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The school year ended about a month ago, which means our high school ministry has a new fledgling crop of high school graduates. Some are planning to leave at the end of the summer to go away to school, some are trying to figure out how to stay home/local but still transition to the next stage, and all seem to be in this odd stage of waiting for a shift. Bad news, guys. There’s no magic shift. On the first day that you’re in your new environment, you’re going to suddenly realize that awkward truth all of us realize when we’re in a wildly different setting with different expectations on us: we’re not ready. We’re mostly hoping to fake it until we either make it, or realize that we’re shooting for the wrong goals. (making it seems to be relative. In some cases, making it just seems to be making it one more day.)

That’s the scary news. The good news, sort of, is that God’s equipped you with lots of us who can relate. Our church is now spinning up a college ministry. We’re counting as an extension of our youth ministry, as there are some sort of statistics out there that say folks are still not yet adult until they’re in their mid twenties nowadays. I dunno about that. I can say it feels odd to be talking to these young ladies and gentlemen, and thinking back to life experiences I had at 18 or 19, that I was dating my to-be husband at 21… I look at one of the young couples in our youth group, at their plans to stay local for college for two years and then move onto their next stages of life together – at first you think – ain’t going to happen (statistically speaking), and then I think – but maybe I’m looking at a set of high school sweethearts who’re going to make it.

We’re still figuring out exactly how the ministry will work. The neat thing is that these guys are an engaging group of “kids”, who are really excited to help form their own community focused on the gospel. The adult leadership team has high hopes of helping these guys set their own expectations of what it means to engage with and through the church, such that we help them set mindsets and patterns that will cause them to help push the church to even more of a gospel community focused culture. Too many of our adults come to church on Sunday as individuals, hear a sermon, worship as individuals, and then leave to go back to their individual lives. We hope that by helping these kids feed their own hunger for something more, we in the end help spread that hunger through the church – both our own and whatever venues these guys may move to as God directs them to new geographies in their lives.

Pray for opportunities, for vision, and for excitement tied to God’s priorities. And, uh, pray that on the 16th (our first meeting) we’ll have at least a few folks there…

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Our project at work enabled a community of 1000+ folks to communicate via a closed google group to chat with us about desired software features, any issues, local extensions or patches, etc. It’s this really neat collaboration area that my team of just a few folks spends quite a bit of effort in their care and feeding. Google groups in some ways makes that somewhat hard. Let me put that differently: there are a few things it could do as a core product that would make things much easier, and there are even some extensions/mashups I’d like to make to help me satisfy some local use scenarios.

First stop: google help forums… Can google groups let me identify unanswered messages in some way, or topics over the last x period of time with the most varied set of respondents? answer: uh, those forums aren’t really active anymore, and no mention seen of such features. Next step: any REST APIs to help me put together a solution? Uh, nope there, too.. Feature request out there for such… Lots of comments of ‘I need that, too!”, but no responses from google.

I did trip across mention of ATOM and RSS feeds. Hopefully, those plus some cloud storage of additional metadata may get me to a solution. Aiming for the following: discovery of unanswered messages, discovery of outlier topics (revisited after long time or large number of responses or…), moderator tagging of topics to flag for team, maybe end user tag clouds sorts of stuff…. Lots of ideas, and then the idea of further integrating with some sort of crm kind of system also appeals. (Nope, not proposing writing a crm here. But integrating with one would be useful. Wonder if crms take email feeds or rss or atom feeds to auto handle much of what I just described? Hmmmm….)

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Day 3 of iPad adventuring.  After getting set up on day1, my kids started asking what games I had on it.  First request was for Bejeweled (Callie).  Second request was for Angry Birds (Cameron).  And then they both clamored for Fruit Ninja.  I blame their grandfather for the first two, and their babysitter for the third.  I did download a free Angry Birds and spent too much time throwing feathered missiles at pigs.  I had had a version of AB on my Android and never been impressed.  On the iPad, the user experience worked a bit better – still a pain in the neck game, in my opinion.  Though that hasn’t stopped me from spending too much time on it.

Typing this blog post from my laptop for no really good reason – I pulled out the laptop to do some Javascript development.  So I now have my Android in front of me, updating its apps and downloading Google Voice to let me do some voice command trickery I saw on LifeHacker; I have the iPad in front of me that I’m using as my eBook kind of thing to read ‘Learning Ext JS 3.2’.  And, of course, I’m typing on the laptop for my blog.  I type all right on the iPad – it’s just that I type faster on a physical keyboard as of yet.  Appreciating some of the niceties of the on-screen keyboard: if it knows I’m entering in an e-mail field, then the ‘@’ sign is part of the primary keyboard; as I shift to type a punctuation mark, after I type the mark, it returns me to the main letter keyboard.  However, it doesn’t do that if I’m typing numbers – very smooth.

Did finally set up a cellular plan on the iPad.  $20 / month for 1GB data.  I figure if I primarily use the thing at work and at home, both have wireless connections.  But the $20 gets me accessibility in other places, without relying on wireless networks that I worry may be less secure.  That reminds me: I need to find some sort of virus and other network protection software for the iPad.

Having a very funny geeky weekend!

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So, I’m connected up through iTunes, registering my new iPad.  I worked a few years ago for a cellphone company, and as part of our website, we had folks register their phones.  There was always a question of how to get the information we wanted from our customers without annoying them with all of the information we wanted, and how to confirm that the information for key fields like serial number was typed correctly.

iTunes iPad2 registration experience: I typed in my iTunes id (gmail address) and password, and got taken to a screen that had my address, my phone number, and my serial number, all already populated.  For everything but the serial number, those fields were editable.  They had my phone number wrong, but I first corrected it, and then actually deleted it.  Not sure I like that they had a phone number for me.  It WASN’T the phone number I gave the Best Buy guy yesterday, or any mistyped variant of it.  Not sure where they got it.  Slightly weirded out.  Really appreciative on the serial number thing, though: that info was amongst the set of common errors when registering cellphones where folks would fat-finger.

I skipped the set of questions they ask (what I do for a living, how old I am, primary usage purpose, etc)…  It always bugged me when our end-users would skip those questions, but here they’re not listed as required: interested in seeing what Apple does with my “non-compliance”.  Oooh, it does require my phone number – not liking that.  Giving ’em the fake number run-around.   Whoever has number 366-2273, sorry: your number also maps to “FooBard”.

Did set up the ‘Find my iPad’ feature.  I’ll trade potential loss of privacy here (explicitly granted, instead of just likely going on anyway) for the reward of being able to find my lost device.

By the way, impressed that the keyboard on the iPad counts the ‘@’ as part of the alphabet keyboard, rather than the symbol keyboard.  Nice touch.

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After too many conferences where my options for staying in the loop with my team were (1) lug a laptop around all day, including powerpack, etc or (2) receive/type emails on a phone keyboard while not being able to get to all of my filed emails (probably solvable with better software), decided to go for the iPad.  Then the choice became: Wi-Fi only or Wi-Fi + 3G?  There’s a reasonably significant price difference between them, and of course the 3G requires a service plan with a carrier, which usually goes against my cheapskate side.  But this time had a bit of extra cash at my disposal, so decided to go for the gusto.  Because the iPad isn’t subsidized by any of the carriers in the same way a phone might be, there’s not the same requirement to lock-in to a contract.  In other words, pay a bit more for the ability to do 3G, but not locked in to paying month over month necessarily. OK, workable.

Next choice: which carrier (AT&T or Verizon) – you have to determine which when you buy your iPad.  Just like phones (grumble, grumble), the equipment varies based on which carrier you’re going with.  Having an existing contract with T-Mobile (being bought by AT&T) and not being entirely happy with that (lots of dropped calls lately), decided to test out Verizon.

Next choice: how much space – options include 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB.  I don’t intend to use this as a heavy entertainment platform, so opted to go for the 32.  Probably still more than I need.

Next choice: I was at Best Buy, so they wanted to set me up with a Geek Squad policy.  Listened to what they covered, listened to the price ($120), opted to pass.

Out of box experience: you get the thing, it has a 2×2 inch instruction sheet that tells almost nothing.  You turn on the iPad, and it shows two icons with a line between them.  The first is a drawing of the connector for the iPad with a line connecting to an icon for iTunes.  Really?  They’re really counting on knowledge of iTunes being ubiquitous for their customer base.  I didn’t have iTunes on my work laptop (I’m a Pandora fan, and usually listen on my phone rather than eat network bandwidth at work), so installed it.

Once it’s installed and started, with iPad plugged into my laptop, iTunes recognizes the iPad device and starts me up for registration.   Looking forward to fun here – just really amused by the out-of-the-box experience.