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How long has it been since you’ve watched a live launch of the space shuttle? For me, I’m not sure if I ever actually watched one live. I know that sounds crazy, but as I think back on it, I can’t remember sitting and watching a live launch.

But this week, I was at the gym on a treadmill at 5:24pm central time on Wednesday, August 8th. I looked up at one of the five TVs in front of me and saw in the lower right hand corner a little bug that said “Launch at 6:36pm eastern.” That was just 12 minutes away. I only had 6 minutes of my regular treadmill program left, but I decided I’d stay on a little longer and catch the live launch.

I’m really glad I did. I mean, I got really excited about it. It was awesome, and I couldn’t even hear the sound so I was just reading the captioning. I watched the launch and the whole ascension all the way until the tank separated. I really got a good treadmill workout that day.

I don’t know, but there’s something pretty special about the space shuttle. There’s only three more years until they retire it. Try and catch a live launch sometime.

Just thought I’d give a little follow up on my last post. SunRocket bit the dust so I went looking for a new VOIP service and landed on voip.com. So far, so good.

For a while there, I was really upset at voip.com because I thought I wasn’t getting any email communication from them. I signed up, asked a few support questions … etc., and nothing. No feedback. I was beginning to get worried.

Well, a couple weeks later I checked my spam folder (which I need to start checking more often) and there were all of my communications from voip. Nice, friendly letters every step of the way letting me know that everything was moving along. So, sorry voip.com that I doubted you. All is well now. We’re still friends, right?

Took a little extra time to get the conversion equipment, but that’s understandable considering the fact that they’re dealing with 200,000 SunRocket subscribers who are now without service. Even with that, I was up and running in under two weeks with my old number transferred and everything.

Quality is great and, as always, the price is right. And they do have a responsive support ticket system and even a support phone number. Let’s just hope they stay in business.

Well, I really loved SunRocket — right up to when they sent me that email last week saying they are closing up shop. You can read their corporate announcement on their homepage. Wow, what a shocker.

In case you don’t know, SunRocket is (was) a VOIP (voice over internet protocol) telephone provider. You’ve probably heard of Vonage because they are the biggest. Well, SunRocket was the second largest VOIP provider in the world. Over 200,000 customers just lost their phone service when SunRocket shut the doors with very little warning.

I’m really sad about it mainly because I liked them so much. They must have really had a bad business model, which makes you kind of wonder about the whole VOIP industry. But, I’m a glutton for punishment so I’m re-upping my commitment to VOIP. I just can’t pass up the unlimited long distance at a fraction of the price of regular telephone. And hey, I’m already paying for the broadband internet, I might as well use it, right?

After a bit of research (all very discouraging), I’ve chosen VOIP.com. Not that I recommend them to anyone. I used to recommend SunRocket. Actually, I got at least one person to sign up on my recommendation and, well, you can see how that turned out.

Today, Church Marketing Sucks published an article that I wrote called “Why your fancy website sucks.” I am very thankful to the guys over there at CMS for giving me a place to use the word “sucks” a lot in an article.

Seriously, I’m pretty honored to be included on their site as I’ve been a long-time follower and fan. It is a great resource for anyone involved in church work. I say anyone, not just those who have titles with “communications” or “technology” in them. The truth is that communication is something we all do so I highly recommend you check out their site, especially the article that I wrote.

And let me know what you think …

Most RSS feeds are updated sporatically, but some are updated constantly. When you want to subscribe to a very active RSS feed like a Digg search feed or comments feed, you need a subscription method that offers the shortest possible delay.

Personally, I use Google reader to manage most of my RSS subscriptions, but I have found that Google reader often experiences large delays between the time something is posted and the time it shows up. This is not good for feeds that are actively updated.

When you want to subscribe to active content, I think the best method is browser-based subscription, and my preferred browser for such subscriptions is Internet Explorer 7.

Now, it pains me to promote IE7 because I am an avid Firefox supporter and I do everything else on the internet through Firefox. But for some reason Firefox’s subscription features and even the most popular plugins I have tried just fall short of IE7 in this one area.

That said, here’s how you subscribe to a feed in IE7. For other browsers, you can follow similar procedures, but they will each work a little differently.

Note: This post is being written primarily for the benefit of my friends over at the option addict trading blog who often ask about subscribing to comments, so the examples below are taken from that blog.

1) First, find the address of the feed you want to subscribe to. You can usually do this by clicking on the subscribe button found on most blogs. Here’s an example:

Example of a subscribe to feed button found on a blog. Look for the little orange icon.

2) When you click this subscribe button, you will be taken to the feed page. (see note about potential problems with this in Firefox at the end of this post). The feed page may look like a bunch of crazy code, or it may look nice and neat, it depends on your browser. Either way, look up in the address bar and copy the entire address found there by highlighting it and hitting ctrl+C.

an example of a feed address

3) Open up Internet Explorer 7.

4) Paste the feed address into the address bar of IE7 and hit enter. When you access a feed in IE7, you will get a nicely formatted listing of the feed content and at the top, you will see some helpful information about the feed you are viewing and a link that says “subscribe to this feed.” Click that link.

The subscribe message displayed by IE7

5) Click the “favorites” icon at the top left (which looks like a yellow star) and when the favorites panel opens click the “feeds” button at the top. Then click the “docking” button to the right (the green arrow pointing left, see below) which will pin the feeds panel into the left side of your browser.

favorites panel showing the feeds tab, the list of feeds and the “docking” button to the right

6) Find your feed in the panel and right-click on it and select “properties.”

7) On the properties tab, you can set a few preferences for your feed. Select “use custom schedule” and set the frequency to “15 minutes”. This tells IE to check that feed every 15 minutes for new content.

That’s it. IE7 will check your feed every 15 minutes and if there is new content, you will see the name of the feed turn to bold. Then, you just click the name and the new entries will appear in chronological order in an easy to read format. If you want to check more often than every 15, you can “refresh” the feed by hovering over the name of the feed and clicking the “two green arrow” refresh icon that appears to the right of the feed name.

I apologize to mac users and fans of other browsers who won’t want to use IE7. Like I said, I don’t use IE7 for anything else except feed reading. Other browsers will have some form of subscribing built in, but most of them won’t auto-refresh as often and they are, in my opinion, more cumbersome to use. If you have specific questions about using a particular browser, please just leave me a comment and I will check it out for you.

** If you are having trouble accessing a feed page in Firefox, it is probably because Firefox is set to use “live bookmarks” to subscribe to feeds. I guess some people find live bookmarks useful, but I just think they are unnecessarily confusing. Anyway, to help, open Firefox and go to Tools –> Options and then click the “feeds” tab and select “No application selected.” This will tell Firefox to always ask you what you want to do when you try to access a feed, instead of assuming that you want to use live bookmarks.

Last week, I wrote a guest post on churchcommunicationspro.com called “The only two things your church website needs.”  This week, I posted a follow up article called “Why church leaders must blog on their church websites,” where I drill down into more detail about blogging, what it really is, and why I believe it is one of the only types of content you really need on your church website.

Thanks again to Cory Miller for giving me an audience on his site.  Writing these articles has really made me think about some things I hadn’t thought about in a while.

Please note: this article has been republished on EatAroundOKC.com. Please use the following link to see the article:

“OKC’s asian district featured in the New York Times“

I wrote a little post that’s featured on ChurchCommunicationsPro.com called “The only two things your church website needs.” Take a look and let me know what you think. I’ve got a follow up post for that site in the works which should be up sometime soon.

By the way, ChurchCommunicationsPro is run by Cory Miller, who is Director of Communications for Quail Springs Baptist Church here in Oklahoma City. Here’s a great guy and has done a pretty fantastic job of professional blogging (not an easy feat, I can tell you) and he provides a great resource for churches, especially smaller churches who don’t have their own communications resources.

Thanks for including me, Cory.

Here’s what I want to remember about today:

1. My six month old waking me up (with mommy’s help of course) wearing his “I love daddy” shirt.
2. Hot dogs for lunch.
3. An afternoon of alternately napping and wrestling with my five year old son.

Here’s what I want to remember always:

1. I have everything I need and even a lot of things I want.
2. The right thing is to be thankful and at peace.

This was a hard week in the market. The lovely upward trend broke down. Doesn’t mean it’s over for good, but at least for now, things are a little uncertain and directional trading just got a little bit harder.

I definitely fared better on this correction than I did back on 2/27/2007. That gives me hope that at least I’m making some progress and learning.