Missio, Cross’d worship, and why I’m not a recluse

What is a ‘mis­sion’? How do you rec­on­cile the mean­ing you asso­ciate with that and its Latin root, mis­sio, to send, and actual use of the term? Why do we talk about a “mis­sion to do x” and here­after refer to “mis­sion” as though it encom­passed “to do x” itself, rather than the act of sending?

What on earth is a life cen­tred on two bits of wood hur­riedly nailed together and stained crim­son? Do peo­ple wor­ship sym­bols on par­tic­u­larly sug­ary buns?

I think this web­site is a mea­sure of dis­con­tent­ment. I rarely post when there is noth­ing to grum­ble about, because good news is appar­ently bor­ing. This web­site makes me feel guilty. It’s one big occasionally-ugly mir­ror. I don’t look into it when things are good, and pour the bad into it the rest of the time inter­spersed with geeky things… a slightly acquis­i­tive load of rub­bish designed to obfus­cate and cre­ate a false set of val­ues that improve (in the eye of the beholder, for a time) the reflec­tion. It’s easy to for­get these things.

At any rate, blogs are a use­less jour­nal medium. Too much hap­pens in any given day. Yes­ter­day, I installed Quick­Books and realised that absolute morons are able to run their own busi­nesses with good rea­son and it needn’t be so hard after­all. *insert rant about software*

Tax is pre­dictably bor­ing stuff, though, so when Claud sug­gested we go see Becom­ing Jane (con­trary to rumours I dragged her along — though if she hadn’t, I would have done… we enjoyed it for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, I main­tain!) I was there in a mat­ter of… well, about an hour. Some­where in the mid­dle we went shop­ping for food & ate lunch. *insert rant about the film, about the won­der­ful speed-distraction medium that IM is, and maybe others*

Spent a lazy-enough after­noon at her house until a phone call promised poker and food of the bar­be­cued vari­ety at Gareth’s place, which ended in two par­tic­u­larly dim-witted hands, and some inter­est­ing read­ing of Time magazine’s global warm­ing issue. Some of the 51 ideas printed were on the mark, oth­ers seemed a lit­tle less so (energy effi­cient light­ing was one I know enough about to take issue with, hybrid cars were thank­fully nowhere that I could see). *insert rant about global warm­ing bandwagon*

Later, I started con­tribut­ing more car­bon by try­ing to drive Budd’s car (a man­ual, I’d only drive a man­ual lawn­mower in the past) as he lis­tened to his clutch slowly being torn to shreds. *insert rant about manual/auto trans­mis­sion and licens­ing and the like*

There are other funny sto­ries to be shared within that, but each of those com­prises an entire post of its own. I have no inter­est in chron­i­cling my life with that degree of detail. Per­haps if I were a Dick­in­son–esque recluse I’d have time enough to write and lit­tle enough to write about that I might write more. But thank­fully I’m not.

# by Josh on April 12th, 2007 Tags: , , ,
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FEVA not-marketing, motivation, and red wine

FEVA’s “Pro­mot­ing the Word through Image and Text” con­fer­ence (they will break my link fairly quickly, methinks, but it’s good whilst it lasts) was today, and it rocked.

Ses­sions about archi­tec­ture to cre­ative strate­gies to the the­ol­ogy of “pro­mo­tion” (which we don’t call mar­ket­ing for fear of stir­ring the con­tro­versy pot) to a rather help­ful copy­right ses­sion (albeit one rais­ing more ques­tions than it answered), as well as great food, a com­fort­able venue, and gen­er­ally excel­lent organ­i­sa­tion, etc.

Go along next year.

And, now that pos­i­tive rec­om­men­da­tion is cemented firmly with­out men­tion of the web…

I did, how­ever, take great excep­tion to the web strat­egy speaker, who I am tempted to pour out all man­ner of vit­ri­olic utter­ances against but will attempt to refrain. He essen­tially said that footer keyword-stuffing was fine, as was spam­ming meta tags (though, thank­fully, he acknowl­edged search engines pay “less atten­tion” to them these days — I would put that closer to “insignif­i­cant atten­tion and not worth the markup bloat they so often are”). Every­thing he had to say about con­tent for the web could be sur­mised in the key­word, “key­words”, pay­ing no atten­tion to the dif­fer­ent copy-writing demands of web media and the flow-on effects of organic key­word enhance­ment. Fur­ther, he man­aged to sug­gest online games for youth and prize com­pe­ti­tions as legit­i­mate mar­ket­ing tac­tics, which, to me, seems brain-dead — per­haps I should just say “an unpro­duc­tive use of time”. The entire pre­sen­ta­tion appeared to have been repur­posed from a very basic web 1001 pre­sen­ta­tion to small busi­nesses, with­out much (or any) regard for audi­ence feedback.

For exam­ple, he asked ques­tions at the begin­ning to get an indi­ca­tion of where the audi­ence was at in terms of web pres­ence (I would say well over 90% had a web­site, with prob­a­bly half of that being main­tained in some capac­ity — yes, our web­site is get­ting touched up soon… heh, in all my free time) and then pro­ceeded to com­pletely ignore that (although he did act very sur­prised at the num­ber of hands that went up) and tell every­one about how to get online in the first place. Com­plete with the worst in Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion technique.

Def­i­nitely not a high­light of the day!

Any­way, that aside, I went home feel­ing pretty moti­vated to Get­Stuff­Done™ and started on the three gazil­lion changes pend­ing for the Matthias site… then gave up when Budd called say­ing Borat was on. I’ve gen­er­ally had a great evening, though — a few hours with a glass of red wine and a sense of accom­plish­ment as con­tent takes shape, then a con­ver­sa­tion about using Google Maps to plot some 2,100 retail out­lets effec­tively (no con­sen­sus as to how to achieve this yet, because that’s 2,100 points to be ren­dered client-side as an over­lay, which would prob­a­bly crash some browsers, if not make them run hideously slowly — but the brain is churn­ing over), then watch­ing that crazy movie. Yeah, you’ve got to laugh at it, but… gosh. Really hope they went back and explained it was satire to some of those peo­ple, if not apol­o­gis­ing out­right. Hav­ing said that, I think he’s reached the lim­its of the per­sona; it really got a bit repet­i­tive and pre­dictable (but still evok­ing laugh­ter for shock value) in parts. I still laughed loudly.

Any­way. More to come soon.

# by Josh on November 25th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| 3 Comments »