May anyone who ever has the slightest inkling about designing a website read these 12 Ways to Irritate Your Visitors. As I read it, I said “Yes!” out loud 12 times.

I’ve always enjoyed reading, but a few years ago, I started to become more serious about it. I set goals to try to average a book a week, and I have been able to maintain that pace (although I’m slipping this year).

A few different times I’ve had people ask me what I hope to accomplish by reading so much. Much of that has to do with my personality. My Myers-Briggs profile is INTP. (I have scored as an INTJ once or twice, but the INTP description seems to fit me the best.) Being an INTP means that I like to have as much data as possible before making decisions.

For me, reading is a process of continual data gathering. Through reading, I hope to continually expand my breadth of understanding. This gives me more information and insight to be able to make decisions I feel confident about.

After I finish every book, I spend time cataloguing quotes and my thoughts about it in OneNote. I also use OneNote as my journal and a place to record different ideas I am processing. It is very easy to do a search in OneNote, and I find this to be very helpful when writing sermons, lessons or papers. It gives me a large catalog of thoughts I’ve wrestled through. Not everyone is an INTP, but I’d recommend anyone who generally creates content or shares ideas through writing or speaking to use OneNote to organize some of their thoughts and research.

In a few weeks, I’m taking a Christian history since the Enlightenment class that is taught by Leonard Sweet. Last night, an email was sent to all the members of the class asking us to make sure we have Google Earth installed. How can I not love this class already?

Yesterday, Jason Clark blogged about coComment. This is a slick little tool that lets you track the blogs you have commented on. It even lets you show what comments you’ve made elsewhere on other blogs, as you can now see in my sidebar. I think this is a great way to further connect some of the conversations that are happening out there. They state that you need an invitation code to sign up since they are still in beta. I had an invitation in my email almost immediately, so if you get over there quick, they might still be making them available right away.

I’ve had a few conversations recently with people who have joined myspace.com (note that I’m not even providing a courtesy link to them) or invited me to do so. Myspace is pretty much the ghetto of the internet and I’m happily keeping my distance. The owners, however, are living far from the ghetto thanks to all the money the are making selling everyone’s information.

Craig and Mike might have to open an Apple division of XXXChurch and start going to MacWorld. The new MacBook Pro is causing me to lust in ways that I’m almost embarassed to admit.

It’s kind of hard to see, but that’s a Nooma on my iPod. I’ve been converting all of my Nooma DVD’s for use on the ipod video. If this isn’t the perfect use of an ipod video, I don’t know what is.

Foldershare is a pretty cool little utility that let’s you share documents between computers or online. It sets up a private (hopefully!) peer to peer network that allows you to to share specific files or folders to share between your own computers. It can also be used to access files remotely or share documents with others that you are collaborating on. It will even keep the files that are on different computer in sync so that most up to date version is available on all computers. I used it tonight to copy all my work files over to my iMac so that I can access them quickly from there as well. Pretty cool stuff.

Microsoft obviously likes the concept as they bought up FolderShare about 4 weeks ago. Considering there is now a Microsoft logo at the bottom of all their screens, I think it is pretty suprising to see that it still integrates with the Google Desktop search and even displays the Google Desktop Search icon - - when you do a search.

I’ve had little interest in the chaos that happens in stores on the day after Thanksgiving. I did stoop to looking through the ads, and nothing really caught my eye — except a nice and plump 200gb hard drive for $30 at CompUSA. I’ve been digitizing a lot of our video to our hard drives, and running out of space, so this seemed like a good opportunity for some binary breathing room. CompUSA was even going to be so nice as to open at midnight. Josh was still at our house recovering from a late Thanksgiving meal, so we decided we’d make a go of it. How foolish we were…

As we pulled up right around midnight, it was hard not to miss the line. It stretched across the front of CompUSA, as well as the entire big box store that was next to it. I wondered what kind of idiots would be out shopping at this time, but I didn’t wonder too long lest I incriminate Josh.

After I made my way through the massive cuddle party to the hard drive section, I discovered the hard drives were gone. I was, however, lucky enough to find several people who apparently believe that holidays are an ideal day to skip a shower.

The evening was not lost as I wandered through the store and enjoyed the ravaging of the shelves. A large groupthink was in place. People were grabbing just about anything with a yellow tag, not wanting to miss out on a good deal. Or more importantly, not wanting someone else to get something before they did. At one point, I actually heard a guy say, “I’m just jealous of people who are lucky enough to actually get something they wanted.”

I’m proud to say that Josh and I came home empty handed. Somewhat because we weren’t really interested in anything else, but mostly because we didn’t want to wait for an hour in the checkout line that was already winding through the store.

By the way, they have this neat thing called the internet. While you shouldn’t rely on it for all of your social interaction, it is a pretty convenient tool for missing out on cuddle parties infested with unshowered geeks. It’s so neat that I was able to come home and buy this 200gb hard drive, also for $30, from Staples.com. They are even going to deliver to my house for free.

This week in our home groups, we were discussing redemption. We spent some time with the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13). If God’s prime mission in our world is redemption, then how is the Lord’s Prayer is a prayer asking God to redeem this world? And how is it a prayer asking how we can partner with him in that?

Rather than just open our Bibles and go through the prayer verse by verse, we spent time meditating on the passage through lectio divina. Taking advantage of the fact that we were in family rooms, I made this very simple video (first ever on my imac!) and burned it on a DVD. It allowed all of us to spend time in silence meditating together as the verse drifted across the screen.

Both our groups had excellent discussion. The time spent just being silent and listening led to insights brought out of the text that might not have surfaced otherwise.

I’ve set the video to loop…why not take a few minutes to meditate on something of far greater value than the next entry in your RSS reader?

In the midst of starting a new church, one of the mantras I keep repeating to myself and others is, “Let’s keep it simple!” There is enough going on already. Let’s keep details to a minimum so we can focus on relationships.

One of our desires has been to record the teaching in order to make a podcast available, but the process of doing this is yet another detail amongst many. With our collective know-how on the sound board being minimal, we wanted to figure out the easiest way to do it. We had no luck recording teachings our first few weeks.

After three weeks of failed attempts to record the teachings, I remembered a recommendation that Zach passed along months ago. He suggested that we get an iRiver 700 series MP3 player/recorder. It has a line-in, so it can receive a signal directly from the sound board and encode it to MP3 on the fly. I ordered one, and we used it today. It was just a matter of plugging in a cable and pushing a button. I’ve listened to the source file, and it sounds like it worked great, so our teaching podcast should finally be able to go live this week. Thanks for the idea, Zach.

Speaking of simplicity, there is a reason that iPod’s sell so well. They are so simple and easy to navigate. This iRiver did a great job of recording, but it was a bit of trouble to navigate through all the settings so that I could have it all set up properly in advance. I’m pretty technically minded, but had to actually break out the manual to figure out how to get it all set up properly.

I installed the Tiger Admin Plugin on this blog yesterday. If you use WordPress, it gives a new look to the dashboard and the rest of the administration area. It looks really good.

Please excuse me while I spout about how much I love the Search Inside feature on Amazon.

I’m working on a discussion guide for our home groups, and had a vague recollection of a quote by Rob Bell from Velvet Elvis that I wanted to include. I was able to find it instantly with Search Inside. I don’t work for Amazon, or even own any stock, but I love the tools they are making available on their website, and that’s why I buy most of my books through them.

I know that when all those publishers come to me and ask me to write a book for them, I won’t do it unless they allow their book contents to be searched on Amazon.

Today, Apple announced the new iPod and iTunes with video capability. They already have a few TV shows, such as Lost and Desperate Housewives, available for purchase and download. This is huge. In the same way that the music store made downloading music easy for the masses (and JJ), this will do the same for TV. A lot of people already download TV shows with bittorrent and watch them on their laptops, but this makes it simple for the less tech inclined (again, JJ). It’s a simple and very accessible form of Tivo to go.

Good work again from Apple. I’d still rather have the space my 30gb offers, but this seems like a great product.

The iTunes phone, on the other hand, just doesn’t seem that useful to me. The more complex portable gadgets get, the less functional they become. Give me the simple interface of an audio playing ipod anyday.