Ick. I'm sick.

The day after my last post, I started coming down with a nasty head cold. I'm still feeling lousy. I got it, I believe, from my daughter, who was sick and who is ever one to share anything she has... So I have been congested, feverish, achy, headachy, coughing, sneezing, and generally unable to sleep more than an hour or so at a stretch for four days now. 

Can a geek get a "There, there, poor dear?"

This is, of course, of no great interest to anyone except the poor souls who have to put up with my grouchy self (i.e., my family) and the makers and vendors of cough, cold, and pain remedies, all of whom have no doubt seen a marked bump in their profit, owing to my rabid consumption of their products. There is a corresponding dip in the profits of vendors and distributors of coffee, since I have had absolutely no desire for any since coming down with this mess.

To me, the worst thing about being sick like this is the total inability to concentrate on all the trivial and useless pursuits that usually bring me such joy and hours of diversion. Things like TV, or reading geek news, or doing Sudoku, or reading sci-fi novels. I suppose it is bad enough that I don't feel good enough to do the things I really need to do, but the indignity of not being up to do the things I usually do to avoid productivity is just too much.

Makes me wanna go cry in my NyQuil.

Mops and ministry

I had an interesting experience in ministry today. Well, maybe "interesting" isn't the right word.

I've been spending some time during the week at our church building, studying for the class I'm teaching and doing some administrative stuff for the worship ministry. I was getting ready to update our song database, and pulling some filed song sheets in our workroom, when I noticed a pretty bad smell. Brian, our minister, had mentioned a few minutes earlier that the toilet in the bathroom off of his office had overflowed, and he had spent a few minutes mopping it up. There is also a bathroom off of the workroom. Its toilet had overflowed, as well, and without getting too graphic, let's just say it was yucky.

Obviously, we have a systemic problem, plumbing-wise.

Now, I'm not on staff. I'm not involved in the building & grounds ministry. I don't even need to be at the building, I can take the materials and work elsewhere. But I'd be a real jerk if I didn't do something to clean up the problem, myself. Brian would have done it, but should I expect someone else to clean it up, when I'm capable and available? I'm a part of this church family, and I ought to be willing to pitch in for things like this.

Granted, I hated this part of working in restaurants when I was in high school, and that's one of the main reasons I was motivated to get an education and make a living as far away as possible from a mop.

But Brian's position as our minister doesn't qualify him to do this any more than my status as a sometimes-volunteer. He's got a Bachelor's degree in Bible, a Master's in Religion, and a PhD. in Communications -- that'll earn you a free trip away from mop-land, even more than my Bachelor's degree, if anything will.

But, as I said to him as I was cleaning, "It's all part of full-time ministry."

Because even though I am not a "full-time minister," in terms of employment at our church, my status as Jesus' disciple makes me a full-time minister of reconciliation, and with that job comes a lot of opportunities to serve. Sometimes those opportunities look like teaching, sometimes like leading worship, sometimes like counseling, and sometimes like doing technology stuff around the building. But sometimes, it looks like a mop.

Too many Christians are very willing to let someone else do the dirty work, whether it's plunging toilets, mopping floors, teaching Sunday School, carrying food baskets to a shelter, listening to someone who is asking for help, or reaching out to tell people about God.

Obviously, we have a systemic problem, service-wise.

So, what about you? Have you mopped up anything messy lately? Have you overlooked an opportunity to free someone else from an undesirable task, even though it's not your job?

Just something to think about on a Wednesday.

Et tu(nes), Amazon?

Regarding the story that broke yesterday about Amazon working to develop their own competitor to iTunes, and even an Amazon-branded MP3 player:

Is it just me, or does this count as another "ho-hum" for Apple? Virgin said they were going to do the same thing, and we haven't heard a peep about it since the announcement. The only advantages Amazon might have is that the companies they're planning to partner with have a boatload of titles that people might actually want, and their database technology will probably adapt to the music store task very well. Other than that, it's pretty much going to be just another potential source of stuff to put into iTunes.

If they were to come up with their own branded media player app for both Windows and Mac (and really, why even try on the Mac?), I doubt it'll convert anyone from iTunes. Having to re-import your library and playlists would be enough of a deterrent for me.

As for another hardware device, have they learned nothing from watching Sony, the inventor of the personal media player (by way of the Walkman), flounder in the digital music space? If Sony (who used to be coolest-of-the-cool) can't keep up, and Creative (the only other company whose players you can buy just about anywhere) runs a distant second to the iPod, why is introducing another device into the market going to get them anywhere?

Besides that, if you're walking around with an MP3 player bearing the Amazon logo, you're GONNA get razzed. "Did you win that player in a contest? Was it a freebie for buying a bunch of books or something? What's with the logo?" It'll look like a cheap "me-too" product iPods have the cool factor mindshare locked down, which is why they have the market locked down.

To the music-buying public, Amazon is a guy in business-casual attire, ready and willing to sell you CDs and books. Apple is one of those silhouettes in their ads, dancing around with reckless abandon, listening to the beat of their own personal drummer. And the music-buying public thinks that Amazon guy, while he can get you just about anything you can think of asking for, doesn't know what's cool. The silhouette guy can tell you what stuff is cool, and help you show off that you're cool, too. The music-buying public is, by and large, all about being cool.

I don't blame Amazon for jumping into the space, though -- even if they bleed off only a percentage point or two off of Apple/iTunes/iPod, that's still a significant chunk of change. They'll make some money off the deal, perhaps.

Now if it were Google announcing this, it might work up a little sweat in a certain Cupertino executive suite. But then, Apple could just buy Google and solve that problem. Right after they buy Disney.