This past Sunday our church service featured How Great Is Our God a video by Loui Giglio. I was absolutely amazed by the science and research that he shared during that presentation. But I was blown away by the sheer magnitude of God and His Creation.

In high school I worked my senior year at a Staus - a fine men's clothing store in Jamestown, ND (now out of business). Straus not only sold suits and ties, but was also the only location in town that people could rent tuxedos.

Today I was on a field trip to see some copy/scan/fax/print machines.
I knew it would be loaded with excitement, but little did I realize just how much I would have to hold back my sighs and comments of "would you like us to come back when you are prepared for us?"
Considering that most of the copy machines interface with the PC world and, because we have two Macs that don't play nice with our current machine, we wanted a demonstration done with my MacBook Pro, my software, and my images. Don't just tell me they will pay together, show me! I want to see what it looks like when I print it.
Our first stop was great. I plugged in to their network and found the printer immediately, my Mac loaded the basic drivers and we were printing within minutes. Two runs, one on standard paper, and one done with better stock. I must say the presentation was nice, the images were crisp, and the sales staff were knowledgeable about the machine.
Then it was off to the second stop. I should have known I was in for a treat when they said we couldn't meet them at their showroom because they were out of that particular model. We pulled into an office building where the people there were nice enough to let us sabotage their work space while we were presented with a copy machine demonstration.
They knew we wanted to bring in our machine, they knew it was a Macintosh, and they have done several installations and set up of these machines. We figured they would know exactly what we needed for the demonstration.
I connected my computer with a cord that didn't snap into place, "will it come loose?" I asked myself as I began to add their printer to my computer. Found right away, but before I could print... Error message. The printer could not be accessed.
"Oh, I guess you'll need the driver" was the reply from one of the FOUR reps crowded in the copy room with us.
"OK" was the reply, where do I get it I wondered. "I can get it to you on a flash drive. Will that be OK?" Sounded like a harmless enough question, until I realized he had to log on to a server through a slower-than-cable wireless card to download the driver. Twenty minutes later I get the flash drive, unzip the file, click the installation file, and begin to go through the wizard.
"Which printer do I install?" I asked as I looked a the list of about a dozen options.
"The 245" was the reply.
"I'm sorry did you say 245? There is no 245 in this list," I said.
"Well install the one for the 244 and then I'll download another one and we can give that one a try."
We finally get the driver installed and print a couple of images for comparison to the other machine, it only took about 75 minutes to accomplish that task.
In all it was a nice machine, and the machine would sell itself (come on it has to with a presentation like that), but if the service after the sale was indicated by the service to GET the sale... I think we'll keep shopping.
What do you think?

Recently when watching some presentations at TED. I was fascinated by one by Jonathan Harris entitled "The Web's Secret Stories."

I had seen presentations of Mulit-Touch Computers, people show turning the Wii into a smart-board, others talk about the proliferation of cell phones into the world and how this technology is changing the way we interact with each other, but this one about the secrets of the web made my jaw drop!

Jonathan Harris has created a website that combs all of the major blog sites in the world for the phrase "I feel..." It then captures the entire sentence, and the image if it has one, stores it in the database. He has then coupled that sentence with the ability to determine the gender, age, location, and even the major weather of the day that blog entry was written. Users can then go to his site WeFeelFine.org to view a random "artwork" of floating dots representing each of the feelings captured around the world.

I find this fascinating that a computer can gather all of the feelings around the world in one place and we can see how the world is feeling.

Today I went on and found that:

128,155 people felt better
93,390 people felt bad
40,683 people wrote that they felt right
255 people felt Christian
20 people felt humorous

And how to you feel?

Amazing that a computer can do this, that a human mind can create something like this... but then I remembered that this is exactly how God made us. He made us to know and be known. To desire others to know us deeply and to know them in return. That's what makes our relationship with Him so incredible.

He knows our feelings, thoughts, and everything about us and still loves us! I find that absolutely overwhelming at times.

How does it make you feel to know that the One who created you want's to know you?

For me, today I feel loved by my Creator, I feel admired by my wife, and I feel looked-up-to by my boys. Who knows, maybe one of you will see my dot floating through the myriad of other feelings at WeFeelFine.org.