Comment Moderation Tweaked

I used to hold all com­ments for mod­er­a­tion, but that was annoy­ing. I’ve start­ed using a WP plu­g­in that strikes a bal­ance between ease of com­ment­ing and spam pre­ven­tion.

So if you want to make a com­ment, go right ahead!

Please let me know if there are any prob­lems.

Stateside Versus Global Effectiveness

I emailed my obser­va­tions about the Assem­blies of God reach­ing just under 1% every­where to a few of my friends.

Earl Creps weighed in with this com­ment:

I just did some research for an AGWM pre­sen­ta­tion and found reports that about 40% of all Pen­te­costals (not just AG) live in Latin Amer­i­ca (with a lot of those in Brazil), com­pris­ing about 10% of the area’s 500 mil­lion inhab­i­tants. You’re right about the gross sta­tis­tics con­ceal­ing huge dis­par­i­ties, with the con­se­quent dan­ger of an “aver­age” real­i­ty. We are def­i­nite­ly much more “suc­cess­ful” abroad, but only when cer­tain select­ed head-to-head com­par­isons (e.g., New York vs. Malawi) are used. When oth­er com­par­isons are in view (e.g. Arkansas vs. Swe­den), well, things just a look a lit­tle dif­fer­ent.

Steve Mills not­ed that my stats might be flawed

For exam­ple, here in the NW we have a pop­u­la­tion of 6,131,445 and total adher­hents of 118,662 mak­ing 1.9 per­cent of the dis­trict. Even if you add in 2 mil­lion peo­ple for North ID which is also in our dis­trict the num­ber is still 1.4 per­cent.

First, bra­vo to the North­west Dis­trict. I’ve long thought they were among our most effec­tive dis­tricts in terms of coach­ing and flex­i­bil­i­ty. Now I know that my sub­jec­tive impres­sion is val­i­dat­ed by the facts.

Sec­ond, this is the sort of thing I’d expect. We have hot spots and cold spots in Amer­i­ca just as we do world­wide. They’re prob­a­bly bal­anc­ing out places like the north­east where we’re strug­gling much more.

Dave and Busters Rocks

After read­ing about the Dave and Busters in Mil­pi­tas in an aside at Real Life Comics (scroll down to “An Open Let­ter”) I knew I had to go, so Paula and I head­ed down at the end of last week.

It rocks. It’s like Chuck E. Cheese for adults. The food is good, the games are incred­i­ble, and there aren’t hordes of scream­ing young­sters every­where you turn.

I’ve got to plan a Chi Alpha event there some­time… I’d love to book a lead­er­ship learn­ing par­ty there and fill the day with peri­od­ic breaks so every­one could go blow things up and return full of ener­gy.

Lookout Outlook

After read­ing Joel Spol­sky’s com­ments on Look­out (and the fol­lowup noti­fi­ca­tion that it was now a free down­load) I went ahead and got it for my machine.

Very impres­sive.

If you use Out­look at all, you MUST down­load this pro­gram. It will make find­ing mes­sages SO much eas­i­er… search­ing for an old mes­sage used to take for­ev­er and now it’s faster than I can keep up with.