define: Jared Barden

Two weeks ago, we traveled to Indiana for my brother-in-law’s wedding. We had a great trip out (about 10.5 hours or so), and the wedding was a great time. I learned a couple of things about Indiana during the weekend, and I thought I’d share them here.

1. At McDonald’s in Indiana, you can rent new movies. No, really, you can. The service is called Red Box which I’ve never seen before, but it was pretty cool.
2. At said Indiana McDonald’s employees are allowed to wear iPods (with the ear buds plugged in) while they wait on you.
3. In the town we visited, they had no idea what a sheet pizza is. What a shame.
4. White Castle hamburgers are disgusting, or at least the little ones that come in the Crave Cases are.

Those were just a few of the things I learned/noticed about Indiana during our trip.

Pictures to follow.

This past weekend our church hosted its first Seize the Rock concert, which featured Manafest and Fireflight.

Here’s a breakdown of how the weekend went…

• Friday night - go out to eat with Manafest and our friend Mara at the Dumping House in Wellsboro (more on that later)
• Later Friday night - play Rock Band with Mara for far too long
• Saturday morning - go up to church to help supervise Skate Park
• Saturday at 3:00 - go to a friend’s Little League game
• Saturday at 5:00 - back to the church to get ready for the concert
• Saturday at 6:30 - doors open
• Saturday at 7:30 - concert starts
• Saturday at 11:00 - get home

As you can see, Saturday was a fairly busy/hectic day, but it was a lot of fun.

One thing that really impressed me about Manafest (real name Chris) was how down to Earth he was. Granted, he’s not a superstar (yet), but he was really cool to hang out with and treated us like friends, instead of acting like a Prima Dona. He was even gracious enough to spend almost 2 hours skating with the kids Saturday afternoon before he had to perform that evening. I wish Chris and his wife all the best in their music and speaking ministry.

If you’re a fan of hip hop / rock music, give either of these bands a listen. They both put on a great show, and I would recommend either one of them.

Ever noticed that some companies like to tell you to, “search for us on Yahoo! and learn more…” ? That seems like a risky strategy to me, and here’s my reasons why.

1.) Why not just send the person right to your web site? If you’ve ever read Don’t Make Me Think , this will make sense. Basically, you want to decrease the number of steps for someone to accomplish the action you want them to take, and you want to make it as easy and “thoughtless” as possible. Sending them to a search engine, telling them to search, and then hoping they click the link you want them to, seems to not follow the “Don’t Make Me Think” mantra.

2.) You increase the risk of competition.

Case in point, Pontiac did an ad a year or two ago, where they told you to search on Google for them. Well, the competition got smart and bought Pay Per Click ads for that term and got some great branding and exposure out of Pontiac’s ad.

Also, what happens if someone gets their page to rank higher for the phrase you’ve suggested to the TV viewer? Then you’re kind of stuck.

Or what happens if someone decides to Google Bomb the phrase you’ve targeted in your ad? Granted, Google has gotten stricter on this practice, but you could still use your PPC ad to get negative press out their about the competition.

Just seems like it would be easier to send the person right to the page you want them to go to. However, lots of companies take this, “search for this and click the link” kind of approach, which just seems like one too many steps to me, but maybe I’m just lazy when it comes to my surfing behavior.

We just returned from Williamsport, where we watched Ben Stein’s new documentary, Expelled, with our friend Mara.

I didn’t know too much about the movie, but I did know that it was supposedly in support of Intelligent Design, and I like Ben Stein, so I figured it would be a good time.

I was definitely not disappointed. Well, at least not totally. I was kind of hoping Ben would take more of a side/stand than he did, but that is his prerogative.

I won’t really get into the whole Intelligent Design vs. Evolution debate, because for me there isn’t much of a debate. I believe in Intelligent Design, but I also further believe in Creationism. Do animals/species evolve over time? Sure they do. It would be silly to think otherwise, but did we all come from single-celled organism in some cosmic soup? Highly unlikely.

What I wanted to touch on were some of the explanations offered by prominent Evolutionists as to how life might have begun.

1.) Molecules attached themselves to inorganic crystals and somehow formed life.

Wow. That’s about all I can say on that one. I’m pretty sure that takes more faith than believing that God created life.

2.) There is a possibility of an Intelligent Designer out there, but it must have evolved from somewhere, and then evolved enough to create life in our own universe.

Another far-fetched one it seems. And this was mentioned by one of the world’s foremost Evolutionsts - Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. Frankly, that explanation seems a little delusional to me, but that’s just me.

No matter what you believe on this issue, I hope we can all agree that debate should not be stifled, as is apparently happening in academic institutions at all levels across this country. That is truly a shame. Voices from both sides of the aisle should be heard, and then people should be able to make their choices from there.

Something always puzzles me about the credit card scanners at our local Wal Mart. In fact I’m not even sure if that’s the correct term for them, but for the purpose of this post, it will suffice.

What always gets me is that the scanner knows when you’ve swiped a debit card, and it proceeds on accordingly. However, when you swipe a credit card, you are prompted to let the cashier know that you swiped a credit card.

I always hate saying, “hey that was a credit card.” I don’t know why. It just seems awkward and unnecessary to me. My goal in checking out is usually to check out as quickly as possible, and having to take that extra step, even though it seems small, seems unnecessary to me in 2008. Seems like we should be able to make a scanner that doesn’t require letting the cashier know that you just used a credit card.

I also learned a couple new things about credit card scanners this past week.

1.) Apparently they are a pain to use for left handed people. Never really thought about that before, being right handed and all.

2.) What happens to the copy of your signature that is entered into the system and shows up on your receipt? I would like to think that Wal Mart wouldn’t use my signature for nefarious purposes, but you never know.

Credit card scanners at Wal Mart - one of the great mysteries of my life.

The definition of greed was on display over the last couple of days in the form of the Boston Red Sox players.

A little background on the story for those of you who aren’t sports nuts. Boston is playing their season opening game in Japan, which is a huge deal, due to the popularity of baseball in Japan, etc. etc.

Supposedly a deal was struck that the players, coaches, and staff would receive a $40,000 stipend (more than yours truly makes in an entire year) to make the trip to Japan. I have no complaints with that fact. We live in America. We all enjoy the benefits of capitalism. If someone wanted to pay me $40,000 for a trip to Japan, I would most likely gladly accept.

Apparently MLB reneged on part of their deal, and they were only going to pay the coaches and staff a measly $20,000 for the trip. Now, it wasn’t right of MLB to back out on their part of the deal, but come on people, you’re getting paid $20,000 to go on a trip to another country to take part in a GAME.

But, all is not lost, a deal has been struck, and Boston will be making the trip to Japan, and all is right with the world. Or something like that.

A post I recently wrote about the test of Google Health drove some unexpected traffic to my blog from an unexpected source - none other than Google itself.

The following is one of my “Jedi Web Geek” tips on how to drive some traffic to your site from the world’s biggest search engine.

The steps are pretty easy.

1. Read a blog post on one of Google’s many blogs.
2. Write a post on your own blog reflecting on the post you’ve just read. Write it as soon as possible after reading the post.
3. Wait to show up in Google’s “Links to this post” section of their post.
4. Hopefully get some unlikely traffic to your site.

It really does work. See the “Google Wants Your Medical Records?” link in the screenshot below? That link points to this site, and has driven some traffic over the last couple of weeks that I wasn’t expecting when I first wrote the post.

Give it a try. You just might get some unexpected results.

Danielle and I were reading through the story of Moses the other night, and a couple of things really stuck out to me that I either hadn’t read before or just never really noticed.

1.) Moses changed the course of history.

You might say, “well yeah, Jared, we know that.” I’m not talking about the plagues and leading the Israelites out of Egypt. Don’t get me wrong, that was a miracle, but there was another moment where Moses was used to change history.

The back story…Moses has been on Mt. Sinai meeting with God, receiving instruction on all sorts of different subjects for a long period of time. The Israelites left in camp become restless, they ask Aaron (who, by the way, is supposed to become High Priest) to build them a god that they can worship, Aaron complies and builds the golden calf. Moses hears the sound of the Israelites throwing one wild party, and God becomes extremely upset, and rightly so. Can you imagine being miraculously led out of Egypt, and then complaining that Moses hasn’t come down from the mountain, so you want to worship the golden calf that “led you out of Egypt?” A little crazy, right?

Anyway…God is so incensed with the Israelites that he decides to burn them up. Moses asks God to spare the Israelites in Exodus 11:13-14 (The Message)

Stop your anger. Think twice about bringing evil against your people!

And God did think twice. He decided not to do the evil he had threatened against his people.

Just goes to show the effect that someone cane have when they truly connect with God and ask Him to make a difference not only in their life but in the lives of people important to them.

2.) God uses imperfect people.

I thought it was quite ironic that God still allowed Aaron to be priest after this little episode. Because, while Aaron is busy building the golden calf, Moses is receiving detailed instructions regarding Aaron’s priestly duties. Yet, God still allowed him to serve as priest, despite his playing a part in the Israelites’ sin.

It’s encouraging to know that we serve a God who can work with imperfect people.

3.) The whole sacrifice system must have been a mess.

When you read about all the different sacrifices that had to be performed daily you start to realize that it must have been a big bloody mess, between the slaughtering, removing of certain organs, etc. etc.

Thankfully, Jesus performed/was the ultimate sacrifice during His death on the cross so that we could be right with God without all the mess of animal sacrifice.

It appears that after Yahoo! rebuffed Microsoft’s $40+ Billion hostile takeover bid, Microsoft might be taking another route to acquire the company.

Apparently Microsoft is considering a proxy fight to gain control of Yahoo! Apparently they really don’t want to take “no” for an answer.

Both Microsoft and Yahoo! seem to have a way to go before they can really compete with Google in terms of search, where Google, according to Hitwise, holds approximately 66% of the U.S. search market share. Putting Yahoo! and Microsoft’s share together still doesn’t even equal half of Google’s. Talk about dominance on Google’s end.

It will be interesting to see how this whole situation plays out and what kind of competition can be put up against the mighty Google.

Apparently the much-rumored Google Health is going to enter testing soon with a group of patients from a clinic in Cleveland.

I’m not sure what to think of this program yet. I don’t really like the idea of any other company having access to my health records, but let’s face it, how do we know who has access to our medical records currently?

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Google, but the amount of information that they possess is somewhat scary when you step back and think about it. The thought of them having access to my medical records seems just a little much for me. However, the blog post does note that you will have access to your records through a secure API (Application Program Interface - aka. “nerd stuff”). So, it’s hard to say how much access Google will actually have to the records.

Either way, it seems a little scary and “Big Brother” to me.