• Dedicated to the staff

    Seems like this comes up at almost every staff meeting. I prefer the baby Jesus. Jimmy prefers the teenage Jesus with the tuxedo t-shirt.

    This gets funnier every time I see it.

  • When the cat is away… the mice play on the mac

    Classic stuff here. My kids are gun shy about pictures, but this captures the “Adam” in all of them. Way to go Autumn for leading the way.

  • USB Gloves: A gift for Kristen

    USB GlovesKristen suffers from cold hand disease. While not a real disease, it is annoying because Kristen likes to take her frigid fingers and try to touch me. (I am built like a human furnace and rarely get cold.)

    So when Kristen is typing on her computer, the aluminum keyboard gets her fingers extra cold.

    So here is the solution. For $22 she can get a pair of gloves that plugs into the USB of her iMac and warms her hands up! Though 125 degrees F may be a little too toasty.

    HT to Make Magazine

  • First Things First, How Most Mornings Start

    dawnI start each day pretty much the same way. Here’s a list of things I try to do in the morning. The days of grabbing a cup of coffee and reading the morning paper are long, long gone.

    1.  Download e-mail. This usually takes just a couple of seconds as almost everything I get is spam. Even if I get something compelling enough for a response I typically will wait until I am more awake. The only thing I’ll do right away (typically) is send out a prayer request if one was sent to me.
    2. Login to feedburner. Actually I login at least twice so I can check out the subscriber levels of YMX and my personal account. (With blog accounts for Kristen and I.) Here I’m looking for a spike in additions or subtractions. If it has spiked, I’ll update the YMX team.
    3. Login to Google Analytics. Since I’m managing about 20 websites now, this is my one-stop shop to see how everything is doing. (It doesn’t update live, so the morning is my first look at what happened yesterday.) Again, I’m looking for spikes and dips. For YMX, my blog, the church site, and any other site I’m paying special attention to I’ll look at the referral tab. I alway like to see how people are making it to my sites. The vanity search thing is sending us bucket loads of referrals lately. (People googling their name.)
    4. Check site rankings for my favorite search terms on Google. (No, I’m not checking out my name… I get emailed when that pops up anywhere on the internet!) But I like to know if there has been any shift in organic search terms I care about. In just the last 30 days Google has sent 4100 visitors to YMX… our number one referral. (Gospel.com is moving up quickly, love that site!)
    5. Google Reader time. I subscribe to about 100 blogs. My goal in the morning is to clear out the blogs… meaning I want to drop the number of unread things to 0. If it’s good I share it (appears on the left side of my blog), if it isn’t I don’t finish reading it. This is also my primary news source. So if there is something going on in the news I am depending on bloggers to cover it. This is also the source of my morning Bible reading, devos. (Check out RBC’s RSS page)
    6. Pop into YMX. That may surprise people but I only pop into the YMX forums a couple of times per day. I love having a great team of folks that keep the forums going! Patti is the forum-meister and the more I trust her, the better.
    7. Post on my blog. If there has been something on my mind or if one of these other steps brought something to mind that was compelling. I’m also becoming a bigger user of the draft feature, so sometimes I’ve got 8-10 posts that I want to work on when I get a chance. I also go through big “writing feasts” where I may write more posts in a day than I should publish… so I time them to release later.
    8. Publish stuff for YMX. I login to Google docs and see if there is something Amy wants me to publish. It takes me at least 20 minutes to publish an article, do the graphics, and pimp it out. If I’ve got time and it needs to get done, I’ll do it then. If I can’t swing it, it’ll wait until after work.

    How long does all this take? It depends on what I’m doing, how much time I have, and a lot of other factors. (Like getting picked by Megan to take her to school.) I can do all of this in as little as 5 minutes… or if I’ve got a lot of time, it can last all morning.

    What about your morning routine? What do you do?

  • Notre Dame Football is #1

    Notre Dame Football is #1

    Unfortunately, they are #1 at “least efficient dollar per win.”

    Allegedly, Charlie Weis made $1.16 million per win in 2007.

    Here’s the list

    Oops.

  • Good news for Romeo

    The mood in town, economically, is horrid. Everyone makes it seem like we are in the great depression or something.

    Here’s a little reminder to the people of Romeo that things are still quite good. The Ford F-150, whose engine is made right here in town, is still the #1 selling vehicle in America.

    Story

    Sure, sales are down. And things may continue to slow down. But we’re still doing pretty good.

  • Youth Ministry Pro

    youth ministry proObservers of YMX and this blog will remember that we recently started “domain farming” a few domain names that aren’t currently registered… but we think would make great websites.

    In other words, we bought a bunch of domains hoping that if we marketed them a little, people would pay for them. Well, along the same lines we’ve learned that you can’t just buy the domain and do nothing… sometimes you have to do a little property development.

    So, I’ve had that buried in my “dream list” for a couple months. Today I decided to go for it and develop a domain we’ve owned for a long time, Youthministrypro.com.
    I could not believe that this domain wasn’t owned by someone! It’s a great domain name.

    Today I finally took a little time and developed this little property of ours. I installed Joomla, pimped it out with a nice template, did some simple graphic work, wrote a little copy, partnered with a great content delivery system, and voila: Youth Ministry Pro was born.

    What is it? Basically, it’s a job board for youth ministry. Sure… there are lots of these… but not very many of them are independently run. Most are tied to a school, denomination, or a publisher. What makes this one different is that we can offer some job finding content, a safe place to post your resume, access to Raising Lazarus, and of course a place for employers to post jobs. (Actually, it’s part of a mega-network of job listings so there is lots of stuff already there!)

    The best part is that this new site pretty much runs itself. Other than posting new content (e.g. reprinting from YMX) there isn’t a lot to do with it. That is… unless someone was willing to invest a lot of time and a little bit of money into the project. (Neither are commodities I have.)

    And, of course, the domain is still for sale. Now instead of just selling a domain, we’re selling a complete and profitable little business. Interested? Contact me.

  • K Mart saved Christmas

    kmart logoWithout sounding overly dramatic, K Mart saved our Christmas day. After the service last night I took a gander at our food situation. Let’s just say the cupboards were bare and the day had been so insane that we hadn’t had the chance to get groceries.

    A quick search on Google maps determined that every grocery store in our area closed at 7:00 PM. Unphased by that reality and in search of anything that could be assembled into a Christmas dinner I started driving around.

    If you’ve never had to shop on Christmas eve, plan on doing it in 2008. It’s a trip. A lot of gas stations are closed. Any type of grocery store is closed. Most pharmacies are closed. Specialty stores are closed. Pretty much everything closes on Christmas eve at 7:00 PM. (I know, I checked!) Wal*Mart. Miejer. Kroger. Vince & Joes. Sheenah’s. Everything.

    So this left me with two choices. Liquor stores or KMart. Every liquor store in Michigan was open late last night… but I figured that my hopes of getting mashed potatoes, ham, and other items for a Christmas dinner were slightly better at KMart. (Serving the kids Slim Jim’s and Molson Ice for Christmas seemed a little like child abuse. I wasn’t quite that desperate… yet.) So I pulled into the KMart parking lot at 23 & Van Dyke at 8:45 PM.

    The place was packed!

    And it was filled with tons of people just like me. Did you know that KMart has a grocery section? They don’t have much of one… but they have one. It was getting tribal in the grocery aisle as we were all looking for the same thing, meat! As I contemplated spam and ham cold cuts for Christmas dinner… the aisle filled with people looking for “one thing” they forgot to purchase. A conversation quickly erupted of the places we saw that were open that might have sour cream, yams, or freshScrooge fruit. I settled on pot roast and mashed potatoes then walked around looking for other things. After double checking the store for a spare ham in a can and walking around to snag some last minute stocking stuffers, I headed the check out where a scantly clad checkout girl scanned everything and I headed home. (She must have thought it was Halloween. Brrr.)

    I just want to add. Had a grocery store stayed open until 10 last night they would have done quite well. While I had fun trying to put together “something” for a Christmas feast… it would have been so much better at a grocery store.

    I kept thinking about Charles Dickens’s Scrooge. Where did he get that goose and all those presents on Christmas morning? It must have all come from KMart– open until 10 on Christmas eve.

  • Stoney Finally Got His Squirrel

    Shopping yesterday Paul and I ran across the perfect gift for our yellow Lab, Stoney.

    You may remember this Spring I lamented about how Stoney longed to kill and eat on of the squirrels that haunts his backyard. So Stoney went into training and even went jogging with Kristen for a while to try to get fast enough to catch a squirrel. Even once, in early summer Stony actually had a squirrel in his mouth… but it got away. The rest of summer Stoney was depressed and refused to chase the black squirrel in the backyard.

    Well, we bought Stoney a squirrel for Christmas. Sure it’s fake. But I’d like to think that he’ll enjoy killing it just the same. Perhaps it will even help him come out of his depression and begin training again.

    In other news, the Christmas eve service was fun tonight. The MainStreet portion was a trip. It was the first (and last) time we did something without a rehearsal… and we pulled off most of the elements of it just fine. I kind of made up a character on the spot to match a video… which was pretty fun. It wasn’t a MainStreet with any content, but it was definitely a lot of fun to do. And I think the audience enjoyed it. The second half of the night was our regular Christmas eve. Jimmy and Jason did a very nice job.

  • From the MainStreet vault

    Some of these clips are for MainStreet tomorrow while others are for “web only.” But over all I thought this was some funny stuff.