The Stats of Porn Online [Infographic]

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New Blog

A short post for anyone following the feed of this blog I infrequently keep up...

I am "moving" my blog to Posterous. Because Posterous is so web-connected, whatever I post there will automatically load here. However, I will be making my posts for Posterous, not for Blogger, so I can foresee some occasional issues arising. If you want to ensure you are seeing and reading what I have posted, then head over to http://erinbird.posterous.com. If you don't want to bother with resetting up a new RSS feed or changing your bookmarks, you can continue to visit this site - I'm 95% sure you'll get 95% of the content I post. :o)

Catching Up to the 21st Century

Another Catch-Up post:

• I'm catching up to the 21st century. On Sunday, I had my first Skype video chat ever. I'm doing premarital counseling for some friends who are currently in California, but coming back to Iowa for their wedding. Our first couple of "sessions" were over the phone. I must say it was much nicer having our conversation via Skype. Other than the occasional visual freeze, audio worked consistently, and we could hear each other just fine.
• Last week on 9/9/09, I watched The Nines for most of the day. The premise? What one thing would various church leaders/pastors say to other church leaders/pastors in nine minutes or less? I really enjoyed the format (and I'm not even ADD!) and some of the 9-minute speeches really challenged me, some encouraged me, and I found my faith inspired and my prayers going to another level. I missed the last couple of hours, so I hope to go back and catch some that I missed and rewatch some with my wife.
• During The Nines, they were giving away some books, curriculum, and other items during their short breaks. But the only way to have a chance at winning a giveaway was to Twitter. However, I didn't have a Twitter account. I complained via their feedback system, but heard nothing back. :o) And this isn't the only time this has happened - I've seen other giveaways that are only for people who tweet with a specific hashtag. So I've been left out of the party. Therefore, I've decided to join what I thought would be a passing fad (it may still, but it's lasted longer than I expected). I have no illusion that the masses are just waiting to know what I'm eating for snack with my boys and other such drivel, but I hope to be challenged and learn from some others in ministry as they tweet various thoughts about faith, life, and ministry. If you have any suggestions of who I should follow on Twitter, leave me a comment.
• I upgraded to Snow Leopard on both my laptop and iMac at home. Two years ago when I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard, I had very few "hiccups", which exceeded my expectations. With this upgrade, I had very high expectations, and unfortunately the upgrade hasn't been as smooth. Things don't feel that much faster, and while I save a ton of gigabytes on the iMac, I didn't see the same savings on my laptop. My printer at home no longer works. I had a half-day trying to figure out how to get email working again on my laptop (which was confusing since Apple was touting the improved Exchange support). I'm running smoothly again most places (except the printer still isn't working at home), and Snow Leopard seems like a great OS, but I was surprised at the bumps I encountered. I should have known better than to place my expectations so high, but hey - I've drunk the Kool-Aid.
• My daughter is truly in the right family. She came home and complained today about the fact that her school switched to all PCs.
• My wife is also entering the 21st century with me. She now has an iPhone 3G. And she is thinking about signing up for Facebook (but for her to find more than 5 minutes to spend at the computer might be hard to do).
• I've not read any blogs in a LONG time. But my input strength has been satisfied by the books I've been reading lately. Right now the book in my bag is Made to Stick. I've also read Love is an Orientation, Case for the Real Jesus, Living the Cross-Centered Life, and When God Writes Your Love Story in the past 2 months.
• I'm preaching October 18th. I have a VERY creative idea, but if I'm going to pull it off, I have to work on it now. I sure hope it works out! (If you want to know what the idea is, you'll just have to come to New Covenant that Sunday, or listen to it on the web the week after.)

Well, that should do it for now. Guess I should go Twitter that I posted a blog which will import into Facebook. I feel so "hip" and important all of a sudden. Or maybe that feeling is just being out of breath trying to catch up to the current century.

300 Web 2.0 sites

The "300" in the title does not mean 300 website links.  I'm making note that this is my 300th post since using Blogger.  Not quite sure this is worthy of being the monumental 300th post, but oh well.  I don't have time to wax eloquent right now.

I've come across some new websites lately that I thought would be of interest to some young adults.  So here are the links:

WeSeed - I saw this a couple of days ago.  I intended to look into it more for my own curiosity, but I'm thinking now I won't have time.  But if you are like me and don't know tons about the stock market, this might be a fun and risk-free way to learn.

ChaCha - A friend told me about this one.  With ChaCha, you send any question in a text message to 242-242 ("cha-cha") and a real live human being texts back an answer.  I tried it a couple of times.  The first answer was spot on, the second one left a little to be desired (but I admit it was a bit of a trick question if the person who got it was a non-Christian).  This could come in handy at certain times.  But please don't use it to cheat at Trivial Pursuit.  And if some of you are desperate for money, you can even become a ChaCha guide and get paid to answer people's questions!

TaTango - Another friend told me about this one.  I've seen other group texting sites before, but none that offer "free" like this one.  I was thinking it might work out for the new BE[cause] ABF we started here at New Covenant for young single twentysomethings, but turns out we already have this functionality built in to some software we use.  But perhaps it might be useful to someone out there.  Happy Text Messaging!

Let me "Send U It"

Austin Spooner just told me about this little web gem: SendUIt.

Hope you find it as helpful as I expect to!

My boring blog

Finally I know why my blog is so boring.  I don't post frequently enough.  I don't post about enough current topics.  I seem to be more of a drive-by blogger.

But I'm content with that.  I blog for myself and any young adults (or perhaps their parents) that might actually be interested in reading one of my thoughts.  I know my blog doesn't contribute very much to the grand scheme of life and God's Kingdom, but sometimes it is the perfect format for me to just share my thoughts.  And (based on the very nice person who just stuck their head in my office moments ago (unbeknownst to what I was typing here) and said how much she enjoys my blog) it occasionally blesses others too.

So I think I'll just stick to the way I've been doing things.  Even if it is boring.

Razooing Blood:Water Mission

I got an email asking me to join Blood:Water Mission's group on a new action-oriented social networking site called Razoo. If Blood:Water Mission gets enough members, they could be selected as winner of the Change Your World Contest, which would award them $10,000.

Blood:Water Mission is doing great things helping Africans get clean fresh drinking water from wells right beneath their feet. I'd encourage you to join Razoo as well, and after you confirm your email address, click on http://beta.razoo.com/groups/bloodwatermission to join the group and help them out.

A fresh approach

I appreciate it when people take a fresh approach to something ordinary. I think that is one thing (of many) that attracts me to Jesus. He was routinely taking the mundane things that people took for granted and breathed fresh life into them. Whether it was religious traditions like the passover or daily jobs like farming, Jesus had a way of making you think about these things in new ways.

In our day and age, websites are extremely common. So how do you make your site stand out? Here's one author's very creative attempt to combine humor, out-of-the-box thinking, and advertising into one website that will attract attention and readers. I have no idea if she is a follower of Jesus, but I can't help but think this site makes Christ smile.

(Thanks to Seth Godin for the link)

Free Music

I'm not sure how they can make it free (legally), but I just learned about Pandora, a website that becomes your personal DJ. Just tell Pandora an artist or song you like, and it finds what you are looking for, as well as similar songs and artists.

By the way, I'm currently listening to David Crowder's "B Collision" (even though I already own it...).

My face is now on Facebook

Well, it's happened. I have officially joined Facebook. I would like to take this opportunity to blame Mark Forstrom and the Church Relevance blog for this life-altering event. I don't foresee myself spending tons of time on Facebook, but I think I'm going to enjoy keeping up with some people via this method.

If your face is also on Facebook, feel free to add me as a friend.

Scrub Away Porn

I've posted in the past about the free accountability software from xxxchurch.com called X3Watch designed to help guys (or gals) who strugglewith viewing pornography on their computers.

Thanks to the Swerve blog, I just learned about another free method called Scrub It. Because I can't use X3Watch on my home computer, I think I might try Scrub It on there.

Where do YOU spend your time online?

I just read on Church Relevance's blog a post about Compete.com's report on the Top 20 websites based on the amount of time people spend on the site. MySpace is the overwhelming winner (unfortunately - as a wanna-be webdesigner I am offended by the ugliness of MySpace sites ;-). I was surprised Google wasn't slightly higher with all of the services they offer, but this is a report about time, not # of users.

But the things that surprised me most is that the Top 20 sites take up 39% of the time used on the Internet. With all of the billions of web pages out there, this amazes me most.

Oh, and in case you are wondering, the site I spend the most time on is Google (if you count gmail, Google Reader, Blogger, and Google News).

The Procrastinator's Clock

I'm not a procrastinator by nature, but I still thought this clock was a funny idea. I know a few people who could use this (but I won't name them here!).

Living on the Cheap

Since so many reports have been coming out the past couple years revealing the deep debt that many young adults carry, I thought this site might be helpful to some of you. Consider how you can cut costs to free yourself of debt and make YOU the master of the funds God gives you. And even if you aren't in debt, maybe you can glean some helpful tips!

Waterblogged

For those of you in Cedar Rapids, I thought I'd let you know that Watershed now has a blog. It's not "mine" per se - the majority of my blogging will still occur here - but for announcements and occasional thoughts about life as a young adult, head over to http://thewaterblogged.blogspot.com/

Online world = Real world?

According to the USC Center for the Digital Future's 2007 report, 43% of Internet users say that their online communities are as important as their real life communities.

Hmm... I'm going to need some time to chew on this one.

Thanks to LifeChurch.tv's Swerve blog for the link.

Congratulations (and Thank You's)

Thank you, thank you. Thank you very much. For this award, I would first like to thank God for giving mankind brains to come up with the technologies that allow us to shape culture through the use of the Internet. I would also like to thank Apple for making my PowerBook so I could connect to the Internet and type my thoughts. like to thank Blogger for providing me with the platform to publish my thoughts to the Internet public, to YouTube for the videos that let me catch news items that I might have missed (or videos that give me a laugh!), to Kim Pagel for encouraging me to blog so I could share in this award with him and all of you, and to all the little people who didn't act little, but acted big and made the biggest impact in 2006 (according to Time).

And that brings me to the other half of this post. Congratulations to you as well as being a recipient of this year's Person of the Year award. I hear that if you pick up a copy of this week's Time Magazine that you even will see your picture on the cover. I would enjoy seeing that, however I'll be too busy looking at myself on the cover. After all, it's not often I win such a prestigious award as this.

Online file conversion

As a wanna-be graphic artist/web designer, I loved finding this site:

Zamzar - free online file conversion

Haven't used it yet, but look forward to the day I need it!