Something really got to me yesterday that made me end up writing this big three page entry, then after venting a whole bunch, I decided not to post the entry..  But this is still really bugging me, so I figured I should at least get it off my chest…

As you may or may not know, I’m a bit of a web site design nerd.  Throughout the last 9 years I’ve designed or been involved with designing around 50 different web sites.  I’m not one of those sexy, flash-site designers, but I’ve always been proud in my ability to create functional, attractive and useful web sites.  It’s a gift that I truly enjoy…

One of the sites that I’m most proud of has been the design of my Campus Ministry web site…  That site was a long time coming and took two different re-designs, but after hours of work in color-coordinating, structuring and maintaining, we put together an awesome site, and probably one of the better campus ministry sites in the country..  

Well that all changed in the last few months, and now has taken a grave turn…  Last night I’m surfing around the net, when I came across my old Campus Ministry site, which I found has been redesigned by the new campus minister… Now I’m not some egotist that thinks my designs are the best, nor am I not willing to except the ever-changing nature of the Internet, but I can’t help but be offended when they’ve gone and taken something that I worked hard at for years, and totally discarded it – replacing it with something that frankly looks elementary and basic. It would be one thing if they weren’t able to update the site – but I went out of my way to make the web site easily editable – but I guess that wasn’t good enough.

And what’s going on with the web site is an illustration of why I’ve really struggled with the new leadership at my campus ministry, and ultimately at my church.  Here, likely because of youth and inexperience, the leadership has elected to throw out quality ministry/work, and has sacrificed quality (to the point of mediocrity) just so they can have full ownership and most importantly control.  They are unwilling to look to others that may have more skill and expertise – if it exists outside their inside group.

This happened before when Sean, Emily and myself felt so alienated that we had no choice but to resign from student leadership.  It’s why the UM Search Committee was forced to pass up quality candidates for a campus minister.  It’s the reason why I go to Pastoral Council meetings with few expectations in being able to make any real impact.

Before I was fuming mad, but now I would still say that I’m pretty pissed, but trying to turn this around, this is an opportunity for me to devote my web design skills more fully into some other projects (my friend’s web site, my cousin’s org she’s starting, and of course, the NCSC site), and this may also be an opportunity for the staff at church to figure out what exactly they want regarding their web site…

Once again, I am reminded of Matthew 10:14: "Whoever will not receive you or listen to your words – go outside that house or town and shake the dust from your feet."

Oh and if you’re curious, some links.  Like Fox New: We report: you decide…

• The original, unaltered Campus Ministry web site
• The new site they replaced mine with

Song: "Three Little Birds" – Don’t Worry About a Thing, ’cause every little thing, is gonna be alright…  How true…

You know the phrase "Today is the first day of the rest of your life"?  I feel like that today.  Not so much in the sense that I need a renewed look upon life, but more-so that I need to stop dwelling on my shortcomings and do what I need to do to fix the things that are causing stress in my life.

Of course, all of this is self-inflicted and it’s all due to the fact that I’m the biggest procrastinator in the world.  There’s a saying on a calendar I have at work: "Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now."  Unfortunately I live by that all too well, so much so that it gets me into trouble.

This week I’m committed to resolving all of those things that I’ve been putting off all summer long, and a pretty sizable list has piled up.  Ugh…

First and foremost – my crowning disappointment – the NCSC Western Retreat…  You might be asking "What NCSC Western Retreat?" – exactly..  I’ve done some work here and there about it, but nowhere to the point where it should be…  Which has lead me to write the following email to my regional team:

 I am sad to say that due to my inability to manage my time effectively throughout this summer, as will as my ineptitude in delegating tasks that I have only accomplished some minor logistical tasks in preparing for the retreat.  Additionally due to my inabilities I was not able to effectively market & outreach this retreat to our target audience with any realistic notice. I am deeply sorry for letting this fall by the waste-side.  I realize that many of you have gone out of your way to make yourselves available throughout this summer to assist in any way, and I apologize for not taking advantage of your gifts and enthusiasm.  I realize that I have let many of you down, and at this point would ask for your forgiveness as we look towards the fall semester in serving our region and the rest of the NCSC.

It sucks, and it’s pretty much all my fault…  All is not lost, because I was such a bum about this no advertising has been done, so there’s not really anything that has to be canceled in any official capacity – so we’re still able to take the same concepts and ideas and hopefully apply them towards something later on in the semester.  I’m just frustrated because I knew this was looming over me, I kept putting it off and let myself get busy with other things.  Then the next thing I know too much time has passed – it’s too late and now I’m writing apology messages.

Right now I’m working on creating an opportunity for our regional team together at the end of the summer, have some fun together and do some more visioning and planning.  I hope that this opportunity will come to fruition and I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that it happens.  I am blessed with an awesome regional team and I need to use their gifts effectively.  At this point I definitely need a lot of prayer in this area…

So that’s the 800-pound gorilla that is still on my back, but here are some more bits of straw that’s breaking me:

• Pay Off My Broncos Tickets – While I am *officially" on the season ticket waiting list, I effectively have Season Tickets through some former co-workers of mine that have been selling them to me at the beginning of each year.  This will be the 4th year I’ve done this, but first I have to PAY them.  It’s not because I don’t have the money, it’s because I’ve been such a bum to work it into my budget to pay them.  Now our first home pre-season game is August 20th and I need to get all of the money to them.  – Today I emailed them…  I’m hoping to hear from them this week and get the ball rolling.
• Start the Fantasy Football Ball Rolling - Did that last night…  This isn’t so important, except for the fact that if I don’t get going this early people will find other leagues to join and we’ll be up the creek on this one – Emailed a bunch of people yesterday – already received 7 responses!
• Fix the Family Football Pool – I *still* haven’t awarded any of the prizes for the pool, nor have I taken anyone’s dues for the pool.  This is something I need to do before the week ends!  Luckily I will no longer be the football pool commish – I’m turning it over to someone who has the time and capability to do this!
• Tie up the other 50 loose ends I have…

So a bunch of little things – pretty minor in their own but combined have become heavy burdens in themselves…  But hopefully by the end of this week I’ll be able to say that I have all of these taken care of!  Wish me luck!

Few random thoughts:

• Peter Foresburg is no longer an Av – NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooo!!!
• Freakin Comcast randomly changes their channel line-up!  Thanks for breaking my Tivo!  I’m glad I recorded an hour’s worth of the TV Guide Channel!  That’s quality viewing there!
• Only 6 more days until I suffer against the addictions of Madden 2006…. 
• At this moment I’m waiting for a call so that the Explorer can become the drunk bus!  I guess I’m picking up 8 people – should be interesting!  If you ever have too much to drink and need a ride home, call me 24 hours a day at 1-800-AAAAARRRRRRHHHHHHH.

Quick question:  What (if any) is the appeal of Garden State?  Now I may be a little off base here, but Bethany and I rented that movie and we barely got through half of it before we realized we had better things to do…

It was funny because both of us had heard good things about this movie, and we were looking forward to seeing it.  But when we popped it in we just sat there thinking "This is painful"… Next thing you know 45 minutes have passed and you realize that the movie is only 105 minutes long - so here we were: half-way through the movie and we had no idea what was going on, why it was going on or where it was going…  At that point Bethany looks at me and goes "This movie’s so dumb!" and I respond "Let’s give it 5 more minutes.  If it still sucks, we’ll shut if off.".  Three minutes later we both look at each other thinking "Has it been 5 minutes yet". 

I don’t know if I’m going to watch the second half of the movie. I guess because I rented it I might try to see it through to the end, but at this point I have a Tivo full of stuff I actually want to see – so outlook not so good.

Are you ready for some football?!?  Time to get the Fantasy League back together…  If you’re interested in taking part in the fun, email me!

More to come later…  I had an interesting Pastoral Council meeting the other night…  Anxious to process my thoughts on it.

A recap on the places that I’ve been…

First off I ended up working for the first half of the weekend.  I’ve been one of the technical resources on a project we’ve been working on for the last four months, and last weekend was finally the end of the project, where we deployed everything out.  So I had to "come in" on the off-hours to work on the installation & upgrade.  I ended up working on Friday from 9am-1pm, spending time with the fam, then going back in from 4pm-12am.  Then I woke up early Saturday morning and worked from 8am-12pm again, then I spent a good part of the weekend monitoring.  The good news is that outside of a few hiccups here and there, the upgrade went without a hitch.  We didn’t have any major issues and now I am ready to move into my next fun project here at work   Hopefully things will begin to calm down, but we’ll see… 

So when I finally got my work done on Saturday I had lunch with my mom and my uncle (who was visiting in town all this week – there’s where I’ve spent a lot of time this last week), ran some errands with them and then went home to get ready for my big date with Bethany to celebrate her birthday

On Friday I surprised her by having flowers delivered to her at work, and in the flowers was a card that finally revealed what I’ve been planning (she has been in suspense all month): Saturday evening at the Boulder Dinner Theatre to see the Wizard of Oz   So that’s where we went on Saturday.

We had a blast!  I hadn’t been to a dinner theatre in like 6 years, and I’ve forgotten just how much fun they are!  The dinner was pretty good, but it’s obvious you go for the entertainment.  We had seats at the highest level in there, in the middle, towards the left.  The play was a blast!  There was tons of singing and dancing, and I loved the acting!  My favorite characters were the Cowardly Lion & the Tin Man.  The Tin Man’s costume was really cool, except he had this silver thong thing over his spandex (ummmm.. yeah).  I’m not the biggest theatre buff out there, but I was very impressed.  I enjoyed the way they did some of the "effects" from the movie: the tornado, the "no place like home" sequence, along with the flying monkeys and the jitter-bug scenes.  The sets were really cool, especially the Wizard (with the exception that they could have put some black fabric inside his mouth so we didn’t have to see the guy moving it.

Bethany and I had a blast.  In the beginning though, I did something really stupid.  Right as the play started I thought to myself "It’s so quiet in here, it would really suck if someone spilt their drink." and sure enough, freakin’ me moved my arm and knocked my coke over, getting it all over the table.  Luckily the table-cloth absorbed a lot of it, then I was able to quietly clean it up with the napkins, but I felt like a total dumbass.  Argggh… 

Seeing all of those songs again was awesome.  It’s been a good 10 years since I’ve seen the movie, and I never actually saw the live production before.  It was awesome re-living those songs again.  One in particular cracks me up.  It’s the one when they first get into the Emerald City and sing the "Merry Old Land of Oz".  In case you don’t remember, some of the words are:

"Ha – ha – ha, Ho – ho – ho – And a couple of tra – la – las
That’s how we laugh the day away, In the Merry Old Land of Oz!
Bzz – bzz – bzz, Chirp – chirp – chirp – And a couple of La – di – das
That’s how the crickets crick all day, In the Merry Old Land of Oz!
We get up at twelve and start to work at one.
Take an hour for lunch and then at two we’re done.
Jolly good fun!"

Well to show you how much I’ve been shaped by comedy, all I could think of was the "Family Guy" version of this song when Lois talks about how she doesn’t want Chris to go to prison because "(she) know what goes on there.  We’ve all seen ‘Oz’ " then cuts to these guys in the shower singing:

"Scrub scrub here! Scrub scrub there! Whether you’re white or bronze!
A man can wash another man in the merry old land of Oz!"

lol, too funny…

So that’s how my weekend went.  Today was spent doing some work, cleaning up my place and taking a break after a busy few weeks.  Tomorrow I get to go back to the grind and work – beginning another busy week.  Tomorrow night is a Pastoral Council meeting, so I’ll bet I’ll have some thoughts on that tomorrow (never too much drama).

More to come tomorrow

Sometimes we’re posed the proverbial question of "If you could remake the world in your own image, what would it look like?", but most would probably agree that day-dreaming about a self-created world is futile and a waste of time…

Well someone forgot to tell that to the folks at Microsoft, who quite literally re-imaged the world in their own hands.

Earlier this week Microsoft debuted an MSN service called "Virtual Earth".  This web tool is set to compete with the "Google Maps/World" feature.  For those of you who may not know, for the last few months you’ve had the ability to go into Google, type in your address (or anyone else’s address for that matter) and get a map to your house – like Mapquest.  Where this gets better is that not only will Google pull up a map and directions, but also has satellite images of the area as well – so you can pull up a satellite image of your house, work, school, etc..  It’s kinda spooky because of some of these locations you can zoom to the level of your car!  Anyway…

So M$ wanted to get in on this market as well, so they debuted "Virtual Earth" earlier this week.  Since then they’ve received a lot of press about this service, unfortunately most of it has been bad press.

A story in The Register started it all when in their testing of the product, they found that M$ literally has re-made the world in their own image. To summarize:

If you pull up the address for Apple’s headquarters (as in Apple Computers – makers of the Mac and iPod) opening it in Google gives you this image, a beautiful campus with a fully-paved parking lot, green grass and most importantly buildings!

Pull up the image in MSN Virtual Earth and the same location is shown – WITH APPLE HQ COMPLETELY MISSING!  Instead of the beautiful campus with the green grass, you just see a HUGE DIRT LOT!!

It’s erie – almost like aliens swarmed down from the sky and completely vaporized the whole area so that it’s just a dirt lot – like in those sci-fi movies!  I guess in M$’s image of the world, that’s how they view dealing with the competition – blinking them out of existence! 

In seriousness, the maps that you’re looking at are not directly off a live satellite feed by any means.  Both Google and Microsoft have purchased these images from commercial companies and many of them are many years old.  M$ claims that in the "Apple" case the image is from 1990 before the plant was built, but you still have to wonder if someone working on the project thought it’d be funny to pull a prank like this.

Hmmm, makes me wonder if my house still exists in the M$ world…  Whew! Still there!  How about my work?  Okay – looks fine too!

Be careful what you wish for