Yeah, so we got the surprise of a lifetime Tuesday in the mail. A company (avoiding using the name to lower myself on the radar of anybody that might misue the information) whom we’d never heard of revealed to us that they: had our information on our main account (including demographic information like SSN, address, etc.) and a rather unscrupulous employee of theirs decided to sell over 2 million records of people like us to a data broker who in turn pushed that information off to 3rd party marketers.

The thing that baffled me was that someone had all this information that we’d never heard of. Literally, I didn’t know this company existed until they sent us this letter and our information existed on their computers for purposes I’m still trying to understand.

Well, we got the account number changed and we’re spending the next week or two connecting with people and businesses that need to know the new one.

What’s ironic, I think, is that I spent the morning yesterday speaking to a group of people on social networking. That, as educators, they had an opportunity to teach their students about apprpropriate uses of facebook by modeling it and that sharing some information online is not bad and allows them to connect with this student generation.

However, I believe that this current generation lives in a glass house; that information for them and communication is something that happens within the context of a larger community.

The problem comes though is that a weakness with that idea is the inability to be alone. In college some of the most valuable times for this extrovert were up at Cedar Campus, InterVarsity’s training center in Michigan, spending Sunday afternoon’s being quiet and alone–an activity that required that I not interact with people or technology.

I think this is where experience and a different viewpoint become valuable. Managing information online is becoming more of a dance. Reveal too little and you lose your ability to, in a very 21st century sort of way, “connect”. Reveal too much and you lose your identity.

Back when I was a student (and even to some point now), one of the things I really wrestled with was the usefulness of my skills going into IT. Seeing the Kingdom Value in coding or in Systems Administration was one thing that I really had a hard time doing. Of course, that was *ahem* 12 years ago and the world has changed since then. The World Wide Web really came into it’s own, social networking is the latest of a long lineage of connectivity/relational software out there that has enabled people to stay in touch and the role of the geek in any organization has heigtened a bit especially if communication is a part of the goal of that organization.

Well, I helped out Chapter Focus Week this year (InterVarsity runs week long camps at the end of each Spring semester for training and planning for groups for the next school year) and got into some discussions with some friends from NIU and we had some really in depth talks about how we fit into the body and how might IT people be better used or even visualize what they can do for the Kingdom and the idea was floated about having a tech exchange, if you will, where needs can be met with skills. People who otherwise wouldn’t be connect to InterVarsity, the particular ministry I help out in, could reconnect with their alma mater or even the movement in general. Students who are already moving towards a degree can cut their teeth on projects they might otherwise have not known about and InterVarsity chapters can benefit as a whole, and hopefully people can have a fun time doing it.

One of the things I had always appreciated about my time in InterVarsity has been the opportunities I have had to participate, to include my particular skillset (whether it be web design, sound, or geek-fu in general) and to help; it’s been fun, challenging and I’ve always came away learning something. I’ve literally prayed over computers (you laugh, but have you tried it?) and watched God do some amazing things in the field of technology. In short, it’s been a growing experience.

On the same end, I know there is an unending need for skill and there are knowledge gaps that occur when information isn’t passed on. Like a doctor, there seems to be no shortage of ’sick’ computers. Where does that meet? I think Romans 12 offers a suggestion. IT people are a part of the greater Body and have a vital role to play in advancing God’s kingdom. We can help. So, in the spirit of Open Source Communities, I’d like to propose Body Sourcing; allowing IT people who are a part of a community a chance to help out.

I’ve created a facebook group ‘IV Students/Alumni with IT Skills’ as hopefully a start to this. If you’re not on facebook (and why aren’t you?), get on, and if you’d like to contribute, or even benefit from it, join the group and we can get a dialogue going. Either way, please tell your friends because it’ll be as good as the community that comes to it and by all means have a good time .

Hey all, just wanted to catch everyone up on a few topics.  It’s been busy around the Juvinall household:

 - Yesterday was technology day.  We ended up severing ties with our dear ‘friends’ Verizon; we switched to vonage.  Along with that, I followed the instructions on their site and made our house into a closed loop.  If you cut your physical connection to Verizon, you can plug your vonage router into a phone jack in your house and suddenly all of your phones are vonage phones; it’s very cool.  We also bought an iMac this year; yes, an iMac.  Last night, after some struggle, I finally finished configuring it (it always is a struggle in a paradigm shift). We are owners of a computer manufactured by Apple…wow, I said it. I hear admitting it is a first step.

 - Lord willing, we’ll have some big news to announce soon. Pray for us if you think about it, we’re trying to make something logistically work that will be…big.

 - Along with that, Sunday was one of those Spirit filled days at Church where God really affirmed alot of things in our hearts.  The talk is available here, and it was about God’s will for us, and death and doing your life well.  Great stuff; we sang ‘We Rest On Thee’ afterwards, which, if one could have them, is our theme song as a couple (like Over The Rhine’s music, that song factors in a couple of key moments for us in our marriage).  Anyway, couldn’t sing the second or third verse just for weeping; the Pastor led and I have to wonder what he was thinking. It’s a balm to have God really challenge, convict and encourage you all at the same time. 

We go in faith, our own great weakness feeling,
And needing more each day Thy grace to know:
Yet from our hearts a song of triumph pealing,
“We rest on Thee, and in Thy Name we go.”
Yet from our hearts a song of triumph pealing,
“We rest on Thee, and in Thy Name we go.”

I couldn’t help but share this one. It popped up on digg today and it made me laugh, literally, out loud.

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In case, you can’t see it, the sticker on the top says ‘This computer is never obsolete’ – right above the sticker that says 533Mhz Celeron (a rather older, slower computer).

Basically, if you pay them 99 dollars every two years, they’ll upgrade your computer for you (written in fine print).  The humor opportunities are endless when you involve marketing people .

Since today is the official birthday of Windows Vista, Microsoft’s newest OS I thought I might take a minute and share my opinion.

In a nutshell, it’ll be a while before our shop goes to it.  I’ve been running it for about a month now and I’ve been underwhelmed (have I said that?  I distinctly remember saying that…).  For a business customer, there are some signficant issues with the interface. Also, it greatly dissapoints me knowing what was not in Vista and yet it still took them like 5 years to get the thing out of the door.

After a growing look at the OS, the best and worst thing it has going for it is that it changes the interface signficantly.  Paradigms are shifted as well in that some commonalities to previous versions of Windows are now gone.  Chief among them is the idea of drives.  Your C drive and all network drives a bit more hidden in the interface, and I’ve still yet to find a way to map a drive efficently (maybe I’m missing it?).  Run is missing as well, which really irks me.

I’ve been going through a number of programs that are not uncommon to a normal user and there are a number of issues that I’ve been running into in getting them to work.  One such example is iTunes/iPod; when an iPod is plugged into the system, it initially wants to scan it for errors and, in my experience, caused some disk issues on the iPod itself.  iTunes has been a bit more cagey than it normally is. 

Then there’s the issue of missing components.  I’ve been waiting for the update to NTFS, a 10 year old file system, for a while and from the sound of it, the planned FS that was going into Vista was going to be great, but they just simply didn’t have time. I trust that much of what they did have time for was security issues. 

Overall, as I’ve said before, it’s pretty and cool looking.  The worst part about this release is that there are stable, viable alternatives out there (including Windows XP) that do the job better than Vista.  Steve Balmer said in an interview last night that they plan to have 200 Million copies of Vista in production this year; we’ll see.

To me, it reminds me somewhat of Windows ME only with the NT Codebase.  I can only hope I’m wrong…