Looking back on the three days I took off work last week, i learned something. I need to be more intentional with my vacation time. Because I was home, life still happened. I had stuff going on Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night and Saturday night - not to mention stuff during the day. All good stuff, lots of church stuff, lots of christian stuff. But I made it more important than my family, which is why I took the time off work to begin with. Next time I take off work, we're either going away, or not doing stuff, unless it's with my familiy.

Helped someone from my small group move on Saturday. Didn't really want to, but I'm glad I did. It went pretty smoothly, and I had a good time connecting with the the guy who was moving, who's a recent addition to my small group. From church there was Will, Matt Gielow and Joe helping out. We made it fun.

I just flew into New Orleans, staying at the Marriott a couple of blocks from Bourbon street in the French Quarter. I've got meetings tomorrow and Tuesday here and in Baton Rouge, and then I fly out Tuesday night, back around 8 or 9, home the rest of the week. I've got a couple of my co-workers, natives of N'Leans, showing me around tomorrow.

I had a poker party on Friday night. Had a bunch of guys from my small group over along with a neighbor and a guy from the gym. We started off with a Texas no-limit hold 'em tournament and then played poker the rest of the night. It was a good time. We played in my garage, which still reeks of cigars. The kitchen chairs that I had in the garage reek of cigars. Can't have a poker party without cigars.

Went to see the Passion on Saturday. Cathie and I got there about 45 minutes early to get a good seat and waited in line. There were about fifty people in front of us, so I figured we'd get a good seat. By the time we'd gotten into the theatre it was full. FULL. People had rushed in, saved 5 or 6 rows at a time. This sounds petty, but it pissed me off. I went to take a seat and was stopped by a man who told me he'd saved the seats and the manager said it was alright. I explained that none of the 100 people he'd saved these seats for had waited in line, and to be fair to eveyrone, he should probably let them grab their own. He disagreed, I expressed my great displeasure, and I sat elsewhere, before I made too big of an ass of myself.

I thought the movie was very well done, very graphic, very true. Can't really say it was "great", but it made me think. Aside from the brutality of the whippings and the crucifixion, the thing that struck me the most was Mary. Seeing her watch her son tried, beaten and crucified made me think about how I would feel if I were in her situation, having to stand by and watch my son go through this and be powerless to stop it, knowing he was doing it of his own free-will. It reminded me of a time about five years ago when it finally clicked to me that God felt this same way about his son; that he loves Jesus as much as I love my kids. That this was as hard or harder for him to watch as it would be for me. Because of his infinitiy, I figured he could process it much differently than I would.
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Maddie had a follow-up doctor's appointment to see how she's doing today. She'd been having some headaches the past few days, but apparently because she wasn't resting enough the past few days.

We had our storyboarding meeting the other day. Every month or so, a group of us get together for dinner and to workshop the upcoming series that we're doing at Crossroads. Joanne Ickes facilitiates the whole thing, which is an amazing feat in and of itself. You've got a group of ADD people (myself one of the worst) blurting out ideas, some good, some bad, some neutral - jumping from one idea to the next, interrupting, bouncing, and playing off of each other. Joanne is able to facilitate this in such a way that people feel listened to, productive and loved. While all this is going on, 5 people are on their laptops, searching the internet, their archives, song lyrics, instant messaging, etc. It's chaotic, but a great time. I look forward to this every month.

I'm speaking at a conference tomorrow - The Internal Auditor's Group, in Lansing. Should be a hoot. Here's what I'm presenting on.

Had a scare today... I was at the library working on my presentation for tomorrow and I got a call from Cathie telling me that Maddie was hurt. Turns out she'd been in the back yard playing with a friend when she fell off the swingset and hit her head, right on the temple. She came running in, and lost conciousness. From there, she went in and out of conciousness, and then complained that she couldn't see well out of the eye near where she'd been hit. Cathie took her into the emergency room where they checked her out and did a cat-scan. Looks like everything's okay - she has a concussion, but that's about it.

Interesting perspective on Christian Music Marketing:
Open up the latest Newsboys disc, "Adoration: The Worship Album," and out pops an ad pitching "The Official Bible of the Newsboys." The book is the "NIV Student Bible," and the leaflet includes a bold quote from Newsboys frontman Peter Furler: "The NIV Student Bible has been and continues to be my daily read."

Cathie and I went to see the movie Fifty first dates last night. I thought it was a good movie, not great. Adam Sandler was really the straightman in the movie, but not as serious as Punch Drunk Love. The movie's about a girl who forgets everything from the previous day, each morning when she's awake. We went out for coffee after the movie and we made a list of everything we would tell the other first thing in the morning if the other had this condition.

I'm in town all week. I'm speaking at a conference tomorrow afternon and then I'm off the rest of the week while the kids are home for mid-winter break. The following week I head down to New Orleans for a couple of days and then to Kansas City, back Wednesday. The next week I head to New York City for a couple of days, back Tuesday night.

Got this idea from Noel:
Step 1: Open your iTunes or other music player.
Step 2: Put all of your music on random.
Step 3: Write down the first 20 songs it plays no matter how embarrassing

Tourniquet by Evanesence
As Lovers Go - Dashboard Confessional
I Don't Know - Ozzy Osbourne
Irish Day - Iona
Lady D'Arbanville - Cat Stevens
Busted Stuff - Dave Matthews Band
Angels - Shaded Red
Together - 100 Portraits
A Different Drum - Peter Gabriel
Supermodels - Kendell Payne
I'll Talk to You tomorrow - Calibretto 13
What if - Creed
It's raining Men - The Weather Girls
Lady Wisdom - Earthsuit
Jesus, Mary Star of the Sea - Zwan
The Spirit of Radio - Rush
Just as I Am - Acquire the Fire
New Year's Day - U2
Say I - Creed

Hmm.. Looks like I need to go through and prune my collection of stuff I don't like anymore... (It's raining men is NOT included in that mix)

My dad ran into a guy I knew back in High School named Miguel. I can't exactly remember how I met him, but I remember that he hung out in our Campus Life club and we hung out together occasionally. My dad ran into him the other day at church and he asked how I was doing. He told my Dad what an impact I'd had on his life, and said that I was one of a few people who'd really made a difference for him. Go figure. I guess you never really know the big picture of how you're life's going to impact others. I look back at that time and just remember what a hypocrite I was and all the things I wish I could have done differently. I guess God can even work with that stuff towards good.

We went to the Buck Enterprises concert last night to see Dan perform. Dan's the worship leader at Crossroads and founder of the band. Buck is a ska band that's been around since 1994 and has a great horns section. I'd asked him to dedicate a song to me, and sure enough, he did. Just not the song I was thinking. Midway through the concert I heard "This next song goes out to Dave" at which point in time they launched into a cover of the song She's got a way by Billy Joel.

Spam sucks, everyone knows that. Ameritech is my ISP, and they use Yahoo's e-mail system, which has a pretty decent Spam filter. It takes care of 95% of the spam for me - approximately 350 messages a day which I don't have to see. The ones that are annoying are the other 5%. At home, I use Outlook, when I travel, I use Yahoo's web client, so I needed a package that would interact direclty with Yahoo to filter out the 5%. I was reading a review in the Wall Street Journal the other day about a product called ChoiceMail. Two things make this unique:
1.For addresses that it doesn't know, it uses a challange and response technique to validate who you are. Obviously a spammer can't/won't reply to these e-mails. There's a little bit of maintenance up front to get this working, but after a while, it works very well.
2. It works with web based mail interfaces - filters out the non-spam even further.

Check this site out for a bunch of reviews on Spam Filters.

I'm in Kansas City this week. Went to the casino last night. Lost. I've never seen so many overalls and Carharts in a casino in my life. It was a late night, and I had to do a big presentation this morning to fifty people, after only about 2 1/2 hours of sleep. Apparently, I do a better job when I'm groggy. I'm back tonight, going to see Buck/Insyderz tomorrow.

This is just weird.

I upgraded my TiVO system with a new hard drive. I'd purchased the 40 hour Hughes DirecTiVO system along with a 200GB drive for $100. I used the following definitive How-To for the upgrade and was successful. The whole operation only took about 5 minutes. It basically goes like this: Take the drive out of the Tivo, Hook it up to a PC, boot from CD, backup the TiVO disk, restore it to the new drive, replace the drive and Whalla! You can put two drives in teh system, and it will recognize up to 137 GB per drive. Each GB gives you about 1.2 Hours of viewing time. My next task is to figure out how to put it on my home wireless network, so I can update the programming and functionality remotely, instead of having to pull the hard drive out everytime.

Friday night we had a meeting about Crossroad's capital fund drive, we went out with three other couples: The Niemis, Girards and Reynolds. It was the women's job to plan the thing out, so they jumped in one car, the guys in another and we followed. We headed down Grand River, and they turned down the seedy eight might strip, keeping us guessing. We ended up back in Farmington Hills where we played Laser Tag. We finished the night up at the Rhino Dance Pub (nice name, huh?) in South Lyon. If you've never been there, it's a nice place. Setup like a martini bar, but with a DJ and dancing on the weekends. The girls had fun dancing (I even got out there a couple times, much to my own embaressment and lack of rythm) while the guys hung out and talked. We got in around 1, stayed up until about 2:30AM and I got up to work out with Kirk at 6:30. Four hours of sleep made for a long day.

When Bob told me he'd found me front row seats for Annie, I figured he meant towards the front. Madeline and I were literally sitting in the very front row at the Masonic temple, watching the musical Annie yesterday. She and I went as a Valentine's day date, and had a great time! We got dressed up in our "fancy" clothes and she couldn't believe how "fancy" the theatre was. If you've never been to the Masonic temple, it's beautiful on the inside, but it's in a horrible part of detroit, with burned down crack houses right across the street. You don't want to park too far away from the theatre if you can avoid it.

I've been listening to the new In the name of Love CD, a U2 tribute album by CCM artists. I like U2 - I'm by no means a die-hard, I mostly prefer the stuff from Rattle and Hum and prior. I've always been a big fan of cover songs - when they tweak the songs, the style, whatever. I'm sure the U2 purists will scream herasy, but I like it.

Interesting excerpt from a review on The Passion:
This is not a movie that anyone will "like". I don't think it's a movie anyone will "love". It certainly doesn't "entertain". There isn't even the sense that one has just watched a movie. What it is, is an experience - on a level of primary emotion that is scarcely comprehensible. Every shred of human preconception or predisposition is utterly stripped away. No one will eat popcorn during this film. Some may not eat for days after they've seen it. Quite honestly, I wanted to vomit. It hits that hard.

Interesting intervie with James Caviezel', the guy who played Jesus in The Passion.

Now that it's February, Northwest resets their Worldperk's program for everyone. It's been nice because having Gold status this year means I get upgraded to First Class just about everytime I fly, at least for now. I'll probalby fly between 50-75k miles this year, most of it with Northwest. Northwest has the most generous of the frequent flyer programs out there, but their planes are the oldest out there, and their stewardeses aren't the friendliest.

I've got some extra spring in my step today. There's a shoe place out here in Kansas City called Bob Jones Shoes Warehouse. These are the shoes I got. Last year, against my better judgement, I bought a pair or dress shoes at Men's Warehouse, after the guy assured me they were a good quality shoe. They blew. These are the nicest shoes I've owned, for darn cheap. I almost bought some pimp shoes, but the guy I was with moved me back towards these

I'm heading home this morning. Our team had a late night, trying to pull together a deliverable that we have to present to our customer this morning. We're on a very tight timeframe, implementing a multi-million dollar system across a large university by June 30th. I've got a great team, managed by a friend of mine Sandy, who used to be a customer of mine. I brought her over about 3 years ago and we've worked together quite a bit. The sales person, her and I all have a great relationship and the additude flows through to the team. She's very organized and helps keep me on task with any details that might fall through the cracks otherwise. We've been on this project together for almost a year and a half, so you get to know a person pretty well spending 12 - 15 hours a day together over that time frame.

I've been reading through the Gospels and it's really stood out to me how much Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God coming, and the tone which he talks about it. Jesus sees it as a huge celebration and the people around him, including his disciples just don't get it. But then again, I'd probably wouldn't of either. I'd of been the one in the back asking the dumb questions after his parables.

I'm very embaressed to say that I watched the Westminster dog show last night. There was nothing on the hotel cable channels, except MSU losing badly to Illinois, so one of my co-workers IM'd me to watch it. I watched the finals, kibitzing back and forth with Gab, one of my co-workers. If you've ever seen the movie Best in Show, it's that much funnier to watch. FYI - Josh won.

I read this article on Who Killed Jesus? while sitting on the can (I love having web access on my phone). I found it to be pretty one sided.

People often ask me what I do for a living. This is probably the best metaphor for my job:
A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud toward him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses, and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd: "If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?" The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers, "Sure. Why not?" The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location, which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. Then the young man opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC-connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the shepherd and says: "You have exactly 1586 sheep." "That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep" says the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car. Then the shepherd says to the young man: "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?" The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?" "You're a consultant." says the shepherd. "Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?" "No guessing required." answered the shepherd. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew; to a question I never asked; and you don't know crap about my business... Now give me back my dog."

I'm in Kansas City for the next few days. We've changed over to an Embassy Suites, which blows away the AmeriSuites we were staying at, plus I get Hilton points.

Check out this entry in Noel's blog about churches using The Passion movie as an "evangelism tool".

I listed my old WebTV satellite receiver on eBay yesterday. I figured I'd get about $50 for it, since the thing is four years old. So far the bidding is at about $255 and still going.

It looks like there's a Simpson's Movie in the works!

I just got my new DirecTV TiVO receiver installed today. I had DishNetwork's WebTV DVR (Digital Video Recorder) system for about four years, loved the interface, but it was old technology. I got a dual receiver system, one of them being a TiVO one a standard receiver. The TiVO system is easy to upgrade. I picked up a 200 GB hard disk for $100, which gives me the ability to record about 240 hours of TV, plus there's all sorts of great hacks out there to tweak the functionality and capabilities of the system. TiVO has a very cool home media option that Directv doesn't support yet, which sucks. It allows you to share shows between TiVO's, listen to music, view pictures and schedule shows remotely. I'm working to get mine on the network with the upgraded hard disk and then I'll start messing with some of the other hacks. I'll keep you posted.

Cathie, Jes and I watched the movie Thirteen on Saturday. Good movie, but very disturbing from a parent's perspective and from a youth pastor's perspective. The movie was about a thirteen year old seventh grader in a single parent home outside of LA. Throughout the movie, you see a girl who wants to be accepted by cool kids, and ends up being systematically being dragged into drugs, shoplifting, sex and rebellion against her Mom. I was really uncomfortable while I was watching it. I kept thinking of my kids, and the kids in Fusion, wanting to save them, save this girl from what's going on. It's a movie that I'd reccomend for some parents to watch with their kids - and talk about at the end. There's some great teaching moments out of the movie. It does a great job showing the consequences and the gradual slide of someone based on a few bad decisions.
One of the girls who wrote this was, Nikki Reed, was thirteen at the time.

Since Alias wasn't on last night, Cathie and i watched The Surreal Life last night. If you haven't watched the show yet, it consists of Vanilla Ice, Tammy Faye Baker, Erik Estrada (Ponch) and Porn Star Ron Jeremy. The whole cast came in expecting Tammy Faye to spend most of the time preaching at them, but instead, she's done nothing but love them in a non-judgemental way. The whole cast went to her book signing, which consisted largely or fundamentalist fans, transvestites, gays and lesbians. The crowd geniunely loved her and it showed based on how she connected, loved and communicated with them. The clip ended with Vanilla Ice talking about how he expected something so different from a Christian, but instead saw someone who was so loving and caring - blew him out of the water. Erik Estrada and the others had the same kind of feedbcak. The group proceeded back to the house where Ron Jeremy had invited over a bunch of his Porn Star friends, who she talked with, hung out with, and headed inside once they started taking off their clothes.

So we had the big sleepover on Friday night. I took the boys to chuck-e-cheeses, to laser tag, and then back home for our video game bonanza. I'd setup the projector for Xbox and PS2 and the boys played bayblade, watched movies and played video games until about 1 in the morning. I went to bed about 1:20 after I didn't hear anything more from them. I'd forgotten how much fun laser tag was. We played out at Zap Zone in Farmington and I had as much fun as they did. The boys were tormenting some of the high school girls playing in there, stalking them like little gnats, four of them hovering around one or two of them getting them from every angle. It was hilarious.

It's been nice to not have traveled all week. I've gotten a lot done, plus stuck pretty closely to my exercise/eating plan. Big turn-out for survivor last night - Matt, Anne, Katie, Will, Tim, Phil, Jason, Jason, Megan and Jess. Watched the first one and the new one. Richard Hatch is a bastard. I want to see him get kicked off right from the beginning so he gets as little publicity as possible.

Kirk, Dan, Will, Joe did our performance training this morning. Crazy workout involving one legged hopping, throwing medicine balls, bear crawls and crab walks. I've worked out with him four days this week and I'm feeling it today. Just about every part of my body aches.

For Nate's birthday, he's having three friends spend the night tonight. We've got a guys night on the town planned - starting with chuck-e-cheese's, laser tag, big screen video games and ending up with late night scooby snacks. It should be fun.

I'm traveling the next two weeks - next week Tuesday - Thursday and the following week Wedesday and Thursday. Not too bad - down to Park University.

Even if you have no idea who Mike Yaconelli is, you'll probably appreciate this article on how get started doing what he did: Yaconelli, the Early Years

Too much time on your hands? Check out the Center for Prevention of Shopping Cart Abuse

Got this from Will, damn this is fun.

Jason has done his bi-annual blog update! Sure it was just one sentence - and not very interesting, and only pointing out the splinter in someone else's eye - but we all appreciate the token effort.

Where else could you get this much information on mullets?

This is an interesting reference guide on church-speak. My personal favorite: Get your end-times latter-rain double-portion covenant seed-faith blessing.

This is a really interesting discussion thread on how relevant and edgy youth pastors need to be in order to be effective.

What a great stress reliever!

The guy who wrote this Top Ten List: "Top Ten Signs You're a Fundamentalist Christian" list is a little bit bitter.

I received
Dear Citibank-Online Cleints,

This_ EMAIL was se-nt by-the Citi-Bank serevr to veerify _your Email address_.
You must cotplmee this pcoress by clicking on the_ link _below_ and enntering in the smal window your Citi _Debit_ full card_nummber and _pin_ that you use_ in_the Atm_machine.
That_is done for-your pretoction -2- becouse some_of_our memmbers no loegnr have acsecs to their email adedrsess and we must verify it.
To veerify _your_ _E-MAIL_ adress and akcess _your _Citibank_ account, klick on_the_link beloow.

So I clicked on it, gave them my credit card number, social security number, bank account information and blood type. Was that wrong?

Okay, forget the superbowl commercials. these commercials from Quizno's are my new favorites.

Thanks to Jon for this great way to waste time! My best time is 26 seconds...

I missed the new Terry Tate "Sensitivity Training" commercial last night during the Super Bowl. Some of the best lines:"You can't cut the cheese wherever you please!". "Any questions? You're fired". "It seems that even Human Resource executives might be human after all."

This is the view Cathie and I had from our hotel room last week.

Watched the superbowl over at Ted's house last night. Great place for watching the game with a beautiful DLP wall projection system. Lots of Crossroads people and a few of Ted & Sherry's friends from work. It was interesting watching the large group from Crossroads and how they connected and communicated with people outside of our "group". My favorite commercials were the budweiser horse farting and the budweiser dog biting the guy in the crotch.
Brad and I had a little wager on the game to make it interesting. I picked New England with 6 1/2 points. It made the last quarter very interesting. I lost the bet, but then we did double or nothing on a coin toss. I chose tales. Brad had to listen to his son Jim chastise him all the way home on why picking "heads" is always a suckers bet. You can try it for yourself here. Brad can prove his Jim wrong with this.

I had a great weekend now that i've reacclimated myself to family life after being on the road for 10 days. On Saturday, we celebrated Nate's birthday. (Check out the pictures here.) It consisted of my whole family, Will, Jes, Jason and the Thompson clan. These are always a great time filled with lots of kids, and they go on until late in the evening. It was a little lower key than ususal with the absence of Dan, Jon and Kevin. Dans in Korea for business, Kevin had to coach basketball and Jon just doesn't like the family at all. We hung out, wrestled and talked until about 7. At the end, our house is trashed, we're whooped, but had a great time across the board.

If you haven't read Eragon yet, check it out. Will turned me on to this book, and I like it better than Harry Potter.