FLOSS In Church

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[html] Matheteuo Christian Fellowship is now accepting financial donations via our website. All contributions coming from the web will support our va

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Some Unknown robot (identified by ‘bot/’ or ‘bot-’)  got a hold of the osministry.com site and has been sucking our bandwidth dry.

I wasn’t prepared for the extra 5GB that has been used this month, but I am hoping we stretch it out until Monday before running out of bandwidth allocated here.

I just wanted to make sure you all knew that I was checking into it and were not surprised if it happened. If it gets tight I may be able to reallocate some shared bandwidth, but I hope I don’t have to.

So, the site went down for part of Saturday and all of Sunday. now I am trying to figure out if I need to block a particular search indexing robot. Some unidentified robot actually passed up Yahoo!’s Slurp as the biggest bandwidth hog.

I’ll have to see if this is going to be a continuing problem. If so, I will need to allocate more bandwidth to this site.

I am thinking about blaming Cuil. Fortunately, I won’t be missing much traffic if I block them.