The commercials cost so much to air that they tend to be more inventive and more original than others. A lot of people watch the game just to see them.

Music fans might watch for the pregame or half time musical acts. Last night Madonna put on quite a show. If you’re a fan of her music, it was nice to hear.

I guess I’m weird, though. I watched the game for the production of it all. I’m always on the pages of wondering what ideas I can use to make communication memorable. Here’s what I noticed:

Halftime
• The stage Madonna performed on had LED’s showing different graphics.
• In front of the stage, they were using some sort of environmental projection.
• Cuts were the norm.
• Lesser artists added to the fun.
• The dancers really added to the show.
• The dancers almost made Madonna look like she wasn’t doing anything by comparison.

Commercials
• I wish there were fewer sexy commercials.
• You can really show how good your product is by showing the downsides; don’t drive a car with headlights as bright as the sun if you’re a vampire.
• I’m glad none of my domains are on GoDaddy anymore; isn’t there anyway to advertise domain names other than sexy girls?
• Does anyone else think the Doritos commercials are better than some of the ones that people are paying millions of $$ for?
• The etrade baby freaks me out a little. The baby boy at the end of that commercial “speed dating” was just wrong…funny, but wrong.

BTW, I know I put the space in the wrong place for the title, but superb owl isn’t a registered trademark of the NFL like the other way of spelling it is.

Paul

Paul

December 6, 2011

Dear Mr. Clifford,

Thank you for taking the time to contact me regarding the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PROTECT IP Act). I appreciate hearing your thoughts on this issue.

The PROTECT IP Act aims to protect the rights of trademark and copyright holders, including a private right of action for intellectual property owners. This means that intellectual property owners as well as the government can seek injunctions against websites “dedicated to infringing activities”. Many websites are large with a great deal of content. Having an entire website blocked from searches due to questionable content is a broad overreaction to the problem the bill’s sponsors are trying to solve.

Copyright owners already have legal remedies at their disposal to remove infringing material piece-by-piece. The definition of an “Internet site dedicated to infringing activities” in this legislation is both broad and vague. Many industry experts have also raised security and other technical concerns relating to the domain filtering requirements of this bill. Using a similar law, the Department of Homeland Security has already seized web site domain names – including some by accident. This hardly seems like a good solution, and such problems need to be fixed before this bill is considered.

On May 26th, 2011 the PROTECT IP Act was placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar, where it awaits further consideration. Again, thank you for contacting my office regarding this matter. Rest assured, should this issue come before me in the Senate, I will keep your thoughts in mind.

Sincerely,

Rand Paul, MD
United States Senator

As a video guy, I get the gift of being in the live truck for at least part of the day.  This year, I took a turn running the shader position.

Somehow after six of these, I still manage to learn something new every year.  This year was no exception.  I’ll be sharing some of the hacks I picked up from the guy who owned the truck over at Hack.ingChurch.com.  What I want to talk about here are some of the heart pieces.

I arrived early, as I do each year, but this year the rest of the team had it well in hand.  I was a little disappointed.  I love helping and learning what I can.  Still, watching our daughters helped my wife, so I was glad to do it.

This year was different for me because the person I’ve known the longest in my life other than family was there and brought her teenaged daughter.  It’s always different to look at something you love through someone else’s eyes.  I knew Jordan (the daughter) liked Remedy Drive, so as I was running the shader, I was praying for her to really enjoy their time on stage.

When I finally met up with my friend, she was blown away by my church.  I’d been her friend through the tough teen years, so it was great to see her heart rev with excitement for what makes mine beat.  In the last 11 years, I’ve seen things that I wouldn’t have believed.  Last night was one of those times.

During Third Day’s set, my pastor came out and told the prodigal son story from Luke 15.  I sat with 8000 others, hanging on his every word.  I watched out of the corner of my eye as my friend and her daughter took it all in.  We all participated as he asked which brother we were, the prodigal or the pretender.

I knew each of us had a slightly different story and fit into different roles.  I couldn’t have cared more for these two if they were my sister and niece.  She asked if I knew that he was going to do this.  I told her that the first year it was a surprise, but from then on I knew it was coming.

When the time came, hundreds of people stood to give their lives to Jesus.  I couldn’t help but cry a little.  I know how costly this event is to us.  I missed being in the crowd for Remedy Drive.  I only slept four hours last night.  My girls were very close to getting ill from one of the summer’s hottest days, but I felt that it was all worth it.

My friend thanked me for the invitation.  She’d never seen this sort of miracle in person.  She said that she’d be back (along with her husband and other kids).  I love my church. I love that I get to do this.

I hope you get that people were forever changed by something I got to be a part of.  I helped make it so that people could see what was happening.  Since I was in the crowd for part of the day, I got to see what others probably didn’t — people encountering a God who loves them and others who are willing to show it.

I hope you get to see something like this in your life.  Oh yeah, and the tech was great, too.

Paul

1. Bad color schemes: You’d think that Microsoft with all their money would hire great designers to put together great color schemes that are optimized for projectors. But that’s not the case. I’ve seen such horrible color combinations in presentations. I always try to use a dark background with light text. Your eye is attracted to light, so make the text the light piece. A screen isn’t a piece of paper, so I really like that combination. I’ve seen a blue background with yellow text. That’s okay, but it really feels retro to me. Whatever you do, avoid colors that are similar. Dark blue with light blue is bad. It’s hard to read; that’s the most important.

2. Clip art: Happily you don’t see this as much anymore, but I am so tired of clip art. You still get a bunch of it in Powerpoint despite the fact that it’s gone out of style. When I started using PowerPoint 11 years ago, I’d use it all the time, but then I noticed how much better photographs looked than clip art. There’s something so much more dynamic when you use a photo than a drawing that looks like it’s been around since 1984.

3. Animations: Most of the animations in most programs are completely useless. My first video, I used the “random transition” feature, so I speak from experience. Text shouldn’t type in for each point. Lines shouldn’t fly in. There are exceptions, but less is more. Try having text either dissolve in or even just appear, in whole sentences or paragraphs, when needed.

4. Too much text: If I had a dollar for one mistake, this is the one I’d choose. Never put more than six lines of text on a screen. I don’t care what your reasoning is, don’t do it. The eye gets lost too easily. If you have to reduce the font size to fit the words in, you have too many. For song lyrics, I’m extreme in using one or two lines, but you get my point. No one loses track of which line they’re reading if there are two. I’ve done it with four. I’ve seen 15 lines and thought the whole text to War and Peace was on the screen. It just seems like a lot more than it is.

5. Using it for creation: If you’re in a bind and need to create something fast, the built-in image editing tools are fine. I just know people that use them to the exclusion of Photoshop, Video editing and text editing software. If you can, try using Photoshop to create your slides instead of PowerPoint and your slides won’t be as editable, but they won’t look like every other presentation either. The first time I did this people were astounded at how great the slides looked. All I did was add a stroke and an outer glow to the text on a background I made.

6. Stock Templates: Speaking of backgrounds, everyone uses the ones in PowerPoint. I know where there’s a sign that even uses a stock Microsoft background as part of the design. Don’t do it. Look online for examples of great templates and use them for inspiration.

7. Bad Fonts: I could talk for weeks on fonts, but I’ll summarize. There are two basic types of fonts. One is meant to be used for titles. The other is meant for the body. The first is much more dramatic and less legible. The second is more boring, but readable. Most of the time you’ll want to use a font like Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, etc. over LoserBoi grunge. Occasional use for emphasis is fine (or as part of a background element), but if it’s something you want people to write down or sing, keep it simple.

Since legibility is the goal here, have someone with average, but not great vision try an read your text from the worst seats. Can they? If not, increase size and adjust contrast between text and the background. Obviously someone who’s legally blind will never be able to read what’s on the screen, but an average person should be able to. Legible is better than cool, but strive for both. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Paul

As I’ve been building my twitter followers I’ve noticed that I’m getting the attention of different types of followers.  Most of whom I don’t follow back.  I want more followers, but I also want engaged followers in the church tech niche.

Type 1: Pretty girl with no profile and no updates.  I don’t know who they think they’re fooling, but I don’t want porn spam showing up in my follower list, so I’m not following them back, no matter how many times they unfollow and follow me.  A variant of this it the person who has one update.  Sorry, but that’s still not enough.  I need to know that you’re real and what your interests are for me to follow you back.

Type 2: Random businesses.  I guess they have someone telling them that social media is the key to their business, but I’ve never been to Delaware, so I’m not interested in real estate there.  The same goes for people who have the business model of selling ebooks on single-column websites with tons of text.  If I followed you by accident; I’ll unfollow you real quick when I see those links.

Type 3: “So and so uses TrueTwit…”  This service is the scourge of twitter.  There is no white list, so the only way not to go back over and over again is to use it and make your followers jump through the same hoops or pay money.  I used to @ reply these people and explain my position.  Some followed me anyway; most didn’t.  I’ve gotten tired of it, so I’m ignoring anyone who auto-DM’s me what I’ve started calling TrueTwit spam.

How about you?  Are there any rules you have for following people back on twitter?  Do you follow everyone back? Do you follow no one?  How do you handle it?

Paul

Not everyone knows why I’m doing this so I thought I’d share. In November of 1982, I gave my life to Jesus. Not long after, I read about the church in Acts 2. I wanted to be a part of a place like that where lives and eternities were changing. I also knew that I was born when I was for a purpose, so I gave up on that idea.

Years passed and I felt like God wanted me to give the best hours of my day to Him. He had a purpose for my life and I trusted that, but didn’t know what it was. I went to college where I first thought I should become a musician, until I realized that I had no musical talent and then a philosopher, until my plans for grad school fell through. I finally landed at a seminary in my home state where I learned that technology and ministry weren’t mutually-exclusive. I loved it. I’d had quite a problem with procrastination in the past, but now I had trouble getting to other work when there was a video to complete. I found out there was a video job on campus and got it before they could find anyone qualified.

As part of a leadership class we visited a local church and I recorded the meeting for the distance learning students. I couldn’t believe that such a church existed. They were actually impacting people. Adults who’d led hard lives (and ones who thought they had it all together) were coming to know Jesus. On average, every week someone was coming to know Jesus.

My wife and I started going to that church and were amazed by what we saw. I quickly joined the tech team and started making videos. My first one was cited by a guy named Jim as the reason he’d given Jesus a second look. I was hooked. God had used my oddness to help bring people to Himself.

Our church was growing, but couldn’t hire me, so I took other jobs: at a local television station, in event technology, in technical support, but nothing quite fit right. When my church was in a place to hire a tech person, they were looking for someone with a different skillset than I had. The same thing happened with the video director. I continued to volunteer, but my heart longed for the day when I could do what I’d felt called to some 20+ years before.

This past November, I took up the challenge of “Write Non-fiction in November” month and wrote Podcasting Church. I didn’t know why I wrote it when I did, but I had to know if I could. After a lot of editing, I released it on June 2 of this year.

My last job was with an audio/video manufacturer. They decided to move my job from Kentucky (and the church I so loved) to California. I knew immediately that I wasn’t supposed to go. They gave me a generous stay-on bonus to stay through the transition and I used the time and money to start TrinityDigitalMedia.com, llc. Now, I get to spend my days helping churches take the next step and I’ve never been happier.

Starting a business is stressful. I sometimes don’t know where the money will come from. Still it’s worth it to know that I’m doing what I was made to do.

Paul

5. Spam: Let’s just get this out of the way first. I hate spam. I hate when I’m somewhere and I get an @reply from someone and I click on it and see porn. This actually happened to me in church once. I thought it was something important, but boy was it not.

4. Long tweets: Sometimes people tweet things that are just too long for the medium.  I get it when you’re writing and you either aren’t paying attention or you think it’s shorter than it is.  That’s one thing.  Using a service like TwitLonger is something else.  I don’t want to read twelve paragraphs about your dog’s intestinal issues.  That’s what a blog is for.  ;) Use twitter for the little things that pop into your head or stuff that can add value to others.  I’ve already convinced one person to stop this.  I try and do this nicely.  I think it’s the wrong genre.

3. Accounts with no tweets: If you joined twitter just to read other people’s stuff, that’s fine, but please put that in your profile so that we know not to follow you.  I had someone follow me and she had zero updates and 500+ followers.  I didn’t want to assume she was a porn spam account, but I didn’t follow her back (even though I tend to follow most people back) because I thought the chances were more than average that she was spam.

2. False advertising in the profile: If your profile says you’re a videographer tweeting useful video links, do just that; don’t tweet about get rich quick schemes to the exclusion of other stuff.  I love following people who share interests with me, but am very bummed when they don’t actually.  If you never tweet in English, don’t make your profile English.  I don’t mean that to be xenophobic.  I mean it to be accurate.  I would feel the same if the roles were reversed.  I speak English and French; if you never tweet in those, I still like you as a person.  I just can’t understand your language (which is beautiful, but I just don’t know it).

1. Don’t annoy would-be followers: I want to follow everyone in my niche.  I can’t because of some limitations.  That means that when someone autoDM’s me telling me they want proof that I’m not a bot, I’m a little unhappy.  I’m more unhappy when they use truetwit (who won’t get a link from me). I understand the hatred of spam, but if you go to their site, you have to fill out a Captcha for each follower you want.  Is there a whitelist?  Nope.  Is there a way to permanently validate? Yep.  Just use TrueTwit yourself and bug your would-be followers.  Can you turn that part off?  Yep, for a small fee.  That’s right. If you use play the truetwit game, you have to spread their crap by signing up and either bugging your possible followers, paying money, or do a captcha every time you follow one of their people.  To be clear, they have great customer service because I emailed them and they got right back to me. If they add a whitelist of people who’ve completed captchas, I would gladly do one.  I just can’t do that to the people I want to follow.  I’m sure they’re not mean, but need to work on their business model.  When they do, I’ll remove this from my list of annoyances.

What about you?  What are some things that annoy you about twitter?  I don’t want this to be a complaint session, just a way to think about solutions to these problems.  I using some tools to make sure I don’t follow people with no status updates.  What about you?

Paul

I was with my girls at a parade last year (actually we were in it). Their daycare had a float and they wanted to ride along.  So there I am in the back of a hay trailer waving an American flag when it happened.  The music from the truck pulling us started turning on and off by itself.  The solution that the guy with the truck thought up was to unplug and replug the wires.  After a little while, I hopped off to take a look at it.  I thought that maybe the speakers were in parallel instead of in series and that the amp couldn’t handle that low of resistance.   Turns out they were in series, but it was either an amp issue or they had a short in one of the speakers.

Whenever I visit my in-laws, my mother-in-law always has me take a look at her computer.  Last time it was that her anti-virus had expired.  Sometimes it’s a driver issue; sometimes malware.  No matter what, I’m on for tech support quite a lot.

I’m not complaining, I love what I do, but I’ve never seen a lawyer tell his kid to swing on the swingset at a park while he wrote up a quick lawsuit for the two people arguing in front of him.  I’ve never seen a painter, at the grocery store, stop and pull out a paintbrush to take care of some flaking paint in the produce section.

I guess it’s just the nature of tech that we see something wrong and either want to fix it or are asked to.

What about you fellow techies? Do you get called into action at family events and during your spare time, too?  Let me know in the comment section.

Rt @sharonclements @sempei13 Congratulations on publishing your book, Paul!! We’re celebrating with you! // Thx. #PodcastingChurch #

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