Category: Misc Stuff

I just wanted to let everyone know that I have heard from my parents. They sent me an update to post here for everyone:

We have been here a week and time is passing quickly. We have settled into the routine and adjusted well. The weather is generally mild temperatures during the day and comfortable at night. We leave nearly all of the windows open in the apartment all of the time. There is no central heat/air conditioning in any home in this portion of the whole country. It has rained at some time during each day so far but that should be ending soon. The dry season is starting and there will be no rain until next March or May. We are on the 5th floor of this building and there are no elevators anywhere. One of the team members lives on the 6th floor. They have 2 small boys and a baby this means 91 steps up & down every time to go in or out. It’s a way of life. 

We have been busy supporting the other team members here with listening ears and some home schooling. Judy has completed reading classes and even some science experiments. She even helped to put together a balsa wood helicopter. I have lead the boys on several bike rides for exercise and to give moms a little space. The kids here are just like every other kids and love attention.

It is funny trying to communicate. I tried to order a 5 gal bottle of water this morning. It is 1600 (4 pm) now and the water still hasn’t arrived. I just called again. I have this script to read to them which has our address written in phonic Chinese. It generally goes well but this time the girl started asking me some questions which I couldn’t understand at all. Finally she must have recognized who I was because she said,” OK-bye bye” and hung up. She probably turned to her co-worker and said something about dumb foreigners. We’ll see if water arrives or not. We have succeeded in the past getting our shui (water) we go through about 1 5gal jug every day. You need a lot of water here because of the altitude.

Judy has been involved with 3 English classes which the team members teach to the local kids. Some of these are kids from the professional class whose parents are sending to learn English. There are a few kids from a local orphanage so they are a bit challenging. They have a difficult time with some of the English letters. D and V are particularly difficult because they don’t use this sound much here.

Tonight is the formal English Corner which we talked about last week. There should be more people at this corner since this is the end of the National Day holiday. Last week I noticed that some students were actually speaking English and others were just saying memorized sounds (like ordering water). It sometimes is productive for the team.

Shock of shock! Boys and Girls learn differently.

The differences between boys and girls are profound. Most classrooms are girl-friendly and largely feminized in culture. Boys think differently, communicate differently, and are incentivized differently. Young boys cannot sit quiet and still for long periods of time. Their concentration patterns are very different from those of girls — and they know it. Resisting an acknowledgement of these differences requires a tremendous capacity for denying the obvious.

So, what kind of pen do you use to write with?

Bics Clog Dumps.

Yes they were, but the media hasn't covered them too much. Here are some pictures I found online of the Gulfport and Biloxi areas.

For those who don't know, I was active in the BSU (Baptist Student Union) at Marshall University when I was there. My first year, the BSU was good sized and had probably 20 regulars. The next year, the president didn't do such a good job and attendance went down. The next year, I was elected president. We started off the year with 5-10 regulars and grew to about 15-20. The year after that, the growth continued. We weren't as big as some of the other groups on campus, but we were solid and growing. Thrown into all this, after my year as president, there was a big tado at the state level and we lost our campus minister. The next year, we didn't really have one and had to make everything up on our own. After I graduated, things continued going downhill.

I hadn't been back in Huntington recently, but I think often of the BSU and the people I knew there. The group definantly made the group. Anyway, I digress.

Cyndi stopped by the Christian Center at Marshall today and met the current BSU Director. Only it isn't called BSU anymore. Most BSU groups changed their name to BCM; however, Marshall already had a BCM group so they chose the name Revolution. From what Cyndi said, when the current director arived, there was only a remnant of 3 people meeting on Mondays (traditional BSU night) for prayer. Anyway, the group has now grown to over 60 people! Praise God!

Here is a link to their website: http://www.marshallrevolution.com

Those of you who read my blog may not realize it, but not many other people do. Why do I keep doing this? Well, I read a lot, I think a lot, and I have an opinion on everything. I think a blog is a good way for me to communicate what I think. Eventually, people will find it and read it. Besides, I like to think that some people like to know what I think about certain things :^)

Anyway, over at the EvangelicalOutpost, there is an article dealing with how a blog can be an important communication tool even if a small number of people read it. To read more of the article, click here.

Here is an excerpt:

Imagine that you've been provided the opportunity to hold a daily public conference. Six days a week between a dozen and a few hundred people gather together for the sole purpose of hearing what you think. Some of them find you insightful, even brilliant while others think you’re a blithering idiot. Each day, though, they come to hear you give an opinion about current events, expound upon an obscure topic of personal interest, or hear you share an amusing anecdote. A few stay thru your entire oration while others leave after only a few words. But every day someone shows up for your briefing.

Unfortunately, we bloggers rarely appreciate the power we possess. Instead of being constantly amazed at the potential influence we wield, we carp and whine (if only to ourselves) that we don’t have the links of Glenn Reynolds or the site hits of Daily Kos. We believe that since thousands of people could be reading our blogs that we should have thousands of readers. If we don’t then we judge ourselves to be inadequate.

If you have a blog that is read by more than a few dozen readers then you are making a bigger impact than you probably realize. If you have 50 people reading your blog then you have more people in your “classroom” than most professors at Harvard. If you have 90 readers then you have more people in your “pews” than most pastors have in their churches every Sunday. And if you have more than 1000 readers a month you have a larger “circulation” than most poetry and short story magazines.

But having a larger audience doesn’t necessarily translate into having more influence. As Malcolm Gladwell argues in his book The Tipping Point, the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship is about 150. In blogging terms, this means that when your readership grows, you’re ability to have a true one-on-one relationship with them decreases significantly. This is not to say that you should attempt to limit your readership to 150 readers, turning people away when that number is reached. What it means is that if you want to maximize your personal influence you would focus on establishing strong bonds and deep interaction with at most 150 readers.

Now consider what would happen if each of these 150 readers read and thought about what you wrote on your blog for five minutes every day. Five minutes may seem insignificant but it has an exponential effect: with only 5 minutes every day, six days a week, every month, you will have the reader’s attention for more than one entire day – 26 hours – every year. With only 150 consistent readers you will have gained the equivalent “mindspace” of one person for one entire day for almost five straight months. This is what I call the "5/150 Principle": capturing the mindspace of 150 people for 5 minutes can create an astounding opportunity for influence.

This is yet another reason why support in disasters just takes time: The logistics of disaster relief operations.

There's something called "logistics." Check it out.

You cannot just snap your fingers and make the military suddenly appear somewhere.

Nor can you legally send federal troops willy-nilly to shoot looters, courtesy of the Posse Comitatus act. You should know this, Ann. You're a lawyer by profession. You shouldn't need a dumb grunt to explain it to you.

But watch for much of our news commentary and public debate to predicate itself around a vast ignorance of logistical capacity and principals.

For instance: Suppose you got a brigade worth of troops (5,000 or so) available,. How are you going to support them? How will you transport them? Think organic trans is sufficient? Think again. Even at 100% operational readiness, a typical infantry battalion can only self transport perhaps a company at a time. And if every soldier is bringing a rucksack and a dufflebag, you're really talking about maybe two platoons. And unless you expect the unit to become a drain on local resources, every company is going to take a half truck or more of MREs and a half truck or more of bottled water, along with its own water trailers. I've seen it happen. I've done it. I've been a battalion S4 in combat, an HHC XO for dozens of major moves of a hundred miles or more, and an HHC company commander for six hurricane mobilizations.

In this post, I mentioned two missing persons that my boss' family had been looking for. Well, I have just recevied the following e-mail from my manager:

Thank you for praying today! After over a week of searching the message boards and phone calls, we found a distant relative who just heard from my cousin in Biloxi. The cousin says they are ok and will communicate more news later.

Thanks for praying! God is faithful.

Here is a blog from New Orleans. I thought you guys might find it interesting. Enjoy!

Firstly, I have more information about this post about the man who lost his wife in the storm. Thanks to TH who left this in the comments of that post:

That story was from WKRG TV in Mobile. The man (Mr. Jackson) was from Biloxi. The news journalist's last name is Mayerley. She has had alot of response to that candid interview with the distraught man…emails from around the world, she said. Later today, on WKRG, she said that there are hundereds of family members like Mr. Jackson. We can not all help him, personally, but we can give to every victim…by giving to United Way or the Red Cross, or any church group or agency that will aid the vicitims.

We live in the WKRG viewing area, so we saw the interview, Live. Almost unbelievable at first. I think it's hard to imagine such devestation right down the road. We will give and we will PRAY!! I know you will too. God is STILL in control and WE are STILL his helping hands, standing in the gap for our neighbors in prayer!

Thanks for caring about this poor man in Biloxi…and all the victims of Katrina.

If anyone in the storm area needs any phone calls made to relatives, I'll be willing. Drop me a line, leave me a message, and I'll call anyone you want to let them know you are ok. My contact information can be found here.

If there is any other ways I can help out from here, I'm willing. The people in the area are on my mind in prayer quite often.

Fox News has this story about the flooding in New Orleans.

CNN has this $4 gas sometime.

I lived in Hermann, MO in the '91 Mississippi/Misouri River floods. We weren't impacted, but had friends who were. Hermann was greatly impacted. You pull together to help out your neighbors any way you can. Christians, imagine what an opportunity you have to live out your faith to your friends. Let them see where your priorities really lie.

Here is a picture that went around work of FBC Gulfport:

What kind of witness would it be if the membership would show up tonight singing and worshiping God. What do they have to be thankful for? Well…they are alive for one. Second, they can be thankful for the opportunity to minister to their neighbors. In lots of these places outsiders cannot get in to help. Help has to come from those who are there.

The pictures below reminds me of pictures of levees breaking in the '91 floods. I wonder why the levees in New Orleans broke so fast. The ones in MO lasted just about all summer before they broke. Anyone have any ideas? I found the first picture on the CNN.com website. The second came from FoxNews. I would have linked to it, but couldn't find the URL.