LARSROOD.COM

Out of town

I'm heading out of town tomorrow to a conference my staff likes to call the "Gathering of the Twittertards"  In reality I'm going to the GodBlog conference which is probably a name not much better than the one they gave.  I'm looking forward to wandering around the convention center and seeing what is new and come down the pipe for online stuff.  Looking forward to connecting with some new people too.

GodBlog

Facebook is so 2002

Today was a funny day.  I did a lot of Twitter updates which are all linked to my Facebook account.  I was mostly talking about how close we were getting to California on our drive from Texas.  Well out of the blue I had 4 friends from 2002 who either just found me on Facebook or have been my friends for a while e-mail me and tell me they want to hang out this weekend. 

Facebook has become so much of a lifestyle tool for so many of us that a part of me wasn't even shocked by this happening.  As positional networking becomes more and more a norm it'll become even easier to just update "where you are" and have friends close by meet you to hang out.

In 2002 I worked at a camp in California for the first of 4 summers called Forest Home That was a very transformational time for me so I'm pretty glad to get to hang out with friends from those years there. 

I'm pretty stoked right now to be sitting in the back yard of my Mother-In-Law here in San Diego.  It was a long 2 days of driving but totally worth it when we got here and the weather was amazing, the food tasty and I'm meeting up with some friends tonight in Old Town San Diego for Guacamole.

Here's to Pat, Jobo, John and Mike for tracking me down. Looking forward to seeing you all.

Will get back to the Youth Ministry stuff tomorrow. This was too good.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love Craigslist I've bought, sold and traded a ton of stuff on it. Well today I may have found the ultimate deal. I think I'm going to do it so if you don't hear from me in a while check out memories from the past I may be in them

What I've been spending too much time doing.

Ok so maybe not too much time but definitely enough time that my eyes hurt. I've been working on our new web page for the last week. As with most churches we're using the youth ministry site to push the envelope a little bit further than our church has ever gone. It's mostly the interconnectedness that I'm excited about. We're working on adding in a twitter feature that will track all of our staff who are out an about and twittering with their cell phones to give students updates of where they are at. A lot of stuff with video will be ending up on the site soon too.

Here's a link for now. In the future it'll have a different name.

Sometimes I get over my geek head

Most often I'm just a dad, youth pastor, student and friend. But every once in a while the Geek-O-Meter hits at 11 and I enter the world of the net. Today it happened and here's the story. I logged in to Twitter.com where I happened to see that Kevin Rose the founder of digg.com had posted a link to a website called qik.com. Qik is basically a web portal that allows you to stream live your web cell phone camera on the web. It also has a chat feature that allows you to interact with the people who are on video.

So Kevin had just picked up a friend of his from the San Francisco airport named Gary who runs the Wine Library.tv website. They were driving to Sonoma together to taste wine.

Anyways there were only a few of us watching the stream. I was chatting with Gary while Kevin drove. At one point in classic Lars fashion I asked Gary to punch Kevin in the neck while they were on the Golden Gate bridge. Gary reached over and punched him. At that point the world seemed very small to me. That I could chat with someone while they were driving in San Francisco over a cell network and I could watch him hit someone in the neck made me realize how connected everything is becoming.

So there it is. I'm a geek and recognize that to be the case. Today was interesting, at least it was to me.

Iphone Ringtones

It's been a while since I've posted anything remotely techy on this this site but here's a quick blurb. Today Apple updated the Garage Band portion of iLife that now allows you to drag songs directly from itunes (as long as they aren't protected) cut them down to size and then "Share" them back to Itunes as a ringtone.

Pretty cool feature. My wife's new ringtone is "She's Crafty" by the Beastie Boys