Test01

Airport BeeGees

Airport BeeGees from leftsider on Vimeo.

So "To Love Somebody" by the Bee Gees was the first song I've ever purchased from iTunes. This is what happens when you're up late editing silly footage you recorded over your week in Denver. FWIW the song was actually playing in the restaurant I was sitting in when I recorded this--that's how I was able to include the ambient sound.

The video doesn't make sense, but I get it; hope I'm not the only one.

In the Garden of Good and Evil

Lately I've been wondering whether I'm a good person or a bad person.

I don't think I've done anything too bad; not that I can recall. But I wonder, are good things what make me a good person? Is it a ratio of good versus bad deeds that determines our goodness quotient? If a genuinely good person does several bad things, is he now a bad person or were those actions done "out of character?"

Moreover, if I do good things only so that I might be seen as good and might generate public consensus to my will based on my reputation, am I still a good person? I would consider that person to be of the most reprehensible villiany that mankind can observe, yet all that she or he has done would be good. If a bad person does good things for an ultimately bad purpose, does that make the good deeds "not good"?

At this stage in my philosophical contemplations, I'm trying to determine what a good person is. Sofar I've come to this: we are forced into socially accepted norms of goodness and virtue. When we gain freedom from these restrictions, or a power that can make us exempt from them, our true identities are revealed. As a theist, I imagine my ultimate power or form-maker; what if there were no god or I was that god? If I look honestly, I see myself having much different actions than I do now; then I imagine, say, Siddhartha Gautama (who was not god nor claimed to be) reaching enlightenment yet leaving its bliss to share the path to others, and I see the distance between me and what I imagine as Good.

Am i a bad person then? Hmm... still out to lunch on that one. But I think it's all a matter of the strokes I make in the process of making my life, and making it better.

A New Way to Survey

I've been asked by the church I attend to be director of Young Adult Ministries. I'm not sure how I feel about that, so I suggested that I'd prefer if I could use this capacity to generate data on who young adults are, their interests, values, and concerns; this data I would then hand over to a team of young adults that I'd help to create new and pertinent programming.

Wikipedia says that a young adult is between ages 18 and 40. If you know anything about that age group you will know that:

• They are least likely to be at church.
• They are least likely to be at church on time.
• They are least likely to be at church long after the service is done.

So how do you poll the disillusioned, the disinterested and the easily dispersed? With a novel and portable interview system.

I knew that if I narrowed my survey down to about a dozen questions, it could still take 30 minutes per person. I'd be lucky to get 6 people in the 6 weeks I was given to work on the project.  I needed a way to hit many people at once, in a way that would catch them no matter where they were.

Text Messaging.

I don't know one person at my church, high school age or older, that doesn't have a mobile phone (this knowledge is supported by the 2-3 phones that tend to go off every service). What if I just had them send me their answers via SMS? Enter PollEverywhere.

PollEverywhere allows you to receive SMS "votes," which it automagically tabulates in cool little  graphs like the one above. It's just like American Idol! It also allows for "free text" responses, which allow for personal answers rather than choosing from a pre-selected set.

The novelty and portability qualifications were met, but I still needed a way to get the questions to them--without manually sending SMS to individual mobiles. Luckily, a link showed up at the bottom of my SMS when testing the poll--one for www.41411.com, the same number to which I had cast my vote.

The address sends directs you to TextMarks, a web app which PollEverywhere uses. It allows you to create SMS mailing lists, for lack of a better description. Pick a name, tell your friends to text that name to 41411 and they'll be subscribed to your group.



You can send message out to them (exactly what I needed!) and also allow them to reply messages back to you or to the group as a whole. This could be good for coordinating an event or a ton of other group activities (espionage, anyone?).

All said, it seems to work out pretty well. As long as you generate a decent sample size, this could be a free, simple and convenient option for creating your own SMS based survey.