tonight. sunday. skypecast.

TomorrowTonight is Sunday January 21st. At 9:00pm Eastern, 6:00pm Pacific, and whatever that translates to your locale, I’ll be on the Next Gener.Asian Church Skypecast, where we will explore the question: “Is the Asian American church – necessary, optional, or simply an unhealthy diversion?” At this moment, I’ll be presenting about it as being “optional”, and a good one at that, b/c we need all kinds of churches for all kinds of people. [live update: bummer, the skypecast server isn't working well, so we're reverting to a Skype conference call - invite only, sorry!]

The skypecast is free, all you need is Skype and a good broadband Internet connection. We’ll try to record it for posterity.

[update] We got it recorded, listen below (mp3 audio):

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Side note: our family is again subscribing to a DVD-by-mail service, this time with Blockbuster. We’re one of the 700,000 newbies. Their Total Access program really is the best of both worlds, and makes sense for their retail stores: you get up to 3 DVDs by mail, and you can also exchange those at the store for free in-store videos, when that movie impulse itches. This NYT article describes the market’s response, Blockbuster Marries Stores to Internet:

Q. You recently started a program that competes directly with Netflix called Total Access, which gives customers the option of returning DVDs through the mail or exchanging them at a store. How is that going?

A. We launched Total Access on Nov. 1, and in the last two months of last year we added 700,000 subscribers.

Q. You are giving customers a two-week free trial. Do you know how many are staying on and paying for the service?

A. We believe it�s somewhere between 70 and 75 percent. And that�s a much higher conversion rate than any of our previous programs.