One of my current projects is redesigning Parkstreet Brethren's website.  This will be an interesting project, because I am also becoming more involved in this church's ministry.  In an effort to make everyone's life easier, I will be attempting to integrate some handy technology into their site.

Cell phones are even used by church-goers during the service, so I am working on an idea to allow texting of prayer requests during the service.  Maybe this will make all their playing worth while, and it will also serve as a new way to continually keep people connected.  The prayer requests will be accessible as an XML news feed, which will be useful not only during the service, but also on the site and on any potential prayer screens we may have located around the church campus.

In addition to receiving text messages, I also hope to make information and announcements on the website more accessible through RSS news feeds of all updates and enhanced mass mailers/texters.

Also, I thought I would throw in "Fuel" in the title.  One of my coworkers and I are thinking about ways to take the 710 house off the electric grid and make it run on alternative energy.  For starters, we will be playing with pedal bikes that will run or monitors.  We hope to make them from old bikes and other junk that people have.  After that we hope to implement methods by which to actually power the whole house, including Veggie oil.  Yes, we both have been watching Invention Nation on the Science channel.

I find it rather foolish that with today's level of technology and automation, people are busier than ever.  So, in an effort to battle the burden of busyness, I have begun to look into ways to make things easier.

For example, I am soon going to be taking on a media position within Park Street Brethren Church, as I have concluded that my involvement in their website at work could compliment the slides and media within the church.  In an effort to make things much easier, I am scheming up methods by which church staff will only need update the events and notifications on the main website, and during the service we will simply feed that information onto the projector.

Stay tuned to see if I come up with any useful ways to make technology our friend instead of another burden.

I have heard stories, "tales" if you so choose, of people with clean desktops on their computer.  After years of experience on computers, I know this is a preposterous proposal.  But recently, after filling up the 200GB hard drive of my MacBook Pro with random documents and web clippings, I decided it was time to investigate the possibility of such a place.

I started at the beginning, a very good place to start.  It seemed logical to go through everything on my desktop and sort it into the correct folders within my system.  BUT, I was a little too busy to do that when I was thinking of it. So i just put everything into a "Desktop Crap" folder.  Surprisingly, within a week it was all full of files again.

I am currently trying out a little App called Hazel.  It is pretty sweet, as it looks at whatever lands on my desktop and, according to rules I configure, it will sort the files automatically.  It also dumps anything in my trash for more than a week, and sets a limit on the size of my trashcan.  Now if I could get it to do my dishes.