08 Dec 2006
One of the really interesting things coming out of this latest CYIADA survey is a really amusing (but kind of sad) disparity between what people know when asked, and what they understand and do.
Take, for example, e-mail & SMS communications.
Respondents were asked how much the youth they lead use mobile phones/e-mail services. In one case, a respondent said that “nearly all” youth used mobile devices, whilst “about half” of them had an e-mail address or used MSN/other IM platforms. Frequency of use was not polled.
The same respondent, when asked about their existing communications, said that whilst they sent out e-mail messages, they did not use SMS at all.
There are less cases in the opposite direction, which is encouraging. There does appear to be an underreporting of mobile usage occurring in some instances, but this is only verifiable where multiple respondents from one church give data. Generally, the higher figure will be accepted as authoritative, as higher figures are — for the most part — those supplied by more knowledgeable respondents, measured according to exposure to podcasting/use of video, and awareness of existing church web activity.
Either alarmingly or encouragingly (encouraging given the state of some of these websites), respondents’ awareness of their church’s web properties is, speaking generally, quite low. This is not only for reasons of stale content — some websites, despite aesthetic deficiencies, have up to date content but apparently little in the way of visitors. This could be taken to suggest that the content is up to date but remains irrelevant!
One website visited had as its most recent forum post a declaration that it had been three years since the last post was made on that forum.
Youth websites have been slightly under-reported but not significantly so, and this may be attributed to the wording of this question: “Does your youth group have a website (separate from your church site)”. There may be instances where there is a website separate in design and maintenance but existing under the same domain name in a folder or something, where this has not been reported. One or two cases of this have been detected.
Further, there was no question on Myspace/SocNet presence (for reasons of simplicity as much as anything — the aim of the survey was emphatically not to confuse!). Usage of these is not even moderately common, but enough are popping up to make me wish I’d at least left space for it somewhere (“Other web sites of note:” type question).
Still got about a third of responses to process still. This will be reposted at CYIADA.com when I setup a blog there (probably this weekend, or early next week… depends somewhat on what’s happening in Fiji the next couple of days)
08 Dec 2006
I don’t usually even remember dreams. And, when I do, they’re generally just random narratives that don’t link in closely with real life. Last night was different… I dreamt that a box of computer stuff arrived unexpectedly (from a known sender, with known contents… it just wasn’t meant to be sent for free/at all), and then, in some bizarre shift that tends to happen in dreams, I was at church before something started (Carols service? evidently the holiday I’m meant to be away on then didn’t happen… but what happens next defies that chronology) just standing near the door, when all of a sudden a friend who is a long way away taps me on the shoulder & we go and sit down somewhere. Just for a day, just on a stopover at home, before heading elsewhere… but still… lovely. I miss more than I think. Then there were vision and sound problems, but I wasn’t going to get up in case my friend disappeared. And the problems fixed themselves/other people appeared (literally, it’s a dream okay?) to fix them.
But this morning is weird because the dream established a contrast of distance from reality that isn’t entirely pleasant. That’s why good (completely) irrational dreams must be better than good (tenuously) bound-to-reality dreams. And now I’m in that post-dream woke-up-too-early (I woke up normally) state of confusion & expecting something strange to happen & not knowing exactly what’s going on or if everything is alright (there were other dreams, too). By the time that feeling subsides, I will have forgotten the dreams completely and remember them only by this milestone. This boundary stone of dreams.
07 Dec 2006
I recognise this post is highly ironic in light of yesterday’s remarks about my not being able to use a spreadsheet in parody of Apple’s Mac/PC ads, but, please, let it slide.
So all I want is an enum field. Or a multiple choice box, easy to get in Excel.
Neither of these are available at time of writing. The term “enum” has only been mentioned on any OO.o mailing lists pertaining to Base nine times, ever. And it supposedly connects to a MySQL server. Yeah, right.
I guess it’s back to rapid prototyping of a web interface to deal with data entry, or using Excel/Access… sigh. This was meant to be the quick and easy (and open source) solution.
06 Dec 2006
Spent most of this afternoon absolutely raging at an iMac. They’re unstable, buggy, pieces of crap and any pretense at simplicity is entirely unfounded. Several behaviours (or lack thereof) are altogether ridiculous — even Windows manages to do photo thumbnailing & previews better, and, yes, it’s a PC. Take that and shove it up your “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials — I can’t use Excel, but I can sure as anything see what photos I have on a CD when I throw them in my drive. Sigh.
I was lead to believe that iMovie was a safer bet than Windows anything-free, but after this afternoon’s experience, perhaps not. Time to blow $800 on Adobe Production Studio already, methinks. This end of the year makes me feel like applying for a credit card (for practical reasons, not just “silly-season” consumerism), but I won’t, yet.
Also had fun this morning sending a hundred and fifty dollars (or thereabouts) worth of lamps up in flames. Well, not quite anything so spectacular, but they’re dead now. Even so, still vaguely ahead of the game. If anyone wants to buy a stack of 110V 1,000W GE Par 64 globes… heh. I have a feeling this investment may prove profitable sometime in the next decade when there is finally spare time enough! Meh! Either way, this morning was good times. And Katy & myself now feel rather more pleased with our ghetto grey-area-legality electrician skillz, knowing that it was the lamps, not our wiring, which sucked. Or, didn’t suck but were totally not designed for certain usage. Or something.
Mind you, I’m no particular stranger to blowing theatrical lights. At ANCON, out of a rig of perhaps twenty par 64′s, three broke on my watch (two on the last day). I’m adamant it’s because the venue’s power sucked, but the site manager reckoned they hadn’t needed replacement in over two years. Which makes me think that, given a 2000 hour rating on such things which gives <170 days @ 12 hours a day, they can’t have been using the space too much! Shrug.
I should probably just leave the lights alone for a couple of months so that I spend enough time working to afford video things — which would, recursively, cause the same problem as the lights, I spose! All good fun.
04 Dec 2006
So titled because, God willing, there will be more surveys to come.
Went down pretty well methinks. Praise God! I managed not to talk too long or garble words too much, as evidenced by the fact that people managed to write down what “CYIADA” stood for when I explained it was nothing to do with cryptosporidium or Sydney Water — some surveys had “Christian Youth in a Digital Age” neatly penned across the top next to my cryptic “CYIADA” acronym, which brought great joy! Obscure acronyms worked well because the previous spot had opened with “What does CMS mean?” (no, not the web developer’s idea of a CMS), so I was able to follow that up with something no-one would guess, and use that as an excuse to launch into a little rant about what it was. I’m pretty sure I took under three minutes.
That three minutes was basically: for people like you (youth leaders); early next year (2007); gives blog, podcast, email & SMS tools; lets you get resources you need online instantly; best used to link back to real world ministry/promoted in real world ministry; we want to know what you think about it/how you’d use it.
I had planned to read from a script but kinda got up and changed my mind, for whatever reason — we were running a couple of minutes behind, the audience seemed more intimate than I’d thought (hadn’t seen the venue before), and I didn’t really like what I’d already written, anyway. So yes. Punchy apparently worked well enough.
Enough people were excited about it to make me immensely happy, and I got more than 50 survey responses (from 130 printouts, probably 120 participants as predicted, but it let me cover empty seats when papering the room before the session) which is so so useful. A few seemed very disinterested or generally negative about it, which did hurt a bit but really, there’s no way I was going to get 100% positive feedback.
By positive I mean supportive rather than “yes, we would use something like this” — I got a lot of positive responses that even fall outside the product’s scope, which is frustrating in an entirely different way — I’d not even considered there might be people who only did kids ministry at the conference, but discovered two lovely responses from people that had added primary school years to my question, “Leading kids in school years…” and circled them, instead. They were interested in none of the contact functionality, but were keen on perhaps starting to use video to support what they were doing. Of course, that’s outside the scope of what CYIADA is trying to do, but there’s no where else for them to get that in the same way (there are DVD-based resources for this, but not any videos available online under a micropayment model).
Aggregate results might get published sometime. Not tonight, I think the last week has just set in (or maybe I drank a bottle of V this afternoon and it’s worn off? Shrug.) Either way, I’m sitting at work completely exhausted and need to go home and sleep muchly.
(Still need to setup cyiada.com domain name quickly, before anyone sees it! Sigh… I’m so organised…)