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the BEST new blog tool (slogan: “Let’s make babies.”)

By on March 30, 2012 in Reviews, sponsoring, tips & tidbits, ♥ l.o.v.e.

you’re going to notice a few changes around here as you scroll down our site. it’s getting cleaner and more organized, folks! we haven’t been a part of the modern blogging community for very long, but it’s been long enough for us to appreciate the time and energy this super stellar new ad management tool saves us! seriously. if you’re not using it yet, you’re doing yourself a disservice…

helloooo Passionfruit!

(there is usually only one cute heart in their logo, but I felt it deserved a few more)

Passionfruit’s creator, Jason Lynes, hit it out of the park with this one, and from the conversations we’ve had it’s only going to get exponentially more awesome. (yes, that’s right, I said conversations – this dude is one of those forward thinking, long-term mindset, business owners who connects with his customers. judging from the 1,000,000 ads that have already found a home with Passionfruit, it’s paying off.)

so how does this great tool work? WELL, basically it’s like a virtual ibuprofen for your ad management migraine. hmm, no, that’s like saying it masks the problem, when really it gives it a swift kick in the butt and ushers it out of your life while you heave a great sigh of relief.

the process is quite straight forward.

1. simple account creation

2. set up your ad spots

(lots of great options here, including if you want the spots to shuffle or line up in the order they were purchased, and more to come!)

3. place the ads for purchase on your site

 

4. define where you want your ads to show up

(nothing will show up on your site yet, it’s just getting the nursery ready – because of all the baby language, you know)

5. make some babies! er, ads.

(you will probably want to import the ads you already have on your site or this is also how you should put any of your own ads on your site. I initially thought I’d have to make a promo code for myself in order to place one of my own ads with out paying myself, but no, just import it! yes, I said promo codes, I’ll get to that in a bit.)

5b. let others know they can make babies on your site!

(our baby-making factory is right here)

when someone goes to purchase an ad this is what they’ll see

do you see that??? they get to upload their ad themselves! not only that, but they can log in and change their ad if they need to. (you’ll always have the option to approve/edit) did you also notice that promo code box?

6. you might want to make a promo code (great for ad swaps!)

we did!

yep! that code will work on any of our ad spots, and it’s the one you use on our swap option in order to get some FREE swapping action going.
go on, do it now! (Passionfruit lets people purchase ads ANY time, not just at the beginning of the month ;) )

let’s see, did I forget anything? oh!

7. feel really smart for making your life more efficient

that’s about it! we obviously highly recommend Passionfruit.

go make some cute babies!

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Mr. D’s Mouse-vana

By on March 12, 2012 in fyi, Reviews, Tico Says

I was gonna call it  Mouse-gasm but naaah, do you need to put ratings on blogs? I mean … Christina already wrote a post on condoms so I think we might be pushing a PG-13. Oh well! In contrast to the “juvenile” beginning to this post  the content is a little bit of “randomy-serious” everything, God’s provision, life lessons, a bit of tin foil, excellent customer service, and yes, I am a mouse snob.

This little anecdote starts a couple of weeks into our “workation”. Almost 3 years into our blissful relationship my mouse decided to start acting up. Random double clicks and no clicks started happening, and to someone whose work is clicking and double clicking, this got annoying very fast. So I did what I learned in Iowa working with my wife’s family. I tried to fix it!
<!—– Insert life lesson here—–>

I was a city-boy, little learned in the ways of start-up business when I started working at my former job. I had a “toy -robot” mentality, “If something doesn’t work, stop, you can’t do anything about it, get a new one or get a hold of someone who can help you “. I had a bit of an “epiphany” about a month or so into my time there, “learn how to fix things!, learn how to find ways around obstacles, don’t stop moving!”. It was life changing. I learned the ways of the business and began to relish problem solving opportunities, eventually putting that same mentality to use in my own business ventures.

I used that life lesson and examined the entrails of my mouse and it seemed to respond but a couple days into the “responding” the erratic behavior came back with no signs of abating. I came to the decision that it was time for a replacement.

/*God provides*/

It’s cool and subtly LOUD! I was looking for a replacement and asked my friend, Eddy the computer nerd, about mice: “look for the Anywhere Mouse” he said. so I did, and found 2 of them. Being the good man that I am, I gravitated towards the best one that I could find. The price tag was not out of the question but was still going to be a nuisance to buy, specially on the budget we are on right now. I did the due diligence on the mouse (read the reviews on amazon, like my bro-in-law, Jeffrey, taught me) and found this gem:

Fortunately or unfortunately, Logitech’s reliability isn’t what it used to be, so my MX Revolution failed just before its warranty expired (the latest in a long string of Logitech devices that have failed right around their warranty expiration for my family), and Logitech’s wonderful customer service replaced it with a new Performance MX. I’ve always found Logitech’s customer support to be absolutely top notch (which is why I keep buying Logitech hardware even though it keeps failing)…

I don’t know why I didn’t think about it, but  It turns out I was one week away from the expiration of my warranty and due to the fact that Logitech has amazing customer support, ended up with a new Anywhere Mouse replacement! The catch was that it was on its way to Iowa!

Eddy lent me his former mouse and I was making do, but asking a number of questions regarding what kind of pot the Microsoft engineers were smoking when they designed this mouse. The receiver, the battery placement, the royally annoying buttons to push to get the mouse and computer to communicate… but I was still grateful that I didn’t have to battle the randomness anymore. This little veteran was a battery eater though, which would end up being its demise. On the second battery change in 2 weeks I managed (with a little help from the engineers) to break it.

 

 The little tab that connected the battery to the mouse board broke off. With no replacement in sight I put my life lesson to work and came up with a solution!

Yes, that’s tin foil and yes, it worked! It managed to “hold the fort ” until my parents handed me my awesome new mouse on Thursday evening. Praise God, and welcome to the family Mr A.W. Mouse !

(btw, this mouse is the “schizz” – perfect weight and size and it works on everything, including glass!!!)

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Knowing the Face of God: Double Vision

By on February 1, 2012 in God and stuff, Musings, Reviews

One of the main reasons for this blog is growing and learning. There are many books that have a big impact on our journey and we want to make notes and impressions here so that what we learn is imbedded more deeply in us and we are also able to come back and review it later. If our musings are able to encourage anyone else, all the better.

The first post in this series {Knowing the Face of God by Tim Stafford] did not appear to be a popular one, but this blog is not about butterflies, puppies, rainbows, and fashion, – it’s a bit of a mind-barf, so read at your own risk! :)

something I’ve wondered about for a long time – “personal relationship” with God. this phrase is equated with salvation, and really is so intertwined with the concept that many of us have of salvation that to try to change it would be like removing chunks of our brain – just wouldn’t compute. at the same time, it is not found in the Bible as such…

as Stafford points out, our predecessors’ focus was on sin and its forgiveness by way of the cross, whereas now our emphasis has become loneliness and alienation.

why? Stafford believes that we have managed to deny the reality of sin.

it’s easier to identify with feeling lonely than with being a SINNER, and this has been what has guided many of the “come to Jesus” experiences of today.

not only does this cause people to start out on the wrong foot, as it were, in their spiritual life in regard to sin, but it also sets them up for substantial disappointment and confusion.

our relationships with God are personal in that he knows every detail of our hearts and hair on our heads, but they are certainly not personal in a way that we ourselves can immediately identify with on a human level – we don’t get physical hugs and verbal affirmations.

we are instructed to do all the “right” things – church, fellowship with other believers, Bible reading, and prayer for starters, but seldom are we able to find (and even less often maintain) the kind of relationship that we thought we were signing up for.

as time passes we are often left wondering if this really is “it” or if we are not doing enough of the “right” things or doing them well enough and therefore missing “it” altogether.

occasionally we have one of those “God moments” where we seem to catch a glimpse or experience a jolt of how we thought it should look or feel. we then try to hang onto that moment, riding the “high” for as long as possible until we are knocked back down into “real life” again. when this happens it seems to further solidify that niggling feeling that we are simply not grasping the right formula.

in truth, we tend to jump back and forth between striving for that something “more” and the feeling of disillusion that sometimes descends on us in moments of weariness.

sermons do not seem to satisfactorily answer our questions, nor do Bible studies. there are trite answers, to be sure, but nothing that rings true in a way we can really cling to as life continues to bombard us from all sides.

it is for good reason that Paul wrote 1 Corinthians 13:12 “Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face”.

the Old Testament only serves to greater confound our unfulfilled longings as we observe a God who broke into people’s lives and spoke audibly as if to leave no questions.

while we find a different sort of interaction in the New Testament, it is in some ways even more relational, describing God as our Father and Christ as “in us”. but the “reality” of our day-to-day life begs to differ.

Stafford describes this dichotomy as “double vision”. he has found that we tend to react to the problem in broadly one of four ways.

Dropouts are those who have suffered enough that they finally seek relief in choosing to believe none of it. whether blaming hypocrisy, legalism, fundamentalism, or another catchword, the bottom line is that they did not find what they were (legitimately) looking for.

Joiners recognize religion as a good thing and their loyal participation comes from a place of practicality, but their method of adaptation involves focusing almost entirely on that which they are able to control and understand – this life and this world.

Enthusiasts are constantly looking for the “missing ingredient”, ever hopeful that it is just around the bend, and do everything to make sure not to miss it. conferences, books, speakers, whatever new thing comes along, they’re right there.

Hard-liners go in essentially the opposite direction of Joiners, ignoring the realities of their everyday lives rather than the tug of their heavenly visions. they tend to be full of answers, and always right.

I’m not sure how much sense this all makes outside of the context of the book, but for what it’s worth I would say I identify as part Joiner, part Enthusiast, with temptations toward Hard-liner :) I can easily get behind causes and enjoy the challenge of moving forward and making as much progress as possible in this life, but at the same time I do consistently seek out new and greater revelation. meanwhile, though I am certainly a realist and refuse to ignore all the complexities of life, I find the allure of living in my own little “heavenly world” very real at times. and then it’s time to make supper and I’m reminded I’d kinda have to join a cult or something equally crazy in order to make that happen at this point in my very real life :)

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Knowing the Face of God: A Personal Relationship

By on December 26, 2011 in God and stuff, Musings, Reviews, ☞ Truth, yo, ♬ music & art ✎

One of the main reasons for this blog is growing and learning. There are many books that have a big impact on our journey and we want to make notes and impressions here so that what we learn is imbedded more deeply in us and we are also able to come back and review it later. If our musings are able to encourage anyone else, all the better.

I started reading Knowing the Face of God by Tim Stafford earlier this year. It’s an older book, one which we gleaned from the library of Mr. D’s grandpa after he didn’t need it anymore, and it’s been sitting on our shelf for years. This felt like the right time to read it. Not too far in I realized it was going to be one of those books that changes the way I think about things. I always markup books, of course, with highlights and underlines and tiny notes in the margin, but for a long, long time I have been wanting to do a much better job of recording what I am learning. Thus, I greatly slowed my reading in the book and in fact now have been waiting to continue until I get caught up on hashing out my musings. I prefer to record first impressions.

The author sets the stage by describing the struggle of wanting to know God and be in relationship with him in an undeniably real sense. He talks about the effect that others’ apparent spiritual lives and interactions with God have on one’s own sense of God; the feelings that arise when you allow yourself to go to the recesses of your mind and contemplate the questions that linger there but are not often fully formed; the longings that are often stuffed down by the realities of simply surviving everyday life. These are my words, and the reasons I sought out this book.

I have experienced times of intense connection with God where I felt my spirit fully alive and engaged in constant dialogue with him throughout my day. It is these experiences which educate my understanding of Paul’s recommendations to not marry. Marriage and subsequently children add so many more things into your mind and heart which were previously much less cluttered. It is unquestionably more difficult to find that sense of communion with God on a regular basis with all the extras floating around in one’s brain and constantly engaging all the other 5 of one’s senses in the impossible-to-ignore way that diapers and hunger and little squabbles do.

I find, though, that it is much more noble to engage fully in life and these kinds of relationships, even if that means accepting the struggle of knowing God on a different level and in a more complicated way, than to choose a path of hermitude and a selfishly monastic lifestyle which enables one to seek out intense feelings of heavenly connection at all times.

If you are not the type of personality given to connecting with your emotions like a surfer at home in the ocean, you may not understand the desire to embrace the melancholy and contemplative moments and cling  to them until you have wrung every drop of emotional high out of them. Have you ever tried to have a good cry with kids hanging on your leg, needing lunch?

You can’t very well be in your own little world and at the same time be any good in relationships. I think this may be why the most celebrated artists are often those who meet or have met with tragic ends – they seek out the intensely dark place of creativity where no one can follow, and people are not made to be alone – it is actually, then, a somewhat self-destructive state, a twisted version of creativity.

I do believe, however, that there is a place of creativity that is much more open and vulnerable and engaging. God is a creator, but he involves us in his processes, he does not turn inward and isolate. It is this journey I find myself on, of learning to throw off insecurities and the perceived comfort and gratification that isolated creativity provides, and rather join God in embracing the joy and pain of creating while being fully engaged with all the complexities of LIFE and relationships with others.

So there is this reality that feeling and interacting with God on a day-to-day basis seems to be much less an ethereal experience, and much more a volatile trusting that our present state of mind does not change who God is our relationship with him. It is simultaneously that simple and that complex. And it is this struggle of wanting more that we shall continue to explore in part 2.

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