Worth the time to read

i've been doing more blog reading than blog posting lately and during today's late lunch i want to share a blog with you that never disappoints.

Not Ready For My Burqua

enjoy

Lost in Translation

Today was a really great day with an awesome Sunday School class (could i clone myself so i can attend both the classes i want to?), great worship and super messages. My friend Johnny spoke this evening on Post-Modernism. [i can read your thoughts] - well, you see that was the whole point - if we are going to effect our culture we have to understand our culture.

The District Assembly was way cool - Dr Rick Rigsby was one of our speakers - he rocked the house. [Awesome] so naturally i bought his book (signed, thank you very much :-) i ate too much chocolate (if such a thing is possible), rested well (and much) and didn't check my email from Tuesday afternoon until just a couple hours ago.

Okay, the "translation" bit. At the assembly i saw some old friends and met some new ones. Wednesday night, several of us were seated around a table and the couple to my left were valiantly trying to have a conversation with another couple at the table but the first couple speak only Spanish and the second couple speak only English. Long story short - the background noise (the dinner conversations of several hundred people), our table's proximity to a large speaker (belting out Bavarian folk tunes - not a joke) and our juxtaposition at the table all made it quite "interesting" for me trying to translate for the two couples. Hopefully, not too much was "lost in translation".

Now, after taking three days off from work i can hardly wait to see what Monday brings (and i *know* some of the machinery at work is on the fritz (and i was having so much fun in Austin that i forgot to go to Red's Guns ;-)

Coming back from the assembly, we stopped for gas (and the obligatory potty call) and one of my friends said "Hey, i heard some people talking the other day... - what is a 'blog'?". i just told him that i would have to come over to his office one day and show him. Sometimes i feel like a (very inadequate) translator between generations...

You know, this month i had every intention of blogging at least two or three times a week. Well that didn't quite go as planned. And May doesn't look any better.

Where has the time gone?

Oy! April is FLYING by, i already have most of May spoken for and a couple of work deadlines come up in June. Fortunately, the promotion that i accepted at the first of the year is "normalizing" and i have been more able to concentrate on my own regular responsibilities.

Change may be the only constant in life but that doesn't mean that its fun.

i will be headed to a 3-day conference in Austin in a few days and i'm planning on doing as much as i can to loosen my "electronic tether" while i'm out of town.

EDIT:April 22 marks my one year anniversary on blogger.

Tax Time

well it's April 12 - guess i should start looking for my W2.

April 1 on Google

Well if you didn't have the chance to use Google today, you missed it. (not a joke) I will tell you what you missed but you should "google" them and read them yourself. (Hopefully they will still be posted on the web somewhere for a while - good jokes should be preserved in their entirety :-)

First a screen shot of the Google home page. Notice the "New! Get FREE breakthrough broadband with Google TiSP (BETA)"? It stands for "Toilet Internet Service Provider". The slogan for this "breakthrough"? "Want WiFi around? Just flush it down."

Once on their welcome page you can click the "Get Started with Google TiSP" button and it will take you to an installation page with some hilarious graphics.

About 2/3 of the way down on the "install" page is a link for "professional installation service" that takes you to an error page. The error page basically explains that this page wasn't finished because the joke got thrown together pretty quickly. The up side is that this page links to other April Fool's Day Google hoaxes.

There is "Google Romance". On the "tour" (no, I'm NOT looking - I knew it was a joke) you will find such jewels as "User B inadvertently reveals that he's kind of full of himself. Note: User A's telepsychic predicted this."

Google gulp "with Auto-Drink"

From the FAQ page "...you should be aware that by popping the seal on the twist-off Gulp cap, you send a wireless signal to Google's servers indicating your irrevocable acceptance of the Google Gulp Terms and Conditions, which do include the possibility, however remote, of hideous genetic mutation resulting from your consumption of this product. We're pretty sure you won't die, though."

As a quick aside, this makes me think of the scary factoid that only an estimated 2% of people actually READ End User License Agreements...

Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering (G.C.H.E.E.S.E.) - complete with "Googlunaplex"

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A re-visit of a page explaining Google's lightning fast search results - Pigeon Rank using, yes, real pigeons. (Originally put out April 1, 2002)

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And the opportunity to search using the revolutionary "MentalPlex" (Originally from April 1, 2000)

Instructions:
Remove hat and glasses.
Peer into MentalPlex circle. DO NOT MOVE YOUR HEAD.
Project mental image of what you want to find.
Click or visualize clicking within the MentalPlex circle

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And last of all, I'm not sure if it was a glitch or an April Fool's joke by Blogger, I ran into a little snag when I uploaded these last four images (Google Gulp, Googlunaplex logo, Pigeon Rank and MentalPlex). Blogger just kept uploading and uploading all four images (22 times) before I figured out what was going on and could get it to stop.

ha. ha. ha.