I'm a Mac...no, I'm a PC...no, I'm a Mac...

This is outside the normal purview of this blog, but it struck me the other night, and I just had to say it...

I listen to several of the TWiT podcasts in my free time, or when I'm doing more mindless tasks, and there's been a whole lot of bandwidth spent lately on figuring out Microsoft's latest ad campaigns. Starting this all has been the Seinfeld campaign (1 & 2), which may or may not have been dropped after 2 commercials (and Jerry's contract canceled), and then the more recent "I'm a PC" jab at Apple's wildly successful ad campaign.

Could it be that MS is floundering in the Marketing department, the once Achilles Heel of Apple? (This being said by the former owner of a MacTV, an OS8 machine with a built-in TV tuner, which I bought on clearance because they only marketed it to campus bookstores.)

Actually, I've got a great theory...and it involves the single interpretive key needed to make sense of the two Seinfeld commercials, which at first glace appear to be "a commercial about nothing." The key is this...Jerry is Apple. Why else would they hire a guy who, in his own series, always had a Mac on his desk? Plus, you needed a hip and funny guy to off-set Gates, in the same way Mac and PC play off each other in the Apple ads.

Now it's an interpretive leap, perhaps, but stay with me here...MS is symbolically saying in these commercials that Apple over the years has had some very inventive ideas. While MS ignored them at first ("Churro?" "I'm good."), they're starting to understand now (both seen eating churros at the end of the 1st ad). Some ideas were really out there (showering in your clothes), but some made a lot of sense (breaking in the leather shoes by repeated bending). Even the way in which Apple has learned from it's customers, (the second ad)and given them products that are all about user experience, MS is saying they've learned from that as well.

And so, MS has learned a thing or two from Apple, and has a few innovations of it's own in the works as well (the repetition of Jerry's ending question in both ads about what Bill's got in the works).

And no sooner do they pull these ads, than they prove my point...The newest ad campaign takes Apple's "I'm a Mac" ads and spins them, attempting to prove that not all PC users look and sound like John Hodgeman (himself an avid Mac user, ironically). And the real irony is, the commercial was most likely made on a Mac. More evidence to back up my otherwise seemingly outlandish theory.

So expect some new stuff, which will probably be code-named "churro", to be coming out any time soon. Maybe it's Windows 7X, maybe a zPhone (with built in water gun), maybe it's just another ad campaign which will be airing soon, talking about how all Mac users are slacker artists, while the real producers in our society are slogging away on PCs like any good American. Maybe it really is edible desktops and ready-to-make pet websites out of the box. I dunno, but it's good enough to make Bill Gates shake his shorts. :-)

This post, being typed by an avid Mac advocate...in exile on an HP laptop running Mojave...I mean Vista.

A week off from preaching...

Well, with the youth leading worship this past Sunday, and my Wednesday night lessons already prepared, I had a chance to play catch-up last week. Keeping more than 3 things in my head at a time has never really worked for me, so I've had to do some investigating into organizational methods. I did the Palm Pilot thing for almost a decade, and did the Franklin Covey planner on and off alongside it. But those things were tools, not methods. And as a Methodist...well, I need methods! ;-)

It wasn't until a couple of years ago that I discovered the Getting Things Done (aka GTD) methodology, set out by David Allen in his book by the same name. The flow goes something like this:

1. Collect-Get all of the thoughts out of your head, your email, your various post-its all around the office, and get them into one big bucket that you sort through on a consistent basis. For me, this entails use of my cell phone's voice recorder, and my handy-dandy Hipster PDA.
2. Process-Ask some basic questions...Is this actionable or not? Is it a single action or a project? Is it for me or for someone else? Is it something I can do in 2 min right now, or do I need to do it later?
   
3. Organize-Get them in the right places...in files, on project or task lists, on your calendar, etc
   
4. Review-Go over your calendar and lists, and make decisions about what to do this week, today.
   
5. Do-Ummm...do the thing!
   

I've heard-tell that Allen's spirituality is a little on the creepy side, but then again, so is that of my favorite chess guru, Jeremy Silman. So I don't get into a lot of his side stuff. I've actually found my best resource for applying GTD has not been Allen, but another guy (and a Floridian at that) named Merlin Mann. His site, 43 Folders, is good for both organization and technology. He's the guy to (tongue-in-cheek) popularized the Hipster PDA, which is a fancy term for a stack of index cards in a binder clip.

It's been a long learning curve for me, and I've changed the system 10 million times in the last year or so, but it's been beneficial for me. Of course, once I get a good system, then I have to deal with the worries and fears in me that make me want to procrastinate all the things in these wonderful lists.

But that's for another day. Hope this is helpful to somebody!

They let HIM run a church?

So, I'm officially 6 weeks into my first pastorate, and it's got me thinking. Who would have seen this coming? OK, in reality, more than a few saw this coming, especially in High School. But what a strange kid to grow up and hand the keys of a church, I think to myself. Particularly since I've never totally shed the odd things that held my interest as a kid. I'm still a Sci-Fi nut, I still love video games, I am still pretty conversant in comic books, I find myself day-dreaming about starships, I am compelled to crank-up good music, no matter the genre (or whether it's Christian or not), and I'm eagerly awaiting the return of Heroes on NBC. Somewhere in my head, I wonder if these things fit with what it means to be a pastor. I dunno. They just don't seem to fit the stereotypes. I should be into golf, classical music, and theater, or something more pedestrian like that, right?

Then Sunday, I was contemplating life next to a waterfall (OK, I was really in the shower), and a thought (probably not my own) pops into my head: “You don't cease being who you are when you become a pastor. You just bring all that with you to the table.” Kind of a comforting thought, actually. God doesn't want me to quit reading Star Wars novels (and frankly large portions of Wookiepedia) just because He's also asked me to take care of His people. He's never asked of me to lay aside day-dreaming about aliens and far-off worlds, just because I get up on Sunday morning and help people understand His Word. He's never asked me to stop being me, just to submit all of me to Him, and let Him use me in helping others. So I can have long conversations with owners of comic book shops. I can reference both Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail and The Phantom Menace in sermons only a couple of weeks apart (and you should have seen some of the guys my age light-up when I pulled out that plastic lightsaber). So I can take a pie-in-the-face at VBS (an act some thought was gracious of me, and I never thought twice about). And I've got at least four guys in our youth group wanting to challenge me in Halo. : )

Sometimes, we feel like we have to be different people when God gets a hold of our lives, and to a small extent that's true, but only in the things that run counter to holiness and love. I remember many years back my pastor Roger challenging us to tell him what a Christian looked-like, and confronting us with the truth that a Christian doesn't fit a mold or stereotype, but is just an individual submitted to God. So I don't have to be ashamed of the urge to hunt-down free war game rules on the Internet, or the fact that I still would love to publish a comic-book some day. I just bring that with me, one more part of a very complex Body of Christ. And see how God wants me to use that today.

Look, ma! Actual content!!

OK, I've decided that I've been making this whole blog thing too big of a deal, and I just need to write. Quit worrying about audience, quit fussing with "theme", and just write. Merlin Mann writes "Remember that your blog is only incidentally a publishing system or a public website. At its heart, your blog represents the evolving expression of your most passionately held ideas." (from 43 Folders) So I'm gonna do just that.

So bear with me, folks. The ride may get bumpy, but well, it'll be fun. At least for me, anyway! : )