Scott Fillmer

I have tried over the years to reconcile the whole of what is social networking to how it helps or destroys the effort of devoting one’s life to the pursuit of God.  Reading through a sermon written by a family member in 1976, I came across this poem by Arthur Guiterman called “The Complete Egoist”, who wrote this around 1930 about our pursuit to self. I wonder what he would think of our narcissism in 2010.

A Mollusc who dwelt in primordial slime
Was always himself to the innermost core;
As being himself took up most of his time,
He never did anything more.
Still just as he was, though long ages have flown,
He stands on the specimen-cabinet shelf
A fossil, immortal in durable stone,
A monument raised to himself.

–Guiterman ~1930

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Some of you may or may not know that I have been looking for a good job match in a full time IT related field for about 3-4 years now (yes I said years). So far, it has been one of the most frustrating ongoing experiences I have had in business.  I have been denied a lowly $7-9/hour job to work out of my home office because I had too much experience, and have turned down a $60,000 job because it wasn’t a good match between my personality and their culture.  There is nothing easy about finding a good career match any more, and I have a lot to offer a company.  Almost 20 years of business experience, education, flexibility, a low required salary, and a willingness to travel.  See also my post Top 5 Tips to Help Your Job Search.

How I Can Save Your Business Money

What is astonishing to me, is how many potential employers will not look at the possibility of having a professional (and I mean that in every sense of the word) work out of their home office when the typical IT job really doesn’t require a physical presence in an office, or anywhere for that matter.  I understand some do, and that’s fine, but not all by any stretch.

It’s simple math.  If I can be hired to do a job in a middle-income American city for $50,000, which requires me to move, I can do the exact same job from my home office for $40,000.  That’s $10,000 a year in payroll expenses your company doesn’t have to pay.  Computer equipment they don’t have to buy, phones, office space, parking, gas, and food that doesn’t have to be purchased.  If your company has a tight budget and really needs to control expenses, why ignore this potential savings?

My Office is Better Equipped Than Most Office Buildings

How old is your office equipment? What tools are you missing to get your job done in an effective and efficient manner?

I have 4 different phone lines/numbers I can use including a landline, cellular, and VoIP.  A network of 5-6 computers (PC and MAC), laptops, desktops, mobiles devices, a reliable 6M high speed DSL line, 10 TB of data storage (yes Tera), data backups, and my office is even wired for a 20KW backup generator in case of power failure with 250 gallons of propane on site.  I am probably better equipped and better prepared than the standard office building in middle America.

With that said, I have no problem going out of city or state for the right position, it will just cost everyone more money.

What Comes Around (To Get Down, Timo Maas)

This week I had a few different conversations with potential employers, some very promising.  One of these companies was so unique in the way they required applicants to submit information I decided to go the extra mile and respond to their creativeness with creativity by making a portfolio video.  Videos like this are nothing new but I made it specifically for them for an added personal touch.

Below is the video, (with the names removed to protect the innocent of course), but if you are one of those out there looking for a job, don’t just do the exact same thing that all the other applicants do, that accomplishes nothing but allowing yourself to blend in.  Be creative, stand out, showcase your skills.  Not all employers will appreciate this approach for sure, but a company looking for a Linchpin instead of a door knob will.

See the full size version of The Portfolio Project here.

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In my ongoing pursuit of the perfect full time employer I have compiled more information than I could possibly have imagined a few years ago.  I could probably write an HR book called HR, the Good the Bad, the Ugly but I am sure someone else has beat me to it.  After writing a post about a recent interview I decided to put down a few quick tips I learned just in case someone else out there is also looking for that perfect match.

The Match-Making Job Market of 2010 Is Fluid

Today is a different market than even just five years ago.  Potential employers are doing more with less, and are in no hurry to bring on a new hire that may or may not be an exact match with the company’s existing culture.  As a potential employee, I am also just as picky when it comes to looking at a potential employer.  I don’t just want any job, I want a good match, but in 2010 it’s more like online dating or match-making than job hunting.  Don’t just automatically jump on the first offer, really look at what kind of match you are with the company culture, business model, and their clients.

Flooding the Market with Resumes Doesn’t Work, Be Creative

I have sent in hundreds of resumes, made countless followup calls, gone out of my way to not be in the way when needed, met tons of new people, offered to move to all over California (my native land), Texas, Florida (wife’s preference), New York, Wisconsin, Montana (those two were a stretch), Georgia, Virginia, and Kentucky.  Yet, it’s the end of another week of meeting new people, making new connections, learning new companies, and waiting.  One thing I have learned, flooding the market with resumes doesn’t work.

If you want to be seen, you need to do something creative and unique.  Don’t just do the same old thing that everyone else does, that doesn’t do any good at all.  Find a unique way to stand out to the HR person or hiring manager.  For an example of what I did this week see this video I did for How I Can Save Your Business Money.

Become a Major League Scout in Your Search

You need to seek out new prospects like a scout looks at potential minor league players.  Traditional job sites like Monster have been almost worthless to me.  Today, employers will post on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, craigslist, and on their own websites.  Where are the creative companies posting their new positions?  Don’t limit yourself to finding a great job by only looking on the traditional websites.

Do Your Own Research, Don’t Just Skim the Surface

When you do get an Interview, phone or otherwise, do you know more about the company than the HR person?  Impossible?  Not at all, and many times I have known far more about the details of a company than even their own employees do.  Do your own research, and dig deep.  A good example is to look at the company on LinkedIn.  Look at their current employees on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook (are they happy with their job), their former employees (why did they leave, where are they now), and all the associated websites you can find.

Keep in mind your potential employer is doing the same research on you.  Don’t give them a stupid reason like a photo on Facebook to hire someone else.

Don’t Try To Hide, Control Your Internet Footprint

If you are on Facebook and you hide your account from a potential employer they will probably wonder what you are trying to hide, and if there is good reason, perhaps fixing that first would be a good idea.  I have created a one stop shop on Google where potential employers could find out every thing there is to know about me (http://www.scottfillmer.me), professionally and personally, and from there they can find their website of choice without having to give them 10 different places to look.  You can still be publically seen and control your private information, just use common sense.

What are your favorite job search tips?

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I read a few interesting articles today in Entrepreneur Magazine and Marketing Pilgrim, about how people communicate, and have difficulty communicating, between the generational gaps.  Each generation has a different way of embracing new forms communicating that becomes comfortable to them but where gen-x and gen-y ‘ers seem to have adopted to new forms of communication, the boomers have let is slide and still prefer their face-to-face and over the phone exchanges.

Face-to-Face, Phone, or Twitter-ific

The reports go on to talk about how that makes it difficult to properly communicate between the boomers and gen’ers who don’t really care for face to face and hate making an actual phone call.  All that got me thinking about how we communicate within the church.  Poor communication in a church can kill its momentum, growth, or relationships, but “poor” communication is not universal and what is poor communication from a 20-something to a boomer is acceptable among their peers.

Being Unaware Creates Mis-Understanding

It doesn’t take long to see how mis-understandings in communication methods between generations can cause problems.  As an example, I have found that the farther away you get from the Baby Boomer generation the less an actual response to something is deemed necessary… a response to a phone call, email, sms, facebook comment, tweet on Twitter, whatever it is, the younger you are, the fewer responses are deemed to be needed where the closer to a boomer you are, the more you expect a response to everything.

Where a boomer-ish person is offended by a non-response, the gen-y’er doesn’t even give it a second thought.  Being a Gen-X’er myself, I get quite irritated with non-response but always try to remember who it is I am communicating with, then interpret what their lack of response means.  What it means is that they don’t communicate in the exact same method I do, and I shouldn’t hold that against them when I don’t get a response.

Of course that is a generality and certainly not scientific, but it highlights that an understanding of how each generation prefers to communicate is needed, especially within the church body. If we want the church body to grow, if we want to reach new people for Jesus, we have to understand how the younger generation likes to communicate, what is important to communicate to them, and what they could care less about.  As we all get older, it isn’t about what makes us happy and what we like, right?

Who is the Church Trying To Reach Anyway?

Who are we trying to reach?  If we are trying to reach the Boomer’s, they are probably still looking for those traditional forms of communication from the church like a weekly snail-mailed newsletter, a printed paper bulletin, a pictorial directory of church members, and even those phone calls to the house.  It wouldn’t be a stretch to say Gen-Y doesn’t care a thing about getting something in the mail or receiving a bulletin when they walk in, that just isn’t what they are looking for in a church, it doesn’t add any value to their experience.

They want to share ideas.  They could possibly be the most sharing generation the world has seen, but it isn’t sharing face-to-face like the boomers, it is sharing stories, ideas, life dreams, it is life lived as open source. Even email is unimportant, and becoming less and less important as time goes by.   It is just considered to be spam (even if it isn’t), and sending an email newsletter is irrelevant to the generation that lives on rss feeds.

Produce, but Don’t Push Information

Like each past generation, they want to communicate with each other in the manner they are accustomed to, which is electronically.  They get their information proactively, and don’t want it pushed onto them, this means we have to produce the information and let them come get it.  Communicating things in that manner may seem backwards to traditional means (because it is), and may be more difficult, but push methods will be rejected by the Gen-Y’ers.

So how do we produce information we want them to see and just hope they find it?  Carefully I guess, but I know if it is meaningful enough to them, they will find it.  Word of mouth still rules with Gen-Y as it does with Boomers, so maybe that is the bridge over the generation gap.

Check out the chart below.  I think if we make an effort to understand how each generation prefers to communicate we can better know how to serve each person.  Serving someone in a manner or custom they could care less about it totally ineffective and a waste of everyone’s time.  Wouldn’t it be better to know how best to serve (communicate with) each individual person instead assuming all will respond in the same way?

Learning the Differences, is Important

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It is not to much of a surprise (outside of the actual look) that Cornerstone is about to launch a new website.  I had the privilege of working with Brad Ruggles, a website/graphics designer and creative developer, on the launch of this new site.  Two of my three earthly passions are faith, technology, and photography, which means I was pretty much able to combine all three into one project.

This project was something that took a few months to put together, and was the collaborative effort of every staff member at Cornerstone, but it was something I have wanted to work on for many years now.  Not just a new website, but a new mindset into what potential the Internet has in the Church body.

Tools like Twitter, Facebook, rss feeds, podcasts, videos, and all the things that make up the Internet today can be utilized for kingdom purposes, and done in a professional way.  This isn’t a new subject for me personally (see The Church’s New Drug of Choice // Part 1, Does a Church Really Need a Website?, The Church Body and the Internet, Part 1, The Church Body and the Internet, Part 2, to name a few past posts), I have been on a quiet campaign for relavant church websites for the better part of 10-15 years.

This is (to me) what people expect out of their church today, and especially those Believers and visitors in the 19-29 age range.  It is a connected world, a connected society, and they don’t want or expect to walk into a church today and see 20th century technology.  We don’t need to or have to spruce up Jesus. The Salvation message has remained the same for 2,000 years, but each church in the Church body reaches different people according to its purpose, and a website is a great place to start.

I say start because a website, a well designed, relavant, media based website, is where you can start to bring people to the Church and where they can learn and connect with others that have a love for Christ.  It is no longer about displaying something static that shows the worship times and directions, it is about how do we connect with each other and grow in the Body.  I can’t wait for the new site to go live.  I think this is exactly what Cornerstone is to me and my wife when we arrived about a year ago and I was thrilled to have some part in putting it together.

I know there are a few other Church IT people that read my blog so I will be writing some additional posts on how it went together and how to even get started.  What to look out for when choosing a website design company, and what you should be able to expect from your developer.  I think we chose one of the best in Ruggles but throughout the course of the project I did meet several other companies, some good, and some very bad, and hope to share that with you in the upcoming months.  Hope you enjoy the new site, it should be live some time this weekend.

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We are just about to launch a new website (details coming closer to the end of the week) and Twitter is highly integrated into the framework of the website, so I thought I would highlight some of the better applications you can use with Twitter for Free (mostly).

People often ask me, “what is twitter”.  I should just write a post about that, but this is assuming you already know about Twitter, at least a little bit.  Some of you Twitterholics will recognize most of the top 5, but be sure to check out the ones at the bottom which I consider up and coming.

What Is Twitter?

If not, I have determined there is no one answer to “what is Twitter“, but for me, it is a free flowing exchange of ideas and thoughts with people who may have never been able to meet or contact in any other way.  I have talked to musicians, politicians, and a lot of other ians that I would never have access to before Twitter.  It is a two way street of course, but Twitter is far more than just “what am I doing”.

Because Twitter has made their service somewhat open (meaning they provide an API for their systems) there have been many people and companies that have developed great applications and services for twitter.  On a side note, I would argue (slightly) that Twitter is at risk of becoming the next AOL without making themselves a true open source project, but that is also for another post.

So if you are looking for some great things to do with Twitter, here is my short list.

1. The Ultimate Desktop Application, TweetDeck

If you read no farther than this first item, you have hit the best right off the top.  Tweetdeck is THE desktop application that pulls out the potential that is Twitter.  Tweetdeck really deserves a post all its own so I will make this recap brief.  Once you get to the point where you are following more than about 25 people on Twitter it is time to install Tweetdeck.

It allows you to add twitter groups to filter out different users (I have a group just for news where all Twitter news feeds like CNN, AP, etc, go so I can see them independently of all my other tweets.  You can view Twitscoup which is a live running tag cloud of converstions on Twitter, and of course you can send out new tweets with a shorten URL field for posting links.

2a. Mobile iPhone Apps :: Twitterific

If you have an iPhone (or Blackberry), that will really unlock the potential of Twitter (a Blackberry will do but honestly, the apps really don’t compare to the iPhone, but they do have corresponding Blackberry apps too).  Twitterific is the place to start.  This free iPhone app is one of the best ways to follow a larger number of people with basic @reply, direct, and tweet functions.  You can also see user info and tag favorites within the iPhone app.

Some of the features I like about Twitterific is you can click through to links and photos and they open in a twitterific type browser on your iPhone that allow you to open and close without having to launch Safari.  What I have found that you can’t do, is see a list of your favorites, which is something I would like to do, but that is minor for what this app does.

2b. Mobile iPhone Apps :: Tweetie

If you can ignore the name, Tweetie is probably hands down the best iPhone Twitter app available.  It costs $3.00 through your iTunes account but is well worth the price.  It has far more functionality than Twitterific (the free version) but I don’t find it quite as fast to use.  What you can do with this iPhone app that I have not found with any other desktop or mobile app is manage multiple accounts.

If managing multiple accounts is important to you, this is about the only way I know to do it without having to log out and log back into the other account.  For that I would have paid $10 for this mobile app.  Some of the other things you can do with Tweetie is view @replies on one page.  For those who complain that they are overwhelmed by the people following them and replying to them, Tweetie is built just for these popular Twitter divas (I love you. I really do€¦but€¦) who are just so popular on Twitter it is impossible to keep up with effectively on anything else.  I am going to pick on Anne Jackson just because I love her blog and her work in general (sorry Anne).

Tweetie is one application that will allow you to still follow the conversation with anyone and everyone that wants to send you an @reply without actually following them.  Just tap the button at the bottom for @replies and see all those replies coming in from people you don’t follow.  Tweetie also has several unique functions under the “more” section.  One that is really wild is the “nearby” link.  This will allow you to see who is close to your location by using the GPS on the phone.  I used this last time Deb and I went to Gulf Shores and it worked great.

3. Tweet Grader

Do you love stats.  Then Tweet Grader is for you.  Find out how you are doing amongst all the other Twitter users, find local people using Twitter, and see a host of different stats about your own usage.  This and the next one may be the vain uses of Twitter but I find them very very useful to help improve everything about how I use Twitter.

Tweet Grader, if you notice, is a user entered stat grade, and you can check anyone, not just your own Twitter ID (like mine here, still sitting at #6 in Twitter Auburn behind some great people).  This has several uses as well but all in all a great stat tool for Twitter.

4. Mr Tweet, the Networking Assistant

This is the most recent addition to my Twitter life.  Mr Tweet is quickly becoming the most useful tool that I have found for Twitter.  Tag lined as “Your Personal Networking Assistant for Twitter”, it allows you to do three things. (a) find new people based on my recent activities, (b) find recent followers I am not following, and (c) check my own profile and usage stats.

What this does is pull data that you can probably not find by just surfing around.  It gives you useful information like how likely the person is to reply to your tweets, how many tweet per day they average, and what their network of followers looks like.  You have to follow Mr Tweet on twitter before they will start calculating your information, and it is updated every two weeks.

5. TwitPic

Being a photographer (even one on Twitter), this is my favorite of all Twitter uses.  Twitpic has become an incredible source of information.  That actually posted one of the first photos of the US Air flight that crashed in Hudson river here http://twitpic.com/135xa.  It ended up almost crashing the Twitpic servers but it showed how useful Twitter is as a journalistic tool for everyday people.  This photo was one of the first to circulate the Internet after the crash.  It wasn’t by CNN or Foxnews, or MSNBC, it was by a Twitter users using Twitpic.

Twitpic is one of the easiest Twitter tools to use.  All you do is sign into Twitpic and they give you an email address that uploads to your twitter account.  You can take a photo with your cell phone (for those who have cell phone cameras) and upload it to twitter on the fly, right then and there on the spot.  Facebook has done this with their iPhone app so it works in a similar way if you are familiar with how that works.  If you don’t have a cell phone with a camera, just use the desktop uploader and start sharing your pics.

Are You Ready for Twitter Now?

So if that isn’t enough for you to ponder on Twitter, there are a few other cool tools of note.  With Twitter allowing the use of its API data there are almost endless applications available, but the great ones find a need and build upon that to make something we will find value in using.

• Twhirl (desktop app)
• Hashtags – a great search tool – http://hashtags.org/
• Eventbox – combines all kinds of social sites
• Summize – Twitter search, Summize before Twitter bought them, great job on this one
• Twingly (http://www.twingly.com/) – something I am pretty hip on using right now
• FriendFeed (another combining tool)
• Dial2Do – very interesting tool that might prove very useful

So take the plunge and get started with Twitter.  Just don’t tell me no one cares what in the world I am doing.  It is far far more than just that.  It is a free network to exchange ideas and thoughts with the world.  Oh, and if you want to follow me on Twitter, here you go http://www.twitter.com/scottfillmer or @scottfillmer on Twitter.

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The Internet can be many things to many people.  Can it be the drug of choice today or is that to harsh a term to describe what we as a society have done with the Internet?

Most of the time we have a negative connotation associated with a “drug”, but drugs can be just as positive as negative, especially when one company has promoted their product as the “wonder drug” of all time.  One legal definition puts it like this:

Some governments define the term drug by law. In the United States, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act definition of “drug” includes “articles intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease in man or other animals” and “articles (other than food) intended to affect the structure or any function of the body of man or other animals.

This is one of those random blog posts I couldn’t decide if I wanted to dive into or not, but I am going to do it anyway.  I started writing this several weeks ago but it culminated this week with a conversation I had with the worship leader (photo shown above) here and moved into the finer point of Calvinism (if only we actually had time to just sit and discuss these things).  And that is… what is the Internet doing to fellowship and how does it change how we read Hebrews 10:25 (in context) that says: “25 Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another€”and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

If you are reading my blog and are not a Believer, then insert “social skills or socializing” in place of fellowship, but for the rest of us, what does it mean to move our worship and other networking (i.e. fellowship) to the Internet?  This is what I envision when we combine the greatness of the Internet with the Bride of Christ.  Something totally awesome if I can still use that phrase, but how careful are we to not be slowly creating a generation of Internet only Believers that don’t know how to, want to, or even care anything about fellowship?

The ultimate online church campus right now is lifechurch.tv but this week I was really excited to watch the initial launch of the iCampus for NewSpring as posted on ChurchCrunch (read NewSpring Church Launches iCampus BETA).   I was so excited to see NewSpring launch a full blown service that I could sit here in my office and watch Sunday evening from a church in Greenville I have never been to (but will in about a month) and feel like I was part of the service, but was I really part of the service?

The questions that ran through my mind when talking to other about where the church is going through technology goes something like this:

1. What about those Believers who really don’t like to fellowship in the first place, or worse, highly dislike it?  To say “they should” is what I would equate to saying a gay Christian just shouldn’t be gay (from Anne’s post Why is being gay a sin?).  Can we look at the issue seriously and not just say “because the Bible said so”.  I know that, but that often doesn’t change a person’s behavior or attitude.
2. How do we fulfill Hebrews 10:25 online?  Can we fulfill Hebrews 10:25 through only online means?
3. Can we effectively fellowship with others online?  I have gotten to know quite a few people online I have never met in person?
4. What about those church-a-phobics (that would be the opposite of church-a-holics)?  How do you get people in the building when they highly dislike (hate) the thought of “going to church” but will engage online?
5. What intentional steps do we take to move from online fellowship to discipleship?  Are we being intentional about the steps we take to pull people to our online venues in the name of Christ?

These are just a few, but serious questions to me, and quite personal.  I have asked myself these and many other questions for many many years and I will continue to try to find where technology fits into God’s kingdom.  It is not just something the church can ignore, or misuse.  In some respects, it is the future of the Church.  Thoughts?

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If you haven’t had time to get into Twitter yet you might want to jump over there and do a Twitter crash course before you read this post, but for others who are already knee deep in Twitter, how effectively are you using this great service?  There are so many aspects to Twitter that can be utilized that the deeper I go in Twitter the more I find.

One thing I started really using lately is the “favorites” feature on Twitter.  If you haven’t given this much thought, the favorites feature is a great way to start to bookmark those really great posts you see and don’t want to forget.  Once you start to mark tweets as favorites (or star them) you need some good way to get back to the information at some point.  I was marking the posts on Twitter I didn’t want to forget but never went back to look at them.  So, this is how you can take the Twitter favorites and pull the RSS feed from Twitter into your favorite RSS feed reader.

First thing you want to do is start marking your favorite tweets.  You can do this in TweetDeck or in the basic browser application by clicking on the star icon when you mouse over a tweet.  Then, follow these steps below to start pulling your Twitter favorites feed (if you want the short version just read step 1 and that should do it).

1. Create the Twitter Favorite Feed in RSS Reader

This doesn’t seem to be published on any Twitter help pages or anywhere else, but you can grab your favorites feed (or anyone else’s for that matter) by using the address: http://twitter.com/favorites/[insert_your_ID_here].rss , so to pull an rss feed of my twitter favorites, you would place the url http://twitter.com/favorites/scottfillmer.rss.  Just drop this url in your feed reader and it works just like any other feed.

For more information on actually pulling RSS feeds from Twitter that are posted by Twitter (that would be the friends timeline, profile page, @replies page, and the home page, you can visit How do I find my Twitter rss feed? from Twitter support.  You can also read an older post of my called Add Value to Your Blog, Offer an RSS Feed in Reverse if you really want to look at some different rss feed stuff.

If you question after reading this is what in the world is an RSS feed Brad Ruggles has compiled some of the popular how-to YouTube videos on what is an rss feed, twitter, and blogs.  You can see that here.

2. Make Your RSS Feed Public (optional step)

You can now use it in any way you would use a normal rss feed.  So do some cool things with it like make it a public feed or as a blogroll on your site.  You can see the results below, those are live and updated as I mark items as favorites.

You can do this (if you use Google Reader) by going to the “manage feeds” link in your reader, then choosing the tag where you placed the rss feed to be public, then either choose to “add a clip to your site” or “add a blogroll to your site” and it will give you a piece of code to use where ever you like. The list below is my last 5 favorites (when they are placed in your RSS Reader they won’t clip after a certain number of characters like they do below).

3. Use What You Have Created

One reason to use the favorites options is to mark the genius in Twitter.  There is a lot of information to be gained from Twitter, but it isn’t really from Twitter, it is from the people who post to Twitter.  Many people take the time to post very useful information and actually create value in their 140 characters.  You can find new websites, new ideas, new ways of doing things that you may not have ever thought about before seeing them on Twitter.

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I wanted to post something a little different today, so here is a slightly useless use of your iPhone’s wallpaper screen, an electronic business card or ID name tag.  I have found a few uses for doing this other than it looking a little conceited and vain, but it was a lot by trial and error and I just wanted to write down the specifics of how I did create the wallpaper.  You may not want to create a “business card” per say, but you can use this exact technique for creating any customized wallpaper for your iPhone.

This actually came from a friend of mine, Michael, who had found a Nikon D100 camera body and lens back this summer.  Back in its day, this was a $2,000 camera body and someone, somewhere was going to be missing this camera.  It took great time and effort for him to actually find the owner of the camera but he did.  A phone of course is not the same thing cost wise, but I thought about putting some digital name tag on my various paraphernalia, so this is one way to do this with your iPhone.  Besides, with as many of them as there are around, if someone picks up yours by mistake they will instantly know who’s phone it is and be able to return it rather quickly.  That’s the idea anyway.

This type of thing can also be done on your Twitter background and it works just about the same way since Twitter doesn’t really give you an exact as how they control their background image sizes and such, and that takes a bit of trial and error too.  The background I used here came right off my Twitter background image with a little size adjustment.

To Create a Custom iPhone Wallpaper or Background

To start, I have assumed that you have some image editing software like photoshop.  You need to create a new blank image in photoshop and I am referring to the diagram below for the sizes I used.  The size of the iPhone wallpaper image is 320px wide by 480px height, so make an image that exact size.  You can use something larger or smaller but this will keep the iPhone from automatically resizing the image and in most cases distorting something.

Next, I made a two tone black and white out of the 480px height.  The part the phone’s date and time covers will remain white in most cases, so if you put a light colored background it does gray out a little of the background, but it is far easier to read if you make it a very dark color.  So, color the top section (approximately 115px from the top of the image down) a dark color of choice.  You can also do the same thing on the bottom (not in the diagram, but at 95px in height) but the bottom is already a lighter color so it isn’t as hard to read.  I left my bottom 95px white as you can see, but you can make that a different color too if you like.

The actual usable space is the center, which basically measures out at a 270px square if you want a nice margin on the right and left side.  For the image you can really take or create anything you like and just make sure it is cropped down to a 270px square and it will fit perfectly.  If you wanted to make this a don’t loose me name tag, put some way to get a hold of you in this center info.

Like I said, you are probably asking who cares or what’s the point, me too, but none-the-less, there it is.  A customized iPhone wallpaper.  All together this took about 20 minutes to do at the most (not including this post of course).  Anyone else happen to do this on their phone?  Now customizing your Twitter background page might be a little more tricky, but, a little more useful.

iPhone 4 Update

I wanted to update this post since the iPhone 4 does not use the same screen resolution as the iPhone 3 or 3G (or iPhone 2 for that matter). The concept still remains the same as it did in the original post, but you will need to get the dimensions of the iPhone 4 to make this custom wallpaper by taking a screen shot with your iPhone 4, which come to 640×960 pixels. Just take the screen shot by holding down the home key and the lock key at the same time for 3 seconds and then you will see the background image.

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Here we are another 24 hours has gone by and the 24 Hours of Wise Words, Rusty’s Challenge from Rusty is over for the sake of this blog post. As far as the meaning in our lives and how we treat others, this should continue and be a part of our persona as we grow in our Christian walk.

A Reflection on How I (We) Did

I will have to say if you didn’t participate or haven’t tried doing this yet (using wise and kind words all day), it is far harder than you might think. I can’t say that I went the entire 24 hours without an unkind or unwise word, but, I can say it made me much more cognizant of what words I do use.

Doing this little exercise did make me examine the words I use, or was going to use, and how they might effect those I was speaking to or about. It showed me where I was building others up, and in the process of tearing them down. There were several others (@hspur, @mandycon, and @bslash) who followed Rusty’s suggestion and if you followed us on Twitter you could see the progress we made and didn’t make in real time. If you didn’t, I think the others would tell you it was a good 24 hours of self examination of words and heart.

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