Archive for 2006-03

Many of you have spotted the link to ether™ under the new “Must See” section (where I’ll just highlight some temporary but important links from time to time, Google-ad-style.) Ether is a company I heard about via TechCrunch. After hearing the vision of this recent start-up, I applied to assist with the beta immediately. A few weeks later, I was invited give it a whirl and received an Ether t-shirt and business card holder via mail. Sweet!

The idea that drives Ether is quite simple. Earn money selling what you say. Pretty simple by idea, but novel by approach. When you sign up with Ether, you get an extension at 1-888-MY-ETHER that allow calls to be forwarded to the phone of your choice enabling Ether to charge the client and pay you the revenue. You choose the charge of the call as well, either per minute, per hour or per call.

The interface is clean and easy to work with. Once you setup your account, you are asked to create a listing on the Ether service. Except, your listing doesn’t get added to any sort of directory, but simply lists your services on a page that you link to in email signatures and blogs, etc. (To me this is one option I’d like to see added to Ether: a directory for clients to browse.)

After you advertise and (hopefully) begin receiving calls, Ether will pay you from the funds received from the prepaid client call, less 15% for commission (10% for beta testers.) No other fees apply. Ether has also added a couple of new options for selling digital content distributed via email or web. For instance, you can place a price on an ebook sent via email, or a podcast through a blog, and let Ether do the exchange.

The bottom line is this, if you’ve got something to say, you might as well get paid to say it. If you’re knowledgable in a particular field and you’re willing to assist someone else, sign up and earn a buck or two.

Visit my Ether

Ether: How It Works

Technorati Tags: ether, service, phone

Just wanted to flash away from the tech stuff to offer my mom a Happy Birthday! Perhaps I’m a tad biased, but my mom is the greatest mom in the whole world.

We are in Orlando and surprised her yesterday by showing up for the celebration. And she didn’t think we were coming. Always fun to pull a surprise. We left a beautiful 65° day in D.C. and arrived to a beautiful 85° day in Orlando. Not a bad trip. We’ll be hitting Daytona Beach later today. Mom knows how to celebrate a birthday!

I love you, Mom. Enjoy your day!

Still trying to decipher exactly what those words mean and even how they fit in the context of NCC. But what an awesome new adventure!

I think I’m doing something different every day. At least, it feels that way. I’m not even a pro audio guy and I’ve run sound twice already. Big gigs too, not the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fan club small group meetings (though they are fun!) I’m not really great at art-by-hand, but today I found myself spray painting the letters N-E-O-S on a sheet of aluminum. Pastor Mark and I were thinking up a few stage ideas for the new series that starts Saturday. (Better late than never.) We thought about going for that urban “tagging” look and we both tried our hand at it. His clearly said NEOS and even looked pretty cool. Mine said NEDS and didn’t quite achieve what we were going for. The funniest thing to me wasn’t my bad attempt at spray artistry, but the fact that our experiment took place on the sidewalk in front of the coffeehouse while Capitol Hill commuters strolled by on their way home. “Welcome to Ned’s. Want a latte?”

When I’m not revolutionizing the world of spray painting, I do actually work on tech-based projects. In a few months, we will launch the new theaterchurch.com. Before we get there, we’ll have to tie up a few loose ends with the rest of NCC’s web presence. There are a plethora of sites that fall under the umbrella of NCC and I’ll be standardizing things just a bit to help the overall process going forward. Not a huge issue, but in the past, lots of different people have worked on lots of different things. Nothing wrong with that at all, but it does make organization suffer somewhat. So, I’ll have to spend a few weeks in organization mode. Less productive in the short term, huge benefits in the long term.

At some point in that process, I’m going to gather a few of the web experts in the church together. I also want some creative types, some technicians, some business people, some slackers and some regular joes in the room. We’re going to sort through some data, analyze some traffic patterns, talk openly about usability, draw some things, eat some waffles, determine the win and chart a course for the next iteration of NCC’s digital identity. I realize that to go this alone would be unwise. Sure, I know what I want to do. I know what I love. I certainly know what I don’t love. But I believe this process will need lots of objectivity, lots of ideas and opinions and arguments. It has to be thought through, inventively and cautiously. It’s going to be a blast!

Every now and then, you might find me reaching to define or redefine the scope of the digital pastor by fleshing some things out here. Hope you don’t mind.

Technorati Tags: church, technology, pastor, ideas, project, organization, development

Rounding out a bit of weekend reading (no time for it during the week :)) and found a cool article on the world’s best skylines. Mostly the author’s personal preference, but the article holds some beautiful imagery and features several U.S. skylines. Some of the more impressive skylines come from rapidly developing cities in the Far East.

World’s Top 15 Skylines

Technorati Tags: images, skylines

Okay, so not exactly real life. But I started taking Auburn through a dynasty season on EA Sports™ NCAA Football 2005. (After all, basketball season is almost over…) This week’s match-up was certainly an easy one, but I never expected the massacre that ensued.

With 10:00 quarters and all penalties and injuries and team balancing turned on, I came out of the game with a 175-point shutout. The stats are even more incredible than that. Check it out:

Score
Citadel 0
Auburn 175

Box Score
Citadel 0 0 0 0
Auburn 41 49 43 42

First Downs
Citadel 7
Auburn 51

Total Offense
Citadel 101
Auburn 1127

Rushing Attempts (Yards)
Citadel 47 (-56)
Auburn 60 (673)

Passing: Comp-Attempts-TD (Yards)
Citadel 11-45-0 (157)
Auburn 17-31-6 (454)

In addition, The Citadel’s QB fell to 11 sacks, compared to 0 for Auburn. Oddly enough, The Citadel had the ball for 23:41 compared to Auburn’s 16:19 T.O.P. proving just how quickly Auburn was getting the ball in the end zone. On average, that’s less than a single game minute per drive. And no drive went without a score.

Auburn’s quarterback rushed for 673 yards. Yes, rushed, I said. Also, all 25 TDs in the game were either from a run or throw originating from the QB.

So I know it’s just a game. And yes, I basically found a pattern of offensive and defensive plays that simply annihilated all hope of the A.I. for The Citadel to even score. And yes, it might have been a waste of an hours time. But boy was it fun! Plus, we are 3-0 on the season, we moved up from 12th in the preseason ranking to 6th on the coaches poll and 2nd on the media poll, and the QB is already a Heisman candidate.

Technorati Tags: ea, ncaa, football, xbox, gaming

Since arriving here in D.C., I’ve been casually shopping for an ISP for our home connection. As usual, there are the cable and DSL and satellite providers. Dave Clark, NCC’s media pastor, mentioned that they were using DC Access for the wi-fi at Ebenezers. So I decided to look into their residential services. DC Access offers broadband wi-fi and dial-up services for residents and businesses on Capitol Hill.

After reviewing their service tier and checking out some of the particulars, I felt like they could offer us plenty of bandwidth for a fair price. Plus, the ease of setup and the community feel of the company really won me over. When I called at 7:30 p.m., I was immediately greeted by a real, live human being on the other end. No machine, no options, no hold time. I could get used to this.

Tomorrow afternoon, Matt from DC Access will stop by to get things rolling for us. The only hardware to install is a high-power antenna, essentially a repeater, that typically mounts to the roof (in the case of a townhouse/rowhouse.) In our case, the antenna will be installed in our apartment. Our windows are south-facing, with an almost direct line-of-sight view of the POP. (Two blocks south at 3rd and Massachusetts Ave.) I can even “see” the DC Access network in my available wireless connections. But the antenna will help strengthen the signal and guarantee us more efficient performance.

Finally, Internet access at home.

Technorati Tags: isp, wifi, dc access, capitol hill

Sometimes, when you happen upon an incredibly cool site (like davidblog :)) you just want to know if there are any other places out there like it. Enter Similicio.us, a site that deploys a search technology using a combination of del.icio.us and EasyUtil to return sites that have similar content. This isn’t the first tool in the shed to provide this service, but it is one of the better ones that I’ve seen. Lightweight with great results.

Similicio.us

Similar sites to davidblog.com (Amazingly, almost all are friends from the blogosphere.)

Technorati Tags: similicious, blog, search, tech

We just launched the NCC Video Podcast over the weekend. Though we were initally planning on waiting a few weeks before taking the leap, we decided to bump it up to coincide with the launch of Ebenezer’s Coffeehouse, the inaugural Saturday service and our conversion to HD.

This week’s video was taped in standard definition (HD starts this Sunday) and converted to .m4v in Final Cut Pro with the standard “export to iPod” compression settings. I was a little displeased with the output file size (280MB), but I did see plenty of other hour-length video podcasts within that range. Still, I’d like to get it down to about 100MB and in a more accessible format. We’ll craft some custom compression settings and start with those either this week or after the So Far So God series.

1-click iTunes Subscription

RSS Feed (Currently .m4v iTunes only content, converting to more accessible format soon.)

Technorati Tags: theaterchurch.com, national community church, itunes, podcast

Last night, we had a blast hanging with some friends of ours, Nathan and Heather, long-time NCCers. Got some great grub at the Austin Grill at 7th and E NW. We also hung out at the Ebenezer’s Family and Friends Night, where the Eb’s crew were testing out their new barista skills on real people. Tons of fun. A few members of the g.p. even strolled in right off the street.

The buzz surrounding this coffeehouse is incredible. It’s actually more rare to see someone walk by and not be interested in it! Everyone wants to know when it’s opening. It’s going to be insane when that happens (tomorrow or Wednesday). Everyone is really stoked about it.

What a testament to God’s favor! What a blessing to be able to minister in the middle of the marketplace!

Microsoft is having a big week, dumping big news about Origami. Some folks feel that Microsoft was just beginning to create some serious buzz about Origami with the stealth marketing campaign that was developing on the web and that the campaign was just beginning to materialize when they suddenly dropped the stealth mode and announced Origami. We could probably talk all day about the execution of the marketing of this product, but bottom line, we can check out Origami now without some wild speculation distorting the facts.

Mobility is certainly where emerging technologies are placing emphasis. You can see this focus in every company in the market. Origami could be a solid solution for some people, especially tablet fans or other folks shopping that “ultra-mobile” market.

I also ran across some screenshots of Office 2007. Of course, looking at this nicely updated UI can’t tell us much about the usability factor. I’ve always agreed with the folks at 37signals (and others like them) that most apps are just so heavy with features, commands, options, and menus that they are actually less productive in nature. But Microsoft is obviously the world’s largest office software manufacturer. So, when they do make a change to that lineup, it is very significant. I like the direction that the design of this product is taking. Now we’ll just have to see how much productivity is improved in the new Office 2007. Enjoy the screenshots.

Origami

Office 2007

Technorati Tags: microsoft, origami, office 2007