Will Brown is Online

I wonder what it must be like
To be in the midst of war
To fight for a cause you don’t believe in
To kill those who don’t believe as you do
The sounds of bullets flying past your ears

Posted via email from Random Posts of Will Brown

My church put on “Christmas on 14th Street”, a community Christmas program, at the Tivoli theater in Northwest DC. It went quite well despite a few technical difficulties.
 
Lessons learned:
* Volunteers need to be fully engaged
* Word of mouth is the best advertising
* A benefit of practice is that you free up down time to socialize with people you never met. You can’t do that if you’re trying to workout technical issues five minutes before showtime.
 
Thanks to everybody that came out and helped out!

Posted via email from Random Posts of Will Brown

I put together a website, www.HeroNU.com to help my church’s outreach plan for a sermon series my Pastor is presenting this summer. It’s called “Heroes: An Old Testament Teaching Series”.

When Pastor Dan presented the opportunity, I jumped at it because, the best way to learn about building web pages is to build web pages.  As you may know from a previous posting, I just started to learn Drupal, so I figured this was the perfect opportunity to “go live” with it.

As you can see, this is basically a one-page site, and comes no where close to using Drupal’s true power and scalability. But that is the good thing about Drupal, too. You can have an extremely complex site with multiple sections and menus, or you can create a simple site like this as well. Sure, I could have just used some static HTML, but I would have lost a learning opportunity as well.

In fact, I did learn a great deal about simple things like nodes, blocks, themes, permissions, user rights, etc. So it was a win in my book.

Now I’m thinking about how I can add to what is already there.

Any ideas?

A Veteran is someone who at one point in his or her life, wrote a blank check to “The United States of America”, for an amount of “up to and including my life”.

That is Honor, and there are way too many people in this country who no longer understand it.

–Author Unknown

I took the first step today and joined the Drupal community!

For those of you who are thinking, “You joined another social network?!?!” Relax. Drupal is a powerful Content Management System (CMS) that I’ve decided to learn. I’m relatively comfortable with Wordpress, which is primarily a blogging platform, but I want to be able to build a solid website from scratch now.

Why? Am I interesting in becoming a web designer?

No.

It’s just one of those things that I just have the urge to learn. 

I’ve been listening to two great podcasts  that have been feeding my hunger and teaching me a lot. “The Lullabot Podcast” and “Geeks and God“.

The Lullabot Podcast is purely about Drupal news and how-tos. They talk over my head at times, but bring to light a lot of topics that I later go on to research.

Geeks and God is a podcast about technology and the church. Matt and Rob use Drupal to design their churches’ websites and the sites of the businesses and individuals who hire them in their respective companies. (I’m contemplating going to their conference in July)

Both have been tremendous resources for me and I highly recommend them.

So, I’ll be posting my progress and lessons learned here as I get to know and understand all that is Drupal.

Any tips, suggestions, or resources for a noob like me?

Air Force officials have released more details on the structure of the upcoming Cyber Command, currently targeted for an initial stand-up date of 1 October.

The date appears to be very aggressive and I can only imagine the amount of planning going on in bases across the country to get this to happen.

My foremost thought is that of personnel.

Think about the logistics of that. A base has not even been named yet (interim location is Barksdale AFB, LA). The process has already started, but they have to figure out which Airmen, civilians, and contractors are going to man it and get them and their families moved to the new base.

The Air Force’s interim plan sounds like it would be a good idea for a permanent plan. Forgo the traditional ‘everybody on one base’ command structure and go…well…virtual (this is the Cyber Command after all).

As Secretary of the Air Force, Michael W. Wynne, explained on Capitol Hill recently, “We’ve asked [the command] to become virtual. In other words, we’ve said, we don’t want you to be a standard … command as you might see from the Napoleonic era. …We asked them to look [into commercial] companies [to] see how they operate and minimize the headquarters. … [Many of our units are] already located in the various states around the country, so our first inclination is to leave those in place.” (From Air Force Cyber Command News)

This attitude is quite refreshing and very forward-thinking for a military command. Here’s to hoping that the policies coming forth from the Cyber Command is just as refreshing.

It looks like the Air Force is all up in the new “Iron Man” movie. We’re sportin’ our new uniforms on the young Airman in the Humvee scene and on the old officers in the missile test scene. You can also see that the Air Force’s favorite cargo plane, the C-17, is making yet another big-screen appearance as well.

I’ve always wanted to be at a base where they film one of these movies. Hollywood and Air Force public affairs usually do a great job of casting actual Airmen as extras in key scenes.

Oh, and this looks like a kick-butt movie, too! Check the trailer below:

The New York Times reports on a recently released report by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life on religious affiliation in the United States.

The graphic below tells the whole story:

As a “protestant” it does sadden me to see this, but it also gives me that internal nudge that every Christian asks of themselves periodically: “What am I doing to make a difference?”

Read the NY Times article to get the overall look at the report and read the full Pew report to find out more details, but here is the key paragraph that stood out for me:

The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.

Broken down this says that a very large chunk of the unaffiliated are the younger demographic in our society. I have heard many pastors and speakers talk about the importance of teaching our youth what we know to be true, and this is the data to prove it.

What are your thoughts?

2008 Lunar Eclipse – Washington, DC from Will Brown on Vimeo.

I had the chance to try out the Sprout flash content creator and I have to say that I am impressed. There are so many applications for this…uh…application.

As the site simply states, “Sprout is the quick and easy way for anyone to Build Living Content.”

You can create music, video, and podcast players, slideshows for your pictures. All with a simple drag and drop interface that is, for the most part, easy to learn.

Here is something that I created in about 10 minutes. It’s not beautiful, but it is a good starting point to what is possible with a little time.