I was reading Mental Floss and they linked to an article in Time magazine (March, 2007) that focuses on pastor’s wives. Here’s the most interesting part:
Eight in 10 pastors’ wives say they feel unappreciated or unaccepted by
their husbands’ congregations, according to surveys by the Global
Pastors Wives Network (GPWN); the same number wish their husbands would
choose another profession. "Wives’ issues" is the No. 1 reason pastors
leave their ministries. The divorce rate among ministers and their
wives is 50%, no better than that of the general public.
Ouch.
It would be interesting to see if female pastors’ husbands feel the same kind of pressure. I seriously doubt it since our society tends to assume that men will/should work, so a female pastor’s husband probably doesn’t have the same set of expectations heaped upon him. According to the article 70% of pastors wives choose to work, but the tone of the article implies that the working doesn’t relieve the expectations of them to support their husbands’ ministries.
I guess what this means is next time you’re in church you need to make sure you take a moment to shake the pastor’s wife’s hand before you shake his and head out the door.
My Congresswoman Virginia Foxx caught a lot of heat for her support of the Teapot Museum in Sparta, NC. Well let me tell you that there are stranger ideas out there and Mental Floss has a few of them. They include:
I doubt anyone would have thought twice about the Teapot Museum if it hadn’t been for the fact that Rep. Foxx was trying to get federal funding for the project and it made a perfect political punching bag for thsoe folks trying to attack pork barrel spending. There’s also no indication that any of these museums received any kind of public funding, but if they did then I’d say by comparison the Teapot idea looks great. And lest we make fun of people who collect and marvel at things like teapots and PEZ dispensers let’s remember that eBay was started as a PEZ trading site. Those PEZ geeks are laughing all the way to the bank.
Xeni Jardin is one of the co-editors of Boing Boing. She posted a piece on Edge.org called Online Communities Rot Without Daily Tending by Human Hands that essentially fleshes out the thinking behind her very descriptive title. (Hat tip to Ed Cone for pointing to it). Among the very smart things she wrote I found this bit to be flat out brilliant:
Finally, this year, we resurrected comments on the blog, with the one thing that did feel natural. Human hands.
We hired a community manager, and equipped our comments system with a secret weapon: the "disemvoweller." If someone’s misbehaving, she can remove all the vowels from their screed with one click. The dialogue stays, but the misanthrope looks ridiculous, and the emotional sting is neutralized.
Now, once again, the balance mostly works. I still believe that there is no fully automated system capable of managing the complexities of online human interaction — no software fix I know of. But I’d underestimated the power of dedicated human attention.
I suspect Ed is hunting for a Typepad version of the disemvoweller as we speak. If I got more than my normal quota of one comment per millennium I probably would.
In the spring of 07 the US played Spain in a Davis Cup quarterfinal tie here in Winston-Salem. The US won and then went on to win the Cup itself in December. It seems the Cup, the actual physical Cup, is on a Victory Tour and today it’s in Winston-Salem. If you hurry you can see it at the Ski & Tennis Station on Stratford Road until 4:30 today. You can also see it at the Joel Coliseum during the BYU-Wake Forest basketball game tonight.
Celeste and I had lunch at Mayberry’s and then toddled on over to see the thing at the Ski & Tennis Station. It’s huge and it’s fun to look at the inscriptions from the ties that were played literally decades ago. I took particular pleasure in looking at the ties from the 60s that featured the great Australian teams with players like Stolle, Emerson, Newcombe and Roach. Of course I was looking for the American teams to, but since it started to get crowded with people wanting to take their picture with the Cup I needed to get out of the way before I found them.
Fred Wilson has a great post titled What My Kids Tell Me About the Future of Media in which he evaluates the current and future state of media based on the consumption habits of his kids. Here’s an excerpt:
1) When they walk into a DVD store, they rarely walk out with a movie.
It’s almost always the first season of a TV show they’ve heard is good.
They’ll go see a movie in the theater but don’t really enjoy watching
movies at home or on their computers. They feel that TV shows are
better written and more interesting. And the entertainment value is
certainly more compelling. For roughly $40US, they got something like
25 episodes of Brothers and Sisters…2) They will play games whenever given the opportunity. My oldest,
Jessica, favors brick breaker on her blackberry and admits to be close
to addicted. She claims to know kids who play it under the desk at
school…4) The only time they listen to radio is when we have it on in the
car for short rides. If it’s a long ride, we almost always plug in the
iPod and they’ll take turns DJ’ing…5) They still read books the way we did as kids. That doesn’t seem to have changed a bit…
6) They love magazines and read all the fashion, cooking, and gossip
magazines they can get their hands on. They read about the same topics
online and on TV (particularly food), but they show no signs of moving
away from the magazine. In fact, I detect a growing obsession with
magazines among my family. They literally fight over a new issue the
day it arrives.7) They don’t seem particularly interested in newspapers. They get most
of their news on the Internet. Josh will read the sports pages over
breakfast and the girls will glance at the front page. Important
current events and politics will sometimes generate enough interest
that they’ll read the front page portion of a story and then launch
into a discussion over breakfast. But I don’t see a commitment to
newspapers like we have in my generation and my parents generation.
If you’re interested in the future of media I’d definitely read the rest of his post. I’d say that my kids’ habits closely mirror his, and I’ve been struck by how my kids also enjoy books and magazines but only look at the newspaper when they have to cut out an article for a current events project at school.
One thing that is intriguing to me is how much more fun my oldest finds gaming when it’s done online against lots of different players. He’ll still play games offline if that’s his only choice, but he gets really charged up for the XBox Live games and it almost doesn’t matter which game it is. And the thought that there are millions of kids (and adults) like him out there truly boggles my mind. I think that’s a truly game-changing, culture-shifting phenomenon.
How the kids watch TV is also interesting. If they’re
worn from a long week of school they might veg out for a couple of
hours in front of the tube, but really they just watch it in short
bursts and then head to the computer to fiddle around online, or read a
magazine or read a book. They aren’t as likely to passively watch TV
as we were growing up back in the 70s and 80s, probably because they
have more choices but also I think because that they get interaction
when they go online. Actually going outside and interacting with other
kids at quaint pastimes like, oh, football or basketball is another
story entirely.
As for music, in our house the kids seem to find their music via word of mouth, whether it’s online or offline. I know this because I have a Rhapsody account set up and they have to come to me to purchase songs to download to their MP3 players. When I ask them where they find the songs the answer is always "It was on some friends MySpace" or "So and so told me about it at school" or "my best friend let me listen to it on her iPod on the bus". In my day we found most of our music from listening to the radio in addition to recommendations from friends and being bombarded with someone else’s music selections bellowing out of his boombox. Also, if you wanted just one song from an artist you had to buy the album or get a friend to tape a song off of their album (and later CD) for you. Now with services like Rhapsody the kids mix and match what they want: one Black Eyed Peas tune, a couple of Fergie tracks, etc. I think they’d fall over if they had to spend $15 to buy a CD that has just three songs they like. For that matter I’m right there with them.
I’d say it behooves all of us to watch how our kids operate because in a few years the media companies are going to change how they deliver their wares to meet those habits and we’ll be following their lead.
Fec is reading The One Percent Doctrine and has pretty much sold me on what my next read is going to be by sharing an anecdote that contains the following:
The book tells of a specific incident after 9/11 where the FBI
briefed the president about a group of middle-easterners attempting to
buy a large warehouse in Kansas. Due to the Cheney doctrine of acting
upon even the slightest suspicion, effort was expended to find out what
these characters were up to. In days subsequent to the report, the
president, as was his custom, asked for progress in the investigation.The briefing FBI agent, succumbing to the president’s penchant for
operational bravado replied, “Mr. President, the FBI has Kansas
surrounded.”“That’s what I like to hear,” Bush replied. Later, it was determined
that the suspects were planning to run flea markets and needed a
location to store their goods.
Read the rest of Fec’s post because, well, it’s good.
Despite my earlier lamentations about running a home office network I do want to make a recommendation for anyone that is setting up a network in their house. Definitely check out powerline network gear as an alternative to wireless. FYI, powerline networks allow you to plug a network cable from your router into a small converter that plugs into any power outlet in your house, then you plug other converters into any other outlet in the house and run network cables from those to the computers you want to connect to.
My office is the hub for our home network and is located on the top floor of the house. The kids’ computer is just down the hall from mine and Celeste’s computer is downstairs. Both are close enough that they shouldn’t have an issue with wireless signal strength but unfortunately they do. Celeste in particular would have very sketchy connections that varied from moderate to very weak, and that made her online experience not-so-pleasant.
Last week I was reading a small-biz magazine and came across an article that said that the latest generation of powerline networking gear had eliminated a lot of the problems experience with the first generation gear back in the late 90s and now offered more reliable and faster connections than most wireless networks.
On Friday I was in Staples and saw that they had a Netgear Wall-Plugged Ethernet Extender Kit – XE102G for $99.95. Since that price matched what I found in my online searches I snagged it and brought it home. The setup was incredibly easy:
I did this and fired up her browser and found that she was connected and had great connection speed. The only problem that we’ve found is that certain appliances, like a vacuum or hairdryer, can slow down the connection by providing a little interference but it’s not a major issue.
According to Netgear’s info we can connect up to five devices in a similar manner so I’m probably going to get adapters for the kids’ computer and for the XBox 360 that the oldest son is saving up to buy. That way he can game online and maybe we’ll see him on the weekends instead of having him disappear for two days to a friend-with-XBox 360’s house.
A couple of things to point out:
Working out of a home office has some definite upsides and downsides. The upsides include not having to shave every day and working in sweats. The largest downside is being your own tech support. Take this morning (please)…I get up to my office and find that I cannot get to my email or get my browser to "find" the web. Strangely my VOIP (Vonage) phone works and I can access my client’s VPN (virtual private network). To rectify my situation I resort to all my old tricks:
I run down to Celeste’s office to see if she can connect. No problemo for her, so that means that the problem’s with my PC. Using her computer I Google my issue and get some tips involving manually resetting DNS’s, pinging and other nefarious and hideously technical actions. I continue cursing.
Upon returning to my office I decide to plug the cable from my router directly into my computer, thus bypassing Vonage. Voila I’m online. Still haven’t totally resolved the issue, but hopefully I’m getting close.
Still cursing.
Befuddled 