Michael Geist says it perfectly:

“The Canadian government passed legislation in 2005 mandating the creation of a do-not-call registry.  The registry takes effect on September 30, 2008, yet many Canadians may be disappointed to learn about the exemption of a wide range of organizations (registered charities, business with prior relationships, political parties, survey companies, and newspapers).  Under the law, exempted organizations are permitted to make unsolicited telephone calls despite the inclusion of the number in the do-not-call registry. However, organizations must remove numbers from their lists if specifically requested to do so.”

If I were to summarize the types of organizations that I get telemarketing calls from, it would be charities, survey companies, and certainly businesses with which I’ve had a “prior relationship”. The last one is especially egregious in that the threshold of what a “prior relationship” is doesn’t seem to be defined anywhere that I could find. If it means “We got his number from a database that we purchased from a company that he used to do business with”, then what’s the point in having this Do Not Call list?

Thankfully, Michael Geist has created iOptOut. I don’t know how well it will work, but I’ve registered and given it a try.

…you’d better be professional and deliver professional results. Over the past few days we’ve been putting the final pieces in place in a home renovation project, and I’m getting increasingly frustrated the more I discover about the errors one of our contractors made. There’s nothing worse than trusting someone to do a job for you and finding out that they cut corners, didn’t install what they said they’d installed, and generally rushed the project. Doesn’t anyone care about their professional reputation any more? You’d think in this Internet era they would…

Here are my notes from the second day. Unfortunately I was quite tired on day two, so my notes (and my ability to absorb everything) likely suffered for it. The second day also had a couple of sessions that were harder to take notes on – namely Chuck Colson and Brad Anderson.

IT: How Leaders Can Get IT and Keep IT – Craig Groeschel

• He told the story of the starting of his church: Lifechurch.tv started in a two-car garage
• 13 sites across the US, 25,000 people reached every week, one online
• Some churches have IT, some don’t have IT
• God makes IT happen…IT is from him, by him, and for His glory
• It’s rare for one person to bring IT, but it’s common for one person to kill IT
• Wherever you see IT, lives are transformed
• The early church had IT…when people tried to kill IT, IT spread
• Acts 2:42-47
• Four qualities that are most often there when IT is present
• Churches with IT have ministries that have razor-sharp focus. More ministries are not always better. Better ministries are better. What can we be the very best at in our ministries? In order to reach people that no one is reaching, you’ll have to do things that no one is doing. They do weekend worship, small groups, kid’s ministry, student ministry, missions. They don’t do concerts, men’s ministries, women’s ministries, single adult ministries, and many other things. What are you doing that you need to stop doing?
• Churches with IT see opportunities where others seem problems. We have everything we need to do what God wants us to do. What is God trying to show us through our greatest limitation?
• Organizations that have IT are willing to fail. Failure is part of the process in finding God. Peter failed many times at the beginning before he made powerful strides for God. If God is speaking to you, have the courage to get out of the boat (like Peter did). If you fail, shake it off and step up. What has God called us to do what we’re afraid to attempt?
• Organizations that have IT are led by people that have IT. You need to have IT for your ministry to get IT. When you have IT it draws others. It’s easy to get distracted and focus on the results of IT rather than IT itself. He lost IT when he became a full-time pastor and a part-time follower of Christ.
• If you don’t have IT, what are you going to do to get IT?

(more…)

The Onion has some of the sharpest comedy writing around…I love it!

An interesting discussion popped up today on a private mailing list I’m a part of, and the topic was global warming. I don’t pretend to know much about this issue other than the commonly-used talking points the media feeds us, but I’m old enough to remember several of these “dire predictions” over the past couple of decades. Does anyone remember textbooks in school during the ’80s telling us we’d run out of oil by the year 2000? Or that the would couldn’t possibly support more than 5 billion people because we’d all starve to death? Or that we were going to run out of space for our garbage by the mid-90s? The past 30 years are chock-full of predictions by experts who were sure certain things were going to happen…and they didn’t. Ten years from now, are we going to look back at the hysteria over Global Warming and wonder what we were all thinking? I can’t say for sure, but it’s always important to remember history to keep things on context.

I don’t believe we’re treating the planet and the resources we have as well as we should – I believe that mankind is a rather short-sighted, selfish steward of the planet we rule…but I also know that just because 99% of people say something is true doesn’t necessarily make it so. Most people don’t want to admit that.

Matt Miller pointed out an interesting article written by John Coleman that raises some points worth pondering:

“You may want to give credit where credit is due to Al Gore and his global warming campaign the next time you fill your car with gasoline, because there is a direct connection between Global Warming and four dollar a gallon gas. It is shocking, but true, to learn that the entire Global Warming frenzy is based on the environmentalist’s attack on fossil fuels, particularly gasoline. All this big time science, international meetings, thick research papers, dire threats for the future; all of it, comes down to their claim that the carbon dioxide in the exhaust from your car and in the smoke stacks from our power plants is destroying the climate of planet Earth. What an amazing fraud; what a scam.”

It’s also worth noting the damage that thoughtless environmentalism can cause. The move toward ethanol-based fuels really gets me because it’s the worst kind of environmentalism: knee-jerk, “do it ’cause it sounds good” choices rather than looking at the big picture. It’s idiotic to take a limited resources (food) and use it to replace another limited resource (fuel). That’s like cutting off your legs to save money on buying pants. Converting everything to electrical power and going nuclear is the best option we have in North America (and most developed countries for that matter), but that’s going to take a supreme act of will on the part of the people and their government, and I can’t see it happening for another two decades – and things getting much worse.

I’m so angry at wasting my time watching this movie, it’s hard for me to put into words how pathetic I think it is. I watched it purely based on the cast involved – I figured with an ensemble cast, it must be decent, even if I’d never heard of it before. And I happen to like sci-fi movies, even the not-so-great ones.

What a huge mistake I made. To call this movie “bad” is an insult to every “bad” movie ever made (and that includes the worst, cheesy sci-fi and fantasy “B” movies I’ve ever seen). This movie is horrible. If I could think of a word worse than horrible I’d use it.

It’s like everyone in the cast thought “Hey, it’s that Donnie Darko guy, let’s not even read the script, let’s just say yes and go for it!”. Each actor involved with this project should immediately fire their manager for not slapping some sense into them. I don’t think this movie was released in theatres – it probably caused riots in testing. It’s not worth the plastic it’s pressed upon. I want to find each of the actors involved and ask them what kind of crack they were on when they signed up for this project.

*Maybe*, just *maybe* if you watched this movie while high on acid you might be able to make some sense of it. Not being the acid-dropping type, I can only report that that watching this movie sober only made my head hurt.

I want to find the “visionary” writer/director, Richard Kelley, and demand that he give me back the 2 hours and 20 minutes of my life that I wasted on his self-fellating opus of idiocy.

I’ll leave you with a quote I found online that sums up my feelings quite nicely:

“For anyone to associate any possible positivity to this absolute colon blow of a movie is insane. This is the worst movie of all time and will be forever disappointed with anyone associated with its making. I would have preferred to have stuck a red hot needle in my pupil and slammed my face repeatedly into a slab of concrete, then to have seen this movie. All movie making is a form of artistic design and expression but some stuff is best kept to ones self.”

Do not rent this movie if you value your time or sanity. This movie, all by itself, has made me re-think my policy of always watching a movie to the very end, to give it a chance. I should have stopped this movie after the first 15 minutes.

It’s an ugly way to start my week: opening up my personal email account and seeing 300+ messages…290 of which are spam bounce-backs from some jackass spammer using my personal domain as a reply-to address. And it just happened a couple of weeks ago! Hopefully it will be as short-lived this time as it was then. And I really hope all the alpha-geeks in the world would get together and solve the problem of email domain-hijacking once and for all (and spam for that matter).

Ok, we’re back up and ready to rock – although things are a bit slow at the moment because we’re copying over large chunks of data. I’ll be posting the Dragon contest later today as planned – but it won’t be until the late afternoon/early evening. Watch Digital Home Thoughtsmebeli for it!

I’m not bad when it comes to editing video, but I truly admire people that have the sense of timing and intuition to make truly superb movie trailers – you know that ones where you end up finding out that the movie trailer was better than the movie itself? These are three movie trailers that take the movies in a completely different direction…much to the delight of anyone watching them. This is funny stuff! [Language Warning]

(That last one would have been even funnier if the announcer’s voice was more appropriate for a movie trailer…)

Like most men that were kids in the ’80s (yeah, I’m over 30 now), I have fond memories Transformers, GI Joe, and other franchises that are now flooding the modern movie market. For the most part, that’s a good thing – I really enjoyed the Transformers movie, even if I think Michael Bay should have been punched in the head for a few of the decisions he made. At any rate, as you might have guessed from the photo above, GI Joe is coming to the big screen…and I’m not sure I should be scared or excited. Will they slaughter my childhood memories with a campy, cheesy movie that will suck? Or will they retain some of the coolness and make it an enjoyable romp? Well see – but one things for sure, GI Joe: The Movie in cartoon form still kicks ass! I just watched it a couple of months ago…

Oh yeah, and in case you didn’t figure it out, that’s Ray Park playing Snake Eyes – the same guy who played Darth Maul. I think Ray Park is great, but someone needs to teach him a new stance – that’s a total Darth Maul rip-off.