It’s Ian and I haven’t updated in a while… yup, I know. I just recently got back from the regional Vineyard youth retreat in Hillsdale, MI, called Cloud 9 and let me tell you, it was pretty hott and kickin’. As you know, beautifully amazing people such as Donnell Wyche and Matt McCoy were there, which makes it an extra special thing.

On Friday night when we walked into worship, I could really sense an anticipation and an expectation that God was going to show up. Fun, loud music was all around, of course, and lots of people were praising God. It was a great way to open the retreat.

Saturday was “fun.” The night before I got like no sleep because… well, c’mon, it’s a retreat duh! No, really, it was a lot of fun. We started out the morning with, you know… breakfast and everything like that. Then chapel, breakouts (love the prophesy!), and then evening chapel. God was doing a lot of amazing Saturday night with lots of people crying and receiving ministry. You know, typical Vineyard stuff.

God has this thing for legs at Cloud 9. Last year, there was this boy that was born with one leg shorter than the other. A couple of people prayed for him and his legs evened out! No lie! He shared his testimony at the end of the retreat last year! Then, this year, there was this girl that walked in to Cloud 9 with a broken ankle. Again, a couple of people prayed for her and on testimonies morning (Sunday morning, the end of the retreat), she was walking around normal and shared how God healed her ankle.

So, like I said… God has a thing for legs.

And that’s my story! Notice the purposeful vagueness on some things… too personal to share! God is amazing, that’s all I’ll say. My life has more purpose than it ever did before.

Whoohooo!

Overflow (What Love Is Better)

We draw near to the God who saved us all
Never fear, He’s redeemed us from the fall
Glory of God, come dwell here
You come in power and you’ve set our hearts free

You reign, God you reign over all
Your grace, O how you rescue us all
We love you Lord over everything else
What love is better than this?
Your fame goes beyond the universe
Your song echoes through heaven and earth
Your love, O how you lavish freely
What love is better than this?

Father come, shine Your light on Your great truth
Send your flood, fill our hearts afresh, anew
We rejoice at death’s end
You have conquered and you’ve made us fully alive

It’s the overflow of a grateful heart
Here us now we’ve come to give you all (2x)

Chord Sheet

Want to play this song? Get the chord sheet here.

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Your pants will be blown off.

Well… figuratively speaking, of course.

I advise that everybody read this book. It’s my all-time favorite book!

For those of you who didn’t already notice, we’ve had a “site down for maintenance” notice up on Gas Finder for the past couple of days, almost going on a week now. Why? Well, we made a multimillion dollar company mad. Oops. Fear the wrath of the attorneys of a multimillion dollar company!

Our main service provider for gas price data was Motortrend. Motortrend gets their price data from a company called OPIS (Oil Pricing Information Services) which monitors the price of gas by analyzing credit card transactions throughout the entire US. Motortrend has a public RSS feed for gas price data and that’s where we got our data from. Several days ago now, we got a “friendly” call from the head attorney representing OPIS requesting a cease and desist within 48 hours.

What’s funny to me is that the gas price data is publicly available. If you wanted, you could subscribe to the RSS feed and get it right in your Inbox. And yet they call us “pirates.” Hmm? If they really wanted to protect their data, they should hide their feed, or at least encode it. Or something.

So, we got back with the head attorney, requesting information about the licensing. And guess how much it costs…

$1,500-$25,000 a month. Yeah. Major oops.

A note to anybody who wants to start a gas finder service - you can’t. We tried. And we got fried. Unless you can get proper licensing from OPIS, you will eventually be shut down. Learn from our experience. It’s already being done by Mapquest, Motortrend, Automotive, MSN, and more… so unless you got a boatload of cash…

It’s fun to say that I’ve almost been sued by a multimillion dollar company. At least I can say that I did it. Fun.

I get fancy points and karma (on the site of course, I’m not advocating “karma” and mysterious voodoo crap like that) for referrals. I’m trying to reach 10 to get a silver star. So, you should sign up.

Yes, yes! You should. Even if you never log in again.

Find me: http://plurk.com/user/imcq

~imcq

Apple liked our webapp so much that they’ve featured Gas Finder on July 23rd, 2008, on their webapp homepage!

http://www.apple.com/webapps/

AND they’ve included Gas Finder as a staff pick!

If you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch user, you’ll want to check out the Gas Finder at the following:

http://www.apple.com/webapps/travel/gasfinder.html

Our hope is to integrate Gas Finder with other mobile devices in the future. This is just the start.

Again, tell your friends about Gas Finder so they too can find the lowest gas prices and save money.

Enjoy!

Cheers,
~imcq