FLOSS In Church

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Seen at the bottom of an email from a Yahoo user:

“When your life is on the goake your life with you. Try Windows Mobile today”

In the context, what do you think the word means?

Google evidence of this typo in the wild: here. Interesting that I see this page when I search through the church network, but nothing when I search from my home network. Life is like that when you live it on the goake.

Some back-to-back tips:

1. Lighting a Jack-O-Lantern with Solar lighting.  Last night my daughter and I carved a pumpkin during an Adult Bible Fellowship (aka. Sunday School) class party. I did the cutting and scooping while she told me to use triangles for eyes. When we got home I was looking at the solar power lights along our entryway and decapitated one (mwahahaha!) to use as the pumpkin’s light. This works better in the Sunshine State than in darker places up north, but it is perfect for us.

2. Keep a copy of Undelete Plus portable on your thumb drive and memory cards. When editing the above picture with Windows Live Photo Gallery I forgot that it automatically saves the file when you close the gallery.  Since I knew the image was still on my SD card in spite of it being deleted, it only took a few seconds to recover it. You may not like Undelete Plus, but keeping one of these portable apps on all portable storage media is a great help. i have used it to recover files on hard drives since it gives a place to run it without writing to the drive andyou immediately have a place to start exporting the important recovered files.

While visiting some friends in another part of town last night I filled up with gas that cost nearly $0.20 less than what it costs where I live. I did a quick search on local gas prices and I found a station that I had never noticed before and I decided to check it out on Google maps Street View. That was when I noticed that for one frame, the car was between the pumps.

Now, unless the driver was wearing shorts with white socks pulled up really high, he/she is not visible in the picture. It does, however look like Google is issuing ghost cars.

Google Maps Car Getting Gas

I listen to “This American Life” more often than I used to now that I can get it on line. Recently I was pointed to a recent episode discussing some about the current financial crisis.

Their episode on “The Giant Pool of Money” back in May had a good explanation of the global issues that lead to much of the crisis (too many people with too much money and too little to do with it). On October 3rd, they ran “Another Frightening Show About The Economy“with a follow-up the next week in a replay of an old episode “A Better Mousetrap 2008.” This one is a replay of an episode from 2006, but with a couple different stories mixed in.

I just finished listening to the one from 2006 “A Better Mousetrap” and found the portion about creating a new religion to be very interesting. Anyone in ministry can immediately recognize the eye-roll inducing sentiments.

You can download the most recent episode from the podcast or the link on its page for a period of one week starting the week after it airs. After that, the only links available are for listening online or purchasing through iTunes. If you wish to download it directly in spite of these restrictions, you can use the following formula:

Start with
http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/365.mp3

Then enter the episode number in place of the “365″ above.
For example, the episode from 2006 is #311 so the link will be
http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/311.mp3

This has been all over the tech news since yesterday and I found the powerpoint presentation interesting.

It is an interesting look at how venture capitalists are viewing the current crisis.

If you consider that venture capitalists are dealing with companies that desperately need growth to thrive and are living by credit rather than money bins then we match what they are looking at.

With consumers tightening up their wallets they are focused on maintaining the necessities. Unless we make sure we stay a priority to them with a good return in quality of life then we lose their investment.

This also tells me that we need to get some Christian Financial Planning people in to make sure that the finances of those supporting us don’t tank. People have been relying on home equity rather than savings for their fun times and as a buffer in the hard times, and that piggy bank is broken.

We have been severely cutting back our budgets at the church while still trying to maintain quality programming (although less of it) and not letting the missions that rely on us to go without our support. But we are not unaffected by the economic troubles, just ask the business office and watch their faces.

How is your church handling this? Especially for those of you in IT or security, 2 areas that have raidable budgets.

Q: Who is smarter, a Chimpanzee or a Baboon?
A: A Chimpanzee. That is why we have trained chimps that have gone into space (but they still have trouble with bulk mailing)

Q: Who is smarter, a group of Chimpanzees or a group of Baboons
A: The group of Baboons.
Chimps are under threat because chimp populations have trouble adapting to changes as humans encroach on them, but baboons are under threat because they have adapted too much and get threatened when they encroach on humans (note: Brief research relying heavily on the assertions of the scientist mentioned in this post).

I was listening to an interview of Howard Bloom talking about his book “The Global Brain” and a few things caught my attention. One is how much more effective you are when working as a well functioning team built on respect for one another’s gifts, and the other is how repeated failure causes mental apoptosis and destruction of an individual.

Lessons: Communicate, respect, and grow.

I was playing around with Netstat* the other day (Does that sound geeky to you too? Nah,  I didn’t think so either.), and realized that whenever I opened Firefox I was accessing tons of web sites. I looked them up and discovered that they were all the RSS feeds I had bookmarked in Firefox and used in Sage (simple feed reader).

There was no reason for them to keep loading and getting refreshed so I decided to clean them out, and here is how I did it.

Sage can display live bookmarked feeds an regular bookmarks of feeds, so since I didn’t need all of them to be live I opened up  C:\Documents and Settings\MyUserNames\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\profilename.default\bookmarks.html (the parts in Bold Italics will need to be changed to match your installation) in a text editor and replaced all instances of FEEDURL with HREF. Oh, and you will want to copy that file first as a backup.

Firefox seems to load much faster and run a little more smoothly.

*Netstat is a program included on Windows and can be accessed from the command line. It displays all the systems your computer is currently (well, very recently) connected to. If you are worried that some program is contacting undesirable systems, you can verify that here.

Open a “Run” box (either from the start button or by using [Windows Key] + R), type cmd and press enter. Type netstat to run netstat or netstat ? to learn how to use it.

I am writing this in Google Chrome right now.

[Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13]

Unfortunately, Chrome has some issues with the wordpress post entry text box, but it is more of an annoyance that a big problem and they are very annoying.

It is fast, but not smooth. It is more stable than Safari on Windows (as far as I can tell), but not great. It does at least work with Arena (which Safari does not).

I brought it down to a lack of responsiveness trying to download 7 podcasts from Bloglines, I dislike the tabs on top of the address bar, the download page cannot be cleaned up (as far as I can tell), New Tab is not letting me open my homepage instead of recently visited pages, and it is lacking important features (I really miss my FF extensions too).

Something interesting, about:memory brings up a lot of memory information. I found this by middle clicking on the top bar, selecting “Task Manager” then “Stats for nerds.”

I may use Chrome for GMail or just another browser option, but it is not ready to replace FF or IE (well, duh).

UPDATE: I won’t be using it for Wordpress posts any time soon. I am editing it in Firefox because Chrome completely goofed the posting.