Tag Archives: twitter

Mar 04

Twitter @church?

Posted on by

The bulletin at the church where I’m a member now specifically forbids tweeting or texting during the sermon. I love my pastor, but I have to say this particular notice annoys me to no end. Whether or not this behavior is acceptable (we’ll get to that in a second), I find that notice a little condescending and off-putting. Of course, I thought the same thing about the original version of the notice, which told people when they were and weren’t permitted to converse at the beginning of the service.

I believe that a worship service should be a time of focusing on God and should encourage a reverent attitude. But I think that attitude should originate naturally from the service itself rather than from schoolmarm-like pronouncements in the bulletin. What a terrible message that sends to newcomers or seekers who might be visiting!

Scott Williams not only believes Twitter should be allowed in church, he believes it should be encouraged, as a way of people sharing with others (and reminding themselves of) points that they will take away from the service. (Hat tip to Gavin Richardson — via his Twitter account, naturally.) I’m not sure I’m personally ready for that — I’ve never tweeted during a church service. But I can imagine looking something up online that the preacher mentions during the sermon.

Reverend Mommy, a minister in North Carolina Georgia, just added this to the Twitter conversation about the issue:

@LakeNeuron @gavoweb Can’t twitter during sermon at my churches; we don’t have any cell phone coverage. HA! Take THAT!

Whatever you do with your phone in church, it needs to be discreet and respectful of others sitting nearby.

UPDATE: I had originally linked to the wrong Twitter account, but it’s fixed now.

Mar 05

Brush with greatness

Posted on by

By the way, I just realized that I forgot to blog about this a few days ago — I got an actual, real-live Twitter reply from Peter Sagal, the host of “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” on NPR. I had messaged him on Twitter that standup comic Paul Provenza has now, for all intents and purposes, become one of the regular pool of rotating panelists, and so why wasn’t he included on the web site, in the panelist bios or the little caricature-like graphic on the home page featuring the cast?

Here was his reply: “@LakeNeuron Yes, but have you ever looked at Paul Provenza?”

I had to laugh.

Oct 18

I take back my haiku

Posted on by

There was a haiku contest at BarCamp. Here, from memory, was my entry:

My door prize ticket
Flew away on crimson wings
I can win no swag

I don’t know if I would have won or not; it probably doesn’t matter, because I think you had to be present to win the prize.

The haiku was about the fact that I misplaced my red door prize ticket shortly after going through registration. I went through my pockets, through the tote bag that each attendee received, and through the pages of various handouts in said tote bag. I couldn’t find the ticket anywhere. And there were some good door prizes, and lots of them!

At about 2:30, I realized it was an hour until the only remaining session that I was interested in seeing — and I wasn’t interested enough to kill the hour. So I got in the car and headed home.

Just now, I dumped out the contents of my tote bag, and do you know what I found? You guessed it. Ticket #284037. It looks like I had not won any of the prizes announced at the time of this blog post.

Anyway, I’m very glad I went. I saw some terrific sessions in the morning and early afternoon, and I got to have lunch with my Mountain T.O.P. buddies Gavin and Erin Richardson and Chris Smith, all of whom were at BarCamp. I knew Gavin and Erin would be there; Chris, who now works for a company that designs web sites for recording artists, was a pleasant surprise. Chris and his wife Amy gave me a brief introduction to geocaching a few years back, and so we talked about the huge geocaching event that will take place next year in Bell Buckle.

I plan to write news stories about at least one, and possibly two, of the sessions. I may also look at setting up a Twitter account for the Times-Gazette.

I was also near sports royalty and never realized it. BarCamp was held in meeting rooms at the Sommet Center, the home of the Nashville Predators. A well-known Nashville blogger posted on Twitter that he had seen Terry Crisp, the former NHL manager who is now the beloved color commentator for the Preds, walking down the corridor next to the meeting rooms accompanied by … Gordie Howe. Depending on which of the meeting rooms I was in at the time (or perhaps I was elsewhere in the corridor), I couldn’t have been more than 50 or 100 feet away.