Out of Egypt:

wget debugging magic

(Explanation to come later. Wish that party next door would stop. It makes it hard to even want to sleep.)

Command: wget -S -p -Pwebtests/um.org/volunteer --output-file=volunteer.log http://www.urbanministry.org/volunteer

wget : gets web files, non-interactive

-S : get server headers

-Pdirectory : save to directory

-p : gets all necessary files

--output-file=file.log : file to save information in (is saved in your home directory)

http://www.example.com/page : page to get

Open the logfile that's created in your home directory and you have an instant log of how your site performs - a) total time, b) headers sent, and c) any 404 or 3xx errors.

fun drupal training: an answer to prayer

So I was a bit stressed the past few days because, while my teeth haven't yet completely healed, I had a major web page creation task to complete and a training to prepare. I had my small group pray that the training would go all right, and it exceeded all my expectations. I don't know if everything was retained, but at least I held people's attention.

In fact, it actually turned into an impromptu photo-shoot at one point when I totally geeked out and started drawing a Lego-block explanation of the Panels module on the conference room whiteboard. Hopefully, I'll have a picture up here soon to show you.

Fun times, but I'm glad the weekend's here. Now time to get some rest - and really recover from last week's "vacation."

why i wanted to be a writer

Poor writing has never caused the death of thousands. Poor engineering, poor design, poor programming - that's a different story.

A misplaced comma is more forgivable than a misplaced decimal point. At least the former could never cause a bridge to collapse.

give $10 to TechMission before 3 pm today & we may win $1000

Everyone loves the power of multiplication. If you give to TechMission's Facebook Causes competition today, there is a chance your $10 donation could become $1000 for us. All we need to do is accumulate the most unique donors prior to 3 pm.

If you want to learn more about TechMission, you could check out our Wikipedia entry or just look at the post on Sarah's blog.

learning to love php

More work with code today - discovering the joys of string variables, conditional statements, and decision trees. And learning that PHP is a recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. That makes a lot of sense. No, really, it does.

Ok, to be truthful, I didn't actually code so much as comment out code that was already there. It's easier to take stuff out than to put new stuff in. All you have to know is where the bad stuff stops and the good stuff begins. /programming lesson for the day.

why i love proofreading/copyediting

It's a form of sanctified nitpicking.

True confession: I asked my dad for a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition when I was 8 or so. My favorite part was the section on punctuation.

And yet I'm not a perfect speller (or punctuator, for that matter). In fact, I seem to be getting worse. Earlier tonight, I would've misspelled "commitment" in an email if it hadn't been for Firefox's amazing inline spellchecker. I don't know what's happening to me.

TechMission featured on Gospel.com

Most of y'all have probably heard of BibleGateway, the most popular Bible search site on the Internet.

What you may not know is that BibleGateway is run by Gospel Communications, an organization that, among other things, strives to link together the various Christian ministries that have a significant presence on the 'Net.

Anyway, their new portal site, Gospel.com, just went live a few days ago, and TechMission is one of the featured ministries. This makes me feel like all my hard work bookmarking Urban Ministry's best content has paid off.

Also, if you want to learn more about our organization, there's a pretty decent history up on TechMission's Wikipedia page.

TechMission Inc. pt II

What Sarah didn't mention is that we're hiring.

Yes, you too could potentially be a grant writer at TechMission. It's a great experience working here - in terms of experience gained, supportive co-workers, and personal growth. If you have relevant experience with writing, non-profits, urban ministry, or community development, I highly recommend you apply. Click here for position details.

my ideal time management system

GTD, with a few wrinkles:
  centered around projects,
    which are faceted,
    can be broken down into tasks (next actions), 
        which are organized into contexts
        and placed in relationships to other users of the system
          (team members, supervisors, etc.)

Normal GTD, I feel,
   is too reactive:
   I need a system that not only captures,
      but also prioritizes,
      and lets me see not only the nitty-gritty
   but also the big picture.

I need to know not only what I have to do,
   but how those things relate to each other.
Only with that knowledge can I hope to be proactive,
   to spend my time wisely,
   to anticipate problems before they occur.

Will you build my system for me?
Or does it already exist
  and I just don't know it yet.

Ideally, I would want something that works with Outlook,
  because I'm stuck with Outlook for the time being.
But in the future, the sky's the limit. 
  (Keeping in mind affordability, of course.)

We got listed!

My Gospel BuzzBlog post got used. This is a good day.

four words that signify failure

"Are you selling something?"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And what have I learned through this experience?

Basic courtesy. Telemarketers are people too, and should be treated humanely.

Though I'm not doing telemarketing per se (I believe in what I'm calling people about, and we got their contacts from partner organizations), I still fear I would react poorly if someone called me at work and talked to them as I have to, in order to get the word out about our services.

Don't get me wrong; our benefits are good. Just not good enough that I would listen, were the situation reversed.

fresh content on UrbanMinistry.org

Lots of fresh content on UrbanMinistry.org today. Especially take note of the Derek Webb music video from ChristianityToday which should be near the top of the page as you read this.

Also, I've started uploading relevant posts from my blog to my UM.org blog. Check out my thoughts on theology and ministry in reverse chronological order. If you haven't been reading my blog until recently, it's a good way to get to know where I'm coming from. If you have been reading it, it's a good way to get reacquainted. I know just uploading them has been that way for me.

UrbanMinistry.org

If you're interested in any of the following subjects - urban ministry, youth ministry, education, community development, or technology - check out UrbanMinistry.org. UrbanMinistry.org is a new initiative of TechMission, the organization for which I work.

TechMission's core values are Jesus, justice, and technology. To serve these values, TechMission strives to use technology to bridge the "digital divide" and aid underresourced communities.

Via UrbanMinistry.org, TechMission is creating a space where workers in urban ministry, youth ministry, and Christian community development can become acquainted, share resources (such as community-worker blogs, sermons, lectures, trainings, grant templates, program materials, etc.) and best practices, and raise awareness of critical issues in the areas of politics, ministry, and social justice. From UrbanMinistry.org, one can also access the sites of two other TechMission initiatives - SafeFamilies.org, TechMission's Internet safety and pornography-addiction recovery program (featuring free We-Blocker technology), and ChristianVolunteering.org, the largest Christian volunteer-match site on the Web.

Users of UrbanMinistry.org can list their interests and skills on their user profile page, as well as provide resume information. If they wish, this information can then be used to connect them with relevant volunteer opportunities.

In my role as an online publications editor/community developer intern at TechMission, I will be writing a blog on the UrbanMinistry.org site, primarily on topics related to Christian theology, politics, and ministry. If possible, I plan to link these posts to my main blog via an RSS feed in the right column, so they will be accessible from this site, but hosted on UrbanMinistry.org.

talkin' about my generation...

So who am I, really? Born on June 15, 1984, I sit almost exactly on the cusp of generations - stuck between Gens. X & Y; between adolescence and adulthood. Wikipedia's article on what they call Twixters makes me fear for my (economic) future - independence before 25, full stability before 30, that's my goal. But, right now, the thread has not been fully cut - I still receive money from my parents, and thus the description of the Boomerang Generation rings too true.

Does anyone know a good career counselor? I need to know how to market myself. My anxiety about the future fluctuates - right now, I'm still feeling better than I did when I was job hunting over the summer. But I'm not feeling as confident in my chances for future lucrative employment (in contrast to my present position of dependency while doing national service) as I once was.

I think I need certification in a technical field. That'll help a great deal.

Misc. replies to the most recent post

Ryan: sometimes people are victims of circumstances beyond their control. The man I mentioned who was working as a cook for Boston Market until he was laid off didn't plan on that happening. And he wouldn't have been working in the warehouse with me if the temp agency hadn't lied to him about the pay.

Also, I still think Wal-Mart could take the hit. Witness the situation of businesses roughly in the same sector, such as Target and Costco. They pay their employees better, do they not? I would imagine that Wal-Mart just funnels all their profit back into the business, acquiring new products to sell and building more locations. Citibank, on the other hand, doesn't need to do anything to grow but send out more credit card applications.

I think John's criticism is right on the mark. Someone has to do unskilled work, and teenagers aren't going to be able to do all of it. And even if teenagers could do it all, that doesn't justify exploitation. I don't want to go back to the days before the progressive era, when business owners could treat their employees however they wanted. As I said before, freedom of contract is illusory in an unequal relationship. We don't let business owners pay their employees whatever they want for the same reason that we don't let executives sleep with those they supervise - the one on top has all the power.

Furthermore, if we want to get people off welfare, we've got to give them confidence that they can succeed through work. If they can't make as much working as they could being indigent, then they'll never break the cycle of dependency. And surely not all those people can become nurses, lab techs, etc. Not everyone fails at education because of a lack of will. Some people just aren't suited for it.

In conclusion, there's only one reason I would oppose minimum wage: if the inflation it caused, which I don't dispute (costs have to be passed on somehow), was equal to the increase in pay that was mandated. And that, I believe, is highly unlikely.

As John said, a just society knows how to value the people at the economic bottom. Having worked in dehumanizing environments, I know that it's natural to lose hope and to fail to take pride in your work. Cash fixes that, not motivational posters that say "Only the strong survive."

Christians especially need to take note of this. Often when we speak about vocation, we are thinking about the professions or about "Christian service." In the PCA, it may be, laborers are excluded from our middle-class white vision of the ideal Christian life. In this, I fear that we may receive the condemnation of James, who warns us in his letter not to show partiality to the wealthy (or the well-educated) among us. With our penchant for intellectualism, the PCA can be especially guilty of the latter.

"Girls only date guys with skills"

I got a job in a warehouse last Wednesday. I got a sinus infection three weeks ago. The combination can be obnoxious.

But at least I'm learned lots of valuable skills. In the past week, I have:

• Torn open hundreds of large green mailsacks and dumped them out into crates for others to sort.
• Moved giant boxes, called Gaylords (for some unearthly reason), onto skids.
• Unloaded many boxes of toys (it's a returns warehouse, primarily for Toys 'R' Us) from a truck.
• Crushed a variety of toys in a trash compactor.
• Sweated much.
• Learned that my sandwiches don't survive heat very well.
• Avoided slicing myself with a boxcutter, somehow not being able to not think about terrorism while doing it.
• Learned how to operate a hand jack thingy for moving skids, though I haven't learned the real name of it.
• Spent hours (some pleasant, some frustrating) taking apart little kids' motorbikes to remove the batteries, a process which involves the use of pliers, wrenches, hex wrenches, screwdrivers, wirecutters, your feet, and other miscellaneous tools.

At least it's better than the box factory. There I only learned how to make boxes. This is a little more tired, but though there's not much opportunity for independent thought, at least there's some variety. As my fellow temp said while we worked on bikes, "Each one has its own personality." As I said, "Some personalities are more pleasant then others."

He's an interesting guy, by the way. At first he was nearly silent and I didn't bother saying much to him, assuming that, like most of my coworkers at other temp jobs, we wouldn't have much to say to each other. But that was a false conception.

We started talking first about my college and what I was studying and what I planned to do with it. I said I wanted to write, then fumbled as usual for words to make that seem practical and not a pie-in-the-sky dream. Journalism was mentioned, though, of course, I'm a bit disenchanted with it at the moment. Philadelphia came in there too.

As for him, he's an elderly black man, formerly of New York City, who said he worked in advertising most of his life, writing copy and occasionally doing photo work. He also writes screenplays and short stories, he said. I told him plot was a difficulty for me. He gave me some good advice, though I'd heard some of it before.

He said he does temp work now because he's used to changing his job fairly often, since advertising is a fast-moving field. Also he said that it gives him a variety of experiences which help with his writing. Writer need to meet people, and temp work has introduced him to some unusual ones.

He actually gave me an assignment on Thursday, as we talked and ate the hot dogs that our employers were cooking for the staff. He suggested that I write an editorial about Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court. I've never written an editorial before, I said. Perhaps I will.

resume from the underground

I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I think there is something wrong with my liver...

No, seriously, I got my resume done. Here's hoping it's good enough to get me an office job with a temp agency (not a massive goal, but it's all I can hope for right now...).

Job Objective

A temporary position as office support staff, such as a clerical or data-entry position.

Summary of Qualifications

• 3 years’ experience as writer and assistant editor on college newspaper
• High school and college training in Microsoft Office suite, as well as other computer experience
• Excellent command of spelling, punctuation, and grammar rules
• Strong communication skills and work ethic

Education and Technical Skills

Covenant College, BA in English
Anticipated completion: Spring 2006
GPA: 3.78

Technical Skills: MS Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint; Adobe InDesign, Photoshop; HTML coding experience

Significant Achievements

• In 2001, received second place in Lancaster IU-13 website design competition for a site on the Civil War
• In 2002, received Silver Key in the Poetry category of the Scholastic National Writing Competition
• In 2004-05, played an integral role in the extensive redesign of the layout of the Covenant College student newspaper, the Bagpipe
• In 2005, received a perfect grade on a website about the philosopher Boethius, designed for a class on ancient philosophy

Employment History

• Dietary aide at Quarryville Presbyterian Retirement Community, 2000-02
• Part-time child care for special needs child, 2003
• Temporary worker for Spherion’s industrial division, 2004-

Well then. What do you think? Is there anything I did wrong? Anything I forgot? Perhaps I don't know myself as well as some of you may know me...