Smarter Sheep

James won the ipod shuffle in our name the group contest with his very cool entry of “Technical Faith”. To cement the deal we have picked up the domain technicalfaith.com and will setup a blog to host our group there.

James also won the “pick a number between 1 and 100 without going over” contest and took home a 4×4 USB hub… guess he will be up late the next couple of evenings downloading tunes to his new ipod through the usb hub! Way to represent at our first group James!

We plan to have a give away or contest for old computer hardware and software each week at our small group and would love some donations if you have something in your computer closet too.

Tonight is the kickoff for our Geek Squad small group. The group name name is still pending and you can win a Apple Ipod Shuffle if you win the naming contest and show up at the barbecue tonight! If you have a couple name submissions for the group in mind make sure to post them in the comments to the previous post announcing the contest!

See you there!

This next Tuesday evening September 2nd is the kickoff for our new small group. Robert Carrico has graciously offered to host at his house with a BBQ. We plan to get started at 7PM.

The address is

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.

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!

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.

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