I was perusing tech articles a couple days ago when I came upon this one about Google and the perks they offer to their employees. The section entitled “Integrators and Segmentors” is particularly interesting, as it talks about how in some workplaces, namely Google, the line between one’s home life and work life is blurring. I was reminded of a conversation I had with Nick Holovaty back in January about the same thing. It’s a good read.
Sometimes I find myself in situations that, while not overtly strange or unusual, are not what I would have expected to be spending my time doing. This week, for example, I worked full time as a receptionist for a company where one of the branch members works, and while it wasn’t been particularly challanging, it’s really helped me to appreciate the time I spent working at another business last year. I did customer service work there from July ‘05 to July ‘06, and while I never really enjoyed the job, I did learn a lot of valuable things about the way business works — particularly the nature of the relationship between customers and venders. I’m not an expert at it, but over time it became common practice for me to treat customers, and actually anyone that I encountered in the context of my job, with a certain level of respect, and attend to their needs to the best of my ability. In short, I came to treat them as though I was serving them. All of that fit in nicely with this receptionist job, as I was the first person that a customer or a sales rep encountered when they walked in the door, and was usually the one who attends to their needs when they first entered the building. Praise God for the opportunity to serve!
A couple days ago, Google formally announced that it had finalized its purchase of Adscape, a firm that specializes in targeted advertising within video games.
From the press release:
Back in the 80s the cost of producing a single game was about $100K. Today it can cost $25M to produce a game. The good news is there are some very passionate gamers out there that have come up with some interesting new ways to introduce non-intrusive and targeted advertising in order to make gaming accessible and affordable for all.
Hmmm, maybe in-game advertising has a place for easing some of the financial burden that comes with making a game, but “non-intrusive and targeted”? That part in particular seems to contradict the rest of the article, especially when you take into consideration shots like this one from Counter-Strike:
Or this one from Splinter Cell:
I point this out because the world of video games seems very far removed from what Google has traditionally been about. Sure, they’ve always been about advertising on web pages, but those ads are targeted towards what you, the user, are supposedly already interested in, whereas in-game advertising generally doesn’t have much to do with the subject of the game you’re playing (unless I’m missing some crucial connection between chasing down terrorists and eating at Subway).
EDIT: I did a little more research on the Subway ads within Counter-Strike, and it turns out that those were actually the result of a hack, and appeared in the game without the permission of Valve, the developer of Counter-Strike. Full article here.
I just watched the preview for Color Me Kubrick , a movie about a guy who got away with impersonating Stanley Kubrick, the reclusive movie director, in the early 1990s. The movie looks kinda lame, but something that’s worth noting is that at the end of the trailer, are the words “Opens March 23rd in Theaters, Available March 27th on DVD.”
This sounds like it could be disastrous. On one hand, why would people go spend $8 at a theater to see a movie that they could rent next week? On the other hand, releasing a movie on DVD so close to it’s theater release date — before publicity campaigns and movie reviews have necessarily had time to get the word out that the movie exists — could mean that no one buys it, just like no one buys direct to DVD movies.
Well, I’ve gone back and forth about this and decided that it would be a mistake to start this off without talking about where I’ve come from. I grew up in the People of Praise. I went to the meetings and did the youth activities, but never got attached to anything about it. I drifted along through my first few years at Trinity; with little desire to make friends or get to know the people in my class, and in fact, I came to regard most of them with cynicism and disdain. I continued like that for several years, until finally, in 10th grade, I started to realize that the only thing that had been keeping me in this perpetual state of unhappiness was the way I thought about everyone else. The way things had been going until then were due to the choices I had made about how I wanted to relate to people, and as a result, I had become depressed, bitter and lonely. Well, I was done with that. I made the choice to start making some friends, and finally got to know some of the people in my class and the class ahead of me. I started being more social, I joined the Chamber Singers at Trinity, and became outwardly happy for the first time since I could remember.
I continued like this until about half way through my junior year. The Action Division of the People of Praise had launched the year before, and I had heard a few things about it, but hadn’t bothered going out of my way to find out more. In my junior year, however, I joined it at the encouraging of my Dad, with whom I had begun to develop a real friendship. So for a while I hung around, went to the Action meetings, and didn’t go to the Action work functions, until halfway through January of my junior year in high school, when all the men in Action went to the Wacker family’s island in Wisconsin one weekend for a retreat. It was here that I first experienced what the People of Praise was — as an adult. I saw my friends — several of them had just recently come underway — talking about what had made them decide to join, and how the Lord had worked in their lives to lead them to this decision, and the way they talked about it moved me such that I was compelled to reexamine the way I had lived my life up until that point. It was also the first time I recall hearing about the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, as well. After this, I wouldn’t say I was ready to join — still far from it, even — but it was the first time I considered the possibility of joining sometime “in the future”.
About six months later, through a series of wanderings and loosely connected events, the most notable of which were getting to know Dan Reinbold and seeing his subsequent interest in the People of Praise develop over time, I decided — almost on a whim — that I also wanted to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. Several weeks later, Dan and I went to Allendale for the first time, and heard Sean talk about what was going on down there, and why they needed all of our help to continue the work. It was at that point that I decided that I wanted to be a part of this. The Lord was clearly present in all the work that the People of Praise was doing in this neighborhood, as well as in the rest of the community, and I wanted to be a part of that, and to help build his kingdom. So, at the end of the summer, I arranged a series a meetings with Joel Kibler, the head of our branch of the People of Praise, to discuss what coming underway would mean, and to get a clearer picture of what I would be committing to, and on September 16, 2004, I made my underway commitment to the People of Praise.
A lot has happened since then, and my understanding of the community has been, and continues to be refined over time. What remains as true today however, as it was two and a half years ago, is that this is where the Lord has called me, where I can build his Kingdom, and continually give my all for his glory.
Praise the Lord!
Joe