April 6, 2011

April 6, 2012

Sarah has done an amazing job taking care of The Brown for one whole year!

Click the photo to explore the 360 panorama….

So sit back, kids, and let uncle Owen tell you about the time…

Jesus turned the water into wine…

The story is actually way better with words.

Let’s be honest. Most of the time, IMs are for impromptu movie references and swapping LOLs.

But, every once in a while, you actually have a deep, useful instant message exchange that gives you an idea or helps you see something in a new way. I had one of those conversations with two friends this week….

We started out poking a little fun at the typical “inspirational women’s ministry speaker.” We ended up with a sad and true observation about how we all love inspiring stories of grace…as long as they’re not in the present tense.

Email on the iphone and ipad is a pretty good experience. With one big exception. Groups. Steve Jobs insists you only converse electronically with one person at a time. If you break this rule, you’re punished by having to tap, tap, tap every recipients’ address one by painful one.

The discomfort is even worse when you can see your beautiful, elegant groups sitting in there your contacts. They’re synced up from your desktop address book, but you can’t use them. So close, yet so far away.

Thankfully, there’s an app for that.

MailShot is free. It’s available for iPad and iPhone on the App Store. It imports groups from your contacts and reformats them to work in your iOS email. Once you go through the quick set-up, type the group name into an address field  – just like a single contact.

Except now, your email’s on it’s way to the whole crew.

No more typing recipients one at a time. Sweet!

Later, he would get mud in my shorts.

TripColor is a nifty, new iPhone app being featured in the App Store. And, I’m being featured by them. So, in a strange way, Steve Jobs is smiling on me with an approving twinkle in his eye from wherever he’s hiding out right now.

TripColor works as an easy photo journal. It reads the location and time data embedded on your iPhone photos, let’s you add a short caption, then posts it to a tumblr-esque blog.

Today, they’ve put my recent trip to the Mediterranean on the app home screen for some reason. So if you download he app, you can see the donkey that tried to kill me in Santorini and other great moments in travel right from the front page.

It’s a free app that’s worth a look for photo nerds.

Steve Jobs on corporate culture:

“If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions, and you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.”

How many institutions, organizations, and causes lose good people due to frustration about bad ideas and pet projects being favored ahead of good ideas?

The kind of people who are driven to excel in their fields, those who sacrifice deeply in order to contribute significantly to their world through their work are rarely motivated by money. No price is worthy of their life’s calling. To make an impact, to succeed in a meaningful way is their pursuit and their reward.

Such passionate innovators have little patience for an environment that values playing it safe over playing to win. They feel little loyalty toward those who are not loyal to the task at hand.

Why?

Because winners don’t like playing for losers.

Watch as Eric discovers two unexpected ingredients in this Venetian delicacy as we dine on the banks of the Venice Grand Canal….

(Be sure to view in 720p to catch all the delicious detail.)

And what would the meal be without an appetizer? Click here to watch what Eric ate first…