Friday, August 20, 2010 at 04:51PM This may be a bit edgy for some of you but I love it - In Shallow Seas We Sail by Emery. It falls in the same genre as Almost. Speaking of Almost, have you heard Hand Grenade? This has become one of my FAVORITE SONGS. Here it is...
Have a great weekend. See you back here on Monday!
Monday, July 19, 2010 at 11:38PM Well its official. I am a leader. Like it or not and I better be careful.
I am a long time hater of everything Google. Why? They are just all-too-encompassing. It's like the Georgia Bulldogs. I don't know anything about them but as a Georgian, I am sick of the insanity. Most fans never even attended UGA and even more of them have never set foot on campus. Red, dogs, hedges - arghhh.
Google has been the same until the last seven months. I recently founded an online, cutting edge, Bible study tool called WordBloom. Marketers and donors wanted to know who was visiting and what they were doing. Someone mentioned Google Analytics. That was an incredible solution.
Then came Google voice which is now being used in our SOHO church environment to enable virtual and physical office communications at a fraction of the traditional cost.
One week ago, while testing WordBloom and checking out Google Voice, I found that Chrome had extensions (like our Joomla deployment) for Voice and other tools. I had to give it a try and it was as good as they say. It uses minimal resources, is faster than fast, and incredible.
So why does going Chrome make me a leader? I just looked over and my circle of workers and friends are trying, installing, and customizing Chrome. The same thing happened when I finally tried a Mac. I am on my third and our church is getting ready to migrate to a Mac network, my family has macs, my friends have macs, and iPads, and iTouches. Whether I want to be or not, I am a leader.
I had better be careful what I choose to do next. Good thing I have great computers and a great new browser!
Friday, June 4, 2010 at 12:26PM As I write, I am on a bus with 35 of some of my favorite people on the planet. The crew is headed for a 10 day build in Mexico to add 5,000 square feet to an incredible camp in Saltillo. The camp will reach 10,000 kids with education and Good News over the next 5 years.
The bus is outfitted with WiFi so email and Skype are up and running. The phone just rang and one of many called to talk about the Atlanta Business Chronicle profile. I had forgotten about it. The interview was incredible and the writer a really neat guy. The photo shoot was another thing.
Who knows what the pictures look like? I don't. I just know that the very astute photographer could tell that I didn't have much "photo shoot" experience. My life's work was once described as "the guy you can always count on who is changing the world but who no one knows." I think he was correct. Another friend says that Northwest Church is the best kept secret, which, of course, doesn't really reflect our mission.
God is funny. God is awesome. He has definitively and with great wisdom protected me so that I can work His work without distraction. The very things that I longed for in my youth would have so distracted the work that he called me to do.
We'll have to see what that photo looks like!
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 07:52AM My life is awesome. Yours might be as good but it isn't better.
The sun is just right, the air is crisp but not cold, the sky is clear - something feels right. The night was good, sleep was deep, morning came well. The seeds of 40 days of worship are blossoming in my heart. My mind becomes more and more consumed with nothing ill and everything incredible. I am consumed in a feeling of well being. It's euphoric. I love days, moments, minutes like this.
Funny, this wonderful, internally powered euphoria didn't exist before I was a Christian. Any euphoria before Christ was powered solely by the outside.
Take today for example, there is hopelessly more work than can be done, WordBloom is still new and tight, the mission trip planning is overwhelming, the lawyers won't let us use the new bus to help other churches, there are bills to pay, a dear friend now has stage 4 T-Cell cancer, another friend lies in a bed shot, and the list goes on. However, I sit here with a silly grin anxiously waiting tonight's worship. A few minutes ago, certainly embarrassing someone, I was jamming out to one of Ike's techno, pop worship songs in carline.
I love God. He loved me first: I get that. He started this chain reaction but now He loves me back and I just can't stand it. He overwhelms me. He loves me. His is incredible. My life is awesome. Excuse me now, I need to go dance...
Monday, March 29, 2010 at 10:11AM I'm sitting here drinking freshly roasted and ground Kenyan coffee, listening to Beaming by Reliant K, struggling with an intermittent Comcastic internet connection and finding myself glad to be home again.
I just returned from BibleTech 2010 which was really incredible. Everything from technical linguists, programmers, internet and data architects, database engineers and innovators in technology - all of whom translate and provide access to the Bible in the 21st Century. The promoters did a great job providing a clean, highly valuable conference with little of the wasted time of other networking and innovation meetings.
We found out that WordBloom is indeed at the cutting edge of Bible data delivery as people across all of the technical disciplines stopped by our display and were blown away by the concept of WordBloom. A few programmers weren't impressed with some of the things that they felt would be easy to code. Some technical linguists saw the information presented as too simplistic for their needs. The database architects wanted to know the secret to the data relations. It was a good debut of the many different approaches to help people see the power of WordBloom. Again and again, we said, "It delivers content immediately - all at once - no clicks" or "we have achieved an 85% click reduction" or "any resource, any time, anything relevant is the focus."
At various times throughout the day, people would visit the booth and say (with a lightbulb over their head), "So you could plug in any resource and any part of that resource is automatically linked and immediately presented? I can see all the Greek, the parallel Bible, the suggested readings, cross-references, everything? No tabs? Cool. No panes? Cool." Another visitor came to the booth, listened and then walked away. He came back later and said, "So this really is the first ever Biblical thesaurus?" or "So my students just type in Matthew 11:1 and they see everything about the verse? Amazing!"
It was hilarious, fun and made me realize it isn't just the way we comunicate the idea of WordBloom. People in this industry simply have never seen anything like this ever before and it is going to take time for them to realize the power of the product. In a way, it reminds me of my faith. My faith is revolutionary but I have many new friends who just need to be able to see a portion of it, watch me live it out and then chew on it for a while until the light bulb goes off. On my end, I need to constantly show off my faith like the it's the coolest new gadget on the planet. At that point, we are able to meet in the middle and both find a relationship with God.