stuck on another Space. Now when I try to change fonts it kicks me to another space. Very frustrating. So much so that I’ve just decided I’m going back to 2004 with the updates that allow me to read the new xml formatted files from 2007/2008. Maybe there will be an update that eventually fixes the problem.

Next task for me to do is sync up the mac with MobileMe. When I got iChat up and going it was very odd seeing everyone’s AIM names. I have it setup so that it translates their handles into their real names. But it pulls that info from the Address Book. Since I use MobileMe with my Mac and my iPhone its all synchronized there. I just have to put in my ID into MobileMe Control Panel and it’ll sync my addresses, bookmarks, etc back to my Mac. Oops, told it to sync my Dock, Mail Rules, Mail Accounts, and Keychains too. Have to undo those things and fix what I just messed up. Ok, all back to how I was going. I’ll sync those things again with this Mac as my new source when I’m done.

Ok, one thing that came up when I did the MobileMe sync was that I need a name for my computer. Just calling it My Macbook Pro doesn’t cut it for me. I happen to use African names typically for naming all of the equipment on my network. I think I’ll drop a Twitter/Facebook/Myspace/LinkedIn out there to create a contest for naming my computer.

(And the winner was Heather with the name Jelani which means Mighty One! She wins a free year’s subscription to Technologies for Worship Magazine!!)

Ok, I think its time to bring up iCal. Thanks to the sync with MobileMe, it comes up with all my calendars ready to go! I just need to open the pane to show all my calendars and the one showing my Todo’s. Todo’s that have been completed are still showing up. A little tweaking of the preferences and away they go.

Next is iTunes. But before I can do that, I need to go get my library restored. So let’s pull up Time Machine from the drive that my old machine is backed up on. Seems you cannot setup Time Machine and then go restore something from another machine’s Time Machine Backup. I just deleted what disk I had setup for Time Machine and then Time Machine gives you the option to Browse Other Time Machine Disks. From that I can see my old machine. Into my home directory and select everything but the Library folder and restore. Whoa…it wants hours. Let’s see if we can get this done through SATA instead of USB. I have a 2 port SATAII Express card that I picked up at Fry’s. Unfortunately, I don’t know where the drivers for it are so let’s do some searching on the part number. That leads me to a driver which brings the card right up. Plugging in the drive doesn’t work though. After some fiddling I find out that the SATA and the Firewire ports (both 400 and 800) don’t seem to work on my drive enclosure anymore. That’s a real bummer! This is the best enclosure I have with all the connections and a fan. Ok, back to USB. Now it thinks it can do the same restore in only 25 minutes. Wonder why it was saying longer last time? Anyway, its on its way back now.

And now iTunes works wonderfully and the library is there and ready to go. Next its time to get Parallels moved over. Easiest thing to do is just go to their website and download the software again. Pulling out the license key and installing that gives me a screen about installing the old license key as well since its just an upgrade key. A half-hour search finds me the original User Manual for the old version but still no luck finding the box and/or CD with the key. A search through archived email does though! Ha! See and people think I’m nuts for never deleting any email except for Spam. I’ve got all my email since 1996 stored away…part of the reason I have to have my own mail server these days.

Firing up Parallels with the different VM’s give me a notice on each one that it appears to have come from another machine. It wants me to mark it either moved or copied. Not sure that that really means but in this case its a move so I’ll hit that. I bet it changes the hardware MAC address for networking if you mark it as a copy since you could fire up two of them at the same time and have a conflicting hardware MAC address.

Now a quick load up of Microsoft Office 2004 as I discussed earlier. Then a quick (ok, not so quick) install of Adobe CS4. Next it looks like its time to just go through the software list on the old machine and find those other indispensable tools that are on there. Ah, Final Cut Pro is another. I mainly use it on another machine so I think I’ll leave it off until I get the latest upgrade. I’m still running FCS 1.0 at this point and a few things are broken on Leopard. Maybe I’ll give the new iMovie a go on this one and leave the big editing stuff to the tower sitting next to me. Though this machine is actually faster, I need it to travel to customers with me and to leave some CPU for other tasks. The desktop machine can just run all day and all night on things.

Grabbing latest versions of Handbrake, VLC, Jaikoz, CrossOver (a great alternative to Parallels for some things), FileZilla, SlingPlayer, ZTerm, oh and Toast! Toast is still one of my most important utilities. Though you can do a bit of CD/DVD burning with the built in tools, it sure makes it easier to use Toast. Oddly enough, when I downloaded and installed it didn’t ask for my key. I have the key right here. Maybe they are quietly giving away the older versions now. I just downloaded version 8.0.5.

At this point, I seem to have most everything back and ready to go. I’ll give it a few days of using it to see whether all is well. Then its time to wipe the old machine and scrub the disk and sell it off! Anyone in the market for a MacBook Pro 17″ 2.4Ghz with 4GB RAM?

Steve

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So to upgrade the Terastation I purchased 4 new 1.5TB Seagate drives. Before starting (and the reason to get this done now) I backed up all of the information to an external 1.5TB drive that I had recently purchased. Since the amount of stuff on the Terastation was just reaching the 1.3TB range I realized I needed to get the data off there while I could still fit it somewhere.

After the backup was done (which took about 3 days to complete) I pulled all of the drives out and replaced them with the 1.5TB drives. Its a very easy process of opening the front door, flipping up the lever on each drive, pulling the sled out, and removing the connector while holding the keeper latch out of the way. Once they were all replaced I booted the Terastation back up only to find out that it could not boot because it didn’t have a boot image.

I surmised that the boot image is probably stored on the drives themselves. So I put one of the original 500GB drives back into the unit and it booted right up. Once it was up I was able to go in through the built in web interface and format all of the other drives. Once that was done, I was able to replace the last drive again and then format that drive and build a RAID 5 set across all of them.

Now I have a nice 4+TB of usable space! I’ve started the copy of the data back to the unit while its also busy clearing all of the data. Since you need to know that all of the bits are cleared to make sure a RAID 5 set can be recovered, it has to zero all of the data. But the Terastation is happy to write data to the drives (clearing it as it goes) while its working that check process as well. From the rate its going, I expect that to take another 3-4 days to complete.

So what to do with the original drives? Well there is a Terastation Pro II Rackmount on the Buffalo refurb store for only $299. That’s better than you can get for just about anything that’s NAS capable out there. And its $150-200 for just an enclosure with no RAID capabilities at all. But then I’d be sitting with 4 250GB drives wondering what to do with them .

What do you think I should do to put these drives to good use? Leave a comment.

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Steve
——-
Nov 10, 2006 – As the church we are doing some wonderful things. We are providing for our communities in some wonderful ways. But at the same time it is time we looked in the mirror and face some of the problems we have going on. I know its not fun to hear, but we have to look at what’s going on in order to make changes. Frankly, there are some places where we are missing things. One big hole is the lack of folks in the emerging generations.
Sure you need recognize all the youth we have. But realize that almost 100% of those are the youth of the parents who are older who are already at the church. We aren’t drawing much in the way of new youth and we certainly aren’t attracting those at ages in between high school and having kids in youth themselves!
That is not to say that we do not have a very spiritual set of generations out there. Consider the impact of The Passion of the Christ movie. Churches prepared, rented out theaters, geared up for new studies on the movie, and really worked to see if they could attract seekers with the message that was shown. And the movie well surpassed anyone’s expectations! It grossed over $854 Million and then the DVD came out and it saw another big chunk of change. Then there was a cut version that came out that again saw more revenue. And even after Mel had some issues with the police people STILL went to see it and it had an effect on their lives. But…church attendance stayed the same. There was an amazing movement that went across our country and the churches saw no gains. We just don’t have people wanting to “do church” the way we have been doing it.

I don’t want to discount the spiritual transformation that occurred as a result of this movie. It made a significant impact on me personally as well as those who were part of my small group in my church. There was actual spiritual transformation. But part of my point here is that the transformation occurred in that small group, not in the part we typically think of as church. People are interested in hearing about the transforming power of Christ, just not in going to church. If we only can tell people about Jesus one hour each Sunday morning and then only if they are willing to swallow the bitter pill of “church” then we are going to continue to see things decline in our churches.

We have to work on taking the church and taking Jesus to where people are.

But church attendance and membership are not the only or even a true barometer of how Christianity is doing. Ultimately, transformation is the product of the gospel. Its not enough to fill our churches, we need to transform our world. Seeking to change people’s lives is what its about, and a byproduct of that will be the growth of our churches. But if our goal is filling the seats once a week, then we are going about it all wrong. The measure of the Church’s influence is found on the streets, not the pews!

How do we do evangelism? Do we just throw a party with a y’all come attitude and hope they do? We expect the world to come to us. We try to make the weekend services so spectacular that people will be drawn in to them and we can then snare them with the gospel. We are trying to reach the unchurched but is making them churched what we really want? How does the worship time at most churches really transform someone’s life anyway? Sitting in a pew listening to people tell you what to say and what to do while a person you don’t know gives you a three point prescription to how to make your life better.

Are we supposed to “go into all the world” or are we supposed to “come and here our message?”

Why do we refer to those who are unchurched as if they do not know God? Why do we think that its important that they come and be part of our church. Why don’t we take Church to them and go out and take them the message of Christ? We are so focused on our religious institutions that we refer to people who do not have a relationship with Christ as “the unchurched.” as if the church part is more important than the relationship part.

When we do outreach , programs, Christmas caroling, do people listen or is it the same as listening to the flight attendant that is telling us a life saving message we are ignoring because we have been inoculated against it.

We might actually have to reach the world by going to the smoking section and not asking them to put out their cig.

The beginning of any great accomplishment is the realization that there is a problem. We need to recognize and realize the issue at hand and work to do something about it. The solutions are right in front of us, we just have to recognize them.We just need to tell God we have a problem, and pray that he’ll help us understand what to do.God is active and engaged with us in our lives, we just have to ask and we will receive.

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But church attendance and membership are not the only or even a true barometer of how Christianity is doing. Ultimately, transformation is the product of the Gospel. It’s not enough to fill our churches, we need to transform our world. Seeking to change people’s lives is what it’s about, and a byproduct of that will be the growth of our churches. But if our goal is filling the seats once a week, then we are going about it all wrong. The measure of the Church’s influence is found on the streets, not the pews, and not the church’s coffers!

So how do we as Christians evangelize? Do we just throw a party with a “y’all come” attitude and hope they do? I admit that out of 1,000 people that attend an event maybe 10 will come. Those may be results, but those are terrible results! We expect the world to come to us. We try to make the weekend services so spectacular that people will be drawn in to them and we can then ensnare them with the gospel.

We are trying to reach the “unchurched” but is making them “churched” what we really want? What is it that we would consider being churched anyway? Is it coming to Sunday worship services? It is becoming a member of a church? Or is it becoming part of a community of believers that live life with you experiencing God.

Why do we refer to those who are unchurched as if they do not know God? Why do we think that its important that they come and be part of our church. Why don’t we take Church to them and go out and take them the message of Christ? We are so focused on our religious institutions that we refer to people who do not have a relationship with Christ as “the unchurched.” as if the church part is more important than the relationship part.

How does the worship time at most churches really transform someone’s life anyway? Sitting in a pew watching the guys head in front of you while a person you don’t know gives you a three point prescription to how to make your life better is supposed to help you understand the nature of God and the relationship he wants to have with you?

Is our typical outreach program something that really can reach people or is it the same as listening to the flight attendant on the airplane. We have heard that spiel so many times now that we just gloss it over and don’t even notice what we are being told anymore. Someone is trying to tell us a life saving message and we are ignoring because we have been innoculated against it. Its not much different from banner ads on websites. We have just learned to not even look at them and so they have lost their effectiveness.

Let me ask a tough question here. Are we supposed to “go into all the world” or are we supposed to “ask them to come and hear our message? We might actually have to reach the world by going to the smoking section and not asking them to put out their cigarette while we talk to them.

I want this to be a challenge to anyone reading this to make a bold move to take Christ into their world. Perhaps next time you are at a restaurant about to pray for your meal instead of waiting till the waiter/waitress is away from the table (you know you do don’t you!) tell them you are about to pray and ask if they have anything you can pray about for them. It’s as simple as saying, “Hey , we are about to pray for our meal and the things going on in our lives today. Is there something we can pray about for you? You are welcome to join us.”

The beginning of any great acomplishment is the realization that there is a problem. We need to recognize and realize the issue at hand and work to do something about it. The solutions are right in front of us, we just have to recognize them.We just need to tell God we have a problem, and pray that he’ll help us understand what to do.God is active and engaged with us in our lives, we just have to ask and we will receive.

Steve

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And of course, everyone recognizes the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

What we get when we put them together is the discussion of whether we are working together toward the same goal of reaching people and helping them connect with God and whether those efforts are built on a solid foundation.

At this point I’m still trying to just get this all setup and get my WordPress plugins all set up. I hope to start really creating the content over the next week or so. I am headed to a conference on multi-site church growth on Monday the 23rd and I think that will probably create a large amount of content that I’ll come back with. Till then…

Steve

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