Friday, May 21, 2010

It isn't working

Oops, this isn't meant to connect to the previous post. Instead It's about a book I saw in the bookstore tonight. My wife and I have a ritual on Friday nights. We eat (out) and then invade a bookstore. In Abilene we have 2 choices. We then select reading material and veg for an hour or so.
Tonight's discovery was this one.
Because I didn't find it until after I'd scanned a couple of other books I stayed in the shallow end. Moving beyond material mentioned in Gladwell's Outliers, author Tony Schwartz delves deeper into the study of thirty young musicians to show that excellence wasn't simply predicated on much, much more practice. Those who excelled also slept and napped more than the "normal" bunch.
Perhaps humans aren't so much like mechanical brains after all. Instead we're more like the created world. We have cycles. Productivity is enhanced by relaxation.
This is one of those insights we need to be applying to the church. The biblical worldview rests on such cycles. Our modern approach reflects too much dependence on mechanical or business models.
I'm not saying that Jesus wouldn't have used allusions from machinery or the business world. But I believe that his agricultural allusions were more than just the result of his agrarian culture.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

PUNdaMental Revisited

I wanted to be the Pundamentalist but that was already taken so here is PUNdaMENTAL. While I enjoy puns, this blog doesn't focus on them. That this blog has a focus is in fact questionable.

Starting tomorrow I'll be using Adwords (May 21 - 31). This is mostly a learning exercise. I don't have any thing to sell but I'd like to develop some expertise in this field. Currently I'm averaging 1 to 2 visits per day on u-lo-g.com. The Adwords experiment will send folks to only one page so a rise in visits will almost certainly be a result of the ad. As suggested in Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords by Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd, I'm running a split test. Here are the two ads
Preach Your Own Funeral
Do-it-yourself
Save to Video

Make the Funeral Special
No Preacher Needed
How to prepare a eulogy

I'm guessing that "Preach Your Own Funeral" will win the contest.
Both ads will point to u-lo-g.com/DoItYourself.aspx. You do realize that by clicking on that link you're gonna skew my results, don't you? Let me know if you'd be interested in the figures.



Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Perils of Enumeration

This week I began calling on homes in order to collect data for the US 2010 Census.
Today a resident told me: "Thank you for doing this." So maybe there are more blessings than perils.
When I was recruiting folks for this job several voiced their concerns. Many were worried about personal safety. That's worthy of concern. I learned today that Census workers have already died as a result of traffic accidents. But that's not what people were worried about. They were worried about the people inside the houses. I was worried about the dogs outside the houses. So far, no big problems.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Garage doors

We don't have a garage,
but if we did I'd want the garage door to look like this:












or this:









or even this:








for other options see: http://style-your-garage.com/us/appliance.php