Mission Trip - Busch Gardens - Growing Up

Hi Everyone~

I am back from our Mission Trip and I AM TIRED! The New Smyrna Beach United Church of Christ’s TEENS IN ACTION Youth Group just got back from a week long mission trip in south Florida, where we helped build a deck; put a roof on a pavilion and poured concrete for a walkway at a deaf center. The center has apartments for the hearing impaired. This was pretty strenuous work for someone who sits at a computer for 40 hours a week!!! But it was so worth it.

What a wonderful trip it was. Our youth group has kids ranging in age from 12 to 15 and I was soooo proud of them. We were led on the job site by a St. Petersburg contractor, Mr. Davis, who taught the kids how to use power tools, ratchets, build roofs, shingle, pour concrete and more! I have never seen a group of kids work so hard. They spent 7 hour days working to help the residents at the deaf living center have a place to gather together for fellowship, picnics and just plain fun!

We stayed at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg in some of the older dormitories. One of our chaperones (who is 66) said that it reminded her of her college days in the 50s! The kids were able to use the outdoor volleyball courts, a beautiful pool and the soccer fields.

I saw the kids mature emotionally and spiritually – they participated in worship services held by TeamEffort, the organization that coordinated the trip. The Teens in Action group bonded, grew in love for each other and learned how serving others could make them feel good about themselves.

Each evening after working at the center our group joined the three other youth groups who were serving in south Florida that week. Our group got to know a group from Georgia really well. Some groups were doing work on the hurricane damaged homes of migrant workers, and some were leading Bible School classes. We enjoyed great worship services led by college students who shared their life stories and their journeys of faith.

We took a day off to visit Busch Gardens in Tampa, Florida – where the braver of them rode the new ride ShieKra (which was a lollapalooza!) – along with all the other roller coasters – Montu, Python, Scorpion, Phoenix and the Cheetah Chase. We got wet on the Stanley River Falls Log Flume and the Tanganyika Tidal Wave – it was a welcome relief from the heat of the day. Some of the groups got to see a few shows, but not ours.



We saw lots of animals, including a baby Grevy's zebra, who stayed next her mother, Kellye. Other animals sitings were giraffes, endangered black rhinoceroses, Bengal tigers (where one of the kids accidentally dropped her camera over onto the ledge, a Busch Gardens employee saved the day - and the camera), chimpanzees, all kinds of exotic birds and much, much more.

We were on the go from 7:30 a.m. to at least midnight every day and even though we were all tired (especially the chaperones) we were energized by becoming closer to each other and to God while there. The day after I got back, I had phone calls from parents who were excited about the changes in their kids and phone calls from the kids about stuff they had read in the Bible.

The trip surpassed my expectations and was an awesome experience for everyone involved. Our church helped raise most of the money for the trip, along with the parents and lots of fund raisers. On the way home, the kids were already planning how to raise money so we can go again.

One of our Teens in Action members had an especially good week where she learned to whistle, blow bubble gum bubbles, overcame her fear of heights by shingling a roof and overcame her fear of roller coasters. A banner week indeed!

A continuation of the group's mission work will happen next month when we share a meal with a youth group from Vermont who will be doing mission work working in Daytona Beach.

We want to offer our thanks to the congregation at the NSB United Church of Christ for sharing their vision of ministry to others. I personally want to thank my bosses, Mary and Rusty Crawford, for donating to the cause and our company, the USCity.net Internet Website Directory for allowing me a week's vacation while on the Mission Trip.

I hope to involve some of our college employees on the next trip as chaperones. (hint, hint, Kristina and Jen!).

Thanks also to Carol for taking up the slack while I was gone.

Microsoft IE 7 Turned Me Into a Human Robot (or) A Human Robot Revisited

OH MY STARS! I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT I WROTE IN THE LAST BLOG ABOUT BEING A HUMAN ROBOT YEARS AGO AND TODAY I HAD TO DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN!

In case you are not following my blog daily, as I know millions - possibly billions – are (judging from the grand total of 8 comments I have received), I was giving a little background about the beginnings of our company, USCITY.NET. In it I mentioned having to do tasks on the computer (usually coding) over and over 51 times for each state page (this was before our genies in the programming department stepped in) in our website directory. Then today, thanks to Microsoft’s new Windows Internet Explorer 7, anyone trying to add their link to our site and leaving the information needed to add the site was given an error saying that we were phishing. I cannot tell you how insane that is. The people I work for and with are the most honest, trustworthy people that ever composed any business.

Anyway I am getting off the subject. So since people were getting this error, we had to fill out a report to send to Microsoft re: our site being legitimate, having a privacy policy, etc. and guess what? – THAT’S RIGHT - had to do it 51 times. Back to being a human robot. On the brighter side, I now have an assistant AND she is back from her cruise, so I had help this time around. I just thought how ironic it was to write in the blog about it one day and then have it happen to me again the next day.

Hmmm. I think winning the lottery would be wonderful.

AND our apologies to anyone who has gotten this error by trying to submit a link to our directory. Please try again, and email us if you have any problems.

My View of How It All Began

It has been a crazy week – our assistant database manager went on a cruise and I have been doing her work and mine too. She is the best – and I realized this week how much she does without ever making a big deal of it. Thank You Carol ;-) I love you!

As I promised when I started this blog, here is a little bit about…

USCITY.NET – My View of How It All Began

This began as the brainchild of our founder, Rusty Crawford – who I like to refer to as the ‘father’ of USCity.net. He is a genius who always seems to be one step ahead of everyone else I know. He taught himself basic programming language in the early 1980’s. About ten years later, Rusty taught himself HTML and Perl coding, Rusty started building websites for businesses in and around Volusia County, Florida.

That was when he came up with the idea for a local county-oriented business directory called Volusia.com (incidentally, that is where I first started working with Rusty and his wife, Mary). At Volusia.com we listed local governments, schools, wrote histories of the area towns and answered numerous emails about the area.

At the time, Yahoo only linked to Volusia.com, our information site, but would not link to any of our business sites. So sprang the idea of a nationwide directory of the United States.

And this took a LOT of preliminary preparation. One of the aspects I was involved with was finding and typing in the names of every county, city and town in the United States. I know there was a lot of programming and behind the scenes work then, but I really don’t know what all was involved then.

I know that he wanted a ‘G’ rated directory that would allow smaller ‘Mom & Pop’ businesses to be found on the web along with the larger companies like Disney, Dell and Sharper Image.

I believe that Rusty, his wife Mary, Sue and I were the first four employees. With a lot of trials and tests, we finally got it! We got our second server, dedicated just for uscity.net in 1999 and went online (we now have 25 servers).

In the beginning, much of the coding and data entry was done 51 times – once for every state and Washington D.C. Often that process fell in my lap and I sometimes felt a little bit like a robot. One compliment I remember Rusty giving me was calling me up one night and asking me if I was working or not, because he thought another computer was trying to get into our site. I told him "NO, it's just your human robot working away!"

We took every effort to make USCITY.NET a safe place to browse and shop (and still do!) and we added information that would be helpful to our users along with businesses, both local and national.

We all work very hard to bring you to bring you the best directory in the United States.

Everyone in our company takes pride in their work and we all want this to be a directory that is practical, easy to use and helpful to our visitors.

We welcome comments and suggestions to make your experience even more pleasurable.