Marketing Chi Alpha

I’m plan­ning to take out some ads on TheFacebook.com and run­ning them for one day each.

Here are the guide­lines:

Your announce­ment may con­tain a title of up to 25 char­ac­ters that links to anoth­er page, and a body of up to 150 char­ac­ters. No HTML is allowed in either sec­tion.”

Title: Chi Alpha Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship is too long.
Options:

  1. XA Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship
  2. Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford
  3. Chi Alpha, Baby!
  4. Got Faith?
  5. Faith, Friends, Fun
  6. T or F: God exists.
  7. Dope­less Hope Fiends

Ide­al­ly, I’d like a fun­ny one. A fun­ny ques­tion would be best, I think. It’s hard to be fun­ny in 25 char­ac­ters or less. Each one would link to xaStanford.org.

As for text, here are some options I’m look­ing at:

  1. Most of your text­books will be out of print next year. Ours has been around for 2,000. It’s worth tak­ing a look at. Chi Alpha Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship
  2. Attend­ing Chi Alpha has just become a require­ment for grad­u­a­tion! Would we lie to you? And is it lying if you expect not to be believed?
  3. Is there a God? We like to think so–come find out why. Chi Alpha Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship — Wed nights at 8pm in 300–300
  4. No dues. No booze. Just Jesus. Chi Alpha Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship — Wed nights at 8pm in 300–300
  5. What does Satan call iso­lat­ed Chris­tians? Hors Doeu­vres. Chi Alpha Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship — Wed nights at 8pm in 300–300
  6. Chi Alpha Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship — Wed nights at 8pm in 300–300

Here’s the problem–I don’t real­ly like any of them that much. I don’t hate them, exact­ly, they just don’t get me excit­ed.

If you have any bet­ter ideas, leave them in the com­ments. I can use up to five.

PersonalMDiv.com

I’ve been slow­ly stew­ing an idea in my brain for a few days now, and I final­ly decid­ed to act on it. I noticed the cre­ation of personalmba.com with inter­est, but did­n’t think much about it until I saw that Jor­don Coop­er was inspired to cre­ate a com­pa­ra­ble M. Div. list (thanks to Andrew Jones for point­ing it out).

Any­way, I noticed that there was some crit­i­cism of the over­all idea and of the spe­cif­ic book choic­es (some of the crit­i­cism was thought­ful, some was knee-jerk). I thought it would be great to cre­ate a wiki to let the broad­er com­mu­ni­ty craft a list of books, arti­cles, and projects that would real­ly make a dif­fer­ence in some­one’s min­istry.

So I did. I present PersonalMDiv.com.

Have at it.

Everyone Has A Blog…

There’s a few small things I’ve been mean­ing to post for a while, but that I just haven’t got­ten around to:

One of our stu­dents, Alan Asbeck, was fea­tured on tele­vi­sion for a patent appli­ca­tion involv­ing a wall-climb­ing robot. How cool is that?

My pas­tor has a blog now: check out Scott Aught­mon at Ran­dom Ram­blings of a Church Gath­er­er.

In fact, more and more of my friends are blog­ging.

And those are just peo­ple that I actu­al­ly have a real-life, 3D rela­tion­ship with. If you count peo­ple I’ve met at con­fer­ences (such as Andrew Carea­ga) or in pass­ing (like Mark Bat­ter­son), the list would be ridicu­lous­ly longer.

Media Shout 3.0

I final­ly got my upgrade copy of Medi­aShout in the mail yes­ter­day.

Wow.

This release fix­es every­thing I’ve ever dis­liked about Medi­aShout and adds tons of new fea­tures I’d nev­er con­sid­ered.

The three best upgrades:
* You can play just a spe­cif­ic, cus­tom clip from a DVD. So you just want to play from 1.54.36 to 1.57.12? Done.
* All songs now have per­ma­nent for­mat­ting stored in the data­base. No need to refor­mat every stink­ing time you use the song!
* You can edit text cues direct­ly from with­in the program–no more ran­dom RTF files lying about.

Also, it looks like they’re try­ing to break into the VJ market–the new ver­sion includes bet­ter sup­port for mix­ing video feeds on the fly. Still, it just does­n’t com­pare to Arkaos in that depart­ment.

The one thing I real­ly wish they had done was include the Greek & Hebrew Bibles (they include the Latin Vulgate–why not the orig­i­nal text?).

Over­all, I’m thrilled.

Happy Birthday, Paula Kay!

For the record, today is Paula’s birth­day. Feel free to email or call her with good wish­es.

I love you, Paula–have a great day!

In-Laws

My in-laws are on a cruise to Hawaii, and their cruise ship is cur­rent­ly on a day excur­sion.

Where do they go?

Wal-Mart.

For the record, this is not an aber­ra­tion. Once we were all in New Orleans togeth­er and they decid­ed we would go eat at Den­ny’s.

Wal-Mart in Hawaii and Den­ny’s in New Orleans. My in-laws ARE red-state Amer­i­ca.

Google Earth

If you have broad­band and a fast enough com­put­er, you’ve got to vis­it http://earth.google.com/ and down­load their soft­ware.

Absolute­ly incred­i­ble.

On The Facebook

I don’t know if I’ve ever men­tioned this on my web­site, but I’m on the Face­book.

I bring this up for two rea­sons:

  1. If you’re a new stu­dent com­ing to Stan­ford feel free to scope us (Chi Alpha) out online. Also check xaStanford.org and Chi Alpha on the Face­book. Feel free to join our Face­book group with­out any sense of long-term oblig­a­tion.
  2. If I’ve met you at a con­fer­ence or some­thing you can feel free to add me as a Face­book friend. Just do a glob­al search for Glen Davis at Stan­ford (the glob­al search link is at the top of the page under the fa in face­book).

Superfluity of Naughtiness

I rarely look at the King James trans­la­tion, but today I hap­pened to glance at it while prepar­ing for a con­fer­ence:

Where­fore lay apart all filth­i­ness and super­fluity of naugh­ti­ness, and receive with meek­ness the engraft­ed word, which is able to save your souls. James 1:21, KJV

That’s right: we are to avoid a super­fluity of naugh­ti­ness.

What beau­ti­ful phras­ing.

Half Blind In Bangkok

I’ve been mean­ing to men­tion this for a while, but my broth­er is half-blind in Bangkok right now. He’s on a mis­sion trip and got some sort of infec­tion behind his eye­ball (yuck).

It sounds like he’s going to be A‑OK, but I’m sure it’s quite dis­turb­ing to fall ill in anoth­er coun­try. Espe­cial­ly a non-West­ern one.

On the plus side, he had trav­el insur­ance and so every­thing is paid for. It’s far bet­ter for him finan­cial­ly than it would have been in Amer­i­ca. And what­ev­er he has isn’t some­thing he got in Thailand–it was devel­op­ing before he left.

Any­way, he should be com­ing back this week­end. Until then, I’ll keep think­ing about Mur­ray Head­’s One Night In Bangkok.