The Land of Ozz

I logged on today to check for comments and trackbacks that needed moderating. Much to my surprise I found that The Land of Ozz had evolved into a “Large Mammal” on the TTLB Ecosystem . The current Technorati Ranking for The Land of Ozz is at 8,446 (338 links from 164 sites). That puts The Land of Ozz in the top .03% of the 27 million blogs that Technorati is currently tracking and in the top .3% of the 2.7 million blogs that are updated at least weekly. Not bad given the fact that this little blog has been alive less than one year.

The traffic to this blog is increasing by more than 22% per month. I attribute that to several things, but the main one is that I update this blog regularly.

This is a pretty big day for me and for God. My recent blogging (since the beginning of the year) has consisted of 17 out of 49 posts being categorized as Faith and/or Godcast. That is a higher percentage of faith related posts than my overall historical blog statistics. The broad statistics of The Land of Ozz shows less than 50 posts out of 187 categorized as faith and/or Godcast. I believe I am headed in the right direction with this blog.

I want to thank my regular visitors most of all for the recent success of this blog. I especially what to thank those who purchase from the vendor links found in the sidebar and ion posts. I am just about breaking even on the technical cost of the HOEI.com domain as a result of the affiliate links found on this and other pages on HOEI.com I also want to thank those other bloggers who continue to bring me traffic. Please browse my sidebar of my main blog page and visit some of these other blogs listed.

Hey everyone,

I found this incredible offer that I think you should check out. It’s a free 31 volume QuickVerse Bible Software CD that this nonprofit ministry gives away (they only ask that you pick up the shipping).

I was quite impressed with the true ministry of this offer. You can get the free CD at their website: www.FreeBibleSoftware.com or by calling 866-66-BIBLE (866-662-4253). You may want to forward this to the people you know that could use some good Bible study software.

Who actually won the Superbowl? Do you want to guess how I voted? Stay tuned for racing.

Update: It looks like Michele Malkin was in the same boat as me when it came to the Superbowl viewing, but she points out to us some folks that did watch and noticed the military being MIA during the big game. I’ll bet you see a military presence at the Daytona 500 on 2/19.

Linked to: Don Surber and Conservative Cat

The pastor of my church presented part four of a series called Journey to Life. This series is outstanding for Christians at any point in their relationship with God. I encourage you to go the Seacoast Church web site an check out this series. You can listen to an audio of these messages, watch a video, and follow along with the notes that are handed out during the services. All of this is available on iTunes as well. I will provide a link to that later in this post.

Today was one of those days at church when you either got convicted or you receive confirmation on how you are living your life. My wife and I were fortunate that we got more confirmation than conviction on a few things that we have been doing in our life and I want to share them with you today.

The first confirmation was related to obedience to God. As Pastor Greg pointed out in his message today we are to be baptized “…in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” My wife and I both had been baptized earlier in life and that was good as far as our covenant with God. We got baptized again after our First Wednesday service in December of 2003 to show our recommitting our lives to God after many years of unrepented sin since our baptisms. I believe that our baptisms in 2003 were a good step signifying a big change in how we were going to live our lives.

The second confirmation in today’s message was related to our commitment to building family traditions. This is a sound principle that is taught in the parenting ministry that we are part of that is distributed by Growing Families International. A good example of a tradition that I started just yesterday was to start reading the Bible with my oldest son Riley on weekend mornings. He got up yesterday while I was still laying in bed doing my morning reading. He came and sat with me on the bed. He then repeated every word that I was reading from Psalms 19. I thought that this was just the neatest thing. I caught our reading with my mp3 recorder this morning before church. I got to church and received a blessing from the message telling me that this was good stuff. You can listen to my mp3 recording of Riley and I reading Psalms 15 this morning.

The third thing that we received confirmation on doing the right thing was Pastor Greg’s point about how Jesus grew through learning God’s word. He quoted a scripture that I am probably going to post as the theme message to my Godcasts of The Living Bible. I think I will use “…meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it.” Joshua 1: 7-8 (NIV) as my theme. My wife Sherry and I have been reading the Bible daily for about three solid months now. We both would had been reading the Bible semi-regularly in the past , but it we were not doing it the way we should. A good friend recommended a schedule published back in 1983 by Fullgrowth Ministries of Tulsa, OK. Here is how that publication recommends you use their schedule:

If you follow this plan devised by Fullgrowth Ministries of Tulsa, Oklahoma, you’ll read the New Testament through twice and the Old Testament once during the next 12 months.

The plan recommends that you do your reading at a specific quiet time each day. If you miss a day, continue with the current day’s reading and catch up when you have extra time. After you finish your day’s reading, mark off that day.

The Old Testament portions are presented as nearly as possible in chronological order. Passages from prophets are included in the historical narrative where they were given, they are often given in a single day’s reading.

You’ll encounter Psalms throughout the year. Frequently, a Psalm that fits a particular passage has been placed with that passage.

As you enter the New Testament, you’ll read Luke and Acts first, then the letters - with periodic passages from other Gospels - and, finally, Revelation. Thus, the story of the life of Christ is constantly related to your Christian life.

I want to add how very important it is that you follow the guidelines given to read the passages for the date given and catch up when you have time. I have tried reading catch up stuff before the current day’s reading after a family crisis took me away from reading for a couple of days and it just didn’t work.

Below I have provided you with the reading for the month of February. The photocopy that I have says that this schedule is copyrighted by Fullgrowth Ministries, but it also says, “feel free to re-print this chart for use in your church, Sunday school, or just to give to friends.” You are my friend if you got this far into this post. I hope this blesses you as much as it has my wife and me. I do plan to post each month’s schedule from the chart before each month begins in the future.

February

Bonus: Num. 25, 26, 27; 1 Cor 13 (This schedule was originally written for the leap year 1984)

This is a fairly aggressive reading plan, but it is well worth the 20-30 minutes per day required to complete the daily reading. There is a link to another Bible reading plan resource on the Seacoast Blog. There are also a couple of other reading plans on BibleGateway.com.

Notes on Seacoast Church and my relationship with Seacoast: I am a member of Seacoast Church. I am not on staff at Seacoast Church and the things I write on this blog about Seacoast should not be taken as official communications of Seacoast Church. Actually, I am not sure that the pastors and staff at Seacoast even know I write about the church here on my blog. You can get official Seacoast information on the Seacoast Blog. If you have iTunes then you can subscribe to the Journey to Life series from Seacoast Church. Seacoast Church has been ranked as the 28th fastest growing church in America, it is in the 30th most influential, and in the 10 most innovative. You can learn more about the church at Seacoast.org.

This post will highlight one of the strengths of a church that is small in attendance relative to a mega church. There seems to be a ton of criticism of mega churches these days. Why? I really don’t know for sure but I have a guess. There have been churches housing thousands of members every week for decades. I remember attending a Baptist church in Houston in the mid 80s that must have had upwards of a thousand or more in attendance in a regular Sunday morning service. My guess on why current mega churches are getting so much heat is because they are changing more lives faster. The way things happen after these lives get changed (saved) can get a little interesting in a mega church. My observations, experiences, and theory on that subject is not the real purpose of this post though. I will post on that later.

I want to qualify my experience on the subject of this post before I proceed. I am defining a smaller church as roughly 100 or less attending Sunday service on a regular basis. Pastor Geoff from my church just wrote of a church about this size who was looking for a pastor. That is the size of church that I have the most experience with. I have been attending what some would call a mega multisite church for almost five years. As with many members of my current mega multisite church I grew up in a church where the members of my family equated to about 10% of the membership of the church. I attended the same Baptist church regularly for the first 15 years of my life. I even have a nine-year perfect attendance pin for Sunday School. I would have got 14 years straight if I had not been hospitalized at six to get my tonsils taken out. I was the kid usually standing in as the preacher on youth Sunday. I know the people in my church and they knew me and my family.

What do smaller churches do a really good job at? My last sentence in the paragraph above leads into my answer. I think that the staff in small churches know and look after their members and attendees better. When a crisis strikes in a family in a small church the pastor is almost always there from my experience. I see large churches with thousands of members have a difficult time addressing this concern of being there for fmailies in a crisis. A mega church can have an awesome pastor to member ratio that may be even better than that of a typical small church, but it can be difficult to replicate the relationships that are build in a small church. Mega churches move staff around and members move between groups, services, and campuses that cause them to fall under different leadership from time to time. I really don’t see this small church strength as a problem to the mega church, but rather I see it as a natural challenge given the dynamics of a large number of attendees with so may service time and location choices.

I like my mega multisite church meeting arrangements, but I also play by the rules. I have plenty of churches to choose from here in Charleston, SC also known as the Holy City. My church Seacoast met the challenge when my family had a crisis. We spent two months in the hospital with our second child Caden. He went through open-heart surgery at six days old. It got so bad that day that the doctors had to go back in and open up Caden’s chest a few hours after the surgery. One cardiologist spoke to us in a conference room while this procedure was going on. A short time later the surgeon came out and told us that he had done all he could do to save our son and we would just have to wait to see how he responded to the emergency procedure that had just been performed. Needless to say my wife and I were a puddle of tears in the hallway after that conversation. The Lord carried our son through that night. The enemy did a pretty good job of planting fear in us that night too. We were wide open at that point to question and challenge God over this situation.

It was no more than an hour after the talk with the surgeon that we had two couples from our small group that came to our rescue due to my phone call to the leaders of the group. They offered to call a pastor, and I told them to use their judgement. That night we did not have a pastor or staff member from our church at the hospital. It was because the system of small groups worked. One of the couples who came to the hospital that night have since become elders in our church. Their handling of the situation was right on the mark that night. By the way, Pastor Geoff’s wife Pastor Sherry was at the hospital with us the day Caden was born and she keep very close tabs on us and visited along with other staff members several times during our hospital stay.

Yes, a small church pastor would have probably been there that night. A pastor was not needed in this case for a couple of reasons. The main reason was that we were involved in a small group as our pastor recommended. The second reason was because we had an awesome couple as small group leaders. A small church does not normally require this small group element to stay in touch with members.

My concern for the mega churches on this subject is that people can slip through the cracks. The primary reason is because they are not participating in a small group. If a new member in a mega church comes from a small church where they are used to Sunday school and other programs they might linger for a while before joining a small group. A worse scenario is that they end up in a group with weak leadership.

Most small churches are a hard act to follow in this area. Small non-mega churches don’t have to worry about staff and members moving between different services, small groups, and campuses. Small church pastors generally get pretty tightly knitted into their members’ lives. That can be a big deal when it comes to a family in a crisis situation.

I continue to be amazed by the number of people who are getting bent out of shape over Google’s handling of search services in China. Let’s consider a few simple questions related to the criticism of Google on the subject of search engine censorship.

1. How do people in China search?

Most of the bloggers and media doing the criticizing probably have no clue how the average Chinese user searches or which Google site they use to search. Do folks in China use Chinese characters on Google.com or do they use English characters on Google.cn. There are a lot of assumptions packed into most of the analysis of the Google China story. I do not claim to have any better information than anyone else, but at least I am passing judgment on Google based on partial truths.

2. How do other search engines stack up?

Have you looked to see how Yahoo.cn stacks up against Yahoo.com? It’s about the same as Google if not worse on some searches. I know they have different philosophies and how they get search results, but why does a search for Jesus Christ from Yahoo.cn only get 149,000 results where the same search on Yahoo.com gets 72,000,000? (Disclaimer: I am an American with no clue how a person in China would search or which engine they would use. See point #1)

3. Did anyone read the Google statement on this issue?

Here is my favorite part:

…the launch of Google.cn did not in any way alter the availability of the uncensored Chinese-language version of Google.com, which Google provides globally to all Internet users without restriction.

What if Chinese folks use the same search engine we do, but with their own language? See point #1.

Can anyone point me to a source on this subject who actually knows how and where an average Chinese person searches for information on the Internet?

The story I did last Sunday on Google’s censoring of its Chinese search engine site has been linked in La Shawn Barber’s post titled Friday’s Blogospheric Conditions. My story on this subject called attention to the JunkYard Blog for falling into a MSM style slant by reporting partial truths. The JunkYard Blog seemed to just bypass the fact that the main Google search engine in China produces more results on religious terms like “Jesus Christ” and “Christian” than does the main Google.com search engine. The JunkYard Blog focused on the images.google.cn site which does show a bias against Christian related searches.

The JunkYard Blog never acknowledged my challenge of their story, but they did an update with a link found on the Instapundit pointing to Paul Boultin’s post on how misspelling of Tiananmen will generate very different results. What’s the correct spelling of that place in English anyway?

I have read how misspellings can be used to your advantage on eBay in Marsha Collier’s book eBay Business All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies . You can capture a fairly captive audience of potential buyer or none at all when you advertise a product with a misspelling. Some buyers might misspell or mistype in a search for a product on eBay that you are selling and you could be the only one selling it with that spelling. On the other hand, you might miss the majority of potential buyers by misspelling something. It’s worth researching before you create your eBay listing.

I have witnessed first-hand how a misspelling can generate search engine traffic to a blog. With my sloppy grammar and spelling I accidentally misspelled Goggle Earth as Goggle Earth in a post on The Tech Land of Ozz back in August 2005. I still get a large number of hits on searches for “Goggle Earth” and on images.google.com because the image name in that post was also misspelled as goggleearth.jpg. Now I will get a ton more search engine hits because I just misspelling Google a few more times.

You can read more on Google censorship Here and Here.

A CNN story says BlackBerry shutdown worries feds. I currently pop (using SSL) three different mail servers including one .mil address using my Treo 650. I love it. I don’t hear the same reports from those who use a Blackberry.

Previous post on Treo vs Blackberry

Now with that said, a link posted over at the Pocket PC Thoughts forum titled Palm, Inc. to be Sold? came into my feed this morning. It linked to a Reuters story. What could that mean for us Treo Palm OS faithfuls?

The Backwater Report says Alito’s First Ruling Isn’t Encouraging.