Month: May 2005

Weekend Update

Well, the weekends over and I need a vacation to recover.

It seems like the last few weekends have been whirlwind experiences that keep coming.

I spent last weekend I had plans to visit friends and family in Dallas as well as announcing for the first CWF Comeback show in Rockwall.

I ended up doing all that, as well as attending the visitation and funeral of a friend on Saturday.
This weekend, I began a fun Friday evening with a good friend, as we planned to eat and visit the Planetarium in Killeen.

And naturally, we ran into someone I knew at dinner.

A couple from our church saw us on their way out of the restaurant and I’m sure immediately began to hear wedding bells as they saw my friend and I sitting on the bench, waiting for our table.

I guess that’s what everyone assumes when you’re single and you’re hanging out with someone of the opposite sex.

What really stinks is when you or that other person starts hearing wedding bells, while the other is hearing, “Run Forrest, run!”

But none the less, we enjoyed our evening and I was waiting anxiously to see Laser U2 at the Planetarium.

We arrived a few minutes early and were pleased to see a very small crowd would be joining us. But as the show started, we soon realized, without any sound or music, the lasers lost their attraction.

So, the show was cancelled and we were given rain checks for another show.

I emailed the Planetarium Monday morning to ask if there would be another run of the show — and maybe its my wonderful persuasive writing skills, or their over abundance of generosity, but the center agreed to run a special show for me and friends.

So, I’ll get to wait anxiously for another show at another time.

Saturday I saw Star Wars – Revenge of the Sith with my good friends Aaron and Keri Lehmann.

I don’t know if Revenge of the Sith will replace The Empire Strikes Back as my favorite installment or not, but it is my favorite of the three pre-quils.

We finished the day off with dinner at Kobe’s Steakhouse in Addison with friends and family, celebrating Kathryn’s Crappy Birthday and her brother-in-law’s Happy Birthday.

The weekend wrapped up with a whirlwind trip to Mountain Home, Arkansas for a CWF show.

We were a bit bumed before the show began. The crowd was thin, with only 20 people in attendance up until the last 10 or 15 minutes before showtime. Luckily the crowd grew to 72 by showtime — but preparing for a show with an extra small crowd is never a good feeling – especially if you’ve just driven eight hours to do so.
As the show began, we had technical difficulties with the mics and music intros (which to me is ALWAYS frustrating) but surprise, surprise, God still chose to use a bunch of guys who love ministry and wrestling, to bring 10 people into His kingdom.

It still amazes me how God can use a wrestling show to bring people into His loving, outstretched arms, but He does.

And an eight hour ride, in a van, full of goofy guys, suddenly becomes worth it all.

Even if we don’t make it back to Dallas till 6:30 a.m. on Monday, and I have to be at work (2 hours away) at 10 a.m. — it’s all worth it if just one comes to know Him.

The thrill of doing Kingdom work is amazing.

I don’t quite feel at home anywhere else. The CWF proves that God works outside of our boxes all the time.

And the angels rejoice in the salvation of 10 people, who put their trust in the Lord. And we rejoice with them.

Evite

I found this cool website tonight: Evite.

You can plan and invite people to parties through forms and such on the internet. Then the site will send an e-invitation to all your invitees. And they can respond with a yes or no as to whether they’ll be there or not.

Granted, I’ve never had much luck with regular invitations, phone email or otherwise, but maybe this might change my luck.

Who knows.

We’ll see.

Steve Jobs buys a washing machine

Day 64: 03-04-08
Doing the laundry | Photo by Jonathan Blundell

Wired News has an interesting article on Steve Jobs buying a washing machine. The college drop out and Apple Computers Founder and CEO got his entire family envolved in discussing the design of their new washer and dryer.

In a 1996 interview, Steve said, “Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But, of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. To design something really well, you have to ‘get it.’ You have to really grok what it’s all about.” (A geek’s word, to grok is a coinage of science-fiction writer R.A. Heinlein, meaning to understand something thoroughly by having empathy with it.)

I think we miss that many times in designing things and communicating messages.

I’ve designed websites in the past that really jump out at people because they look great, but in all reality they suck as a website, because they don’t work well. You can’t find the pages and information you want quickly.

A well designed newspaper is the same way. Not only does it look good, but the information is organized in a way that people can pick it up every day or every week and know exactly where they need to go to get the information they need.

IT Tour of Fellowship Church

Scobleizer writes in his blog about visiting Fellowship Church in Dallas and discusses how they’ve used IT and technology to make people feel more welcome and at home at church.
He has some good points for churches and companies wanting to use technology to tell their story.

Make it easy for everyone to learn about you—on their terms. Scoble notes that the only thing visible from the freeway is the church’s url.
Make it easy to experience your product’s special attributes. Scoble was given a DVD with an overview of the church.
To get word-of-mouth advertising you need to be remarkable. 50 manned computer registration stations, all-digtal sound system, plasma screens everywhere, etc.
Use IT to efficiently get close to your customers and take care of their needs. A high-tech system to register kids quickly and easily.
If you want to be better, make sure you’re better from the first minutes of someone’s experience. The church makes a sports fan feel at home.
If you want to be seen as bleeding edge, invest to be bleeding edge and do so throughout your company. They are the first church to film all their services in HDTV.
Extend the usefulness of your plant. They make WiFi available to their congregation during the week.
Design your systems so they never go down and can expand for future growth. they’ve got redundancy all over the place.
Don’t be religious about technology, choose what gets the job done best for the least amount of money and staff time. While they heavily rely on Microsoft’s technology, they also use Macs and Linux when those platforms work better.
When you become successful, bottle up what got you there and sell it to others. They sell their own software: FellowshipOne.

There’s bits and pieces there that each of us can use daily wherever we are.

U2’s The Edge enters the wrestling business

Jonathan and Shawn Michaels
Jonathan & HBK

Apparently a week or so ago, “my best friend” Shawn Michaels was interviewed before his match with WWE Superstar Edge (Adam Copeland). The brilliant journalist apparently mixed up The Edge of U2 with Edge of WWE. Way to go.

Thanks to the Wrestling Observer for the transcript.

MARIA: Shawn Michaels, tonight you’re facing The Edge. Do you think you can win?
SHAWN: I’ll tell you what, Maria, I — did you just call him The Edge?
MARIA: [nods proudly]
SHAWN: …okay. You asked me if you thought I could win too, didn’tcha?
MARIA: [nods proudly]
SHAWN: I dunno, I guess now that I think about it, yeah! Yeah, I do think I can win. Especially after last week. You know something, Shelton Benjamin I have to admit gave me a run for my money last week. Shelton Benjamin, you are the finest piece of young talent that I have faced in this industry in the last 20 years, and you my friend have an incredibly bright future. Now that notwithstanding, someone’s future who is not looking so bright is … [points at Maria] The Edge! Haha! The name problems aside, he’s facing the Heartbreak Kid Shawn Michaels.

Quality journalism there.

We had a discussion today in our office (however brief it was) about problems in journalism reporting.

This Monday, Newsweek magazine reported that a story that ran on May 9 was inaccurate. Now, an error in a news story is not that shocking, but the results of mistake is where the horror comes in.

The Newsweek article reported that U.S. military investigators had confirmed that personal at a Cuba detention center had flushed the Koran down the toilet as a means to get al-Queda and Taliban operatives to talk.

While it may seem harmless, 16 people were killed and more than 100 were injured in Afghanistan when angry protests were sparked from the report.

Desecration of the Koran is punishable by death in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and The Arab League have all condemned the report.

Now Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker said he regretted that any part of the story was wrong.

“We extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst,” Whitaker wrote in the Monday, May 16 issue.

The magazine said that the information had come from a “knowledgeable government source.” Only now the source said he could not be certain he had seen the account of the Koran incident.

What does it say about our media, when we’re so pressed to get a news story that we find one “knowledgeable government source” to base an entire story on? What happened to being “democracy’s guardian angel?”

For some reason, “find at least three sources for every story” still echoes in my head from my journalism classes.

Where have we, as the media, gone wrong?

Where did we cross the line that having an exclusive or keeping advertisers happy became the standard?

Why are we as a country more concerned with who testifies in Michael Jackson’s case or Kobe Bryant’s case, than the continent of Africa going up in flames with an AIDS crisis?

When did covering a congressional hearing on steroid abuse become more important than covering the thousands of lives that have been lost to civil war in the Darfur region?

Recent reports confirm that up to 400,000 people have died in Darfur as a result of the government-sponsored genocide. The New York Times reported recently that President Bush has actually asked Congress to delete provisions about Darfur from upcoming legislation.

Yet while this genocide continues to go on, the top stories online are, “Abu Ghraib abuser sentenced to six months prison” and “British lawmakers ask Congress to back off.”

According to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, “News is the reporting of current events usually by local, regional or mass media in the form of newspapers, television and radio programs, or sites on the World Wide Web. News reporting is a type of journalism, typically written or broadcast in news style. Most news is investigated and presented by journalists (or reporters) and often distributed via news agencies. If the content of news is significant enough, it eventually becomes history.

“To be considered news, an event usually must have broad interest due to one or more news values:

  • Impact (how many people were, are or will be affected?)
  • Timeliness (did the event occur very recently?)
  • Revelation (is there significant new information, previously unknown?)
  • Proximity (was the event nearby geographically?)
  • Entertainment (does it make for a fun story?)
  • Oddity (was the event highly unusual?)
  • Celebrity (was anyone famous involved?)

“News coverage often includes the “five W’s and the H” — who, what, where, when, why, and how.”

That last news value always upsets me.

So I think the real question is, who decides what the news is?

Does the public decide? With some of the phone calls and press releases I get, I have trouble believing sometimes the general public knows what news is. But granted, we are a hometown newspaper, where hometown events, however small, are important.

Maybe instead, managing editors and publishers who know the business side of the paper should decide what the news is.

Or maybe, we should leave it up to the wide-eyed, green journalism interns.

I don’t know for certain.

I don’t think anyone really knows. But we must keep the discussion open.

John Stewart discusses journalism in his book, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction. And Stewart was more than willing to discuss the media with his usual sarcastic wit.

When the U.S.S. Maine was sunk in the late 1800’s, Stewart reports that the papers were more than willing to tell the story as they saw fit.

“The pairs blend of fiction, bigotry and jingoism became known as ‘Yellow Journalism,'” Stewart writes. “Later the term was shortened to ‘Journalism.'”

A free, honest and independent press is essential to democracy.

Without it, we might as well all take out lifetime subscriptions to the Thrifty Nickel.

“By removing the investigative aspect of investigative journalism, today’s modern media finally has the time to pursue the ultimate goal the founding fathers invisioned for news gathering organizations,” Stewart writes. “To raise the stock price of the media empire that owns them.”