Dead trees for a good cause

03 Dec 2006

I just printed 400 pages for a survey I get to do tomorrow afternoon. I was thinking about taking it to church and getting opinions from the same kinds of people there (it’s a survey for CYIADA for youth leaders), but then realised it was pretty much useless with them because I already knew everything they had to say. So it’s more of a survey for really basic aggregate number stuff, not in-depth things I couldn’t figure out on my own.

Which, I’ve decided, is fine, because I’ve got a web and email address on the piece of paper, and for the number of contacts this so-called “survey” seeds I’m praying it’ll be completely worth it, even if no-one bothers filling in the survey properly. Really, $40 (or however much actual cost per page is here) is pretty good if I only get 10 quality leads on people who are desparately keen to use something like this… and can wait a few months.

I mention that as trouble appears to be brewing on the home front re: the waiting part… :

People are enthusiastic but in a “let’s grab a generic CMS and mix it up with Blogger and Google Groups and it’ll rock” kind of way. Which is fine for all of about six months, then you’ve gotta do it all over again because 1 of 3 stops working for whatever reason. And scalability issues. Grr… anyway. I thought we’d been through all this already with our abortive Yahoo! Calendar attempts of 18 months ago. Apparently not.

So… please be praying for wisdom and patience around that particular issue. And especially that I’d be loving, because right now I’m in a position where I could clobber people with technical ramblings until they agree with me (read: relent), or simply go and change it as I think it should be… but doing either of those things is obviously unproductive. Again, prayer for wisdom is very welcome!

Prayer is also sought for tomorrow — for the Youth for Christ programme running at St Andrews all day, and then for me at the Connecting in a world of change conference as I present in my little 2.20 to 2.30 timeslot. Which is plenty of time for a geek like me — I actually do enjoy public speaking, but that doesn’t mean I’m much good at it!

I’ve also got to get a site up for CYIADA, because I decided that if I stuck it on print materials and did 130 copies of it, then the potential for embarrasment should be sufficient motivator to make me move quickly! Hehe. Really must get one of the IT guys here to setup hosting first thing tomorrow… I figure it’s okay if it’s not working straight away, because I can say it’s just been put up and there’ll be something there in the next couple of days.

In other domain-related news I also picked up josh.st. So you should be able to get to this site via that funky URL in a few hours once DNS pushes through (the nameservers have switched, finally — .st’s NIC took forever with that — but obviously it’s still got to propagate). I know I’m always saying this but there’s a new design on its way. I’ve got three sites in the works at the minute, so if it doesn’t come in a hurry don’t be too surprised. I doubt anyone is anymore, though!