My father, Dr. Sameh A. Mitry, had the cross of Muliple Sclerosis (MS) to bear in his life. Likewise, a friend of mine, Mark Hanna lives with Multiple Sclerosis. Mark was diagnosed at the age of 27 (right after graduating Law School). The progression of the disease has been fast and brutal for Mark. In eight years, he has gone from normal walking to walking with a cane, then a walker, then being confined to a wheelchair. But Mark never complains and he always has a smile on his face (except when he is physically too fatigued to smile). He takes up his cross daily and follows his Master Jesus Christ. He is truly an inspiration and a role model to me and to everyone who knows him.

Mark’s sister, Mary Sarkis, on September 7-9, 2007, will walk 50 miles from Carlsbad to San Diego to raise money for the National MS Society in the MS Challenge Walk.

Please visit Mary’s site to donate online by July 31st. Any donation you can give will go towards research to find a cure,as well as services and treatment for people with MS. If you cannot make a donation at this time, please just pray for Mark and for Mary’s walk. May God bless you for all your support!

Today marks the one year anniversary for anchorite.org! My first post was on June 26, 2006 and I have written a total of 160 posts. I want to thank God for this amazing opportunity and thank you for all your encouragement and participation.

A few quick stats:
Posts: 160
Comments: 329
Technorati Rank: 74,435
Alexa Traffic Rank: 687,840

I don’t have accurate stats for the entire year because I have switched analytic tools several times but according to Google, anchorite.org did see 4,582 visits and 7,702 pageviews over the past 30 days. Also, I’m not using Feedburner so I don’t have a count on RSS subscribers. One of these days I’ll get around to installing Mint for better stats.

Special thanks to Brian, David, and Jason for inspiring me to start blogging and to John Basta for his constant encouragement.

Little Flock Christian School (Fairfax, VA) has a few openings for the 2007-2008 school year:
Kindergarten (K5) Teacher
K3 Teacher
Computer/PE Teacher

We are in the market for a used school bus, if anyone knows of a bus for sale or a good dealer not too far from metro DC, please leave a comment or contact me. We are looking for a relatively new bus (max 5 years old) that seats 60+ and can handle long distance (3 hour) highway trips.

BLOGOS: The Feast of Pentecost: Unity and Diversity

Geeks & God: VoIP and Your Church Podcast

Geeks are Sexy: Dell finally ships Linux PCs

Micro Persuasion: Tips for Starting and Maintaining a Blog

Seth Godin: Alignment

Worship Tech Online: Service

Congratulation to John and Lisa Basta on their new baby boy, Zion Noah Basta.

John barely made back in time from the Dynamic Church Conference to escort Lisa into the delivery room. Thanks be to God, Zion came out a healthy, happy and big baby.

Yesterday, my wife and I went to see Spider-Man 3. We aren’t frequent moviegoers, but we had heard so many great reviews we couldn’t resist. Fortunately we weren’t disappointed, it was nice to watch a movie with a well thought out story line and teaches a good lesson at the same time.

Check out the review by Frederica Mathewes-Green for more details.

We just got back from an amazing week long vacation in Aruba. Thank God, it was a very relaxing time, I got spend some quality time with Christ, my wife and catching up on a lot of reading. Unfortunately, I did have to miss the Church IT Roundtable (this was the only week Sherry and I could get away), but I do look forward to catching up on all the posts.

I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention – invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.

- Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, 1977

The above quote definitely applies to me – not to say that I am an inventor but rather someone who is always hunting down new solutions just because I don’t want to go through the headache of using current solutions. In a way that is what much of Information Technology is about – enabling people through more efficient solutions.

Last Tuesday, in a retreat planning meeting, I was tasked with printing a PDF on Holy Week, it was simply a 50 page document that we needed 120 copies of in book format. Traditionally we would just run it down to the local office supply store or quick print shop, but my experience is that the process is a lot of headache, not that cheap and the end product isn’t impressive. Wanting to avoid the headache, I started searching on the net and found several printers that will publish a PDF into a book.

I stumbled onto 48HrBooks.com, they looked like a good fit for what we wanted to do and great prices. We could get 125 “Perfect Bound” (paperback) books printed for $2.19 each. After checking that they were legit, I reformatted the document for 5.5″x8.5″ and uploaded it to them. The following day, they sent me an email asking to approve a proof of the color cover online and that was it – the books were shipped two days later. We received the books yesterday and they came out great – much nicer (and cheaper) than the spiral bound option we would have gone with if we used the local suppliers.