This is hilarious. 

I heard about it on Net@night last night, then Holy Cow and Neeraj posted to it as well…

By the way, don’t cliclk on the link to College Humor, it’s vulgar and well…Frat house humor…

I have previously bashed the Amazon Kindle as being “not quite there yet.”

Basically, when the Kindle first came out, I wasn’t for it. But, I’ve been reading a lot of thick heavy hardcover books lately. I’d love to have a lightweight handheld device to read on. I just think the kindle still needs a design overhaul. It’s simply not elegant. I don’t buy a lot of tech products, mostly because I can’t afford to, but when I do, I revert to Apple products every time. The products look superior and generally run the way I want them to. 

I wish Amazon would change the look, modify some of the quirky buttons and give it a new ad campaign. Then, I think I would be in. And I would use it all the time. (oh, and cut the price, or give me 10 free books with my $359 device)

I asked my twitter / facebook communities to give me some book suggestions for reading while I’m in France in a few weeks. Here’s the 3 that are going to make it into my carry-on bag:

Common Wealth by Jeffrey Sachs
I read the End of Poverty by Sachs last year. I expect equally great things. 

 

 

Un.Orthodox by Tommy Kyllonen (Urban D.)
Urban D. has been guest artist at Sanctuary a few times for Hip Hop Sunday. He’s equally impressive as a preacher, and I’m guessing equally impressive as a writer. (I’ve already started this one, not sure if it will make it to the plane.) 

John Adams by David McCullough
 I read McCullough’s 1776, last fall. A Brilliant read. What a great storyteller. I want to read it before I see the HBO Documentary.

 

I saw this software over at The Apple Blog.

Grab up is a Screen Shot software that allows you to take a screenshot, upload it to the grab up server and get a url within a matter of 3 seconds. I love this. 

Here’s my first screenshot as I was working on a refresh of the logo for our Youth Ministry:

This is incredible. I will start using this for customer proofs right away…I can’t believe how simple it is.

Been following Design Sponge for years. They’re still putting out a full stream of samples of great design.

Anne Jackson
Anne is working at the ole’ LifeChurch.tv these days. She always has interesting things to say and is open and transparent about how she gets to where she’s going.

Alltop.com
When Guy Kawasaki first launched alltop a few months ago, I wasn’t so sure about it. I’ve grown to love it, and you might too. It’s a one-stop shop for all the top bloggers of a particular topic. He’s growing the list everyday.

I’ve really been into Frontline Documentaries lately..
There site isn’t just a place to point people for “more information” but it really does expand on the content of their documentaries. Worth a visit…you can watch most things online in their entirety.

The Jeriko House.

This really is minimalist modern in a large package. The Jeriko House has really clean lines, and full cadre of possible layouts and configurations. It’s really a beautiful design, though maybe a bit too much of a throwback to mid-century modern for me.

Man I love the possibilities of greenliness, customizability, and reproduction of modern prefab…

It seems, more and more that eco-friendly and sustainable design is at the heart of this movement. I just hope it bleeds out from downtown lofts into first ring suburbs and non-commercial areas of the city…

pardon bmx bandit’s french.

The MKLotus from Michelle Kauffman.

This is a brilliant little prefab model starting at $125,000. The basic floorplan is fantastic with upfront living space open to the kitchen than back to the bed/bath.

I really love it; I love the built in veranda and the grassy knoll on the roof. I love the accordian wall of glass and the open floor plan with tons of glass.

Inhabitat featured it last fall.

Bishop Desmond Tutu was in North Minneapolis this Saturday.
Love Minneapolis was there doing their thing…Simple Acts of Service.

Today, I got rid of Joost and downloaded Adobe Media Player, realeased today…
(AMP).
It’s cleaner looking and cleaner in the sense that there isn’t all the smut that Joost has.

I think Adobe is going to do well with this product. It’s on par with adobe’s other apps. Nice GUI, simple, and modern. As long as they continue to grab good content, they’ll do a good job in the market.

The Willow Creek Lead Summit is coming up in August. Efrem will be speaking there this year.

They’ve got their website up and running now. You can check out a sample video from Efrem there.

Or check out the introduction from Phil Jackson, who co-wrote the Hip Hop Church book with Efrem.

The Book at Amazon:

Incidently, Phil and Tha House MCs will be at Hip Hop Sunday this month, April 20th 9 & 11am. They blew the roof off last time…Tha House is a ministry led by Phil Jackson birthed out of Lawndale Community Church in Chicago.

In the kitchen with Moby

Tony Morgan on Seth Godin…
Your Branding Sucks

FortyOneTwenty
Hot church media

A surly group of friends doing great work, from their passion, here and in Rwanda.
Scallywags - I’m continually amazed by them.

Safari is still the best browsing experience, but Apple still needs to fix a few things.
$10,000 exploit

Church Relevance has a nice list of church websites…makes me excited for the refresh we’ll soon be knee deep in at the Sanctuary…

Below you will find Church Relevance’s favorite church websites. Chosen for design, usability, and innovative ideas, we hope that these websites will also inspire you.

Top 80 Church Websites

This is a truly brilliant interface design. It’s so effective and representative for the content it displays.

Design and the Elastic Mind is an interactive exhibit through MOMA (Museum of Modern Art).

The exhibition highlights designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history—changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior—and translate them into objects that people can actually understand and use. This Web site presents over three hundred of these works, including fifty projects that are not featured in the gallery exhibition.  

Bobby over at LifeCurch/Swerve Blog had a great post today showing a cost vs. excellence curve.

Basically, he’s talking about the Law of Diminishing Returns in the frame of the church.

Excellence grows with more time and more money put in on the front end, but eventually you get less bang for your buck and it costs way more and takes way more time to be a little more excellent.

Even the church is not immune to the laws of capitalist economics.

Neeraj put together a little Love Minneapolis Slideshow of the last 3 months…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUsFVy5ZfLA]

Just in case you don’t get around to reading the whole book, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” read the Eater’s Manifest by Michael Pollan on your lunch break. Nice read. I find his work to be continually enlightening right now…

Change This has a lot of big concepts in small packages. Check em out…

I hate sounding like an Apple fanboy all the time, but it’s hard when you’ve worked on both sides and can easily see the advantage of the Apple experience. I don’t usually have to do much in Power Point, but when I do, I hate it.  

Today, I had to throw together a “state of the church” slideshow for a meeting on Sunday. I decided to use Keynote instead of Power Point. 

Wow. What a better user experience. Almost everything is easier in Keynote than on PP. Apple did a great job. I’m using one of their built in templates. When it came down to making a chart, I could believe how simple they made it. It was also so easy to make it look professional, that I didn’t even try to “design” a slideshow, I just used the template.

Ups:

• Fast
• Intuitive
• Clean and Uncluttered
• Puts the polish on for me
• Nice built in templates
• Animation is a hundred times easier on Keynote than PP
• Font consistency. A dream come true. PP is always trying to resize things

Downs:

• Still not crazy about how Apple deals with the font pallet. It seems clunky for the most widely used tool in the program.
• Floating pallets are still a clutter factor when you have 5 of them open and they don’t lock into a position. 

Oh yeah. I love this….

You’ve got to check out TastyPlanner.com

So, now that I’m getting into my own recipes, I wondered about how I could share them online.

Tasty Planner allows me to do just that.

Here’s how Tasty Planner describes what you can do:

1.  Find & Share Recipes
2. Save recipes to your Recipe Box
   
3. Plan meals weekly
   
4. Create a grocery list
   

Create a Net Disaster. Have fun demolishing your website…. http://www.netdisaster.com 

Things that are happening at Sanctuary this year:

1.  We launched Love Minneapolis. A place for people to “just show up and serve.” There’s been two events and already we’re extending far beyond our doors. 
2. We have a series of Amazing Hip Hop Sunday’s featuring the 3 of the hottest acts in Hip Hop. Starting this weekend with The Ambassador also of Cross Movement. This guy is amazing. The real deal. Not “Christian Hip Hop,” but Hip Hop that’s Christian. We can’t advertise it, because we already know that there won’t be any open seats unless the temps drop below 0 again. Soon to come Phil Jackson and his crew from Tha House. Urban D and others from Crossover Church (#21).
3. We’re adding another service. We’ve been maxed at 1000 for a long time. It’s time to open the doors a little earlier. I’m betting we’ll double in size this year.
4. Efrem will be speaking somewhere that might shine a bit of a spotlight on what we’re doing.
5. We’re tightening the belt. We’re moving to a new office. We’ll start a capitol campaign for our first semi-permanent facility. 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-iCUm24bM0&rel=1]

Guy Kawasaki points to the “Cleverest idea he’s seen in years.” 

Check out the video of the Play Pump.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQu_Jppvzyk&rel=1&border=1]

Innovation comes through many channels. Clearly, in someone’s mind watching the wheels of a pump spin, they reached back to the days of their youth and remembered these wheels spinning.

In the book, “A Whole New Mind,” Daniel Pink talks about PLAY as one of the six senses or aptitudes of the future right-brain ruled economy.

Joy comes from play. Jesus wants us to make our joy complete (see John 15:11) in him. Joy and play go hand in hand.

When was the last time we set out to party as a church. To play together. To share God’s joy with one another. When was the last time we played together to get inspired, to imagine, to innovate.

It sounds fun to me.

Welcome to the Jungle

Flash Mob Improv in Grand Central Station. 

I saw this about a week ago. I love how safely disruptive it is…

 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwMj3PJDxuo&rel=1]

I came across this.This whole site really gave me a happy fresh feeling. Interesting site navigation using flash video and people who are both extremely happy to see me and extremely happy to share their aftercare methods with me.thx Amber mac 

feel free to watch time fly….join us at 12minutes.wordpress.com

How much difference can you make in 12 minutes?In a month, that’s 360 minutes. Six hours. Six hours of conversation. Maybe with God, maybe with the inner thoughts need to be shared, maybe with your spouse. 

3 friends commit 12 minutes a day over 3o days. A personal experiment in incremental growth. Check back daily for your 12 minute update at www.12minutes.wordpress.com 

Isn’t amazing how little those early numbers mean?Last Summer, Giuliani was leading on the republican side, and Obama had half the percentage as Clinton. I’m amazed at the poll numbers going into Super Tuesday where nationally, Obama and Clinton are in a virtual dead heat and Giuliani is backing McCain for President. I’m addicted to CNNPOLITICS.COM. Built on wordpress.Dead HeatCNNPolitics.com 

We went live with the brand spanking new Love Minneapolis site this week. I really like how this one turned out. It just felt right as I was designing it.I’m excited to see the impact that Love Minneapolis will continue to have on our community. 

Most days, I could get away with never getting on the highway…This seems ideal minus the safety factor of needing to have the kids in the backseat pushed up against the back window…

For under 15,000 it’s a pretty sweet deal especially since it claims to run on about $210 of electricity a year…

ZennCars

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qGMkgc2AnQ&rel=1&border=1]

LifeChurch.tv

so i thought I’d provide a few links to some sweet greens:

Inhabitat  I’m really into this blog lately. So much good stuff, it’s heading to the blogroll.

TreeHugger. Deep well of information. Start clicking and you may find yourself at the center of the onion.

The Green Guide. Genuinely Practical.

Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day. Mmmm. Lemon Verbena Green Clean. 

I had no idea. TED has a podcast/RSS Video Feed…. Get it here:

RSS 

iTunes Podcast Link

Zune Podcast Link (Just kidding, I don’t go there…not that there’s anything wrong with it:)

If you don’t listen to TED Talks, you should. 

If you do listen to TED Talks, listen to some more…  

See the photos here…

Gever Tulley’s TED TALK:

1. Play with Fire
2. Own a Pocket Knife
3. Throw a Spear
4. Deconstruct Appliances
5. Break the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
6. Drive a Car

Look around you. What’s broken?

Do you know how to fix it? Or do you need to deconstruct it first?

This speaks to me on so many different levels. I love TED Talks.

As a Kierkegaard fan, I can totally appreciate this.

thanks to Amber Mac…

Haven’t done links in a while. Here’s a few: 

Menu Calendar Clock

On a mac? This is a sweet little app that drops  a mini-iCal Calendar in the menu bar.

Twit.tv

If you’re a nerd like me, you should listen to Leo and his TWIT Conglomerates. This Week in Tech is tangential romp through the world of all things current in tech. I particularly like their MacBreak Weekly Show.

Gladwell.com

Malcolm Gladwell has recently started blogging again. If you’ve read Blink or the Tipping Point, you know this guy reports on connections that most of us can’t see. He has a unique perspective, he’s an amazing story teller, and he brings new clarity to things we already thought were clear. Check him out…. 

what happens when you put out a fire in a minnesota winter?

My friend Phil takes a beautiful set of pictures. 
 

Formerly of Tak Photo

Soon to be of: Philip Hussong Photography 

You should get married so you can have your photo taken by him. 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfPTGTGLA3E&rel=1]

Screenfluent
The best thing I found this week for web designers. So many quality screenshots with links.

Pimp my Safari
For all you Safari users. Yes, it is pluggable like Firefox.

Katya’s Blog for Non-profit Marketing
Been reading this alot lately. Thanks Kem

ColourLove
This site is soooo fantastic.
If you are a designer, or just have a little style…you’ll love it.

ColourLoveBlog

ModestNeeds
if the church could look like this, could look like acts 2
have a need. fill the need.

modest needs

Willow Creek Association
Our membership is saving us about $2,200 on the server I’m buying next week for sanctuary

willow creek

Kiva
If you haven’t had a kiva party you must.
My genius friend Neeraj threw a Kiva Party for his wife’s birthday, instead of a birthday party. 30-40 peope donated and $1,200 was raised and invested in micro-lending opportunities around the world. Throw a Kiva Party. It changes lives.

KIVA
The Power of We - the Kiva Portfolio that came out of the party

iBudget
Simple Finance Management for the Mac - Elegant too.
I’m hoping because of it’s simplicity, the family budget will all work through here. Other software has just been too bulky for my wife who really isn’t a digital afficiando.

iBudget

Blink
Malcolm Gladwell’s latest.
A great read. Sometimes decisions made in the moment are more accurate than those with great deliberation.

Blink

ColourLovers
A must for all Designers

Inquisitor
If you’re on an intel mac and use safari get this plugin, it rocks…
 Inquisitor

Are you on Facebook.
I am. I like it. Though it may wind up being a royal waste of time.
I don’t find it useful for much. Though I have more insights in to the lives of friends and family that I never see.
 Facebook

CreativeMYK
Kudos to these folks who make my job easier:
 Creativemyk.com

XServe
Coming soon to the Sanctuary:
This is what happens when you put a Mac Guy in charge of IT