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Viewing the International Space Station Tonight
International Space Station
Here in Dubuque we have two good opportunities to view the International Space Station with the naked eye as it passes over the city: tonight and Tuesday. I’ll be taking a dozen or so people up to the top of the Wartburg Tower to get above the light pollution of the city and, hopefully, get a really good view. A few more will be watching from the ground. According to the National Weather Service, we can expect only about 10% sky cover at 9pm, and I’m hoping that most of the snow that has fallen will have melted up there. Tuesday is looking like bad weather, but we’re on for tonight!
ISS Ground Track over Upper Midwest at dusk, 29 March 2009
Here’s the sky chart for Dubuque, IA for tonight, courtesy of Heavens Above. Note that West and East are reversed so that you can hold it over your head to get your bearings:
Skychart for ISS in Dubuque, IA at Dusk, 29 March 2009
We’ll also have classmates joining us in Owatonna, MN, Russell, KS, Lafayette, IN, and Ellis, KS.
How to Get Started with Cloth Diapers
Anneliese wearing a cloth diaper
Jennifer and I decided that we wanted to use cloth diapers for Anneliese, but if you look it up online, there is a huge variety of information. Some of it is contradictory, and all of it is confusing. So after having waded through the morass of hype, spin, misinformation, and genuinely useful stuff, I decided to put together a “how to get started” guide for cloth diapers that would skip the crud and just tell people what to buy. I’m not getting any money from the companies involved.
Our primary concerns were, in order, cost, re-usability, and environmental impact. What we’ve purchased is mostly the bare minimum: we’re home all the time, have easy access to our own laundry facilities, we don’t use daycare, etc. If your circumstances don’t match, you might need to buy more, less, or different stuff than what is listed here. This isn’t necessarily the best, cheapest, or most appropriate list – it’s just the list of stuff we did. I hope it’s helpful. Your Mileage May Vary, Offer Not Valid In Nebraska, etc.
A Human Point of View
Occasion: Lent 4, Year C
Text: 2 Corinthians 5.16-21
This sermon was prepared for an assignment for my Preaching class at Wartburg Theological Seminary and was delivered on 18 March 2009.
Several years ago, I had the privilege of participating in a service trip to Charleston, South Carolina. At the time, I was studying computer science in college, and when we visited a local Lutheran Social Services center, it turned out that they had computer problems galore. That was bad news for them but good news for me: who said that service trips can’t be fun? So I set to work on fixing up the computers at the agency. While I was busily fixing computers, I also got set on the task of getting all of the computers networked together. This was the age when wireless internet hardware was still pretty expensive, so we decided to use wires to hook everything up.
The only problem was, there were three buildings to connect together. I knew my way around a cable puller and drill well enough to run the cabling inside the buildings, but I had no idea how to get the cables to go underground between the buildings. That’s when I met a guy I’ll call Mike.
Wrapping up month two for Anneliese
Here are a few more pictures of Anneliese to round out our pictures of her second month. Most are general, but there are a few from our seminary’s Coffeehouse, and one very cute one in honor of St. Patrick’s Day!
Internship Assignment
I’m now free to tell the world that Jennifer and I will be spending the next year, probably starting sometime in July, at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Sterling, IL. We’re excited – this seems to be a good supervisory match, an interesting congregation, and an opportunity to explore some questions in technology and ministry. We’re also really excited because our good friends Chuck and Claire Meyer will be just a few minutes away in Rock Falls, IL.
Internship Assignment… soon.
Well, Wednesday was a really big day. Jealaine Marple and I, as co-presidents of the Middler class, spent most of the evening on the festivities that accompanied Internship Assignment Day. We had a small gathering amongst the Middlers with BYObeverages in Fritschel, which was fantastic – it was wonderful to see everyone pulling together and supporting each other. This was followed by a service of Holden Evening Prayer for the Wartburg community. Jealaine and I co-led the service, and we did it in what we jokingly called “punk rock style,” which was really just using fairly clean electric guitar and bass (and a Djembe). We also had a special sequence of intercessory prayers written for the occasion. After that, we retired into the Refectory for a dessert potluck, which was a smashing success. Actually, I think the whole thing was amazingly successful, and we had twice as many people at each event than I had expected.
As for my own internship assignment, I’m rather pleased with where we’re going, but I’m not allowed to publicly disclose the assignment until Friday afternoon. A friend of mine – and Wartburg alumnus – was saying it was weird how cryptic everyone’s Facebook status messages have become. Cryptic, yes, but honoring the confidentiality with which we’ve been entrusted. So it’s been a good, but very long day, and even as I write this after six or seven hours of sleep, I’m still feeling bone-weary over the whole thing. Thank goodness that my weekend starts at 12:30p this afternoon.
Synog
In the course of reading my RSS feeds this morning, I did a little research about a church in the Kansas City area. In the search results, another church came up as a “Missouri Synog” congregation. I laughed – synog sounds like snog, which is slang for “making out” – and Googled it. It’s funny almost every time!
Why Church search engine optimization (SEO) is more important now than ever
Poorly optimized church websites are getting lower search engine rankings when competing with professional “directory” services.
A few years ago, when you did a Google search for “church city, state” you would get, by and large, a list of websites and relevant news articles connected to churches in that community. It wasn’t perfect, and sometimes you’d end up with something weird, but you could generally count on the first ten or twenty results to be fairly relevant.
Now, however, when I Google the community I came from (church columbia, mo) or the community I now live in (church dubuque, ia), at least one, and sometimes more than half of the results are for directory sites like Merchant Circle or USAChurch that provide no real value to searchers, or to social networking sites that are only tangentially related to a church at all.
It’s not that church websites got worse. By and large, standards for congregational sites are going up as pastors are recognizing the need for a compelling site to attract church shoppers (like it or not) who no longer visit in person. If you look through either of the list of results I linked above, you’ll find some pretty good sites – above average, in fact.
Rather, the directory sites have found an easy target. Church websites are notoriously poorly optimized for search engine performance. Yet churches are something that people search for on Google, and any click is potential ad revenue. Thus, a professional web designer with an eye towards optimization and a national appeal (i.e. these sites are usually oriented nation- or worldwide and thus have more content, more links, and higher pagerank) can easily displace a ragtag group of congregational sites in any given community. They would be stupid not to try.
So, what can we do about it? Three things:
- Work on search engine optimization. Okay, duh. But surprisingly few sites take this into account, even sites developed by professional developers and “church website mills” that produce generic sites for cheap. Using HTML tags appropriately, rendering content as text instead of images, and more search keywords in each page will help make your site friendlier to search engines, visitors, and especially the visually disabled.
- Promote your site offline. It continues to amaze me how churches that have a good website don’t promote it everywhere. Just a little bit of ink and design space on stationary, pens, publications, bulletins, newsletters, and mailings to the community can drive incredibly targeted, relevant traffic to your site for free.
- If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. If a directory listing site ranks higher than your church, see if the site offers a way to add your website to their profile. Make sure that the contact information they list is correct so that people can find you. Even if the directory exists primarily for advertising purposes, you may be able to get some better exposure from them for free.
When people type “church city, state” in their browser, they have a “finding a church” problem. The key is in doing everything we can to help them solve it.
Copyright 2006-2010 Ted Carnahan. Except where noted, the content of this site is licensed under CC-SA-BY.