The Office Curmudgeon

I was excited to have been a part of the trip to Edmond, OK to visit the LifeChurch campus there. See team posts here, here, and here. One of the numerous things that crossed my mind, somewhat unrelated to why we were there, was the challenge of online giving. Using any gateway processor out there will cost you 3-5%, or more. It made me wonder if it were possible to create a non-profit infrastructure that provided payment processing at a much lower cost. If a group of interested Christian businesspersons had enough wealth and desire to solve that problem, could it be solved, or is what we have as good as it gets?

I can’t imagine the amount of money that would saved and returned to churches by lowering the barrier to online giving and eliminating the concern about throwing away that money. I understand the fear of churches allowing someone to give to the church via credit card, and I don’t encourage anyone to use that to their own destruction, but I think a reasonable and sound method of electronic giving would be a blessing to many.

Welcome to the new domain for the office curmudgeon, which is a slightly better named. This was a huge pain to accomplish, taking me about 6 hours of work, but it is completed exactly how I wanted.

If you are linking to this site, please update your links to http://officecurmudgeon.com/ when you can. The links will continue to work indefinitely, simply redirecting to the new domain.

Thanks all.

Ok, I had to do it. Our fearless leader Clif is at MinistryTECH in Oklahoma City as I type this blog post. My cohort in this was Ian, who is there with Clif. Ian was able to set up a webcam in short order and stream Clif to U-Stream:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ministrytech

To the upper right is a shot from my camera phone. This is a projected image on a wall in our training room back in Leawood, KS. Clif is larger than life!

So to sum up - yeah I posted on Clif’s presentation in Oklahoma City before he was even finished, watching from Leawood, KS.

Given even simple technology - you can’t stop nerds from getting creative and participating, even if we don’t get to be there in person.

Ok, a quick follow-up to my last post. Not only was it ridiculous to find the previous one, but I came back and refreshed the search and there are even more companies that found the genius in this strategy. (See image below.)

Great! Now, the first sponsored link looks quite reasonable. There technically is a Mitsubishi Eclipse vehicle. But the link provided takes you to a 2008 Lancer, and “eclipse” is found nowhere on the page. Bad, bad, bad.

Yeah, so I’m sitting here watching the lunar eclipse, and I decide to jump online to find how long the moon is eclipsed. I hit google and type “lunar eclipse.” The first couple of hits, nasa and space.com, seem to be down as they time out. Ha! Then my eye catches something about taxes. Wait huh? (See image below.)

Umm … isn’t this almost a black-hat strategy? Maybe Google was on to this pretty quickly, as when I clicked on the link it wouldn’t pull up the site but only refresh the page.