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?

I know everyone loves free stuff, especially when it makes you work and life easier. I have a couple tools that I use on a daily (sometimes more) basis that I think are worth sharing.

For those of you that host your own websites, blogs, podcasts, etc you’ll probably want to skip to the next paragraph. For those of you still reading, free quality storage for streaming audio/video, pictures, etc. I’m speaking of Ourmedia.org and archive.org. I’m not sure why they’ve set-up the way they do, but to use one you must register on both. Other than that little difficulty I’ve no problems with this at all (using over 2 months). We are hosting video and audio for our main service, and audio only options for our men’s bible study and student ministry. I like this free option much better than the Google Video, youtube, etc options out there for two main reasons. The first one is ease I can have all my audio options (WMA, RM, MP3) and video (WMA) all on the same site, secondly there is no linking of your videos to other similar videos that may be innapropriate. Thirdly, I know two main reasons, is the user interface and upload tool are super easy and straight-forward.

The other free tool I use is logmein.com. While they do have pay options I haven’t had the need for the additional services that these offer. As the name hints LogMeIn allows you to remote control a desktop from any browser. While there are many tools out there this super easy to use for those non-techies that are wanting remote computer access. Most everyone can remember the simple name, their email address and passoword, and withing a couple keystrokes have full screen remote control of their desktop. Much easier to setup and train than VPN, and matches all the needs my people have had.

A site on my daily read is Web Worker Daily on a regular basis there are some great tips for those of us who consider ourselves techies. Today’s post 6 Things to make your office productive and inspiring is no different. Below is number 6:

A reminder of what you love most. The most common item to find in someone’s cubicle at work is a photo of friends or family, for good reason. But you don’t have to put them in a regular old frame. You can make a mousepad with your dogs, a Warhol-esque poster with your kids, or a mug with your partner. If you’ve money to spare and prefer a high-tech display for your photos, how about a digital photo frame?

I had heard of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) before but never really though anything of it. Today over at CruchGear they had a post about the OLPC interface that had been put on YouTube. My first thought with this is could it be used as a ministry tool. If we took part in this loaded up some of these laptops with the gospel, bibles in their language, the Jesus video, testimonies, etc. Could these laptops go where people can’t, could the seed be planted through technology that people could then followup on, would the cool factor of a laptop in the remote parts of the world be an open door for sharing the gospel just by the curiousity of the laptop itself?

When I actually made the transition from work to career way back in 1998 I never thought I would end up in Church IT. I made the move from grocery store to security company and thought that would be direction I would continue on. My first official hacking took place as an alarm operator, we had to log certain events to keep accurate records (translate-cover our butts for the lawyers). This hacking involved setting up macros that logged the events and included generic comments, my alarm handling was triple that of the closest person. Of course this got the attention of people who said I was cheating the system, but soon I was setting up the entire call center to do the macros (and secure it from anyone else creating macros). This continued on for 4 1/2 more years until I automated myself out of a job and soon our center closed down because they consolidated the centers. After 9 months of searching for similar call center/ data management position (translate-salary) God had a different idea. I then began my work at our church doing everything from Music and Youth and Communications but always Computers. This is where I’ve come to realize I really like church IT and look forward to learning more, reading more, and networking more with others that have this same passsion to take the church of of the dark ages and begin using technology to make ministry happen better.

So how did you get into Church IT?

Sidenote: Really looking forward to Church IT Roundtable, hope they let me come

Got this from CrunchGear. One of the best stories I’ve heard about Walmart in a long time.

So this is fun: In a statement from Wal-Mart today, former Senator John Edwards had a staffer contact the electronics manager in a Raleigh, North Carolina store to try and get his hands on a PlayStation 3. Problem was, later that night he reportedly told a story to people on a United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union-sponsored call that his son had ridiculed a classmate about his shoes, which were purchased at Wal-Mart.

Upon hearing the news, the company invited Edwards to visit the local store to check out its electronics as well as its shoes for men and boys. And then they basically said he can get in line with everyone else.

The Company noted the PlayStation3 is an extremely popular item this Christmas season, and while the rest of America’s working families are waiting patiently in line, Senator Edwards wants to cut to the front. While, we cannot guarantee that Sen. Edwards will be among one of the first to obtain a PlayStation3, we are certain Sen. Edwards will be able to find great gifts for everyone on his Christmas list – many at Wal-Mart’s “roll-back prices.”

I have to hand it to Wal-Mart on this one. That’s pretty sweet of them to basically put the smackdown on Edwards like that.