If I had a dime for every time I heard someone in ministry say that they did not pray as much as they thought they should, I’d be doing ministry in the Caribbean somewhere or maybe a cruise minister.  Permanent vacationing aside, most of us really do want to pray more.  My bet is that you feel you’d do it more if you just had something like, say, a text message to jog your memory.

That is exactly what Echo Prayer Manager does: it reminds you to pray via email or SMS.  After signing up for the free account, you enter your prayer requests choosing how you want to recieve the reminder (email or SMS) and how often (more, normal, less, or non-random).  Then you go over to the reminders area and decide when is the best time in each day for you to be reminded to pray.

Here’s the genius thing, unless you tell it otherwise, it reminds you of a random prayer request from your list at that time!  Of course you can ask it to remind you to pray for your friend at the exact moment he is getting his appendix removed, but the real genius is that once you decide when you want to remember to pray, you don’t have to also decide which prayers to pray at which moment.

There’s also a prayer journal where you can keep more detailed info on the prayers.  The only thing I wish it did was have some group option to be able to use it to remind a whole prayer group and an iPhone app for adding new requests, but there’s always future updates to look forward to.  Check it out at www.echoprayer.com And, let me know see any cruise ministry openings!

Last weekend was the Simply Youth Ministry Conference, and there was lots of great training. One of the speakers, Tim Schmoyer videoed his seminar on Communicating Youth Group News with Teens and Parents and dropped it on YouTube. You can watch it here (it was really good):

If you’d like to pickup more seminars from last week end you can get them here. Or if you’d like to register for next year (It’s going to sell out early) Visit: youthministry.com/symc.

It’s my experience that I can often tell when a site is going to spam me. However, there are those times when I need something, and the site requires me to fork over my email and “verify” it forcing me into the conundrum of deciding between and endless barrage of spam and whatever I think I “need” from the site.  This is where Mailinator comes in.  You simply give anything @mailinator.com … anything you choose… and Mailinator will have your email waiting for you when you surf over to their website:mailinator.com. Once you check your email you can have it deleted or just leave it and Mailinator will automatically delete the email in a couple of hours.

Of course there are other applications for this like giving a “persistent” teenager the wrong address or giving it to a vendor at a conference to obtain a free glowing pencil topper, but we do not endorse or participate in anything like that here.  It’s just a quick tip.  And it is FREE!

It seems that although everyone makes their forms downloadable online as a PDF, almost no one formats the files as editable forms that can be filled out within acrobat reader. This means I have to download the form, print it out, fill it out by hand, and then either walk it over to whoever needs it or scan it, save it, and attach it to an email. Sounds like it would be easier to just stop by the registration table and fill it out on the spot.  Formulate Pro fixes that problem.

I should say, that if you have Acrobat Pro, there is a typewriter and annotation tool that works relatively well, but at $449 from Adobe’s site, or $378 from Amazon, it is a little pricey just for filling out forms. That is where Formulate Pro comes in. This tool does one thing, and does it well. It allows you to type, draw and make check marks on top of the PDF.  Then, you can save it with those edits as a PDF of print it out. And, it’s free!

After downloading and installing the app it is as simple as opening the PDF, clicking the “T” (text tool) for typing, the squiggle tool for drawing, or the checkmark to check a box, then save or print. Right now, it’s only for mac, but the source code is available at GitHub.

My main computer that I use for all my day to day work is pushing 3 years old, and it’s really starting to show it’s age. I realize that 3 years doesn’t sound like that long, but it’s the longest I’ve used a computer since the 386 I built my freshmen year of college. But in these economic times I’m sure most of us aren’t able to replace our computers as often as we would like. I find myself in a constant battle in keeping mine from crashing and losing hours of work. I’m sure I’m not the only one, but is there anything we can do that can help prolong the life of our aging machines? Here are a few things that I have found that has helped:

1. Hardware Upgrades: Sometimes over time we can develop some hardware problems that are easy to tackle ourselves.  Two upgrades we can do that make a huge difference are RAM and Harddrive.  If you find your aging computer slowing down, make sure you have the maximum amount of RAM your computer can handle.  If you don’t know the maximum amount for your machine head over to Crucial.com, and run their memory scanner and they will tell you how much your computer can take.  You can also buy the upgrade from them, and their prices are some of the best around.  Another upgrade that can make a big difference is upgrading your hard drive.  Chances are your computer came with a small, slow drive that upgrading can make a huge difference.  If you drive is too full it can slow you down, also upgrading to a faster drive can make a big difference in performance.

2. Clean up the hard drive. You may not feel comfortable swapping out your harddrive, and if you have a laptop it may not be easy.  But that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck.  You can defrag your drive to help speed it up.  I would also clean off unneeded programs and files to free up space.

3. Clean install. This is much more drastic, but often times using the system restore disks your computer came with reinstalling everything often helps fix problems that can be difficult to find and fix another way.  Now if you feel you need to take this step make sure you have a good backup and all the install files for your software because this will result in erasing your hard drive back to the way it came from the factory.  If you are planning to upgrade your computer to the latest operating system (Windows 7 or Snow Leopard) this can be a great time to do this.

4. Find a New Use For It.  You may find that your old computer is just not worth upgrading or fixing so you do take the step to get a new one.  That doesn’t mean the old computer is now completely useless.  You may be able to turn it into a home server to keep your photos or music on so you can share them with other computers in your house.  Or maybe that old laptop will be perfect to your spouse, parent, or child.  I find often times other people in my life don’t have the same requirements that I have, and while my old computer may not be great for editing video anymore, it may be perfect to check facebook or playing webkinz.

What do you do with your old computers?  How old is too old?

Let’s face it, a lot of our church websites need help.  Most of the time they aren’t up to the design and functionality we would like.  Well, the guys over at Snapshot Web would like to help fix that.  They are giving away a year worth of hosting, plus a custom design just for you.  Just follow the link and take their quick survey to be entered.  Who knows, a new church website could be in your future.

I have a confession to make. My life is out of control. OK, that may be a little dramatic, but over the last 6 months I’ve allowed myself to become more and more disorganized. A lot of it has to do with the number of projects and things I’ve needed to get done have increased, and my organizational system hasn’t scaled to the new amount of tasks.

There are those that tell me I need to start using a GTD system, but to be honest those systems seem like they would be too much work to keep going. I see the need for something more than just keeping a list in my moleskin notebook. I’ve looked at a number of different software packages and web tools, but this is what I’ve narrowed my search down to:

1. Entourage
Entourage is what I use for email. It has a task list that can be tied to me email and calendar.  It’s already in my work flow and I’m very familiar with it.  It’s not perfect, but ramp up time would be small.

• Pro: tied to my work email and calendar, everything in one place, little setup time
• Con: doesn’t sync to my phone, have to be at my computer to update the list or check things off, can’t share it

2. Backpack from 39signals
Backpack is an online tool for creating simple pages that can include to do lists, comments, and such. It’s super easy to use and the free version is pretty functional.

• Pro: online-I can use it where ever I am, shareable – I can allow others on my team to ad items or comments to help prioritize, can set reminders that will be texted to me
• Con: may outgrow free version, todos and reminds don’t tie together, iPhone apps not free

3. Evernote
I’ve been using Evernote for awhile as a place to capture notes and thoughts for projects and blog post ideas, and recently I read an article about how to use it as GTD system (but one that seems doable).  The article itself was confusing at first pass, but there were some great basic ideas that I easily implement.

• Pro: online – access it anywhere, free version will be adequate for quite some time, shareable, more than just to do system, research and info system as well, can include photos / voice notes, can email items to it
• Con: will take the most amount of time to setup, a little bit of a hack to do what I want, no reminders or calendar ties

What are your thoughts on these? Anything that works for you?

I finally received my invite from Google for the Google Voice service, and like a huge retreat coming down to the wire, it is getting me excited and frustrated all at the same time.

The exciting part revolves around the concept that you can have one local phone number that forwards to other numbers based on who is calling and will text message you a “preview” of the content of the voicemail that is left if no one answers.

I think that the texting feature is by far the most interesting. When I tested it, it did not do perfectly, but got the job done. I left the message: “Hi, this is a test message testing the text feature on the google voice service. I received back via text message, “hi this is a test message testing the text to make sure on the google voice servers.” Pretty good, and I didn’t have to click through and listen to find out what the person wanted.

The other great feature is the one that has gotten a bit frustrating in the initial setup.  The basic idea is that you can set up several forwarding phone numbers (home, cell, office, your senior pastor’s direct line… whatever), and google will ring one or more of them depending on the assigned group of the person who is calling.  Sounds easy, and it probably is if you have already been using google contacts as your primary address book.

If you are like me and have a gmail account but use something else as your primary address book, you will have some problems.  First, if you have had a gmail account you will have a ton of contacts that have no name… just an e-mail address.  These will be everything from amazon support to some random applicant for a job you corresponded with twice two years go.  Second, if you choose to sync via an exported .csv or by checking the schnazzy box in Apple’s Address Book, you will have MANY duplicate contacts.  The real problem with all of this is that the contacts area has no advanced search feature.  You cant just find duplicates, or those people with just e-mail addresses.  What you’ll have to end up doing is manually scrolling down the list and either adding the missing informtion, deleting them, or merging them.  One word: hassle.

Once you’ve got the contacts all nice and clean setting up groups is easy and you are off to the races.  Now the sixth grader who just got their first cell phone and has two numbers, yours and their mom’s, will go to voicemail 20 times a day and you’ll get 19 preview texts of “what’s up… just bored… call me” and no interruptions in the meeting with the senior pastor about getting the thousands of flecks of neon spray paint off the gym floor. On top of that, you can have it ring your home, office and cell all at the same time (not in succession like many forwarding services) when your baby is due any day now and save your wife the tracking down of her too busy youth pastor husband.

Another interesting feature is called ListenIn.  It allows you to listen in on the message someone is leaving and jump in by pressing star as if you were screening calls on an answering machine.

This has tons more features including conference calling, recording phone calls, temporary forwarding, and much more.  for an explanation of all their features you can click here to see their help page on the subject.

Overall, I think this is a great product, and if I have gotten an invite they are sure to open it up soon to the whole world.  To request your invite, click here and fill out the form.

I’ve started using this service a little while ago to organize the different trips that I take, and with summer coming up travel season will be in full swing.  The service is call Tripit, and it’s an easy way to keep different trip information in one place, and mobile.  

It’s a great tool for organizing your itineraries, details, and updates to your trips.  I’ve used it for both road trips and trips that required me to fly.  A great bonus is if you have made your reservations online (air, hotel, rental cars), you can forward your email confirmations to the service and they will even build your itineraries for you.  For road trips I used it to map out stops along the route and addresses of where I was going for my GPS in the car.  There’s also a place for notes where you can keep other information you’ll need.  When you build an itinerary it adds in helpful information about your destination, including weather and maps.

My favorite part is that they have a great free iPhone app (iTunes link) that allows you to access all the details of your trip directly from your phone.  So if you are flying somewhere you can get your a link to your flight status right in the app.  It’s been a huge times savings for me to keep all my details in one place.  It would be a great place to keep those mission trip or summer camp details in one place.

A few weeks ago I let me MobileMe account expire.  I was a decision that I’ve been contemplating for awhile.  I had mentioned it over Twitter and someone asked what I decided, so I thought I would share my reasoning why I decided I no longer needed to spend $99 a year on the service.

1. Mail, Contacts, Calendar Sync – There are a couple of reasons why this wasn’t important to me any more.  One I must use a Microsoft Exchange server at work so this performs the same function with all my work Email, Contacts, and Calendar.  And for all my personal info I use the Google Suite – Gmail and Gcal.  The Google products perform the same function, and the cost is FREE.

2. Online Gallery – The online galleries that .Mac and now MobileMe have look great, and there was a time they were the best thing out there, but now with Flickr and Picasa once again a free service offers a comparable solution.  iPhoto will even upload to Flickr now.  And I bet for most people photo sharing on Facebook is good enough.

3. Back-to-My-Mac – Now I must confess, I was never able to get this to work right, and I know very few people that use it consistently without problems, but it’s still a feature that could be a great service.  And once again, I found a FREE service that is able to perform the same function.  I use LogMeIn and it works great, and it also can allow you to go back to a PC if you wanted also.  I’ve had much better luck with LogMeIn, than I ever had with BackToMyMac.  They do have a pay service, but the FREE level has been great for my needs.

4. iDisk – This was another service that in it’s day was unique, and the easiest way to share and store files online.  The replacement for this for me has been DropBox.  It works great and is super easy.  You can have both private and public files.  Great for storing things you need access to (even from your iPhone) or things you need to send the links out to share.  DropBox’s free level only offers 2 GB of storage which is a fraction of MobileMe’s 20 GB, but if you needed more you could pay for it.

5. iWeb – This one there I don’t have a great free solution for, but if you really want to host a website, even one you created in iWeb, there are a lot hosting companies that are much better and still cheaper than the $99 you spend a year for MobileMe.  But if a website is what you are after a free Blogger or Wordpress account would give you that blog or site for FREE.

One thing that was nice about MobileMe, was all these services were integrated into one interface.  My current FREE solution is a series of links, but it gives me a series of tools that are all really good at the one thing they do instead of an integrated service that doesn’t always work as advertised.  Plus the money that I saved I was able to put toward an Online backup service which is more valuable to me than an integrated package.

So am I crazy?  Did I make a big mistake giving up on MoblieMe?  What are your thoughts?