Cause to Pause

I had an interesting text exchange with Jason Powell re: the iphone. He is looking at it, I have at least one staff member, possibly two who are candidates. I almost switched when my T-Mobile Dash got wet. However, I read a few posts that talked of less than stellar battery life. Here’s one. Another said the only way they could get to 8 hrs. was to turn off 3G. Seems suspicious from a company like Apple, but I have so far not seen any reports where people say battery life is a non-issue.
All this got me to thinking, what are reasonable expectations in terms of smartphone battery? The trade off is always size and weight. Personally, I plug my Dash in everynight around 10 and unplug it in the morning around 5 or 6. I looked at my bill and I average 850- 1050 minutes of usage a month, and around 300 text messages. I have the wifi on all day so I can access certain network devices at work as well as download email attachments without falling asleep. between personal and work, i view and/or repond to about 20 emails a day through my phone. All this is pretty mild to moderate usage, I guess. I don’t use it for music, but this post is from my phone(edited from home to add links). I’ll add links to Jason and others later(done).
I usually have 2 out of 3 charge bars left at the end of the day.
What do you consider to be reasonable battery life?

My wife and I have been watching the Olympics. Not as much this week. Seems a little anticlimactic after Phelps won the eight gold medals. Also a little disappointing after the gymnastics. I am still not sure how a parent prepares a daughter for such heartbreak in such a subjective event. If it is a race there is no (or little) question as to who won. But if the event is “judged” there will always be difficulties.

I did notice something interesting though. When the women’s beach volleyball played Belarus, Belarus was about to score a major upset and win the first game. It was match point 20-17. Belarus had momentum and emotion on their side. Game ends at 21, but you have to win by 2. The US women held on for SIX match points. The Belarus team getting ahead, the US tying them. Then the US got match point at 23-22. As soon as the player from Belarus missed the shot to give the US the go ahead, you could see it on her face. They were done. The winning point came in mere seconds. The next game was 21-10 US. Matches are the best two out of three, so Belarus was still in it. But as soon as the US got the advantage, Belarus was psychologically crushed.

Contrast that to Michael Phelps’ seventh gold where he won by .01 of a second. He was way behind at the turn, but then hammered home and won with a final push. One guy made a reach. Another kept driving. That was all it took-but it took all of it.

For me, I wonder sometimes if I feel like I have control of life, then when I fall behind a bit, do I get psychologically crushed? Or do I drive to the end instead just reaching?

Our ribbon cutting ceremony went extremely well. Praise God! The opening of the worship was the best I had ever seen.  Our contemporary worship leader Donna Allen, led the procession singing “Open the eyes of my heart, Lord” followed by the five little “Pioneers”, the first class of our school.
When it came time to cut the ribbon, everyone was eagerly anticipating seeing the inside of the new building. So much so they were willing to stand out in the sun. It was really good to see the expressions on the congregation as this was, for many of them, the first time they were able  to see the inside of the education center. The response was overwhelmingly positive. I will post some more pictures soon. These are just the ones I got from my phone.

Congregation filing in

We rented a tent for the refreshments. It was certainly a good thing as the building was PACKED and people had to tour in shifts. Hats off to our Hospitality Commission for making this celebration possible. We had steel drums, a stilt walker, clowns (they still scare me). It was great fun.

Tent awaiting celebration

Tent full of people

Everyone got to walk through and see the wonderful learning environment the children will be in starting Wednesday. We had some of the secondary displays set up on the 32″ monitors that the teachers will be using as teaching tools.

Secondary display

The technology that exist in this building is nothing short of amazing. Certainly not like it was when I grew up. Back then the big thing was printing a banner on a dot matrix continual feed printer via carefully placed “x”s.

Our pastor gave an excellent message about it not being about the building, it not even being about providing an excellent education to the community, but it being about us responding to the call that we believe God placed.