Well, I’ve become one of “those guys” who is going to make you update your bookmarks and/or rss feeds.

There are a lot of advantages of letting wordpress.com host your blog, but there are (in my opinion) even more advantages of hosting your own wordpress blog.

I was thinking about waiting until I have the new site polished and pretty before announcing it, but decided it’s more fun to fly by the seat of my pants.  If you are the type of person who likes RSS feeds, there’s plenty of choices on my new site, and you can just subscribe to the topics that interest you (or just subscribe to all posts, regardless of topic).  If you’re the type of person who comes to visit the site, expect to see lots of changes as I settle in on the theme/layout/widgets I like.

Currently I have several tabs for you to choose from, depending on which info from mateo you are interested in. If you prefer, you can see all the different topics jumbled together.

Without further adieu, you can follow this link to my new home.  I just moved in, and I’m still unpacking, so please pardon any messes.

My friend Joel just posted this, and I thought I’d share it with you.

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Incredible Wing Suit Video- Men Gliding at 100+MPH

This is crazy.  Guys are base jumping from cliffs wearing wingsuits, and falling/gliding/flying at over 100 miles per hour.  Incredible!

<some mild language at end of video, be aware>

CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO

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I realize that 90 percent of you (that means 9 of the 10 total readers) already read this on Tim Stevens’ blog, but for you who didn’t…

This blog post came into my Google Alerts the other day, and by the first few lines that came through I thought, “oh great, another blogger talking trash about my church.”  I’m glad I took the time to read it though, because this guy actually seems to *get* it.  Furthermore, he’s writing on the Wesley Report site, which is apparently about “United Methodist News, Life, and Culture”

Check it out and then tell me what you think.

Like my friend Jeff, I don’t harbor any illusions that most of you are seeing this for the first time on my blog.  Also like my friend Jeff, I have a few friends in far-away places that may not see this if I don’t post it.  Again, like Jeff, I just wanted to show my support.

Whichever political side you fall on, please watch and listen with an understanding of what Mark is saying here.  Without bringing any politics into the discussion, he points out what he sees as positive things about the man, Barack Obama.

(wordpress.com will not allow me to embed this video, so hit up that next link, eh? Beeson’s Thoughts from Granger Community on Vimeo.

What do YOU do while you’re waiting for your Ubuntu 8.10 Release Candidate ISO to download?

I played THIS GAME for quite a while.

(btw, my wife is WAY better at it than I am)

Why not try out the just-released OpenOffice.org Version 3.0?

• It’s a full-featured Office Suite that is fully compatible with documents created in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (including the newer .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx formats)
• It’s FREE!
• It works in Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX (Intel and PPC), and Linux
• It’s FREE!!
• It also supports version 1.2 of the ISO standard OpenDocument Format (ODF).  Microsoft Office does not.
• It’s FREE!!!
• and much, MUCH MORE!!!
• (it’s free)

Infomercial over.  At the time of this writing, their servers were so bogged down by people rushing to download it that they reduced their main page to plain text on a white background.  Anyone who remembers trying to download Firefox 3.0 on the day it was released will appreciate the ingenuity of this solution, as you can at least get to the download (even if it’s not pretty).  Also because of the heavy server load, download speeds are basically at a crawl (getting around 10 KB/s right now).

Speaking from personal experience, OpenOffice has actually helped me on several occasions as it strives to include features that are not available in Microsoft Office (for example, in the past it was things like being able to publish a document to PDF natively, though MS Office now includes this feature).  There were also some times where MS Office could not open one of its own documents (said there was corruption), but OpenOffice was able to open and save the document (saving the person I was helping HOURS of re-creating the document).

I have not been paid or in any way rewarded for telling you about this amazing product.

For the few of you following along at home, waiting to see what sort of eCommerce decisions we’re making with wiredchurches.com, we’re taking some steps towards using Ubercart.  There were a few driving forces behind this desicion.

• We are leaning towards open-source software in the first place for a couple reasons:
  1. Ease of customization/not locked into a product we can’t tweak
  2. Ability to hire a developer to create functionality we need (esp. a good event registration system)
  3. No yearly license fees

• Ubercart seems to have a majority of what we need built into the core package (others are missing vital pieces)
• I personally loved how they set up the Downloadable Products administration (some major products don’t even have an option for downloadable products yet.  See previous point, and earlier posts)
• Ryan Szrama (one of the developers of Ubercart) found an earlier post which sparked a dialogue that led to connecting with Mike O’Connor of the newly formed commerceguys.com
• In our first conference call, Mike pitched Ubercart well, plus he lives in Jackson, MI which would allow him to work with us in person whenever it would be beneficial

We met with Mike this past Friday.  Since he just lives a couple hours away, he drove down to spend 4 hours crammed into a small meeting room with all of us.  We threw a thousand questions at him, and I think he got a pretty good idea of how complex we want our system to be (he also answered the questions).

That’s it for now.  We’re waiting to hear if Mike is going to run screaming from this project now that he’s met us and knows more of what’s involved.

Took this video on my phone for Kem Meyer’s 40th birthday blog hijacking.

*edit* i’ve noticed a lot of traffic coming here from people searching for “ie tab Firefox 3″ and similar.  if you need the .xpi, just leave me a comment and I can email you the file.

From what I can gather, I was extremely lucky to get the IE Tab extension for FireFox 3 during a tiny window when the download was working.  Everyone I’ve heard from on the issue says the .xpi won’t install for them.  In any case, I’ve got the .xpi on my computer and my wife’s computer, and it’s working great on both, so if you are wanting it, just let me know.

In other news, we’re sort of settling in on an eCommerce solution for the new and hopefully improved wiredchurches.com.  More info on that coming very soon.

This came into my Bloglines from the indexed blog today.  It’s the most concise explanation of web 2.0 I’ve ever seen.

This is what 2.0 Means