Blog Relocating Again

I've relocated my blog once more. Hopefully this will be it's final dwelling place.

http://blog.billglick.com/

Time Tracking with Twitter

At work recently we've been trying to get a better handle on how we use our time. My goal has been to document my time usage in 15 minute increments throughout the day. But, obviously this could quickly become a tedious task that is counter productive.

Yesterday I had an idea to simplify this task. I setup a new Twitter account specifically for this task. Then I downloaded a Twitter client and setup a cron entry to automatically open the twitter client every 15 minutes throughout my work day. So now documenting my work day is pretty unobtrusive. And if my coworkers ever want a glimpse of what I'm up to, they can simply subscribe to my Twitter feed.

I've been auditing my work time in a similar manner for the past couple of weeks and have found this extremely valuable. I'm finding 4 main benefits:

1. I feel pressured to be more productive so I actually have something to include in my entries. It's a kind of accountability.
   
2. I can quickly review my week so that preparing status reports for management is easier.
3. I'm seeing areas where I get bogged down and am unproductive, as well as times of day that I'm simply wasting time or goofing off.
4. I have a historical log so that I can diagnose issues down the road. Lots of times we'll see where one of our systems started having problems on a certain date or time; and now it's easier to recall what might have changed during that particular time frame.

Have you ever found it useful to track your work and time in this much detail?

Do you have any other creative uses for Twitter.com?

It's Baby Week

It's hard sometimes being single and an only child. So, forgive me while I dote on my latest first cousins, once removed.

Will Eugene Glick
born November 3, 2007 at 7:31p
weighed 7.13 lbs and 20"
parents: Chad & Denise Glick


Kinsey Grace Jarrett
Born November 6, 2007 at 9:55a
8 lbs., 20 1/2 inches
parents: David & Kristin Jarrett

Mac Tip - Better Screen Captures

Often times I need to grab a screen capture from my Mac. For years I've been doing a Command+Shift+3, which grabs a screen capture of my entire desktop.

But, I generally just want a screen capture of my current application window. Well, that's still relatively easy... just do a Command+Shift+4, SpaceBar, and then click on the window you want to save.

Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? I'm trying to be teachable.

Here's a link to some other basic OS X keyboard shortcuts.

What are some of your favorite keyboard shortcuts in Mac OS X?

Giant Crosses

So, I've seen 3 giant crosses along US interstates over the past couple of years. I've been curious about them and recently someone at church was talking about them. So, I decided it was time to find out about them. It turns out the one closest to my house is the tallest.

Effingham, IL

• height: 198 ft
• built: 2001
• satellite map
  

Groom, TX

• height: 190 ft
• built: 1995
• satellite map
  
• some cool photos

Edmond, OK

• height: 163 ft
• built: 1996
• map and details
• satellite map
  
• This is at one of the LifeChurch.tv campuses that my church is networked with.

Castro Valley, CA

• 3 Crosses, side by side
• height: 100ft
• satellite map

And for a little context, the tallest cross in the world...
Valle de los Caídos

• near Madrid, Spain
• height: 500 ft 152.4-meters)
• built: 1940-1959

Have you seen any of these in person OR do you know of other huge crosses like this?

Coming next... Colossal Statues of Jesus. (not really)

Blogger Web Stats Reporting

So... Google owns Blogger, right? That's the same Google that also operates Google Analytics, the awesomely incredible web statistics reporting tool.

So, why can't Blogger tell me any web statistics about who, if anyone, reads my blog? Hmmmm...

Blogs I Read

In response to Dave's blog entry, I decided to detail some of the top blogs and RSS feeds that I read each day.

God Related:

• Grace Community's blog & podcast
• swerve.lifechurch.tv
• Perry Noble
• Monday Morning Insight
• digital.leadnet.org
• Terry Storch
• Church Marketing Sucks

Leadership:

• Guy Kawasaki

Geek Stuff:

• The Unofficial Apple Weblog
• Digg
• Slashdot

Several Friends & Family

with news about children, health battles, and life in general

General News:

• News Gazette
• FOX News
• Champaign Weather

Do you have any blogs or RSS feeds that you recommend?

ChMS, SMS, and Maillists for Urgent Communications

I'm not sure if I stole this idea, but as winter weather is only months away, this seems like a good idea to pursue. Basically, how can we make use of SMS text messaging?

Mass SMS text messaging seems useful for last minute announcements. One thing that pops up every couple of years is the need to cancel a church event due to winter weather. It'd be cool to have an easy way to SMS everyone we have a cell phone number for with this sort of announcement.

SMS alerts shouldn't be that hard. Here's what I think we need to do:
1) We should be able to export all cell phone numbers from our ChMS system.
2) Then we can remove all characters from the cell phone data that isn't numeric.
3) Append '@teleflip.com' to each cell phone number to get an email address for each number. (Any other email to SMS gateway service could work instead of teleflip.com.)
4) Then load the list of SMS email addresses into a mailing list.

I already have some other mailing lists that I auto populate from our ChMS, so this should be relatively straight forward. This could be scripted to update the mailing list every week.

So, if an urgent church wide announcement needed to be communicated, someone could simply email the sms mailing list and most everyone should be notified in near real-time.

Does your church make any similar use of SMS for any communciation?

What kind of plans do you have in place for urgent communications like this?

Lyric Background Videos using Music Visualization and VJ Tools

I have a hard time coming up with good visual backgrounds to go along with song lyrics. It seems like it's easy to find backgrounds that are either boring, irrelevant, or distracting.

For a couple of years I've been thinking there has to be some way to have dynamically created animations to use as song backgrounds. Several months ago I came across some Quartz Composer animations that were controlled via sound. But, I hadn't been able to figure out how to use any of these animations in real time with our presentation software.

So, finally last week I decided I was going to experiment with using some sound triggered Quartz Composer animations for song backgrounds. After a few hours I finally setup a video camera to capture my Mac's screen animation and feed the video into our presentation software via a live firewire feed. It was clunky and awkward to control, but it worked and looked nice. Unfortunately, I only really found one useful Quartz Composer animation to use, Soundstream. So, I'm not ready to put it into regular use, but I proved it was worth exploring some more.

So, has anyone else used any music visualization or VJ software to create song backgrounds? Any advice you can share?

Addicted to Google Reader

I started using Google Reader about 1 month ago to be a central spot for everything I read online. As a firm believer in RSS feeds for a couple of years, I'd explored Google Reader back when it first was introduced, but didn't really find it all the useful or powerful.

But now that's different. Google Reader has matured into a powerful RSS reader, while RSS and XML feeds have become much more prolific. After a bit more exploring this weekend, I'm finding that I don't need to leave Google Reader to catch up on any of my online reading.

A Few RSS Reader Tips
So, besides subscribing to the normal blog and news feeds that most people are aware of, here are some additional things I'm doing with RSS feeds in Google Reader.

YouTube Videos - http://www.youtube.com/rssls

• http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/willowcreek.rss
• http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/lifechurch.tv.rss
• http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/mosaicla/videos.rss

CraigsList

• http://chambana.craigslist.org/search/msg?query=piano&format=rss

Weather - http://www.rssweather.com/

• http://www.rssweather.com/wx/us/il/champaign/rss.php

Bible Reading

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/DiggingDeeper (warning: personal plug)

Google News

• http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=church+technology&output=atom
• http://news.google.com/news?um=1&tab=wn&hl=en&q=champaign+IL&output=atom
  

Yahoo Pipes - http://pipes.yahoo.com/
I'm not using Pipes yet, but the idea of easily programming applications and feeds via this interface intrigues me. I want to keep my eye on this tool.

Anyone else have any RSS feed tips that help them with managing your daily flow of information?

Trouble Choosing Colors?

A while back Adobe introduced Kuler to help with choosing and sharing color palettes that work well together. While I still haven't really made much use of this tool, I'm convinced that I should.

Today I ran across a blog entry from a site that takes a similar approach to sharing color palettes, COLOURlovers.com. In this blog entry they show the color palettes of a few very famous paintings. These are obviously some nice color combinations that I should try sometime.

• Have you tried using Kuler or COLOURlovers?
• Have any favorite color palettes to share?

Is Technology As Innovative As We Think?

In an article in last month's New Yorker, Steven Shapin writes What Else is New? and points out that a lot of the most effective technology isn't really all that new or innovative. Effective technology has often proven itself over a matter of years.

Here are a couple of quotes from the article:

The nineteenth-century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle didn’t much like the new industrial order, but he did understand the substantive relationship between human beings and their technologies: “Man is a Tool-using Animal. . . . Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.”

In “The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900” (Oxford; $26), David Edgerton, a well-known British historian of modern military and industrial technology, offers a vigorous assault on this narrative. He thinks that traditional ways of understanding technology, technological change, and the role of technology in our lives, have been severely distorted by what he calls “the innovation-centric account” of technology. The book is a provocative, concise, and elegant exercise in intellectual Protestantism, enthusiastically nailing its iconoclastic theses on the door of the Church of Technological Hype: no one is very good at predicting technological futures; new and old technologies coexist; and technological significance and technological novelty are rarely the same—indeed, a given technology’s grip on our awareness is often in inverse relationship to its significance in our lives. Above all, Edgerton says that we are wrong to associate technology solely with invention, and that we should think of it, rather, as evolving through use. A “history of technology-in-use,” he writes, yields “a radically different picture of technology, and indeed of invention and innovation.”

Another thought process that I've been pursuing is how we often view technology as our hope. We often put our hope in technology for solving our current and future problems. Faith in technology can replace faith in God. But, that's a subject for a future blog post.

Be sure to read this article, then let's address some questions for further discussion:

1. What are some of our most effective technologies that are at least 25-50 years old?
2. Do we sometimes get too hyped about cutting edge technology before it becomes truly effective? What are some recent examples of this?
3. How do we spot new, effective technology and distinguish it from ineffective hype?

Free Use Image Searches

I've been trying to figure out a way to make use of Google to search for images from free image websites for a while. Google Coop has shown some potential, but it doesn't really support image searches in it's current state.

But today, I discovered a website devoted to free use image searches:
http://yotophoto.com/

This looks really simple to use and found a lot of useful images that my recent home-grown searches hadn't found.

For those interested, here are a couple of Google Coop searches that I've been testing, for image and media searching:

• Free Image Search
• Church Video Search

And an earlier attempt to hack Google Image Search:

• Free Image Search
  

But, for now, yotophoto.com seems like a much better tool.

Anyone else know of similar tools for searching for media useful in the church?

Design Lab

One of the blogs I read, Church Marketing Sucks, has made creative use of Flickr. They have a group setup there so that designers can post artwork, concepts, and questions for input from others.

Church Marketing Lab
http://www.flickr.com/groups/cfcc/

Seems like a great concept.

Worship Podcasts

Here are some podcasts that have been grabbing my attention recently.

Worship Sets:

LifeChurch.tv South OKC:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=216314816
LifeChurch.tv Tulsa:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=256184053
Mars Hill Music:
http://rss.marshillchurch.org/mhcmusic


Video Podcasts:

LifeChurch.tv:
http://www.lifechurch.tv/rss/messagecast-itunes.xml
Don't Waste Your Life:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/DWYL
Mosaic:
http://mosaic.org/podcast/videofeed/
Mars Hill:
http://rss.marshillchurch.org/mhcsermonvideo