Technology and the Ministry of Reconciliation
I ended up writing my Systematic Theology paper on technology and how it has impacted Christianity in the past and how it will in the future. I’m including an excerpt of the paper from my discussion of GodTube Tangle.
Download Technology and the Ministry of Reconciliation(pdf). I would appreciate any feedback you could provide.
GodTube Tangle is a new video sharing site that is marketed to be a direct competitor to YouTube. Upon arriving at the site, you begin to understand that this is supposed to be YouTube for Christians. A look at the top 20 videos on the site confirms this assumption. The number one video is of a little girl reciting Psalm 23. It is a cute video with over four million views. A video called “Baby Got Book”, a parody of “Baby Got Back” from a decade ago is third on the list. There are also three parodies of the Mac vs. PC advertisements, that round out the top 20 videos on GodTube Tangle.
As the body of Christ why is it we must try to emulate or rip off the world’s ideas instead of coming up with our own. We are Christians, which means the God of the universe lives inside each believer. He created this world. He gave each of us minds to pursue thought. Why don’t we ask God for unique ideas that will reveal His glory to a lost world instead of trying to Christianize bad rap songs?
Leaving the discussion of the content, the question needs to be asked. What is the purpose of GodTube Tangle? According to an interview with CEO Chris Wyatt on ABC Nightline, the goal of GodTube Tangle is to reach the 2.1 billion Christians in the world and help them grow in their faith.
This I believe is the problem with many so-called Christian entities. They are inward focused. They take the words of John in his first epistle and use it for a proof text. “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world-the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does-comes not from the Father but from the world.” Alternatively, they take the symbolism in Matthew 5:14-16 too far, that we are to be a city on a hill, shining our light that others would see our works and glorify God.
Dr. Daniel Morgan, Associate Professor of Missions and Director of Nehemiah Project at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, puts forth that the church has moved away from a fire base mentality. With a firebase, a soldier goes to reequip and rest after battle, but then he goes back out to the front line and re-engages in the battle. He states that many in the church have adopted a fortress mentality. They go inside their fortress and do not leave the security of the walls. They eat, sleep and fight from behind the walls.
There are those in the Christian church who have adopted this mindset. They believe that we are to separate ourselves and protect ourselves behind fortified walls. When the world attacks, we will defend ourselves and yearn for when the battle will be over. We will live pious lives so that we can fulfill Matthew 5:16. The world will be able to see our light through the arrow slits in the walls of our fortress.
To begin with, the fortress mentality goes against the Great Commission. Christ commands us to go into all the world. That cannot be accomplished from behind the walls of a fortress. The armor of God that Paul describes in Ephesians is one of an infantryman, not of a fortress guard. We see how we are to live in the world in 1 Peter 2:11-12. “Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.” We are to live among the world but not be conformed. By rubbing shoulders with the world every day and living lives set apart from the world, God will receive glory. Just a few sentences before Jesus talked about believers being the light of the world, he called believers salt of the earth. Not only are we to reflect God’s glory through our actions but we are to be change agents in our culture.
A better use of the time and resources of GodTube Tangle would be to infiltrate, for lack of a better word, YouTube. They should begin by not posting “Baby Got Book” or the little girl reciting the 23rd Psalm. They should pray and fast as they wait on God to teach them how they should go about redeeming YouTube. Then they create videos that clearly explain the Gospel and God’s work in humanity through preaching, story telling, music and even parables. Jason Moore was quoted in Jennifer Harris’s article about the use of metaphor. “We’ve gotten so far from the method Jesus gave us… Most sermons are informational, mostly removed from story and parable. Jesus gave us the model for a reason. If Jesus didn’t say anything without using metaphor, what does it mean that we don’t use it all?” Those at GodTube Tangle should heed that advice, put forth their very best effort, and create something that is original, culturally relevant, but above all eternally significant.
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You Have to Love, Big Dumb Corporations
I saw this article on Ars Technica about an addition to AT&T’s new Terms of Service. According to the new terms what I’m about to say could get my service canceled. Well, if the last month is any indication it won’t be that big of a deal.
So at the end of August, I decided to get DSL and cancel my cable and internet service with Ygnition. Ygnition uses a Dish Network feed and I imagine their home office is a temporary building with satellite dishes halfway mounted to the side of the building.
Enough about them. So I signed up for the cheapest phone service and DSL I could get. A few days later, I was contacted that everything had been connected and was ready to go. However, my DSL was not working. So I called tech support. They walked me through all the basic steps and they couldn’t figure it out. They gave me some stupid excuse and told me to try again in a few days. A few days passed and nothing. So then I called back. This technician told me she couldn’t check my line because there was an outage. The only problem is that my DSL was not working before the outage. So the next time I called they asked me if I had a dial tone. I don’t know. I don’t own a landline. I haven’t had a landline in a year and a half. I had one in Louisiana but that was only because I had DSL there. I owned a phone but it was never plugged in because I didn’t want to get telemarketers. So I broke down and bought a phone. No dial tone.
So the technician ran a test and told me that my line had not been connected at the central office. He put in a trouble ticket. Two days later, still no dice. So the next technician told me they could send out a technician but if they had to come inside it would cost $30 for the trip and then $99 for the first half hour. I told them to send the technician but I was not going to spend another $100 for service I have been unable to use for the last month. Then he tried to sell me on the $87 package that would cover the inside repairs. The only reason I signed up for DSL is because it was $25. Why would i want to pay 4 times that. So I called back this week and they told me that if you don’t have phone service for more than 3 months then they disconnect a device in the complex phone box. So basically they break the phone so they have to charge me to fix what they broke. The technician told me that they don’t charge $99 ever for their repair work. But he couldn’t give me a hard number on the costs. I was frustrated by this point and I just want my DSL to work, so I told them to do it. So when I got home from class today, I had DSL service.
And then I listened to TWIT, Episode 115, where they also mentioned the change to the terms. According to the changes,
5.1 Suspension/Termination. … AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes … (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.
So because I just wrote about how their support is horrible and it took them a month to fix my DSL, they could terminate my service.
As Patrick Norton and the Ars Technica article pointed out, if AT&T begins down this path they are opening themselves up to a world of economic and legal issues. As an ISP, they are a safe harbor, which means they aren’t held responsible for anything illegal that their users do while online. However, if they begin restricting what goes over the lines then as Patrick Norton pointed out, they become a publishing company and lose their safe harbor status. So then if they allow copyrighted or illegal material through, then they are liable. Plus if they start disconnecting customers, they are going to face a consumer firestorm. So, go ahead AT&T. Cancel my service. I’ll take my money elsewhere and watch as the lawsuits roll in.
Book Review: Joel on Software
Then my supervisor at my Fielder resigned. I became the entire web design department, and we were beginning redesign of the website. My new supervisor deferred to my judgment on how to proceed. I knew nothing about managing projects or relating to management.
That is when I came across Spolsky’s book. The book is composed of articles taken from his blog as well as some new material. Here are a few quotes from the introduction that express the feelings I had at the beginning of this project and now eight months later with the project still incomplete.
“You never asked to be a manager. Like most software developers I know, you would have been much, much happier if they would just let you sit and code quietly.”
“Managing software projects has nothing at all to do with programming. If all you’ve done so far is write code, you’re probably starting to discover that human beings are perhaps a smidgen less predictable than your garden-variety Intel CPU.”
“As a result, many software projects fail in some way or another, either overtly or covertly, because nobody on the team has any idea how a successful software project might be run. So too many teams never deliver their product, or take too long to deliver the product, or deliver a product that nobody wants.”
The Practice of Programming
One of the opening chapters discusses “The Joel Test.” It contains 12 simple questions, but it allows anyone involved in a software development project to determine the successfulness of the team. Our department got a 2 out 12.
Four chapters are devoted to writing functional specifications. “A functional specification describes how a product will work entirely from the user’s perspective. It doesn’t care how the thing is implemented. It talks about features. It specifies screens, menus, dialogs, and so on.”
I have to say that I geeked out after reading these chapters. I spent several days writing spec detailing how the new site would work. I even incorporated humor as Spolsky suggested to make the specs easier and more enjoyable to read. I showed them to our committee and they briefly flipped through them. They have sat on shelf for the last eight months.
To round out the first section, Spolsky covers how to create a simple project schedule in Excel, bug fixing, and Fire and Motion. This is borrowed from military tactics. Fire at the enemy [project issues] and move forward.
Managing Developers
One chapter is devoted to guerrilla interviewing. Any programmer interview should include an impossible question and a solvable programming question. These questions allow the interviewer to see the problem-solving process and the skills of the programmer. Do they use a naming convention for their variables? Do they plan before beginning to code?
Spolsky advises in the chapter entitled “Things You Should Never Do” that a developer should never scrap existing code and start from scratch. I faced this situation after coming on at Fielder. The decision was made to use a content management system (CMS) called DotNetNuke to develop the new website.
I spent several months beating my head against the wall trying to make it work. I finally convinced my new supervisor to permit me to write my own CMS for Fielder. In this instance, it worked out because I was able to tailor the CMS to the needs of Fielder and I wrote it in a language I am very familiar with. This ties in with the iceberg secret.
With software, the user interface, with all the graphics and fonts, composes 10 percent of the work while the programming is 90 percent of the work and goes unnoticed. So when a nonprogrammer sees a program where only 10 percent of the user interface is complete they assume that only 10 percent of the project is complete.
This happens every time I try to show off new functionality on the website. I might show them how I can switch translations of the site with a mouse click. Instead of oohs and aahs I get, “I don’t like the font color” or “Is that the picture we decided on?”
At the same time, most every page on the new site is devoid of copy. So every meeting, I get the question, “Where are we?” I have to remind them that my 90 percent of the programming is done. I just need copy from them. But since the site is empty the natural thought is that it’s a programming issue.
Being Joel: Random Thoughts on Not-So-Random Topics
In the final chapters, Spolsky discusses how to be successful when developing a software business. One chapter is simply titled, “Getting Things Done When You’re Only a Grunt.” Another chapter discusses how each company must either choose the organic growth model of Ben & Jerry’s or the “get big fast” model of Amazon.
Conclusion
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It wasn’t too heavy on the Computer Science (I’m a sociology major turned programmer). He provided a great deal of useful business advice in an entertaining way. I wish this book had been available when I tried my hand at self-employment. I would recommend this book to anyone in software, management or just wanting basic tech business principles.
Net Neutrality, Tubes, Dark Fiber and the 700Mhz Spectrum
Let me first begin by briefly describing the debate over Net Neutrality.
Side A: The Major Telecommunication Companies and anyone else that has spent billions of dollars laying fiber and copper lines over which billions of bits of information flow every second. This group thinks that companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon and Apple should pay an Internet Toll for using their cables. From my understanding the toll would be based on the amount of data sent over the wires. For someone like Google, which owns YouTube and makes billions on Internet search, this toll would severely cut into their profits.
Side B: Companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple think the wires should be open and free just like the highway infrastructure in the United States. Consumers and businesses alike are able to use the highways for personal use and commercial gain.
This story has been brewing for over a year and the remarks I will mention are from June 2006. A particular set of remarks by Senator Ted Stevens came to mind when I was attempting to explain to my mother how email worked over the network. The Internet being “a series of tubes.” I thought I’d share some of my comments about his statements and let you read and hear for yourself.
I first heard Senator Ted Steven’s remarks on Net Neutrality on This Week in Tech – Episode 60. They only played about 5 minutes of the original 11 minute recording of Senator Steven’s comments. Upon listening to his comments I agreed, and still agree with the hosts that he does not have a clear view of how technology works. As I have listened to the entire clip I have come away with a few more observations.
One, it is usually best to stop and think before speaking. From the sound of it, someone on the committee got him riled up and he proceeded to rant for 11 minutes without making any sense. Two, it’s an old proverb, “Better to be silent and to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” Three, he seems to oscillate between the two viewpoints. He just does not make a strong argument either way. Four, this is pure speculation but listening to his comments, it feels like he is fighting for lobbyists and not the greater good of the people. In an unrelated case to Net Neutrality, Senator Stevens is under investigation by the FBI and the IRS.
In Senator Stevens’ defense, Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. wrote an article titled, Senator Stevens is Not As Dumb as He Sounds, which discusses how Senator Stevens’ concepts are not too far off.
Oddly enough, while searching through my brother’s Flickr photos, I found this great illustration of Senator Stevens’ view of the Internet. Be sure to read the captions for a complete understanding of network connectivity.
Here are some of Senator Stevens’ comments, which originally appeared on Wired.com. I will interject some of my own comments. My comments will be in bold and Senator Stevens’ will be in italics.
I just the other day got, an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
Ok, we have all sent an email to friends, family, or coworkers and it never arrived. It is not however because the Internet was clogged and needed a bottle of Drano Max. Bad cables, finicky servers, spam filters and a whole list of other reasons are to blame. Not clogged tubes.
So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this Internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.
We aren’t earning anything by going on that Internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discriminate against those people …
Apparently Senator Steven’s has not perused Ebay recently. There are tens of thousands of consumers using the Internet for commercial purposes. Granted, they are not using the amount of bandwidth of YouTube but Stevens’ argument is that there are just a few people using the Internet for commercial purposes. As someone that makes his living by developing web sites, I am earning money by “going on that Internet.”
They [companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon, & Apple] want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.
It’s a series of tubes.
And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Here lies the infamous quote. There is a Wikipedia article devoted to this quote. This is where Net Neutrality comes into play. The Telcos and some members of Congress want these Internet companies to pay a toll to use “the tubes.” What they don’t understand is this will destroy the model the Internet was founded on and it completely messes with a free market system. If Google has to start paying millions of dollars in tolls, YouTube and Gmail will no longer be free. Netflix will have to do away with their on-demand video downloads. Apple’s cash cow, Itunes, will shrivel and die. They will have to charge more for song downloads and people will just go back to piracy.
Now we have a separate Department of Defense Internet now, did you know that?
Do you know why?
Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.
I am not really sure why he threw the DOD into the mix but I’ll comment. The DOD has their separate network not because of a fear of hairy bits clogging the pipes. They have a separate network because they have classified documents they don’t want the public or foreign nations seeing.
So that is Net Neutrality in a nutshell and why we should not let the government muck with the Internet. In the end, Google may rule the world anyway. They have spent the last few years buying dark fiber around the country. Dark Fiber is fiber optic cabling that has been laid but is not in use. Many have speculated about Google’s intentions. To fuel the paranoia, in just the last few weeks, Google offered 4.6 billion dollars for the 700Mhz spectrum. This is where the old UHF
If I could get on the Internet in most any place in the country and not have to pay Starbucks or some municipal airport for access, then Viva Google.
A Week in the Life of a Developer – Part 5
The custom CMS package is now displaying text to the browser. I got the text editor working so now updates to said pages can be made easily. But at the same time, the more I work on this, I realize there are more and more components that pop up that need to be coded. There are going to be a lot of late nights trying to get this functioning before I leave for Cambodia in 19 days. That self-imposed deadline is looming large in front of me.
But despite all the stress of feature creep and deadlines, I did have some victories. I have spent the last few weeks trying to develop a module that will allow the end user to reorder pages in their menu structure. I also want the module to allow users to move pages into a hierarchy if they want. And for several weeks, I would write equations and draw diagrams to no avail. The solutions functioned but were incomplete. That was until yesterday. I was taking a break and thinking about the problem. It was almost as if the heavens opened and the answer came forth. It was a simpler solution, yet worked in all situations.
It is moments like that which make me remember why I love programming. The struggles, the puzzles, the late nights trying to debug code are all worth it. And yes even the moments where I realize my complete incompetence. Many times after hours of struggling with something, the solution presents itself. Most times it was staring me in the face the whole time. Yet the next time, I do not make the same mistake or I diagnosis the problem in minutes as opposed to hours.
Day in the Life of a Web Developer – Part 1
I have been attempting for several months to write more often. I would like to get into the habit of writing everyday. I have read that forcing yourself to write everyday increases your creativity. I decided what better way to find material than to write about what I spend 6-8 hours being paid to do.
So, I spent my morning working from home because I had a meeting with a contractor in Mansfield. I did not see the point in wasting gas in driving to Fielder and then back out. I got to Fielder close to noon and sat down to work on the web redesign. I got approval last week to scrap the DotNetNuke CMS (content management system) we were trying to shoe horn to meet our needs. So this week I began full force writing my own CMS system specifically catered to the needs of Fielder Road.
Then this afternoon I had a meeting with the Missions minister. It was a conference call with a contractor pertaining to the new missions’ website. Ideally, I would also do that site but the Communications Team has decided I need to concentrate on one project and not spread myself too thin. I have realized looking at proposals from these design companies than when I was freelancing, I horribly undercharged. I once charged a client probably 10 times less than what some of these companies are proposing for even less of a product. Granted I was in a depressed market in a semi-rural area. I guess that in the MetroPlex you have to charge those kinds of prices in order to stay in business.
Aside from all these meetings, I spent most of my day correcting items on our old website. Sadly, that is how most of my days end up. I sit down to focus and begin coding and a problem or a meeting interrupts me. The stuff I’m working on requires I sit for several hours by myself focused on the problem. I feel like I spend all my time in meetings anymore and it feels like nothing gets accomplished at least in internet communications arena.
iPods are fun.
We got our iPods in at Fielder on Tuesday. They bought these for "testing" purposes. I didn't get much work done Tuesday afternoon because I was uploading podcasts and just figuring out the menus. It's a video iPod so I downloaded Strong Bad Emails to watch later. Work at Pizza Hut the last two nights just flew by. I listened to TWiT and sermons by Chuck Swindoll. I didn't think about how tired I was or that I wanted to go home. I also didn't harass my supervisor about going home early.
My one purchase for this thing is going to be the iPocketBible. I will be able to have the text and the audio of the entire bible.
Podcasts to check out
So I have to make a couple shameless plugs. First is Fielder Road podcasts. Partly because I helped get them set up distributing the content they already had as a podcast. Second is Faith Factor Radio . This is a site run by my church, Travis Avenue. They are projecting to begin offering podcasts in the next couple of months. There are mp3 downloads available of the last few months of sermons.
Update – 1/27/2010: I left Fielder Road in Feb 2009 and we were in the process of moving from WordPress to DotNetNuke. Apparently they didn’t port the RSS functionality to DotNetNuke.
iTunes is cool.
So the other day I decided I would check out iTunes, seeing as it automatically installed on my laptop when I upgraded QuickTime. There were a few podcasts I had heard about based off of radio shows. However in my exploration I found several others.
This Week in Tech (TWiT) – Is so far one of my favorite podcasts. Leo Laporte is the host. If you ever watched TechTV a few years ago, he was on “The Screensavers.” I enjoy this show because they talk about all things technology but it’s not a show for the masses. It is geared toward people that either work or spend most of their time in the technology sector.
Insight For Living – I listen to Chuck Swindoll during the week while I’m driving but now if I miss a sermon I can pick it up on his podcast.
Money Matters – This is another show I listen to while out delivering pizzas. Every time I listen, I’m encouraged to work harder to get out of debt. Update: 1/27/2010 – Money Matters is no longer produced but has been replaced by MoneyLife.
New Job
After about four weeks of interviews and spending time in prayer I have taken a job as Web Administrator at Fielder Road Baptist Church. In the past week, I have made the mundane changes of text on a page and I've begun implemation of a podcast for the church. Along with that I'm in charge beginning the migration from PHP to DotNetNuke. At least this will force me to learn ASP.NET and plus I can play with the bells and whistles of DotNetNuke. As soon as my test server finishes formatting the 700GB drive, I will set up IIS, SQL, and DotNetNuke. Then the fun will begin. I can crash it with infinite loops or just generally break things while learning .Net.
