Josh Young

Couldn’t help but post this.

Napoleon Dynamite clips set to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.”

Pure Genius.

We’re back from CIY and now in the midst of VBS (it’s like the month of acronyms or something).

CIY was amazing. It was great to get to know some of our high schoolers more and to see them grow throughout the week. We have some great kids at ACC.

Marie and I also got a lot out of the week aside from the kids. The whole conference was just a great experience (just as I remember it being when I was in high school myself).

One thing that was amazing to me (and yet not surprising) was the way technology has shaped what we do at these things in the last 10 years. The amount of audio, video, lighting, etc. that was used there was staggering. It’s amazing the resources that we have now that we could have only dreamed of 10 years ago. CIY did a great job of marrying everything together to produce some amazing worship experiences. They were able to use these tools to engage a very large group of otherwise distracted and media blitzed teenagers.

Along that line, one of the electives I attended was called “Backstage Pass and Production Principles,” and it was basically a tour of the whole stage setup (back and front of house) and Q&A session with the Production Manager, Josh Maichele. Josh was very impressive. He took any and all questions, and he was a great resource to all of us there. He ran a killer production, and he was extremely nice. It was great to ask him specific questions about how they do what they do, and to see up-close all of the equipment and props they were using.

I’ll post more later on the week. I’m also working on some videos from it all, and I’ll post them once I get them finished.

CIY

Luminous Student Ministries

Our youth group is getting ready to head to CIY in Illinois this upcoming week, and they happened to be two sponsors short at the last minute due to some unforeseen schedule changes, so Marie and I decided to jump on board!

We had originally considered going months ago when the suggestion was brought up, but we didn’t think we were going to be able to at the time. We were still unsure of whether stuff was going to work out with it or not, but we decided to go ahead with it anyway and let God figure out the rest.

It’s been years since I’ve been to a CIY conference, and Marie has never been, so we’re both looking forward to it. It will be great to spend some more time with the awesome teens at our church, and it will be a great time to recharge ourselves as well. I think we both need it right now.

It’s funny how God gives you the right thing at just the right time. Sometimes it comes out of nowhere. And sometimes when you plan on something (or don’t plan on something), God gives you His plan instead.

Can’t wait for next week! Maybe I’ll post a video or something from the week when we get back.

Googles Maps has made some great updates lately. Two that are extremely useful are the ability to drag your route to modify it and the ability to add a location to your directions if you don’t know the address but do know where it’s located on the map.

To show you these new features, Google has put together this short video. Enjoy!

Thanks to: Lifehacker

Well, after many years of talking about it, I finally have all of my data on a regular backup schedule. I have two internal and one external hard drives on my desktop, and an internal hard drive in my laptop - all of which have important data (i.e., I’d be sunk if I lost most of it).

To backup all of my data, I decided to use one 500 GB Western Digital MyBook to hold it all (I already use another MyBook for some of my data storage and really love it).

To schedule and perform the backups, I downloaded SyncBack Freeware. I was originally turned on to SyncBack by a Lifehacker post about it. They were right. It really is that simple, it’s fast, and it does a great job. And the best part is that it’s totally free!

I would walk you through the steps I took to do it, but honestly, the Lifehacker post really does a great job of explaining everything, so I’ll just let it speak for itself.

In the not-to-distant future, I also plan to set up a secure FTP backup of some of the more important files.

My question for you is: Are you backing up your data? If so, how?

Geek to Live: Automatically back up your hard drive via Lifehacker