Life @ Carolina

Rick Warren, who wrote The Purpose Driven Life said: (paraphrase) “Most people struggle with daily time w/ God because they’ve never developed the habit” and went on to talk about how 40 days is about what it takes to seal a habit.

It occurred to me that I don’t think I’ve ever gone 40 uninterrupted days spending time w/ God in my life. Uh oh. I’ve read blogs every day for a year+, and haven’t really missed a day. I never forget to Twitter. Facebook doesn’t just fall to the back of the list. But Jesus does. We have a case of bad priorities.

I have growing ideas of valuable content to add to the blogosphere (this blog is mostly for kicks), but I’m too controlled by blog stats and comment numbers, and such. I’m pretty certain that any amount of success would go straight through my head and a small explosion would ensue. Very messy.

As @loswhit said, “I want to wreak of Jesus.” Like Axe on a 7th grader. Well not really. So from now until Sunday, July 18th: Twitter, Facebook, and Stephenbateman.com will fall silent, saving me way more time than I’d like to admit. From now until then I plan to:

• Devote 15-20 minutes/day to seeking God and studying Scripture.
• Read about a dead guy who did it right (I’m not sure which one)
• Develop a Digital Strategy for the next year, August launch.
• Learn like crazy. Summer time is when you get to learn about things you are interested in.

Goodnight.

Thanks to Carlos Whittaker for leading the way on this one, he took a month off a while back that made this even a thought in my mind.

I joined Elance.com a freelancing site where you market your skills to clients for projects ranging from CSS to powerpoint!

I’m not expecting to get rich, or certainly not anytime soon, but it might be nice to rack up some experience working with clients.

In fact, I would work for pretty much dirt cheap in exchange for experience. Would you?

And who knew you could get PAID to do powerpoints?!

We’re in Mexico, and the past two days, they’ve given us cold cappuchino, basically like frappachino, and they taste very good. But the kicker is: they are REALLY cheap. And you know why??

Because they saved the Starbucks cup, washed it, and brought out a venti glass of “starbucks coffee.” At which point my brain goes:
“$5 dollar coffee!!! GLORY” Even though it’s just coffee.
Branding is ridiculously powerful.

Read This post by Dan Roam

He’s right, we’ve moved from blogs into social networking, twitter etc to the point that 140 characters doesn’t feel weird. But here’s the kicker: Whoever can figure out ubiquitous twitter-for-pictures will make twitter feel old and clunky.

Imagine in a year or so walking around and you see a breakdancing guy, so you snap a picture of him, and send it off to Tw4Pic where your hundreds of eager follows are really excited to see the picture…Twitter can do links, but who wants to click on the link? Soon, you won’t have too…

So here’s the story.

• Yesterday we went to hear a lady preach @ their church, it was really cool. She said: “Dios es un Dios de opportunidades.” that’s pretty much all I got…
• We’re having pizza, and our Host was rolling it with a wine bottle, which works pretty well I suppose…talk about crazy innovation!
• It isn’t hot. Like it’s been really comfortable with all the windows open and what not.
• They have a duck. They call him “pato” which is the  Spanish equivalent of calling your dog…”dog.”
• I don’t really get culture shock, or at least not much, I like to think that I can roll with the punches pretty well. But their steps. They kill me. Evidently they had this guy who *said* he could do steps make them, and the results are awful. The distance between steps is between 5 inches and 18 inches. Needlesss to say, it feels REALLY weird.

Tonight is TinyChat! At 9pm we’ll be hanging out via video since I’m in Mexico, I thought ya’ll might enjoy a quick update and I guess I’ll answer any questions you have…if you have any. Otherwise it’ll just be a fun random time…

(btw, if you’ve been to Acapulco or Tijuana or something, it’s different, very different)
click this link to get to the chat room, which is still hosted here.

Wow. WolframAlpha; a computational knowledge engine. Ask it a computable question, and it will give you answers. Wikipedia… move aside. This thing is beyond incredible. Mr. Stephen Wolfram, my hat is off to you. Hope you enjoy it.

WolframAlpha introduction, by Mr. Stephen Wolfram himself.

Guest Blog by Evan Cothran, introduced in this blog.

Editor’s Note: I’m in my 987th week of life

Ok so this is my attempt at a crazy flight story, and I will address your responses in the next post.

It’s the Saturday morning of Spring Break, and I MUST be out of the dorms, so I pack all my stuff up, and head to work. Off of work at 7ish and go to Cool Beans for like three hours and then over to Luda’s house to spend the night. Finish watching some epic motorcycle movie and drift to sleep around midnight.

Time to get up by 4:30 to drive to CIU, to pick up Will, to drive to CAE. At 6:15am I board a plane and fly to Chicago, where it is 30 degrees and I am in shorts. Get on another plane and fly to SanFran, another plane to Bakersfield. BY now it is 5PM (Western Time) and I’m like 3 time zones backwards.

Exhausted. So we go over and eat at Justin’s, and remember how much fun we’d had until 10:30 SanFran time (1:30am my time). We go to bed, I get up and work 13 hours, the longest shift of my life, at 10am the next day. It was the longest 48 hours of my life…

There is so much I don’t know…Like today I asked: “what does cosa mean?” to be met with the answer: “thing.”

I’ve gone through years of Spanish, and don’t recall ever hearing that word. Until now. Boom. EVERYBODY SAYS COSA. Anyway I felt like today’s first day of learning went really well. It was basically like stuffing a week of learning into 4 hours. Here’s the formula:

High School Spanish (bad) * High School Spanish = College Spanish (effectively squared).

College Spanish * College Spanish = This craziness. Basically, what I’m doing is (HS Span)^4. Or if HS SPan was a 5, This craziness is a 625…Which just makes going to sleep 100 times better…

Today we traveled…All over the place. I figured out that we averaged 381 mph for 11 hours! Not to shabby. But it was really fun, and not really that hard either. It ended up taking a bit longer than we’d expected, because my Aunt got stuck in traffic and lost

But in the end we were glad to see my cousins/aunt, the Mitchell Family, who are missionaries in Mexico. We ate pizza hut. Which is really good. Sorry this is one of the worst blog posts I’ve had in a long time, but I’ve been up for almost 18 hours…and rocked some 3500 miles.

I really want to get together on tokbox or another video chat client w/ whomever would like a live update, we’ll try to have that on the blog if I can get it working.