I love how different every single week of life is, even if you work from home and rarely leave, each week presents it’s own challenges and smiles. I LOVE my nephews smile in the photo above. This is such a typical summer afternoon for a 5 year old in Alabama. This short recap of the week below saw everything from a wedding to meetings on multisite and church planning to rain. I find the more I make the effort to actually carry my camera with me the more I remember about what actually did happen throughout the week. One of my favorite shots from the last 7 days besides my Nephew Isaac is from the wedding I shot last weekend in Opelika. The shot below where she is walking out the door of the church is almost mesmerizing to me. It’s like she is walking out of the church and into heaven. The huge difference in light between the inside and outside of the front of the church makes for, to me, a great blend of blown out light and minute detail (see more details on Flickr).
One more week here in Auburn before our team leaves for Uganda so after that I’m not sure what my blog posts will look like. The camera shot of the camera, a Fujifilm Finepix x100, below is something I got for my trip to Uganda. This is my first small compact camera I have ever owned, and I hope it’s worth it since I traded in two of my Nikon camera bodies to get it (although one was a film camera and I’m not sure I still count that one). For those x100 enthusiest out there you can follow x100 pics from the x100 tag from now on. Have a great weekend everyone.
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Another last minute Friday Feet but it’s still Friday for about another hour. Last Friday I was talking about how it hasn’t rained at our place in forever, and this week it rained off and on all week. My day today started out with rain and ended with rain and our pond in the photo from last week has more than quadrupled in size, what a difference a week can make. Today’s Friday Feet comes from looking towards our house at the same pond as the rain clouds moved across the property. The shot was taken with my iPhone after hours and hours of cutting grass in 100% humidity right before the heavy rain came back.
This week has been crazy busy as we (Cornerstone) continue to prepare for becoming a multi-site church and I can’t believe there are only 10 days left before our team leaves for Africa. I would like to say I’m ready to go and have everything done that needs to be done but that probably won’t even be the case come next Monday when we leave for Atlanta.
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So I almost felt obligated at this point to do a post about Google+ just because it really wasn’t what I was expecting from Google. What I was expecting from Google was another failed attempt at doing something social (they do have a good long history of trying social networking and missing big time), but this time I think they created something that just might work long term. Of course, it works, because basically they finally developed a format stream that is just like Facebook except without much of the garbage that is Facebook. When (not if) Google adds an iPhone AND an iPad app they will have surpassed Facebook, at least in functionality.
When Zuckerberg made the statement that the iPad was not a mobile device, and therefore Facebook would not be developing an app for the iPad, he pretty much told everyone using Facebook that Facebook is whatever Zuckerberg says it is. Google, even though they seem to have the biggest rival with Apple, can no doubt see beyond this and will very quickly release apps for the iPhone and iPad. Once Google+ hits the iPhone/iPad users they will grow at an alarming rate. It’s the “mobile” users that will feed Google+ and the easier Google makes it to use on ANY mobile device the faster they will grow Google+. The misses right now with Google+ remain the lack of an iPhone app and some other minor functionality issues like being able to hide comments in a stream, being able to view several circle streams at the same time, and at the moment people. The people thing is a plus and a minus at the same time. The millions and millions of masses on Facebook are what makes Facebook work. Google+ has a different genre of people right now and I don’t see that as a bad thing, but they do need more buy in.
Why is Google+ better than Facebook already?
- No Ads
- No Spam
- Design is Cleaner
- Messaging System
- Integrates with Google Everything
- People Who Don’t Like Social Networking Will Like Google+
- It isn’t Facebook
- It is Google
- It’s New and Has a Lot of Potential
- Facebook still Doesn’t Give you Ownership of Your Data
so far (who knows how long this will last) there are no ads, anywhere. This is top on my list, and key. This is why I like twitter, this is why the experience on Google+ is better right from the start. All that junk on Facebook’s sidebars is the worst. You never know what’s going to come up but you know you don’t want to look at it.
Facebook and spam go together like spam in a can, or something like that. Spam is not the telemarketer calling you at dinner anymore. Spam is ANYTHING sent to you unsolicited. Facebook is full of this stuff from Mafia Wars to stupid games and poll questions, event invites, and all the other stuff that clutters up your feed stream with stuff you don’t want to look at. The stuff you do want to read is so buried in the mess of Facebook I often just give up trying to find actual real high quality content.
everything is cleaner, but making a cleaner design makes it easier to read, has less clutter, call it whatever you want but Google+ is just flat out easier on the eyes. Google has long since prided itself on simplicity of design, and in this case it works so much better than Facebook
while Facebook has been vastly improving their messaging system, trying to overtake email, the message system on Facebook has always been one of their weakest points, and until recently, no one wanted to look at that inbox, it was just annoying. Google+ has made sending a message to a single person, or a select group, extremely easy. I would expect this since Google has built it’s non-search business around Gmail, but Google+ has the potential to be able to do away with email all together.
this is a no-brainer but it’s worth pointing out. There are some things I like better off Google, like their photo system Picasa (Flickr still has better functionality) but overall everything you do throughout the day is basically run on Google’s cloud anyway, you are already there, so adding Google+ isn’t too much of a burden.
there are still some people that are not attached to a social network at all (really, I know this for a fact). For those people, Google+ is a way into that social networking circle without being in Facebook or Twitter. For many (or most) of these people they are already on Google. They use Google, they use Gmail, they are familiar with Google and in some ways have a trust built with them as a company. If you aren’t on Facebook or Twitter or anything else, you are probably already on Google, and Google will make trying Google+ a breeze for the non-adopters.
there are many people who just hate Facebook, for them, this isn’t Facebook and that is good enough for them.
this is just like the Apple vs Android thing. Some people think Apple is straight from the devil himself and think Android is not. Facebook has a lot of “you are the devil” fans so being anything but Facebook is a plus.
everyone doesn’t necessarily like change but new is always a big seller. Since every company puts out products or services today that are a work in progress (beta) and not a final completed entity, Google will continue to develop and improve Google+. Yes I know Facebook does this too, but they seem to take 2 steps forward and one step back and make everyone mad in the process.
some will say Google doesn’t either, but they have made far more progress in this realm than Facebook has, and Facebook has no intention of ever letting go of your data. Every time you put content on Facebook instead of your own blog or somewhere that you have access to your own data you are building up the mother ship, not your own history. Google+ has a really cool download data set functionality that will probably improve over time. Facebook has nothing. Facebook owns everything you put on there and you own nothing.
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Cornerstone has two teams headed to Uganda in July (I’m on the second trip that leaves in two weeks), and the first team left today for Atlanta and then almost 8,000 miles and two 9 hour flights to Kampala, Uganda. I love being around people who are following their faith not just with words but with actions. Our salvation is not ever tied to our works, but we are called to action not just words, and I love that about these people leaving today. Imperfect people following a perfect Savior as best they can. They were all very excited about the days ahead, and if you want to follow their trip, two of them will be blogging as they can from here and here. Please be praying for our team members as they begin to arrive and get settled into their routine. Here is who is on the mission trip in that photo above:
RJ Harris
Dan Harris
Jonathan Savage
Amy Coxwell
April Brown
Jennifer Robinson
Davis Robinson
Casey Huff
Josh Cumberland
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We had our last full team meeting today before we leave for Uganda in two weeks. This meeting was all about soccer, and we played and/or practiced with the team, in conditions that have to be much like we will see in Uganda, 95*F and 100% humidity. Since soccer is such a big sport, as far as the rest of the world goes, this team was put together with soccer in mind, and has several very talented coaches, and then there’s the rest of us. The rest of us, me being one, are the ones hoping not to be trounced by 10 year old Ugandan kids on the soccer field.
As it gets closer and closer to our departure I seem to have more and more questions rolling around in my mind, but none that really need answering. I’m excited to see how God is going to use our team, how He is going to use our individual gifts to impact those we come into contact with throughout the entire trip. Brian (team lead) put it to us like this today. We are not going over there to continue the western transactional mission field of old where we show up and try to hand over the prosperity gospel to someone. We are going as partners in Christ, to come alongside other Christian brothers and sisters, to worship with them, to do what our scripture commands, to love one another (John 13:34).
I’m not sure what that looks like at this point, but that’s fine. I’m preparing best I can and not going with any specific expectation other than for God to be there, come along side us, and guide us. We are walking where others have prepared a way, and in this case literally, we follow a team leaving tomorrow who arrive back about the time we leave.
I’m taking a book along I bought back in 2009 and just haven’t had time to read yet called The Life and Diary of David Brainerd. Brainerd was an early American missionary to the American Indians in New York, New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania and someone Jonathan Edwards often wrote about as an example of a true, selfless, missionary for Christ. While I don’t really consider our lives similar in almost any way, I do hope to learn more about the history of those who went before us.
As always, I am still trying to raise support for the trip. You can always make an online donation to the church here, even $10 helps. Thanks!
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I started thinking about all the photos I take during the week that never see the light of day. They could be photos on my phone or when I haul around my DSLR (which is most places right now until I find a suitable replacement for everyday stuff like the x100), but most get archived and are never seen from again. This odd collection of photos has nothing in common with the other except they all took place within the last 7 days. I’m calling this gallery a “Saturday Summary” and just including a hodge-podge of 5-10 photos from the previous week. These in this post are from July 2nd to July 9th, which included a weird set of images from stuff like the one rain we actually got in Auburn to the Cow Appreciation Day photos for Chick-fil-a my sister wanted of my nephews (which could be the cutest photo ever even if I do say so).
Call me strange but I love looking at the week in photos. It’s just a narrow frozen piece of time in the normal routine of daily life, something photographers rarely covered years ago, but something we now have the ability to document quickly, easily, and in great high quality. It may be the product of our age or culture, and it also may be just too much in general, but I would love to have seen photos of everyday life from my grandfather’s house, or great-grandfather.
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We have been in this drought for some time now, it seems like years, because it has been. For about the last 5 years or so we just have not had any steady rain at all. The best evidence of the drought, at least on our property, is our pond. This is basically a 2 acre pond that is rain fed. From the feet shot you can see it is dry as the Arizona desert. From the shot of the pond area, almost the entire view of the photo should be under water, in fact I am basically standing where the water should be. Anyway, I know it’s not the most photographic Friday Feet but it’s what this summer is turning out to be like on our side of the world. We could really use an active hurricane season where we get some nice slow moving weak storms over and over again. I know the fish shot is kind of gross so I left you with my moms yellow flowers blooming like mad in this 100* weather.
Coming up soon, some uber cute shots of my nephews in their Chick-fil-a cow costume for their annual photo contest. It was quite something to shoot people in cow costumes in 100* weather. Have a good weekend.
