“I’ll drop them on my server and you can come and grab them via FTP.”

There are sites such as YouSendit which work great, but unless you sign up for a paid plan, you’re limited to 100MB transfers. Those of us who are self-employed know we have to save all the pennies we can.

Thankfully, I found another solution and it’s terrific. It allows transfers of up to 2GB completely free.

wetransfer

It’s called wetransfer and it couldn’t be any easier to use.

You add your files, plug in your email address, add the recipient’s email address and that’s it!

You don’t even have to create an account.

As your file uploads it will show the percentage and if you happen to watching, the background will change, showing different images.

So give it try!

Now, Vizio is ready to enter the PC market. And they are going all in. Check out the video after the jump to see the design of their computers:

They’re obviously getting some of their inspiration from Apple with the sleek design, but that’s a good thing. These computers look fantastic.

What do you think?

If you’re a PC person, would you own one?

Tebow’s winning touchdown pass to Demaryius Thomas 11 seconds into overtime provided a thrilling finish to a very exciting game.

But it gets better.

How many of you remember and/or played Tecmo Bowl?

I remember the ‘house rule’ in the 1991 game that said you could not use Bo Jackson because he simply could not be stopped. It was a classic game.

Well, somebody went ahead and re-enacted the Tebow/Thomas play within Tecmo Bowl, complete with the call:

I love technology!

What a year.

2011 is a year I will remember for a number of reasons. It started off in a scary and exciting way.

In the midst of high unemployment, lousy job opportunities and much uncertainty amongst consumers (both personal and business) with regard to spending, I left my safe job of 14 years for the realm of self employment. It started off pretty easily. While not employed with my former company, I did remain as a consultant role for what was supposed to be an ongoing basis.

The environment was still “safe.” And then in June, the rug was pulled out from under me.

My former employer told me through the human resources person that the consulting arrangement we had worked out was ending. Worse yet, there was no notice. They said, “The check you get this week, will be your last.” I continued to stay on, but without guaranteed hours and now there was a big dilemma in my household. Having guaranteed income made it easy for me not to hustle. Having this happen literally brought to my knees. I was questioning whether I had done the right thing. I was begging God for guidance. What I kept coming back to was Proverbs 3:5

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.”

That’s what I had to do. I had to let go. This lesson was no greater than when an opportunity arose for me to manage a project for a company and lead that part of the company when it was completed. There was an issue however. My wife and I have been feeling for a long time that the Atlanta area is where we needed to be (we live in the Daytona Beach, FL area right now). This company was in Daytona Beach. I knew the guy and thought, “I can do this job remotely. He’ll be ok with that.”

He wasn’t.

Immediately, we started to dash plans for moving to Atlanta. After all, here was a great work opportunity right? We decided to trust God. We made the decision to go to Atlanta regardless. Less than a week later God said, “Check this out.” I got a call from the guy I was working with and he said, “You can work remotely. It will be our Atlanta location.”

So we are planning a Spring move to the Atlanta area. We are very excited. Along with those challenges, some great stuff did happen in 2011:

• I wrote about 50 blog posts for ChurchMag. I love writing for this blog and having Eric Dye as the editor is awesome. He’s a great guy and things are going to be even better in 2012.
• Back in October of 2010, John asked me to write a 10 part series about being an “IT Noob.” It was one of the most difficult undertakings I had done as a blogger. I finally got around to it this past Summer and I was thrilled at the response. Even more gratifying was finding out the series was turned into an e-book. You can get it for free by signing up for the Church Mag newsletter!
• I swapped out my beloved Nikon gear for Canon for the purpose of getting into video. Moving from still imagery to video created a whole new set of challenges. But it’s been fun. Here is one video I did for a business (the one ironically I will be working with. Doing this video started off those discussions):
• My son and I are going to do these coding lessons together starting next week with Treehouse.

I can’t wait to get started this year!

What do you have on the horizon for 2012?

Share with us some of your 2011 highlights (or lowlights)!

Squier is a musician and enjoyed a tremendous amount of success in the early 80′s with songs such as, ‘The Stroke’, ‘In The Dark’, ‘My Kind of Lover’ and ‘Everybody Wants You.’ Squier was so big he was headlining shows with bands like Foreigner and and Def Leppard opening up for him.

Squier had crossover appeal but had a large built in male audience due to his songs and powerful guitar playing.

Then he released the single, ‘Rock Me Tonight’ and made the ill fated decision to make the following video:

(suffering through the entire thing is not necessary. Just watch the first 1:30)

POOF!

Bye bye male audience.

Squier continued to make records and still performs from time to time, but his career was never the same. And all it took was a music video that was less than 5 minutes long.

So how does this relate to ministry and the Church? Are we supposed to be building a brand for those?

Yes.

What is that brand?

The gospel of Jesus Christ.

You can be part of a church that has a million dollar budget for worship or no budget for worship. You can go to a church that broadcasts live with HD video or you can be a church that records its service with a flip camera and loads it to YouTube. You can have the killer website or the meh website.

All of it should be built around the brand of telling people about Jesus.

Is that what your church or ministry is doing?

If that’s what you’re doing, stick with it. Don’t ruin your brand.

GrexIt offers a solution to those issues. GrexIt allows emails to be searched almost like a knowledge base to use for a number of different reasons. You can add selected emails to GrexIt or even forward an email to a GrexIt account to have it stored.

This video describes the tool:

The service is limited at this time to Google Apps accounts, so if you use Google Apps, give it a try!

Aside from it being a violent drama with hardened criminals, there were several scenes that were quite funny.

The lineup was one of them (Warning: Naughty language alert):

Here is some trivia about that scene: It was not supposed to go down that way.

At all.

The guys came down with a juvenile case of the giggles while filming. It got so bad that during a break, director Bryan Singer told the cast they were “ruining” his movie.

Thankfully, he had a great editor in John Ottman who was able to take all of the cuts and put them together to make a great scene.

That’s the beauty of creativity and art. Some of your best stuff may come from something that was not planned.

As a photographer, I’ve had the good fortune to click at unexpected times and it works out so well.

Here are a few recent images:

Juhlya – Juhlya is one of the singers for our church worship team. This image was made backstage just before the Christmas Eve services. There was nothing wrong, but she still had this look of concern on her face. The light in the office was no very bring, but when she looked up the light hanging from the ceiling illuminated her face very well. When I pressed the shutter, it worked out. The image looked even better in black and white, evoking a 40′s Hollywood kind of look.

Sergio & Soraya – These two are friends of mine. I had a portrait special going for Christmas and they asked me to do photos for their family. Most of the time, I was getting good posed shots, but at one point, Sergio started making funny faces and doing goofy poses which led to genuine laughter and this image.

Greg & Denise – This image is of my Pastor, Greg Peters and his wife Denise. Our church has recently “adopted” Philadelphia as a city in the United States where we want to help reach the lost with the hope of Jesus. We were standing on the “Rocky” steps. I was facing the art museum and my wife told me to turn around. I saw Greg & Denise overlooking their adopted city and grabbed this shot.

The lesson here is to keep your options open when creating no matter what it is, and look for those moments that may at first seem to be nothing, but turn out to be great work.

Movable Ink is a similar service but with a twist.

They have some real time apps to embed in your emails which can be used for sales, fundraisers, etc.

Countdown timers, live tweets and local maps are some of the apps you can put into your emails.

Here are some examples of case studies:

They have a free version where the Movable Ink brand is part of your email and is more for personal use.

They have a pay as you go plan where they promise to charge only on what they call a True CPM basis. This means, you only pay for the emails that are actually opened which can save money.

Take a look.

Do you have any ideas on how you can use this in ministry?

I am not a designer nor a developer, but I am always looking to learn more so that I can make custom changes to my web properties without pulling my hair out.

Jason Fried tipped me off to TreeHouse and this site looks awesome.

Step by step, you can learn in three different areas.

The instruction is video based. I checked out the web design side of things and it starts off with the bare minimum, assuming the viewer has zero experience with web design. It really does take you step by step through the process. You move along by earning “badges” that you get after viewing all of the videos and taking a quiz to test your knowledge.

The video lessons are broken down into short 5-10 minute segments covering various aspects along the way in a step by step fashion.

The videos are interactive in that they instruct you to follow along with what they are doing as the videos play.

You can go through several videos for free to see if you want to try the service out.

There are two price points, $49 and $25 respectively each month.

The difference between the 2 plans is the $49 plan provides access to videos that show you how to create some sites and apps from start to finish with downloadable example files. In addition, you have access to conference videos from Future of Web Design.

My son has shown a very strong interest in graphic design and web design, so after the holidays I am going try this out with him (I told him we’d do it together).

We’ll use it for a month and I will then provide a more in depth review, so more to come!

Try TreeHouse yourself, and tell us what you think.

I love the fact that companies are starting to move away from from the typical Dilbert/Office Space cubicle dreariness of the past.

Some of these are really cool.

Living Social

The Hub

Comvert

Go check out the rest.

Which is your favorite?

I love the Living Social offices.