Flash Drive Has No Flash

I ordered a Dell laptop for my wife a couple of months ago. It was backordered for like 4 weeks. While ordering the laptop I also had the option to order a “color-coordinated” 4GB USB flash drive. I figured, “why not”, she needs a new one and besides, the price was good ($20) and it was the same color as her laptop. What could go wrong? So a month or so later the laptop arrives, I set it up, and put all the parts/pieces including the USB drive into her laptop bag and away she goes.

Well, last night she needs to transfer some data from her laptop to my desktop so I go looking for her new flash drive. I pop the drive in and…..nothing. It shows up in Windows Explorer, but it won’t launch. I try formatting it…no good. I change the drive letter, put it in different USB ports (front of computer, back of computer), put it in my Mac. Nothing. This is the first time the drive has been used and for the first time in my experience, it looks like I’ve got a defective USB drive.

No problem, I’ll just return it to Dell. Wrong! Turns out that Dell won’t let you return it if it’s more than 21 days old and it doesn’t say “Dell” on it. Doesn’t matter if it’s broken. If it’s more than 21 days after you bought it (mind you, it took more than that just to get here) then you are out of luck. End of discussion.

So here’s what I learned from this (fortunately) inexpensive event. 1) Test everything you get from a vendor, especially the third party stuff right after you get it. Even if it is something you might normally not use right away–test it right away. If you don’t use it for a couple of weeks, they aren’t going to let you return it even if it is defective. 2) Beware of Kingston DataTraveler 110 4GB USB drives. Even if the ad says they are “reliable”, they aren’t. Or at least this one certainly wasn’t.

Postscript: I ordered a $10 no-name 4GB USB drive from this website. For $9.99, including shipping, I can get two of these for the price of one Kingston and still come out ahead even if the first one doesn’t work. I guess sometimes it pays to be cheap.

Filed under technology | Comment (0)

Smashing is Smashing

If you love great web design ideas, resources and lots of free stuff like icon sets, wallpapers, fonts and such, then you must add Smashing Magazine to your list of daily online reading. At least once a week they will post something that will stimulate my creative juices and send me down a happy tangent for at least an hour or more. I love the monthly wallpaper contests where people submit monthly themed wallpaper (wallpaper with this month’s dates on it) because it generates such a wide variety of high quality work that you would be happy to display on your desktop (and I do). So check out Smashing Magazine and be stimulated.

Filed under web design | Comment (1)

new website work

OK, so the decision has been made and Drupal it shall be. In fact, just to make it extra official, we’ll be building three sites on Drupal, not just one.  Buildingboldlyforjesus.org will be the home site for our upcoming capital expansion project. Paul Martin and company will be leading out in that effort and already they have some placeholder artwork up there. Secondly, kingdomkidFLC.org will be going up shortly as well (currently it’s just naked). Right now I can’t decide if it should be a Wordpress based site or Drupal. It may start as a Wordpress and then go Drupal later once I have a development team free to do that work. This site will be for the Forest Lake Children’s Ministries department. And finally, of course, the world famous website, forestlakechurch.org, will be up for a redo, upgrade, overhaul, what have you in the next few months. I’ve got the crack team of Wilcley and Wesley Lima working on that one. Two brothers of with their own web design business, they approached me and offered to help, so I put them to work. There are several others on board for the project as well and it looks to be a good team of young bucks that have been assembled. We’re gunning for a late October launch date of at least the basic functionality website with continuous improvement happening there after.

Many thanks to site5 for the webhosting services. Reasonable rates, “unlimited” storage and bandwidth (we’ll find out just how unlimited it is :-)  ) and a slick multisite administration panel is what sold it for me. And their Fantastico app is completely up to date with the latest (and I do mean latest–Drupal 6.3 was there right after it went up on Drupal.org) flavor of all your favorite open source toys and goodies. They don’t have 15 different hosting plans, just one–with a “turbo” add-on at $5 more for multisite–and that’s it. All the rest of the upsell stuff on those other hosting plans (pointers, subdomains, FTP, emails, parking, etc, etc) is all included in unlimited quantity with their plan.

Filed under Church Tech | Comments (2)

My First Comment

Yeah! My first comment on this baby blog.

Thanks Jonathan.

Filed under Church Tech | Comment (0)

Post-GiEN Observations

Spending time at a denominational confab is always an adventure. For the first time in many years I just spent the better part of week hanging out with a combination crowd of Adventist techies and administrators, with some significant international presence thrown in for flavor. I usually have an allergic reaction to such a heavy concentration of church administrators, so fortunately there were enough techie types there to put some oxygen into the air.

Not surprisingly I discovered that there’s even some church politics in the mix as well. Seems that one level of the church developed a hosting service for all churches to have a website and so did another administrative level and never the two shall meet. So now you have dueling hosting and website development services. [Just for the record at FLC we use neither of them and are strictly a home brew shop.] It was fun to be approached by both competing services and asked to join their particular platform, but no one really gave me much of a hard sell, more like a glancing blow.

I was surprised that an international conference in its 5th year still only has 60-80 in attendance and the majority were not from the US, even though the meetings were here in the US. I would imagine that most every Adventist church in the US has its own website by now, yet there are only 80 people in the world who are interested in sharing the Gospel via the web? Not even some folks from Denver, just some people with a travel budget. A marketing problem? Lack of interest? Hard to say.

Back to the swamp tomorrow and then back to work…

Filed under Internet Technology | Comments (4)

GiEN 08-Sunday Morning Session

Gary Krause-Morning Worship

In the spirit of the Internet, we need to get real. Sort of like vegetarian Adventists who look far and wide for food that looks and tastes like meat. There is a lot of spin going on in the news, etc. So we need to be able to cut through the spin and distortion. “The Word of God is living and sharper than any two-edged sword.” The Word of God is a guide to our feet and we are fooling ourselves if we think we can walk in a straight path if we are relying on our own intellect and strength.

Presentation #8-Panel: Nancy Lamoreaux, Robert Henley, Gordon Harty

“e-Marketing the Gospel”

Henley-how are we engaging the community via our website? Does a lot of pastor training in terms of technology.

Harty-most effective things seem to be social networks, particularly via Facebook notifications, etc. Center for Post Modern Studies and GiEN both have groups there.

Different presenter now….

Carl Gordon-BiggyTV. A delivery platform for video content. Marketing for movies in order to separate the content out from the background noise and static. In terms of the Adventism, this is called The Adventist Channel. Biggy brings a reputation and marketing experience. This is an “inward-facing” site that only hosts “high-quality” content, not the homemade, YouTube stuff (his terms). Target distribution is Adventist Media Centers and Adventist websites. URL goes live tomorrow. Programming is both inward and outward and now has a social networking component, too (MySDA). There was then a demonstration of the Adventist Channel.

Filed under Church Tech, Internet Technology | Comment (1)

GiEN 08-Sabbath Morning

First Session (Sabbath School)

Adventist Web Presence Around the World (various presenters)

Germany-DVD on the construction and ministry of the German Media Center. Develop content such as Bible Studies and evangelistic crusade materials and provide technical support for countries throughout Europe. The name of the studio: Stimme dur Hoffnum

USA-Discover Bible School (part of Voice of Prophecy). Went online in 1996 and worked with WWC to develop an interactive website. www.biblestudy.com. 850 churches that are branch Bible Schools for VoP. 50 languages. Separate section for kids (Kid’s Zone)-which is self-graded (no adult interaction). HopeTalk.org is a portal with content (unclear what sort of content it is) from each Division. New technology: mobile based content without graphics, answers are all T/F and then submit answers via cell phone. Next version will be more graphically based.

Poland-eBible-Bible software, in Polish, endorsed by Catholic Church, includes EGW as well. Nadzieja.pl-Polish for “hope”. Self-supporting ministry, affiliated with the church but not financially linked. Stream two internet radio channels.

South Pacific Division-David Price. A DVD on materials available to those in the South Pacific such as Discovery Bible studies and their Bible Study Centre.

USA-Someone from SoCal. Stories of people who join the church via online adventures.

USA-PatmosChapel.org. Robert Helmsley-Technology guy from Southeastern Conference (regional conference in Florida). Told a story about the Whitney Phipps video on YouTube. Also told a story about someone who attended Patmos online and left her life of prostitution and came back to church.

Philippines-Advent SIM Presentation. A partnership with the largest Telecom in the Philippines to provide SIM cards with value-added services. Can text each person who has one or people within a certain regions. Additional information can be pulled down included church and pastor locations. Can make donations via the SIM code.

South America-Hope Impact. Major marketing effort focusing on the Second Coming series of meetings in Porteguese and Spanish. Various other websites in a region that has over 21% Internet usage and huge Internet useage growth. Those studying online has grown exponentially.

China-John Ash. Very large Internet audience in country and around the world. Hopenet.tv in conjunction with Adventist World Radio. Creating Bible stories in Mandarin with Flash animation.

InterAmerica-Project with Montemorelos University. Using UStream.tv and YouTube to stream content. Using netAdventist 3.0 and training everyone to use it. Example: recording presentations and campaigns and posting them to YouTube.

The rest of the meeting was a Sabbath School discussion with Gary Gibbs, HopeTV, Gary Krause (who wrote this quarter’s SS lesson) and Homer somebody.

Filed under Adventism, Church Tech, Resources | Comment (0)

GiEN 08-Friday Afternoon Sessions

Session #3-Free content resources for churches

GraceNotes–content for websites, sort of Bible-study-ish in nature

Center for Creative Ministry–series of podcasts on the SS lesson and other content

Adventist Giving–online giving site for Adventists

Circle–free SDA educational resources

The Adventist Channel–current site loads very slowly in Firefox/Safari and appears to be Flash-based(?), presenter quite excited about it, but site is dog slow over wireless.

Digital Vault or The Ministries Tab–something available for those on netAdventist, I guess. Apparently some sort of link to Adventist digital media that will be available on the in-house SDA websites.

SDAPlus–a North American Adventist-centric search engine that allows for self-submission.

Filed under Adventism, Resources | Comment (0)

GiEN 08-Friday Afternoon Sessions

Session #2-Marvin King, Web Manager, Adventist World Radio

Podcasting: the new radio

Various forms of media are converging now into various formats

Defines podcast as a form of radio where a program is distributed automatically based on a subscription model.

Easy to create, publish and advertise. Record, edit, compress and then upload the xml file. Once these steps are done, the file is RSS ready. Aggregator software is used to subscribe (ie. iTunes).

Podcast gear. Spend money on your microphone, otherwise you can podcast on most any budget.

Recording standards. record audio at 44.1 or higher, record music at 64k or better. Clean the sound up afterwards.

Validate the RSS at feedvalidator.org.

WebPasties.com-website with cheap software for generating RSS and XML files

Podsubmitter will submit to over 55 aggregators

Create album art for your podcast.

Automated workflows–example, Leopard Server–if you generate several podcasts at a time, every day, etc.

If files get to be too much to manage, may need to consider getting a asset management solution to keep track of all your media.

Megavoice-source for a low-cost device to load your content on to

Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)

GiEN 08-Friday Afternoon Sessions

Session #1-Klaus Popa, Creative Director, Adventist Media Germany

“in need of a beauty farm 2.0.”

Design principles for websites-its easy to miss something you’re not looking for

1. Do visitors know what to look for? the human aspect (can’t be changed)

2. Do we know what to offer? the content aspect

3. Will visitors find the essential? the design aspect

1. What is attention?

a. being awake

b. choose and filter

c. conciousness

d. control

e. direction

f. interest and curiosity

g. memory

2. Attention on the web-high attention requirements

a. search for information

b. recognition of relevant information

c. ignorance of irrelevant information

d. differentiation between the similar

e. making right choices

f. problems of fatigue, poor design, complexity, etc.

3. Principles on attention

a. intensity and size–bigger and more intense gets more attention, thus the size of objects on the screen should correspond with degree of importance for the aims of the user

b. color-general rules

i. contrast helps something be visible

ii. less is more (5 colors is more than enough on one site)

iii. use subdued colors for surfaces

iv. use intense color for detail

v. be aware of culturally specific color codes

vi. a good interface works fine without any colors

www.vischeck.com–to check your site for color blind people

vii. color dominance and consistency-if the colors shift around then people get lost

c. sequence and position

i. example-an iceberg. Things that find themselves below the bottom of the screen do not get attention. If content is long, provide an outline of links to various subsections.

ii. long pages vs. short-an ongoing discussion, depends to some extent on the content and audience

iii. people remember what they see first and what they see most recently

iv. certain positions are expected for certain items

d. exception

i. certain exceptions draw attention to that item

e. dissonance

i. MAYA-most advanced yet acceptable. Move too far “forward” and it falls into dissonance

f. habituation

i. the wear-out effect, exampl: overworked visual cliches

g. combination

i. not a hard, fast rule but the more elements that you can combine, the better off you are

Question: fluid width versus fixed width? He codes now for 1024fixed (western preference)

Also, probably not possible to create a single website for everyone-cannot work for low and high bandwidth at the same time, so perhaps create two separate websites after a decision point

Filed under Internet Technology | Comment (0)