I’ve had this domain in my back pocket for quite a while. It originally was going to be a side business where I did some side work for people and smaller businesses then I realized who has time for that. So now I’ve decided to my blog official and give it it’s own domain and make the move from blogger to WordPress. Still learning but looks like it should have lots of fun toys and plugins.
So Welcome and Enjoy!
While I work with technology and completely love that my voluteer ministry is to the students through our student ministry. Today we started to blend the two as we began a weekly podcast/vodcast. We thought it was pretty fun and hope you do too. If you listen or even begin too send us an email at studentpodcast@woodlandministries.com.
Check it out via Itunes, here.
My last post just two weeks ago was the beginning of a very long couple of weeks. While nothing particularily could have been done to prevent it, there was also no redundancy. First one of the two media converters connecting the fiber between our two current building went bad. The building affected of course was the church offices with almost the entire minsterial and support staff not able to connect to the internet or the LAN. We had all our fiber re-terminated and it worked better than before, until two days later when our T1 went down. It was going up and down and they got this fixed within a day a half, which was great until 1/2 an hour later (no exageration) the main data trunk of our provider was cut. This normally wouldn’t be a huge time delay other than it was running under a manhole and that had to be drained and traffic rerouted before they could repair. Fun couple of weeks!
Needless to say we are currently looking at a wireless redundant system to connect the two buildings and a secondary internet line from a different provider.
Any help assistance or solutions you’ve already gone through in these areas would be greatly appreciated.
Today seems to be one of those days. Computer issues, server issues, none of the normal fixes seem to want to work. They will all get fixed, I will learn something from it, and the next time it’ll be just one of those problems and not one of those days.
God Bless
Well as with many of his topics today’s post is from Mark Batterson and I thoroughly enjoyed and thought you might as well. His post Santa Claus from an Engineers perspective below for easy access:
A few years ago I got an email that was circulating Santa Claus: from an Engineer’s Perspective. I think it’s become a Christmas tradition for me to share this at NCC every year.
There are approximately 378 million Christian children in the world according to the Population Reference Bureau. At an average census rate of 3.5 children per household that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.
Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west. This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh; hop out; jump down the chimney; fill the stockings; distribute the remaining presents under the tree; eat whatever snacks have been left for him; get back up the chimney; jump into the sleigh; and get on to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations, we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household–a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second–3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run at best 15 miles per hour.
The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set weighing two pounds, the sleigh is carrying over 500,000 tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the flying reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with nine of them–Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth, the ship not the monarch.
Six hundred thousand tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance–this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.
Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of acceleration from a dead stop to 650 miles per second in one-thousandth of a second, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g’s. A 250 pound Santa which seems ludicrously slim would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4.3 millions pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now.
Merry Christmas!
One of my favorite bloggers is Mark Batterson of National Community Church in DC. He’s got great thoughts on Life, Leadership, and the Church (hence the name of his blog, Thoughts on Life and Leadership) His church has what seems like a great coffeehouse that has been nominated as one of the best coffeehouses in DC. What an honor for newly opened coffeehouse that also hosts a Saturday night church service.
Go ahead and cast a vote for Ebenezers here.
As you may have read last month in my Church IT post I have ended up in my position with no formal training in the tech field. I feel without a doubt I’m doing the right thing working in Church Technology, my question is how do I get better? What’s the next step? Should I go for my certifications? should I get a degree? is there one? Can I learn from your mistakes? and triumphs? I’m looking for Paul and Barnabas, hoping to be a Timothy.
For those of you not aware and interested in Church IT there was a pretty cool discussion on Talkshoe this past Friday. You can find some more details from the Chat Host, Jason Powell, and his follow-up post Church IT Talkcast Episode 1 Available for Download. Talkshoe has a great interface that allows the voice chat to be pretty well moderated, as well as a cool text chat feature that allows you to link the conversations by color. The text chats line up and coincide with the voice discussion showing the timeline of the discussion. As I had to leave early the cool feature I was hoping to have when I got back was the ability to bring up not just the audio but the text chats as well. As the text interface was used nicely to put in weblinks etc to for further exploration of the voice chat. I think that needs to be next on the development of this beta tool. Next discussion is on December 15th at 2pm EST, check it out!
In my short 3 years in the church working world I’ve had what most people would say was a cushy schedule. Pretty much made to match my needs, coming and going as needed. This seems to be pretty standard in most of those who I talk to, as long as the job is done it doesn’t matter when, where, or how it got done. Reading an article, Smashing the Clock, today on Business Week Online that says it’s the new wave of future. Maybe the church is more innovative in something? Did we realize that quality not quantity? Some cool thinking, maybe that will allow some more tech volunteers to use their better schedules for ministry?
