Sort of a Loss On What to Blog About

I seem to be in a blog rut.  I have plenty of things going on, yet nothing to really blog about.  At the moment , I’m in the mood to blog but I don’t know what to say.  So here are some quick items:

• I’ve been reading quite a bit but haven’t posted any reviews.  I dunno if I will continue with book reviews unless the book is exceptional (and one of them is).  A good review is a lot of work and I think I haven’t done very well in my last few.
• The Super Secret Project I hint and clue about once in a while is starting to gain momentum again.  I hope that I can reveal it soon.
• At work, I’m still doing lots of Spring and Java.  I’m not learning anything new besides what I have posted on in the past.  I still think Spring is cool and now I think that Spring Web MVC is head and shoulders above Struts.
• My web apps at work don’t have a lot of complex needs on the presentation side. So I’ve been using JSTL for my tag library.  I’m not sure why no one seems to really use JSTL, except that you can suddenly hit a brick wall with it’s functionality.
• I’m still in awe of people who don’t write unit tests.  I can’t figure out how they know they got everything done. And they must have no idea of when things are broken, either.

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Young, Restless, Yet Not Christian Reformed

There was a good article in our last denominational magazine called ["Where Did Our Young Adults Go?"](http://thebanner.org/magazine/article.cfm?article_id=1157) In it, they talked about the fact that [the Christian Reformed denomination](http://crcna.org) don’t have many young adults, which is defined as people in their 20′s and 30′s. The article also has some thoughts from people who grew up in a CRC church but have chosen not to attend one now that they are adults.

What the article doesn’t mention is that [Reformed theology is growing in Christians in that age group.](http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/september/42.32.html) The question I have is why is the CRC denomination struggling with getting members in that age group while denominations like the Presbyterian Church in America is growing?

I think the truth can be found in what the former members said in the article. Instead of focusing on reaching out, the CRC seems to be pre-occupied with itself instead of thinking outside of it’s boundaries. It is asking?”Why are we struggling with this?” instead of “How can we reach out?” A similar question, but not quite the same thing.

But what do I know? [My church](http://www.omahacrc.org) is seeing a lot of young adults being attracted to our church. Not because we have a lot of programs for them, but because they are accepted and we find a place for them. If they have musical talents, they sing or play on a Sunday. If they want to work with our youth group, then we let them. I’m not saying that we are perfect at it, but suddenly, without trying, the church has a lot of people in their late 20′s and in their 30′s (and I’m one of them!)

What are we doing that other CRC churches aren’t?

The Sunrocket Fiasco

Back in December, Gina and I were figuring out ways to lower our phone costs.  We liked having a land line, mostly because we have several friends who don’t have the same cell provider as we do so, when we talked to them on the phone, we would end up using our minutes as well.  Cox, our-then phone provider, wasn’t going to offer us anything cheaper, so we had to figure out another plan.

Some co-workers of mine were using Sunrocket and they like it.  It was voice over IP (VoIP, for the more technically-inclined) and they provided voicemail, caller ID, and even a web interface to get voicemail, monitor who is calling you, etc.  They warned me that the sound quality isn’t always great, but in the end it was worth it.  I looked it up and they were selling a year of service for $200, which comes to $17/month.  Not bad, considering a similar plan with Cox would be $30/month. And Sunrocket was giving you a set of cordless phones to boot.  Which was good, since our old ones were terrible. I talked to Gina and she decided it was a good idea, too.  So we signed up, and after we got our package and used it on and off for a month, we transfered our old number over and canceled our land line.

Life with Sunrocket wasn’t perfect — some people were never clear.  Especially those with Alltel cell phones.  And, since the Sunrocket “gizmo” was in the basement and we live upstairs, you had to stay pretty much on top of the gizmo (and the cordless base) or the quality got really bad really fast.  But it worked well and there were many things I did like.  But, for the record, I liked Sunrocket a lot more than Gina did.

So imagine my surprise when I saw a headline on-line that said Sunrocket had closed it’s doors.  And that some people were getting their phone service shut-off immediately.  I called Gina on our Sunrocket phone and it rang. So we didn’t have a “no phone” problem.

That night, the search started again.  We were disgusted with Cox still, because we only got basic cable, which pretty much has the over-the-air networks, three shopping channels, three public access channels, two CSPAN’s, and a repeat of the last nightly news.  And the next step up is much more money than we wanted to pay.  Anyway, I called up Cox to see how much phone service would be again and if they could up our channels.  Well, they didn’t really offer me any deals, but they did enable the family tier on digital instead of Extended Basic (which was cheaper) and that with phone service was $40/month more than we were paying without phone.  Hmm, not quite what we wanted.

We told them okay, but we didn’t like our answer. Our last hope was Qwest.

I’ve had bad luck with Qwest in the past.  I’ve had horrible customer service, even to the point of customer service personal lying to me.  I may not like Cox’s products, but I’ve always been happy with their customer service.  But Qwest was advertising a deal where they would give you DSL, Direct TV, and local phone for the same price Cox was charging me for basic cable and Internet.  So I called them up and played, “Let’s make a deal.”

The area in town I live in is like the only place in America where Qwest has cable modem available. Yes — Qwest is a cable provider here.  I didn’t want their DSL offering, because that’s what I had all the problems with before.  And they happily swapped the DSL for their cable modem.  But I kept the DirectTV, since that was a better deal then their cable.  And we order phone service and got them to move our Sunrocket phone number over.  Of course, we moved that number from Qwest to Cox when we signed up for Cox’s phone service.

I should mention that all this setup was free.  From moving the phone number over, to installing our cable modem, even for putting the DirectTV dish up.

Yes, you read that right — people came over.  Last Friday, Gina let in no less than four men into our house to hook up the DirectTV and the cable modem.  In theory, they could have just sent me the cable modem and I would have hooked it up.  But they had to move the cable service over as well.  Oh, and they had to get on the roof to hook up our dish.  And drill holes through the house. Did I mention that all this was free?

The phone service was last because Sunrocket was slow on moving the number over.  On Monday night at 5:55pm I got the call that Sunrocket released the number and that Qwest was coming over to move the line.  Qwest support closes at 6pm, so I wasn’t able to call them back to see if someone needed to be home. The good news was that they didn’t need anyone home.

The bad news was that something got screwed up.  I think that Sunrocket didn’t release the number when they said.  Regardless, on Monday we could make outgoing calls and Caller ID said that it was our correct number.  But if someone called our home number, it went to Sunrocket’s voicemail.  It took another 24 to 36 hours before we could get calls at home.  But, thankfully, Sunrocket still had their Voice Mail system through their website up as well as the caller logs.  So we could still find out who called and listen to messages.

It’s been only a week, (and less than that for phone) but things seem to be going fine.  DirectTV’s guide and PVR has more features than Cox’s, but with more features comes more complexities.  And there has been some funny things, like Qwest sending us an automated phone call, telling us that our order has been completed. No duh — you called us on the phone!

So, because of Sunrocket’s failure, we got a new cable, internet and phone system at our house. Oh how strange the digital age has become.

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Too Much Of The Wrong Kind Of Stuff!

Paul Graham’s latest column, entitled “Stuff” really hit me today.  When we moved into our house three years ago, we almost doubled our square footage. And now . . .our stuff is beginning to crowd us out.  It’s amazing how much stuff three people can have.

Do we need it all?  No.  So why do we accumulate it?  Because we think we need it.  Because we think it will give us lots of use, and will make our life better.  But it generally never does.

Gina has been good at getting rid of our needless stuff in the past few months.  This spring we had a garage sale and things that didn’t sell went to Craigslist.  Now she has discovered FreeCycle and shes putting them up for the taking there.  I’m proud of her for taking this initiative.

A great quote from Graham’s post is:

Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things worth having.

So, with that, I introduce the latest purchase for the Hostetler family — and one that I feel will give more than she takes.  And, heck, she’s darn cute too.  Her name is Sadie. 

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Two Years, And Now Five More

It was about seven years ago when we were first introduced. It took us that long to get aquatinted with each other, but I knew early on what was going to happen. Then she said yes, and now, five years ago today, we were married.

I can’t even imagine how much my life has gotten better since I met [Gina](http://www.xanga.com/nebraska_thegoodlife). I love you, babe. Here’s to many more years on this crazy adventure we are on.