• Will it Blend? iPhone

    This post isn’t really a statement about what I think of the iPhone. I just wonder if Tom Dickinson had to pay for the service that goes with this badboy for 2 years or not? And something tells me he paid for the "bumper to bumper" cell phone protection.

  • Monday Exchange

    Monday_promo_logo_smallWe started a promotion yesterday that I think is pretty sweet. Each Monday we’re going to give away a FREE resource for youth workers. It’s not always going to be fancy and as much as we’d like to give everyone iPhones, our giveaways will always be downloadable.

    Here is a link to the free resource page at YMX.

    Here is a link to subscribe to our feed    … get our stuff delivered to your RSS reader so you’ll never miss it.

    Here’s a link to our email subscriptions… you’ll get our stuff delivered to your inbox.

    Our first downloadable is a bucket full of permission slips and commonly used forms for youth group.

  • No More Wimpy Church

    Alright, this is pretty funny and cool. Mark Driscoll is the teaching pastor at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, WA and the founder of Acts 29 church plant movement. What’s interesting to me is that he’s not alone in this sentiment. There are a lot of people asking "the church" to get more masculine. I went to a session at NYWC in Cincinnati last fall essentially saying the same thing about youth ministry… How do you think you’re going to attract young men? By doing stuff that would get them labeled as gay? I don’t think so.

    question: For those who go to church… do you agree with Mark’s sentiment that we tend to make church for chicks? If so, what can we do to change that? If you don’t think so, how come?
    HT to Bobby Williams (aka B Dub)

  • Nigerian Scam

    I’ve now encountered several people who have been tempted by the Nigerian Scam or 419 or it’s official name, the Advance fee fraud. Here’s how it looks:

    You receive and email that says, "My husband is dying of cancer in London, he is a rich oil executive from Nigeria. I am in need to transfer $40,000,000 to a US Citizen upon his death. Blah blah blah."

    Why does something that looks so much like a scam fool so many  very intelligent people?

    1. People aren’t very sophisticated internet users. I hope that doesn’t come off as rude, but the average internet user isn’t as sophisticated at sniffing out a scam via email as they would be in their mailbox at home.
    2. This capitalizes on something in our culture. We all would like to believe that we can get rich quick. We want to get something we haven’t earned… heck, some of us secretly hold out hope that they are really royalty and it’s just a matter of time before the truth is known and we assume our throne!

    The reality is that the Nigerian scam is just that… a scam. The money is never going to come. You aren’t going to get rich. All you’ll ever do is feel foolish and support gangs of scammers in foreign lands. Again… this isn’t something I know about in theory, it’s something people here in Romeo are tempted with.

    In light of this, here is a great article from Back to the Bible that addresses this from a spiritual angle. I love this quote.


    While
    true Christians may stop short of extortion and robbery, the pursuit of wealth
    can easily become the focal point of their lives. Our society, especially in
    the United States,
    encourages us to make the acquisition of money and things all-important. According to Nancy Beach, director of programming
    and a teaching pastor at Willow Creek
    Community Church
    in South Barrington, Illinois,
    "In the United States alone, the advertising
    industry spends over six billion dollars a day. The result is that envy is
    pervasive, and far too many of us live in a perpetual state of longing."

  • In the middle of a customer service nightmare

    Manpullinghairout2754970
    This was a big weekend for YMX. If everything had gone to plan the site would have undergone major structural upgrades and no one would have really noticed.

    I wanted people to login on Monday morning and say, "Hmm, that’s cool. They have a new promotion… wait, something about the site seems different." I had hoped that they would have to go to the Announcement area to find out exactly what all the fuss was about.

    But it didn’t go down as scheduled. My 4 hour Saturday morning project is now in its 3rd day. Here are the 3 things we are changing:

    1. Upgrading our server environment. This will eliminate 95% of our errors on the site. We paid for an upgrade because we want to have a stable environment for the community to grow on.
    2. Changing our site structure to search engine friendly URLs. Other than our web addresses looking prettier, this wouldn’t benefit users at all. But it would mean that our site gets a high search ranking on Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines. Which is like gold!
    3. Announcing our new weekly resource giveaway. This was something we’d been cooking a while and we were using the downtime to create a little buzz before its launch this morning.

    Instead, our site is mostly down. I’m trying to get it sorted out with our host… but in the mean time our customers are not getting the services they’ve paid for. Right now, there is no benefit to the enhancements we’ve put in place because something with #1 went horribly and terribly wrong.

    In short, I am frustrated. I had hoped this weekend would be a home run. And so far this project has been a pop fly.

  • Forbidden Blizzard

    I don’t know if I’ve properly talked about my addiction to Mynameisbill.com. But it’s fascinating to see this filmmaker make his way around the globe and video blog his experiences. Today’s installment is unreal. To think of being able to get Starbucks and even DQ in the once forbidden city.

  • Saturday Tunes

    Saturday_tunes_2These are the next 10 tunes on my shuffle this morning as I do this little project at YMX. Complete with my ratings…

    1. Mat Kearney– Renaissance (Acoustic iTunes version) *****
    2. Five for Figting– 100 Years (Acoustic iTunes version) *****
    3. Aaron Shust– Worthy ****
    4. U2– Vertigo (Live from Milan 2005) *****
    5. Mike Farris– Sit Down Servant ****
    6. U2– Elevation (Live from Milan 2005) *****
    7. U2– City of Blinding Lights (Live from Milan) ***** (Man, quite a streak of U2 here. Loving life)
    8. Robert Glasper– One for the ‘Grew ****
    9. Jeremy Camp– Feels Like ****
    10. Survivor– Eye of the Tiger *****

    Every time I do that I kind of hope I won’t get too embarrassed. And each time I’m always a little shocked what happens when I press the shuffle button.

    What do you listen to when you do projects around the house?

  • Glutton for Punishment

    Yeah, I’m spending my morning doing site maintenance and a big upgrade. I even had to take the site and forums offline to make this happen. So far so good… a little bit of sitting around and waiting for stuff to happen.

    Equally bored or just morbidly curious? Watch what I’m doing… live!

    Licensetowed
    In other news, Kristen and I went to see License to Wed last night. Robin William was stinking funny. There were many moments when you could hear the audience roar with laughter. I think I may be putting together a proper review for the site. I thought it was worth seeing, cute, a little crass at times but not over the top. Actually, while there was some good pre-marital counseling sex talk there wasn’t a lot of cussing. And as someone who has actually done pre-marital counseling… there were many new ideas to implement. (Yeah, right!) There were some sacrilegious moments as well but not over the top. Long story short… it was a good date flick.

  • When Local Government does its Job

    You know, a lot of people whine about local government. And where I live we whine about living in a village where I have to pay 40% more municipal taxes than my neighbors just 150 yards to the north.

    But today is exactly why I love the Village of Romeo. For the past two weeks we’ve had an issue with our waste water backing up in to the basement. It wasn’t a major issue but it was starting to get annoying and a little worse. Each time we did laundry or something significant using water, a little would end up on the floor. 

    So today I stopped into the Village offices to report the problem. See, there is a major project going on in my block where they are putting in new water and gas lines. And I inquired as to whether it was possible that the digging they had done could have disturbed something in my sewer line. Literally within 15 minutes 2 guys were at my house looking around. Within 30 minutes they had a camera device running down my sewer line and determined that there was indeed a clog right about where they had been digging. And right now, less than 1 hour later, they are doing just about everything they can to clear the clog.

    Here’s the thing. It’s likely that this was caused by their digging. But it could have also just been a coincidence. They didn’t blame anyone, they didn’t suppose it wasn’t their fault. These two guys just got to work.

    This is why you live in a great place like Romeo. Sure… it’s not cheapest to live here. But it is great to have these services available when needed.

    Dsc02864
    Update:     The guys have left. At one point I think there were 10 trucks and 20 people here working on our problem. They have completely installed a new sewer line and blown/sucked out every bit of goo all over our house.  While they did indeed discover that one of the contractors had broken our sewer line they did fix it quickly, were extremely apologetics and professional. In fact, our plumbing is in better condition now than it was before. What’s more, it didn’t cost us a dime and they offered to pay for any costs we did incur. (We didn’t have any that I know of.) And as a bonus, I get to keep a front-end loader. They said I could sell it too if I wanted to. First person here with $15,000 gets to keep it. As is, no keys or pink slip.

  • 3 Free Tools for Your New Website

    3freetools
    “I just signed up for hosting, now what do I do?” This is a
    common question that we receive at YMX Hosting, so we’re happy to help
    you turn your dream of a self-hosted blog or youth ministry site into a
    reality. The best thing is that if you are willing to learn you can do
    most things for free.

    Unlike free website options like Blogger
    or WordPress, a self-hosted site is much less limited. You could use
    web publishing tools like Frontpage or iWeb, or you could use one of
    the many Open Source programs that are quickly dominating the web
    world. (Open Source translates practically to “free.”)

    For novice users, we strongly recommend choosing from this list of free tools.

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