Links for 2011-04-20

"Well this little feat has been a long time coming.  For those of you who have worked with me in Unalakleet you probably have heard about my aspiration of using the poster printer to print my boarding pass.  Well two days ago my dream became a reality.  I logged onto nwa.com and checked in for my flight.  Selected my seats and chose the option to print my boarding pass.  Well as you know Mac computers make it super easy to print things as a PDF file instead of to a printer.  So thats what I did.  I was on two different flights and both boarding pass tickets were on the same page stacked on top of each other.  This wouldn't do I need each boarding pass to be on a different print out to really dramatize the "Big Boarding Pass".  So I took a screen shot of each individual one and then took them over to the poster printer.  Each one printed out to be about three feet wide and about 1.5 feet tall."

"Protocol.by is a first pass at defining and sharing these rules of engagement. Coming out of a closed alpha test shortly, it lets you register an account and compactly state the ways in which you'd prefer to be contacted. Greg explains that he dislikes spontaneous phonecalls - his protocol tells people not to call him before noon, and not to expect an answer to unscheduled calls. For emails, he urges correspondents to avoid polite niceties and get to the point. For people unsure of how to contact him, these protocols can make it easier for people to contact him in a way that's minimally intrusive and maximally effective. (I have a protocol, if you're interested...)

The goal for the site, Hugo offers, is for the site to become a "social anchor" to help bridge across multiple identities and online presences. In the long term, it could plug into location-based services and offer richer, more targeted information on how to contact people politely. "

"The thing we all really need is a sharper understanding of the development industry and a wiser appreciation of how our own desires for sweeping messianic transformations are as much of a target market as any other consumer demand. I don't know that we can blame people like [Greg] Mortenson for giving us what many of us want. Nor should we be surprised when people like Mortenson raise millions of dollars before anyone thinks to ask skeptical questions either about the concrete organizational principles involved or about the accounting. Well-meaning, smart young people all around the world who get involved in philanthropy, NGOs, community service, development work and the like frequently find that good intentions, passion, and a dollop of appropriately couched ideological genuflection to the audience for a given pitch are the equivalent of picking up the "Pass Go and Collect $200â³ card."

"What was it about the lie that Mike Warnke was selling that made so many hundreds of thousands of evangelicals so desperate to buy it? If "Selling Satan" was a scandal, isn't Buying Satan an even more scandalous, more disturbing phenomenon? What was the attraction? What made Warnke's horrifying, lurid tales something that his eager audience wanted to be true?

Thanks to the valiant work of Hertenstein and Trott, Mike Warnke has gone away (mostly).

But that huge eager audience he tapped into is still there. The fascination or temptation or corruption that made so many evangelicals so enthusiastically gullible, so willing and eager to believe stories of imaginary monsters, is just as pervasive and popular as it was in Warnke's heyday."