What You Learned in Children’s Church…

Has never been more important.  Remember this song?

O be careful little eyes what you see

Be careful little ears what you hear

Be careful little mouth what you say...

Be careful little hands, what you touch...

Be careful little feet, where you go...

The song goes on to say that God is watching us. (For the Father up above, he is looking down with love)

Not only is the message of the song undoubtedly true, but I think now we can add a verse.  Let’s look at a popular news story from last week.  After reading this article, maybe we should add a verse to the song that says, “O be careful little twitterer what you tweet.”

If you didn’t know it already you should learn that we live in a world where much of our lives is public.  (Nobody any worse than me and I have posted about this before.) Now, however, there is a company that is taking your twitter posts and your status updates and any other public info about you that they can find and building a profile to predict your future behavior.  They know that companies won’t want to hire you if you stand a good chance of embarrassing them publically.

Maybe I have missed the point on this story and this post should be about the fear we should have that people are trying to predict the future. I guess I just think that it’s perfectly fair to make assumptions about the future based on past behavior. You don’t really want to hire somebody if they have a track record of changing jobs every 6 months do you?  I don't see how this scenario is fundamentally different.

I think the point of this article is that we should be careful what we say because people (including future employers) are watching.

Does this prospect seem scary or unfair to you?

Internet Thwarts My Plan

For today's blog post, I was going to write an open letter to NBC about their Olympic coverage.

I would have complained about how ludicrous it is that ESPN or even local NBC affiliates cannot show highlights, and the stupidity of suing everyone who refers to an olympian or who dares to promote the games in any way.  But Stephen Colbert already beat me to it here in this clip (Which I cannot embed because wordpress.com doesn't play nicely with Hulu)

I would have talked about how unspeakably angry I would be if I lived on the West coast and had to wait 3 hours to see an event that is happening in my timezone.  But that has been done already.

I would have asked NBC if they have actually seen their website for the olympics. Because surely if they had they would be too ashamed of it and just take it down.  I won't link to forums about that because of the trolls.  But let's just say the internet has already got that covered.  i think this Alyssa Milano twitter is about the website.  I would have wondered aloud if they think we live in an age without the internet.

I would have complained about all the figure skating coverage and the lack of Hockey.  But that is just preference and I can deal with that.

I cannot find an article about the volume of commercials so I'll just say this.  Any non-live event has a volume of commercials that makes it not worth watching.  I cannot tolerate 1 bobsled run, followed by 7 minutes of commercials followed by 1 bobsled run, followed by 6 minutes of commercials, followed by 1 interview, followed by 9 more minutes of commercials.  It's simply unacceptable.

Since the rest of the internet has already ranted on my topic for today, this is all you get

Your Help Please

If you follow me on Twitter you know that I have been in the process of redesigning the church website.  I needed to move it to a content management system so that others besides just myself could update it .  I chose Joomla because of the amazing plethora of free templates, and the flexibility.  Also because I tend to think of wordpress.org as being just a blogging platform.  I will have a post later about the move, but in the meantime I need your assistance. I am close to going live with it, but it needs a once-over.

I'm not as far along as I thought I would be by the time of this post.  Some of it is unfinished, I think those parts will be obvious to you, (Like the ministries page which I've decided to reformat but haven't) but let me know your thoughts on the template, the functionality, how it can be improved, and obviously any errors or proofreading mistakes.  You have been very helpful to me in the past

I would like your suggestions of any way that the site can be improved, either through design or through content.  It's pretty easy to change things now that I have a feel for this template.

The new-and-improved site can be found at lagrangeparkbc.org/new. Check it out. Hit me with your suggestions.

Also.  I'm in the basement for a few days, so if comments need moderating it may take a while.

Why the Internet is Great

This will probably be an occasional post I make about why the internet is really useful. Today it is about overcoming geographical bounds.

Those of you who know me (I suppose you are the only ones reading this) know that I am a Kentucky boy living in the heart of ACC country. Although I didn’t graduate from there, I spent 4 years at UK. So needless to say, a day like this could be very depressing for me. When I turn on my local Raycom Sports affiliate, this is what is on my TV.

I want to be watching the SEC tournament, not the stupid ACC tournament. (I hate every single team in the ACC tourney!)

Here’s the part about why the internet rules. Thanks to sports.yahoo.com, and my reasonably quick broadband connection from Time Warner, (I hate my Time Warner DVR, but the broadband is reliable and quick.) I am able to watch the SEC tourney streaming over the web. It’s even commercial free. (Unless you count the Raycom bug that never goes away, or all the brought to you by's, or the ads plastered all over the Georgia Dome.) If I am not downloading anything I can watch at the 700k setting and it has quite a reasonable picture. Good enough that I can stream it to my TV and be quite satisfied. Check it out.

My only complaint is the unspeakably horrible music that Raycom plays during the commercial breaks. I don’t know how people got by before broadband internet, I guess they had to read the newspaper or be satisfied to watch highlights on sportscenter or college gamenight.