Monday, November 27, 2006

I was reading Wired over the weekend and this article seemed hit Friday's post on the head. The paragraph that jumped off the screen for me was,

Until about five minutes ago, remember, almost all video-entertainment content was produced and distributed by Hollywood. Period. That time is over. There was a time when advertisers could count on mass audiences for what Hollywood thought we should be watching on TV. That time is all but over. There was a time when broadband penetration was too slight and bandwidth costs too prohibitive for video to be watched online. That time is sooooo over. "The era of the creepy blue light leaking out of every living room window on the block is now officially at an end," says my pal and occasional colleague Steve Rosenbaum, founder of video-sharing startup Magnify.net and one of the inventors a decade ago of citizen video. "The simple, wonderful, delirious fact is that people like you and me can now make and share content."
In conversations with friends and co-workers I hear and sense that many just don't get all of this. Some don't understand the fascination with blogging, let alone YouTube. "It's a dear diary for the world, but why would I want the world to know what's in my diary and why would the world even care?" But it's a whole different mindset.

Administering Grace readers seemed to enjoy the other week's series on our travels to Dallas. Wouldn't it be cool if I could have recorded the encounters so you could have seen us running through the Charlotte airport or seen the security guard ask if I wanted sheets and a pillow? The technology is available that I could have done that. And if I had that I could share it with the world, "Hey, did you see Andrew's..."

Interactivity is another component, one that's been underutilized on Administering Grace by the way. Unfortunately, the majority of people who've attempted to interact with this blog aren't regular attenders of Grace, my intended primary audience. This whole digital mumbo-jumbo gives you the opportunity to interact. It's an element I still hope to add so this can become a two-way dialog about Administering Grace.

There's more I want to comment on regarding this topic, but I want to read The Millenium Matrix first.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Clickable Content

A mouse click here and a mouse click there and presto, you've got information...

While the video is disturbing and not something to joke about, I find the events of this week groundbreaking. The actor who portrayed Kramer on Seinfeld, Michael Richards, went verbally postal at a comedy club in the past week. Thanks to YouTube, if you want, you can see the whole clip (I'm not linking to it, but you can find it if you want it). And that's the groundbreaking part. Where it not for YouTube or the Internet, I probably wouldn't have heard of the incident and the media may not have picked it up. Not anymore. Someone had a video recording device, figured it was worth posting to the net and now there's a visual record of what went down. Very ugly.

We have to adapt to this latest facet of our culture, what H. Rex Miller termed at the WFX Conference as the digital age. He contrasted the current digital age with the earlier broadcast age and applied it to the role of the church in this one statement. In the previous ages (broadcast, written and oral), the role of the church was to provide CONTENT, in the digital age, it's to provide CONTEXT. Though I haven't read his book yet, he backed this premise up with his observation that just about any content is readily accessible in the digital age. I can't tell you the number of questions I've been able to answer utilizing the Internet. The content is out there somewhere, I just need to find it. And it's not just that the church is no longer a key provider of content, it's that everyone is providing content.

Think about the ramifications...

  • There was a time when TV stations solicited home videos of "news happening", but I don't need to bother with that laborious step now, I can just upload my videos to YouTube in a matter of minutes and broadcast my own stuff.
  • If the content is readily available, what does education need to look like? With so much information available now, it may be more important for students to learn fundamental search principles more than memorizing everything.
  • If the content is readily available, I can find messages by just about any Pastor on any portion of scripture, whenever I want, the church will need to educate people on how to discern truth to be able to filter out what's contrary to scripture.
There's a part of this that intrigues me and there's a part of me that's very afraid. That makes me wonder if my age group has a tremendous responsibility over the next 20 years. I sense that I can relate to the generations growing up in the digital age because my generation was on the crest of the digital wave. At the same time, we were trained through the methods that had been tested over time. I sense we're a generation that has the opportunity to fill the gap. What scares me is the amount of garbage that's included in the volumes of information available now. If we fail to provide context, the garbage could go unfiltered.

I hope to read H. Rex Miller's book, but I continue to ponder what changes we need to make to our ministry in order to adapt. I'm finding more on YouTube that I'll share next week.

Friday, November 17, 2006

The Joy of Friday Mornings

A key component of our weekly office routine is the production of the weekly bulletin. One of the more labor intensive aspects of the process is collating and stuffing which occurs on Friday mornings. Over the years several different individuals have volunteered to assist us with this part of the production. Most recently there's been a group of 5-6 people who come to the office each Friday morning and spend about two hours helping us with this task.

What brings a smile to my face is that, to my knowledge, each of those 5-6 people didn't really even know each other when they started working together - we recruited them individually. Now that they've been volunteering together on a weekly basis for over a year, they've formed friendships and quite frankly have made the stuffing/collating process a real hoot. They're often carrying on, laughing and enjoying each others company while they help us out. It's been neat to observe them serving the Lord together and enjoying it immensely.

The other thing that impresses me about this group is their level of commitment. Just this morning, one of them arrived extra early because they have to leave early so they wanted to make sure they didn't skimp on their commitment. I appreciate that kind of sacrifice and commitment, particularly to an aspect of our ministry that's not glamorous and completely unseen.

So to Mae, Sam, Jean, Vera and Carl, thanks for your faithful and dedicated service to the Lord and and for bringing joy to Friday mornings.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Review: Penn Cinema

I did something I'd never done before this evening. I took Beth out to the movies, to the opening of Penn Cinema. I've never been to a ribbon cutting ceremony for a building or that type of thing, so it was a new experience.

It's actually a nice complex. The all-day rain of Thursday did wonders for their beautiful landscaping - it was all dirt at the beginning of the day, all mud tonight. There appeared to be ample parking, at least tonight, in the dark I couldn't tell exactly how many spaces they have. The fact that you could drive into the parking lot at all is a minor miracle as Airport Rd has been closed for a while and was still closed when I drove by on Tuesday.

There were maybe 100 or so people who arrived early enough for the ribbon cutting dog and pony show. Judging from those who cut the ribbon etc., it's a family owned/run operation. The whole ceremony was held up by grandma getting something situated just right or at least that's how it appeared to me. They actually cut a film strip instead of ribbon, which I thought was a unique twist.

Ever wonder where they get the over sized scissors? A woman walk passed us with a large padded mail envelope which left the building with the scissors - destination, unknown.

It looked like they must've had all of their employees on duty this night, probably for training. After cutting the ribbon they showed second-run movies (Cars, Pirates of the Caribbean 2, etc.) in each of their theaters. I'm guessing it was an attempt to attract a crowd, but just a modest one to give them a chance to run everything through it's paces without being overwhelmed. I've never gone to a theater and had someone open the door for me, two people sell me a ticket and tell me to enjoy the movie, three more people welcome us to the theater and finally two people take our tickets and direct us to the theater where our movie was showing. I'm guessing if I go back next week it will be somewhat different, but I'm not complaining.

We were in theater 5. Walking into the theater we were overwhelmed with the odor of a brand new car. I never realized that buildings have that new car smell, but that's what it smelled like. What impressed me most were the seats. Stadium seating, with tons of viewing space, if the guy in front of me had stood up, I still think I would've had a clear view of the screen - he'd have to stand on his seat to obstruct my view. The seats have nice back support and get this, they rock! I've never been in fixed seats that rock. Recline, yes; rock, not until tonight. It's also the first theater I was in which had retractable armrests. To think my rear end was likely the first to squish the foam on that chair was a unique, once-in-a-building feeling.

I wasn't impressed with the audio. I'm not a Clair Brothers-eared techie or anything like that, but this was less than I expected. I have to give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the main theater has the super-duper sound. Maybe the movie we saw didn't utilize the surround sound. But whatever the reason, the theater we were in, the movie we were watching had audio that was less than awe-inspiring. It was as if there was one speaker above the screen and that was the sole source of sound.

Overall, to have a theater on the south side of Lititz is much more convenient than heading down to Regal Manor. The Allen Theater experience in Annville is a one of a kind thing, but for just going to see a movie, Penn Cinema will be very convenient. Granted, we go to the theater maybe once a year, twice if we really splurge.

After the credits finished (we always stay for the credits to get full benefit of the ticket price) and we left our seats, I couldn't believe how quickly a brand new theater could become just like every other theater with popcorn squished into the carpet. I turned to Beth and said, "Take a big sniff, it won't smell like this again."

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

New Homepage Coming

As I mentioned a while back, our webpage (www.lgbc.org) has been in need of a makeover as it's been at least some two years since we last revised it. The work's progressing, actually almost finished, and I expect we'll have a new homepage up in the next week.

Actually, the new design is the work of Bryan. We're putting his eye and creativity for graphic layout to work for us or back to work for us. If you look at the past 8-10 years, I'm not sure we've ever figured out who's best suited to do our website. Bryan ran it until around the year 2000 or so, when I picked it up. I've run it (with Elaine's help the past two years) since 2000 and now it's sorta going back to Bryan, if only temporarily.

Fortunately, I think each time it's changed hands, we've only taken steps forward, building on what the other has accomplished. From the draft I've seen, that trend continues with this latest change.

And don't worry, while a new homepage will be nice, a new menu layout for all of our pages is not far behind. We've recognized for sometime that the menu structure is lacking.

Tag

If you haven't noticed, I upgraded the Administering Grace blog and now, Blogger is offering tags. This is really nice for my blogging since I wax eloquently (or attempt to at least) on a variety of topics. I'll use the tags to categorize each entry. That way, if you're especially interested in my entries regarding finance, facility or some other area, you can sort by those entries alone. So make use of the tags.

Would you like sheets, a pillow and a blanket with that?

Knowing that our flight was scheduled to arrive in Dallas at 11:30pm with a 45 minute drive on top of that, I called the hotel a day in advance to confirm our reservation and inform them of our late arrival. The hotel "system was down", but somehow, our room information was already printed out. I need to hire the guy who, knowing that the system will be down, prints out all of the information he needs in advance. The hotel turns out to be at capacity, "we're giving you a room that may only have 1 bed, check it out and if it does, we'll send another bed up. Having only 1 bed wasn't the only thing about the room, it was a smoking room and nicely equipped for the handicapped. Those comfy beds that had been awaiting us (or that we'd been awaiting), turned out to be less than comfy and technically, I didn't even have a bed yet. Oh, and it's 1:30am at this point.

After 15 minutes my bed arrived. Of course, at that hour of the morning, hotels are operating on a skelton staff. The guy who dropped off the bed didn't appear to have ever done this before. He looked at me as if I was supposed to know where the bed would best fit in the layout of the room, not that it's a technical thing. Once we had the bed situated he looked at me and asked, "Would you like sheets, a pillow and a blanket with that?"

The bed accessories were dropped off another 15 minutes later. They provided me with a Queen-sized sheet for a twin bed! The night couldn't pass quick enough. Fortunately, we were transferred to a nicely accomidated room in the morning and enjoyed a nice stay the remaining three nights of our trip. In exchange for the inconvinience the hotel credited us a night's stay on their tab. Fortunately, while a memorable shared experience with Tim, the content of the conference outweighed the interruption of our travels. I'll get into what I took away from the conference in the coming posts...

SuperShuttle

With such a tight connection in Charlotte, we were convinced there was no way our luggage would meet us in Dallas. But to our amazement and to the credit of US Airways, our luggage was there, fully intact. Luggage wasn't going to be the problem this night. The infamous line from the movie Apollo 13, "Looks like we just had our glitch for this mission" was ringing in my ears.

Having never been to Dallas before, I had scouted the travel arrangements to our hotel, those wonderful soft beds awaiting us, and was advised that the Super Shuttle was the most convinient and economical method. The Super Shuttle turned out to be not so super.

After taking 20 minutes to find the umarked pickup location, we found two other travelers awaiting the shuttle with us, one of which had used it before and found it to be super. This night would change his mind.

Three shuttles stopped, asked us our destinations, told us another shuttle would pick us up and promptly left. The fourth shuttle finally picked us up. The poor guy who'd used it before was going to a different part of Dallas and was left to wait for a later shuttle. We thought that was the last we'd see of him, but for some reason the rest of us never did figure out, our driver Jamal looped around the airport terminal, taking us back to our pick up spot. Now you have to understand the timing; our flight arrived at 11:30pm. And it's pushing 12:45am with all of us having sessions to attend at 8am. We were more than ready to get to those comfy rooms that were awaiting us. Jamal soon finished circling the terminal and put us on our way to downtown Dallas. If and when the poor other guy got to his destination, we'll never know. But I doubt he'll be using the Supper Shuttle again.

At this point, the trip which started in such a routine fashion, which had been so rudely interrupted by the Charlotte dash and the not so super shuttle, should've returned to a routine trip again. That was going to turn out to be a bad assumption.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

CLT - Charlotte/Douglas Airport

We quickly found a monitor, informing us that our plane, which we figured we had missed by this point, was in final boarding. Granted, it's gate was about as far away on the opposite side of the terminal as possible. Fortunately for me, I must still be in some residual shape from the over-30 soccer season. Unfortunately for Tim, he didn't play in the over-30 league.

I'd seen a cartoon many years ago that featured a man rushing through an airport only to reach the gate just after the plane had left. The person at the ticket counter says to the man, "Miss you flight?" To which the man replies, "No, I just like to chase airplanes." Always found that funny, though it wasn't so funny anymore.

Running with a loaded carry-on case is a bigger challenge than I realized but I was outrunning everything in sight. In the meantime, we were creating quite a sight! A guy driving one of those people mover carts you only see in airport, something I've always wanted to ride since I was a kid, offered me a ride. Thing is, he offered it to me as I was passing him. I figured if I was passing him that I was gonna get to the gate before he was anyway.

By this point, Tim was sucking wind, so I told him I'd go on ahead and hold the plane (if it was still there). I arrived at the gate in time, but was so winded that the blood flow to my brain had decreased. So in a temporary loss of brain pressure, I told the attendant Tim was on his way and I boarded the plane. Meanwhile, Tim runs on past the gate. In the end we both were buckled in our appropriate seats, winded, sweaty and ready for a late night arrival in Dallas. Oh, but it gets better!

Monday, November 13, 2006

A not so ordinary trip to Dallas, TX

This past week, Tim Reedy (who is our PT Media Producer) and I had the opprotunity to attend a Worship/Facilities Conference in Dallas, TX. We attended to glean information about the technological aspects of worship and the design of church facilities. Only knowing Tim from interactions on Sunday mornings, I was also interested in getting to know him and share the conference experience with him. Who knew we'd find ourselves in so many different situations in a 4-day span?

What started out to be a routine flight to Charlotte, ended like the mall parking lot on Black Friday. Apparently, Charlotte had experienced bad weather all day, necessitating numerous flight delays, if not cancellations. Since all of the gates were occupied when our flight arrived we sat on the tarmac, very much like when you're in a parking lot having seen someone about to pull out of their parking space that's so close to the mall entrance that you decide it's worth taking the time to wait for the person to pull out... Yeah, that was us, except in an airplane. After 15 minutes with no gates opening up, we were rerouted to the long-term parking lot - at least that's what it seemed like. There were half a dozen planes just parked in the far corner of the tarmac, so remote that we didn't even have a gate, climbed off the plane and walked along the tarmac to the terminal. By this point our 30 minute layover to catch our connecting flight to Dallas had been reduced to 5 minutes. Being a NASCAR fan, I knew Charlotte was known for racing, little did I know how it would affect Tim and me in what would happen next...