My MacBook is home and all fixed.  My couple of days being laptopless have been interesting.  Here’s what I learned:

Old windows laptops suck

I have a very old (8 years) laptop with a massive 500mb RAM and 20GB hard drive which lives under the bed.  It would have been as well staying under the bed!  By the time it had installed its 47 updates and then decided Service Pack 3 was in order I’d wasted a day.  Don’t bother.  A pen and paper work better!

iPhones are great… except…

iPhone

My new iPhone appeared the day after I spilled coffee on my MacBook.  Just as well. The email works great with exchange so all my work email and calender was all there when I needed it and appeared like magic when I started up my laptop.

But there is stuff missing that I had on my Palm m130 years ago that you just expect to be there on what reports to be a ‘business tool’.  

I want to be able to access documents from my server or laptop and edit them.  How hard can that be?  I can get my email from my server, why not my word docs?  I know dataviz is working on documents to go for the iphone but seriously, is there no Word app out there?  I’m sure Micro$soft know there are big buck for the winner of the iPhone mobile office race.  What’s taking so long!!!

What about presentations?  It’s great I can use my phone as a remote… but my Nokia N95 runs powerpoint with a video cable out to a projector.

Come on Apple.  The iPhone is brilliant.  The interface is amazing, the email and web apps for twitter and facebook are all good.  The games are smart and quirky.  But I want business tools too!

Being a youth worker can be a lonely job.  I know that sounds odd, especially given that the job is to spend time with young people and develop good working relationships with all kinds of people.  But the fact is that much of a youth worker’s time is spent on their own, preparing, reading, thinking…

Networks are crucial to help spark ideas, nurture new workers and sustain those of us who have been at this for some time.

The Internet provides lots of ways to keep in touch with colleagues and I’m glad to say that our new Scottish Youth Ministry online network has been a great success.  Almost 40 people have joined in a week!

It was also good to see Youthworks, a real life, in person, network launched last Friday with 50 or so people gathering in Edinburgh.

So, if you are out there and you’re a youth worker then get involved.  There is no excuse for being lonely anymore!

After discussion with Chris today we decided to create a Scottish Youth Ministry Network online at http://scottishyouthministry.ning.com.

This network is for anyone involved in or interested in work with young people in Scotland.  We hope it will be a place where we can support, encourage and resource each other.  So join up and tell your friends.

I think I’ve decided to do my research for my masters on the use of social media in church-based youth work in Scotland.  I could of course change my mind again but on reflection this seems to be something that would be both interesting and worth doing.

I’d still like to have a go at ‘does youth work work?’ but think that might make a better large scale project for me and my lovely colleagues at the URC.

So, If you’re reading this and are involved in church-based youth work in Scotland let me know so I can come and interview you and your young people some time in the new year.

Anyone with any ideas and/or suggestions, please feel free to contribute said ideas anytime you like.

And I’ll try not to bore you all.  Honest.

From BeyondRelevance.com

This evening I’m meeting up with Thomas aka Headphonaught for a chat about Tribes (book or audio), the new book by Seth Godin.

Our chat is being recorded as part of the Something Beautiful podcasts so I’ll try to speak clearly and even make sense.  All I’ll say for now is that I liked the audio book and it resonates with lots of the things I’ve written about and spoken about over the past few years so expect lots of soapbox rants!

Not so much an upgrade as an add on…  Two chances for you to explore some nice tools for getting your church / group / self online.  We’ll explore WordPress, the power behind this site and iChurch, as well as some social media tools.  Both the Glasgow and Edinburgh workshops are limited to 8 people and you need to bring your own wireless enabled laptop.  Both workshops are free.

To book a place email me at the address on the poster.