Smarter Sheep

Get your small group name entries in and land an ipod shuffle! When was the last time you won cool fruit prizes for just making stuff up? ok… your right… some of you do that for a living, but this is serious business that requires depth of character, creative thinking and possibly a google search.

We are kicking off our new Geek Squad small group for anyone that lives, works or eats in a computer or technology field and desires to hang out with us. It looks like Tuesday evenings at 7pm starting the first Tuesday in September is the big night. Do to lack of creativity I am running a contest here on my blog to find an appropriate name for the group.

Here are the rules for the contest:

1. You can’t use the word “geek” or “nerd” in the name.
2. Your name submission should be trendy, creative and even amusing.
3. Geeks have feelings too… be nice.
4. No words with more than 4 syllables.
5 .Submit your group name entry as a comment and make sure to identify your first name and email address so that we know who you are.
6. You must be present to collect your prize at the first group meeting.
7. Submit as many times as you like and increase your chances to win.
8. Invite your friends.

Julie and I received some scary and concerning news from the doctors yesterday. When that happens, you tend to walk away wondering about the future, how this all turns out and your mind immediately starts in with the “what if” movies. These are the kind of mental movies you just can’t entertain and you should seriously walk out on.

“God is a safe place to hide, ready to help when we need him. We stand fearless at the cliff-edge of doom, courageous in seastorm and earthquake.” - Psalm 46

I’m truly thankful that we have a shepherd through the scary valleys regardless of what cliff edge we may be standing on…

Don’t download and install free screen savers…. yes I know.. they come with pretty waterfalls, flying geese and spectacular mountain scenes. But, they also install junk on your computer that sends all your internet browsing information back to some secret website on an island in a third world country where hackers are selling your information to feed their children. Yes, I know.. you want to help feed their children, it’s a great ministry idea…but us computer guys prefer you just send them a check rather than causing more computer work for us.

Never, ever, ever…. how can I say this in a way that will strike fear into the reader… EVER load AOL on your computer. Feel free to load it on an enemy computer if your really that mean… but be careful even acquiring and handling the cdrom from which the software would be installed. I suggest wearing some sort of protection if you do. From a computer guy’s standpoint, AOL is the evil of evils when it comes to destroying computers. BEWARE!

Well, it happened… I turned the “big four O” on Friday.  It was a special day with the  whole 08-08-08  new beginning thing.  It was also amazing to look back as well as look forward and what God may have planned in the future.  I am truly blessed with an amazing wife and 4 children, an awesome church, incredible job and a relationship with Christ that continues to make me an expert in what its like to be forgiven after screwing up again and again.  During the week I considered some things that I will to do differently in the next 40 years:

1. Pray more, Worry less

2. Live more passionately, share Christ fearlessly

3. Love deeply, Laugh hysterically

4. Share more of myself with my wife and kids, sacrifice and serve relentlesly

5. Take myself less seriously, notice others needs more

6. Walk closer with my friends, listen when they are speaking

7. Reflect who God is, not who I wish him to be

8. Adjust my priorities to be eternal in nature

9. Read and study my Bible more, dig in and let it change me

10. Come to the rescue at all costs

We are working at some new options for online event registration. We have used FellowshipOne in the past for much of this where it made sense, however F1 forces us to have every event registrant create a login. When we have concerts and more community related events we just want to take online payments and reserve seating. We are currently looking at Event Brite as well as a custom local option that may be promising. I’ll keep you posted.

I’m really liking Ruby and Rails development. I have been working through some rails books the last few weeks along with evaluating various php frameworks and at this point I have to say that Rails kicks the snot out of anything else so far. phpCake is a close second. I also found Netbeans to be my editor of choice. Coming from a .net world where we have had some amazing editors that I often took for granted, I found it hard to find a good editor for php and rails, but Netbeans is amazing so far and I am quite impressed.

For those, like myself who didn’t attend or even know about the Google conference in may, I ran across a cool area that google has setup with videos and downloads of all the presentations. There is coverage for many of their applications as well as building apps on their new python based appengine. Check it out here

Today wraps up a long week of Vacation Bible Experience for the kids here at Capital Christian. There have been hundreds of kids from the church as well as the community. I ran across the following passage in Ephesians chapter 5 of the Message Bible this morning:

Watch what God does, and then you do it, like little children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.

It’s all too easy to get caught up in everything going on and miss out on what God is doing in lives via his ability to simply love us for who we are.