42

Bowling and Coffee

Tonight, as I mentioned in 42: Good news, safe to invite friends :-), we had a social event as Syston Methodist Church.

For us it was a first. We had 5 lanes of Wii Bowling using 4 data projectors and a big TV. Plus Guitar Hero (again projected) and an xbox 360 motor racing game.

Also our special "Ally Cafe" did a roaring trade with Burgers, Hot Dogs, Nachos (choice of toppings) and loads of cake. Plus soft drinks and tea and coffee.

This was our first use of the new coffee machine and all the feedback I heard was really positive. As people drank nearly 9 litres of coffee I guess they must have liked it :-)

I didn't try to keep a count myself but at a guess there were probably about 80 people in total who came for at least a few games. It was fantastic to see a load of new faces and a lot of people trying something new.

We are very fortunate in having a huge team of people who did the set up, ran the cafe, helped people with the games and then cleared it all up at the end. Not only did they work really hard but they are so cheerful about it that the whole place had a fantastic atmosphere.

I was pleased that I managed to get everything to the Church by bike see Door to door deliveries « 42 Bikes for pictures.

Looks like we will be having more events like this :-)

Good news, safe to invite friends :-)

I am pleased to announce that it is now much safer to invite your friends to Syston Methodist Church. While the Church has a reputation of being friendly to visitors we have rather let the welcome down with the quality of our coffee (summed up as yucky).

Well help is on hand. I have just had three big boxes delivered containing a fantastic professional filter machine and all the bits. We are going to have lovely Fairtrade filter coffee in a choice of both caffeinated and decaffeinated. To ensure top quality coffee along with flexibility and safety our coffee is made straight into big vacuum flasks with pumps for serving.

First airing in the Ally Cafe on Saturday 26th February between 7pm and 10pm for our Wii Bowling evening - all welcome (I couldn't wait til Sunday morning as I'll be in Birstall where sadly their coffee quality is lagging behind). Still last Sunday evening I was at Claremont Street which boasts the best biscuits in the Circuit :-)

Life segmentation

At a recent meeting of people on twitter one of the things we discussed was how connected we have our various pieces of social media.

For me there are currently five main elements to my use of social media:

• This blog 42.blogs.warnock.me.uk, this has now being going 7.5 years. Nowadays the content is mostly faith related with some general life, politics etc thrown in.
• My cycling blog 42bikes.warnock.me.uk this is about cycling :-) A mix of experiences, campaigning, comment etc. I am writing more here in recent months having taken up the challenge to post something everyday for 2011.
• Twitter @dave42w 
• Facebook dave.warnock
• Flickr for photos davew42 

Until a few minutes ago I had these pretty much automatically connected. Now I have some separation. So here is how I plan to connect them/cross post.

• I will update twitter and facebook whenever I post to either blog. I need to check whether they will appear on facebook as full posts or just links (as quite a lot of people comment on the facebook full posts I thiuk that is worth continuing).
• I have stopped automatically updating facebook from twitter. So facebook users won't see all the twitter oddities with # @ etc in them.
• I will sometimes update both twitter and facebook with a status message if I think both groups of people will be interested (for the technically minded I can do this by adding a #fb to the end of the tweet or from within the Hootsuite twitter client)
• Conversations on twitter (replies and retweets in particular) will not appear on facebook.
• My latest photos on flickr appear in the sidebar of 42bikes.warnock.me.uk

If I ever have time to bother I might use the features of twitter and facebook to breakdown my followers/friends into groups (family, work, cycling, ...). But I don't expect to make this a very high priority.

I guess that over time I will fine tune this.