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Ultimate Charades Death Match

One of the great parts of my job is doing ministry with college students. Wednesday nights always feature some sort of crazy activity and tonight was no different. It's always a challenge to balance more sedate activities with more energetic options . We try to balance more active games with less active games over the stretch of a month. Tonight we decided to combine the two options. Ultimate Charades Death Match is what you get when dodgeball and charades combine into one wacky game.

I'd say that it was a great success. I'm now on a mission to determine how many more "normal" games can be made much more exciting by incorporating the ultimate death match format. I'm pretty sure some dodgeballs will make most any game more interesting.

Ultimate Charades Death Match Rules

What you'll need:

• Normal charades topics (movies, music, books, tv). We split them into difficult (two points) and easy (one point).
• Dodgeballs. Tonight we played with two, next time we'll go to at least four, probably six.

How to play: 

Split the players into teams. Set acting boundaries (we used the key of our gym basketball court). The actor may move freely within these boundaries (for dodging purposes). Set player boundaries (our teams were split around the three-point circle). The first "actor" from each team gets to Rock-Paper-Scissors to see which team acts first. The team that is acting/guessing plays charades in normal fashion. 

Scoring: The acting/guessing team scores points by correctly guessing the title. The stealing team gains points by using the dodgeballs to steal the round.The actor should continue acting/dodging until the round is over.

Stealing occurs when the stealing team manages to hit the actor with a dodgeball and correctly guess the title. If the actor dodges a throw the stealing team must retrieve the ball and can try again. The stealing team only gets one chance to guess and the guess must be made by the person who made the throw. If the stealing team guesses wrong the actor's team wins the round. 

The round ends when the actor's team has successfully guessed the title or the stealing team has made a guess and either stolen the points or failed to steal. There is no round time limit. The stealing team can make a judgment call to end the misery by guessing incorrectly and granting the actor's team the round. The actor's team can hit their own actor with a dodgeball to forfeit the round if the acting is too painful.

Play until all of the topics have been used or people grow weary of the game. We went through about 70 topics in 90 minutes.

Mac Netbook Adventures #hackintosh

 We've been needing a small laptop for use in the college ministry - a way to do data entry on campus and not be dependent on my laptop (which I use to preach) or having students bring their own computers. A netbook seemed like the perfect solution - small, long battery, etc. The only problem was that I really wanted a Mac.

I know several people who have hacked OS X onto a variety of systems so I started a bit of research. I discovered that the Dell Mini 10v is really easy to make into a Hackintosh. Last Thursday night I sat down with a 16gb USB drive, a LEGAL copy of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and NetbookBootMaker. I followed the Gizmodo guide for installation and everything went flawlessly. 

Here's the basic details:

• Dell Mini 10v - $318.75
• OS X Snow Leopard - $25.00
• USB Flash Drive - $0 already had it (you can get one for $20 at Amazon)
• a couple of hours

Total cost: $343.75 unless you need to buy a flash drive. Not too shabby for a nice little OS X laptop.

Performance has been really good for web browsing, simple word processing, etc. I will say that it doesn't play web video all that well (tested in Windows and it's equally bad). The battery life has been crazy. With active usage I'm seeing 8+ hours of battery and mixed use (surfing and letting it sit and play music) the battery lasted over 9 hours. I do want to upgrade the RAM to 2gb, but haven't gotten around to it. I'm also really spoiled by Apple trackpads - the 10v trackpad is horrible. I also wish the screen had a slightly higher resolution 1024x600 is a bit too few pixels (not a bigger screen, just more resolution).

I'm really bummed that Apple isn't offering a real netbook option. I've got an iPhone and I've got a MacBookPro. After spending the weekend using the HackBook exclusively I think Steve Jobs is wrong when he says that the iPad is the perfect device to fit between the smartphone and the laptop. The iPad fits really well into the bigger screen/eBook/video player/web surfing category, but it doesn't keep me from needing to carry my laptop around. I think there is a second gap that is filled by really small, inexpensive netbooks. I see a real need for the 10" netbook that costs under $500. The $300 netbook isn't quite good enough, there is clearly a step between the 10v and a MacBook that could be filled (slightly faster, improved graphics, more RAM). This is the PERFECT spot for an Apple netbook.

Here are some things I've done over the past several days that can't be done on an iPad:

• answer email using a real keyboard, mouse and mail client
• tweak a graphic using Fireworks
• screen share to another computer
• use BackToMyMac to share files from my MBP from a coffee shop
• quickly switch back and forth between a google spreadsheet, a PDF file, and my email
• use ProPresenter - it actually is decent for still background images and lyrics

Share your thoughts about netbooks.

Sacrifice

We've been talking a lot about sacrifice over the past couple of weeks here at Schweitzer as we explore what it is God would have us do to support the growth of the church in our current stewardship focus, Growing God's Church. I'm amazed by the level of sacrifice we're hearing from members of the church. Every weekend Bob has shared stories of people giving up cable, eating out, home improvements, savings and much more. We've heard about people postponing retirement, new cars, iPhones and moving. God has seriously gotten into people's hearts about this issue – several people have talked about making decisions to double their pledge.

Sarah and I have wrestled a lot with what we're contributing to the campaign. Our budget is tight and we're not quite sure how that will change once Josiah is born later this month. One decision that we've made is that I'll be mowing our yard for the next three years. For the past two years we've paid some neighborhood boys to mow the lawn which has been great. This covers a portion of our pledge for about half of the year, we still haven't identified what we'll sacrifice for the rest of it, but we have faith that God will provide as we continue to tithe and give above and beyond for the ministries of the church.

I really do think that God honoring sacrifice is less about the amount we give and more about the amount we have left over after we give. Every weekend we've shared testimony from people about sacrifice and this weekend we heard a great one from Billy & Regina Hower. This week Billy is even sacrificing a week away from work and his family to help our college ministry serve on their spring break mission trip. I love their openness, honesty and the challenge for all of us. Everything we have comes from God and we should just "give it up." 

"This poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything – all she had to live on." (Mark 12: 43-44)