I wasn’t thrilled with Schlotzsky’s last night. I had gotten distracted reading news on the free wireless Internet service. After not seeing my pizza for 15 minutes, I went to check on it. They lost the order! There were like four customers in the store and six people working behind the counter. Not exactly an overworked staff.

They had given me one of those buzzer pager things. It never went off. I pointed this out to the guy closest to the counter. He says, “Yah, those don’t always work.” I said, “But you still pass them out as if they do?” He shrugged.

I asked if they had even made my pizza in the first place. He shrugged again and said that maybe someone else picked it up. I looked slowly from one person to the next. Nobody looked too guilty.

I couldn’t let go of the fact that this restaurant has a wireless Internet connection to the entire world. You can walk in and connect to faraway places. Yet they can’t get the pager to work. And since they have pagers, they have no intercom system to announce numbers. Out of sheer curiousity, I asked the shrugger who makes such decisions at Schlotsky’s. He responded quite characteristically.

I’ve added a few more links to other blogs and journals. Check ‘em out!

The Texas Lady: Chatterbox
StateDog
Fragments from Floyd
Perotheus

I’m writing from the road… sort of.

I was heading towards the local laundromat, but I decided to stop off at the Schlotzsky’s Deli for a bite to eat. Schlotzsky’s has free, wireless Internet service. Very cool! I like the Internet. I like wireless. And I am very fond of free. Good deal! All of the Austin locations have free Internet service. (Starbuck’s makes you pay for it.)

Tonight’s dinner is an 8″ Double Cheese and Pepperoni Pizza with sour cream and onion pototo chips, and a small drink. Yummy! I might have to get dessert with this as well.

I am toting along my laptop to see if I can catch up on my various jobs. As you can see, I’m not currently doing much on any of that work. I should probably eat and get some work done.

I have started writing several times tonight, but my brain hasn’t been functioning so well. I think I’m too busy.

I’m halfway through the four weekends of the Midwinter Conferences at MoRanch. I’ve been really enjoying them this year. Unfortunately, they seem to be going by quite quickly. My pastor will be the keynote speaker this coming weekend. I’m looking forward to that.

Work has been very busy over the last few weeks. My team is getting ready for our major cycle of work which starts in the next month.

I’m also working on materials for a capital campaign for a church building project. I’m designing the campaign materials. Should be fun.

And then there is all of the other projects that I haven’t quite finished… ugh. I need a really long vacation.

As I went to throw away a bit of trash tonight, I heard a rustling noise from the back of the apartment complex dumpster. Almost simultaneously, I realized that I was staring into the eyes of a large raccoon.

I thought to myself, “Why isn’t he running away from me?! It’s a bit unnerving when they don’t get scared and just run away.”

Then I realized that the raccoon was quite possibly thinking the same thing.

We came to a rather quick agreement not to hurt each other and went our separate ways.

As I was driving along a stretch of Texas highway this past Friday, I saw a sign at a small church that stated, “Our children know sign language. Do yours?”

I’m assuming that the church was advertising the accomplishments of its Sunday School program or similar. But I thought that the sign would have worked just as well if it had said, “Our kids are better than yours. So there.”

Sorry for the lack of posts during this past week.

I have just returned from the first of four weekend conferences. Getting ready for the weekend consumed a number of evenings during the past week. I was a bit tired going into the weekend and now at the end of it all I am very tired. I’m going to have to go to bed early tonight.

I’m half of the tech/sound/light crew for the conference. My main role is to work with the music and worship leaders for each weekend and put lyrics, graphics, and other such things up on a large screen at the front of the auditorium. Basically, I get to play with my computer and lots of other gadgets. Fun stuff!

I guess I should say a little bit about the conference itself. The conference is called the Midwinter Conference. It is held at MoRanch near Hunt, Texas. Deep in the Texas Hill Country. The conference is for the youth of Mission Presbytery, which covers portions of central and south Texas, and is run by the Midwinter Planning Team (MPT for short).

The planning team consists of about 30 youth and a half-dozen or so adults. The youth are all juniors and seniors in high school. Awesome group! They commit seven weekends out of the year to these conferences — three weekends for planning and the four weekends of the actual conference. Most serve as MPTs for two years. Most of the adults have been involved with this conference for a number of years. This is my 8th year.

There are two junior high weekends and two high school weekends. The format for each weekend remains the same. But there are a few differences. Different keynote speaker; different music leaders; and different youth attending.

This weekend was quite successful! And it was very successful for a first weekend. Usually we have a lot more bumps over the first weekend than we seemed to have on this one. We tried a few new things this year. Some worked; some didn’t. But nothing major went wrong. We’ll make adjustments for the next few weekends.

We had about 190 people total. That includes adult sponsors and a planning team, so there were probably about 150-160 junior highers there. Great bunch of kids! We will have closer to 300 (maybe more) coming to next weekend’s conference. Wow.

Well, I’m getting very sleepy, so I think I’ll post this and take a nap. More on this conference later.

I thoroughly enjoyed my younger years, but I have to say that I simply love being an adult.

Among the many reasons why — I am currently sitting on the couch eating chips and dip. I haven’t had dinner yet. And I just might not. Depends on if I get full on chips or not.

There’s a really stupid company out there who is spamming referrer logs. Actually, it isn’t necessarily this company. They’ve just created the software to give others the means to spam my logs and everybody elses. This isn’t not illegal, but it is certainly annoying.

I’m not even going to bother mentioning the name of the company. They don’t deserve a mention.

In my log, I have referrer links to the Recording Industry Association of America and Dennis Kucinich. The whole point of referrer links is to see who is linking to my site. I’m pretty sure that the RIAA and Kucinich campaign are not drumming up support for the citizens of Peachwater. I doubt that any of the referrer links actually originate with website owners or supporters of these organizations.

You can read more about this at Metafilter.

Learn more about Spam legislation and why its all called Spam anyway.

As a nod to the 20th anniversary of the Macintosh, Apple has posted an enhanced version of their popular “1984″ ad which aired during the Superbowl of the same year. (It was aired once and only once by Apple.)

Text of commercial
Voice of character on screen: Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!

Scrolling text: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.”