It seems like PAL’s posts are becoming event based. It’s something we promise to change so that you can stay up-to-date with all things PAL, but hopefully it’s a testament to how busy we’ve been! We just got back from the SCRC conference in Anaheim and had a blast meeting old friends and making new ones. Take a look at the pics!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=233391&id=24192649919

Being from Los Angeles, we always choose to make the 9 hour bus ride “pilgrimage” to the hot hot heat in Arizona. We met Matthew Leon of Jacob and Matthew who also decided to take his Youth Group to the Arizona conference instead of the one in San Diego. I think seeing legitimate cacti taller than you just keeps you coming back every year.

Our teens were truly transformed by God’s love this weekend. It’s not every weekend where thousands of teens choose God instead of the world – so there you go, it was a weekend of miracles…thousands of them.

PAL Campaign was blessed to have our tees featured at four Steubenville conferences; Arizona, Atlanta, St. Louis, and Rhode Island!

Thanks to every one who purchased and represented peace and love this Summer. We hope to continue making great tees that do not sacrifice great art or great faith.

In honor of Conan O’ Brien’s “In the year 2000,” we here at PAL Campaign have compiled a list of what would happen if (when) the Lakers win game 7 against the Boston Celtics.

1. Nate Robinson and Glen Davis join the cast of “Shrek on Ice.”
2. DJ Mbenga signs on to star in KaZaam 2
3. Shannon Brown continues to redeem his All-Star Weekend Slam Dunk Contest performance by making a slam dunk that creates a vortex in time.
4. Doc Rivers legally changes his name to Nurse Rivers.
5. Los Angeles suffers a record breaking plummet in work productivity as 99% of employees suddenly get sore throats and call in sick on Friday.
6. Rajon Rondo wins best acting performance by a male lead in a dramatic sports series for his mouth covering scene in game 6.
7. Rajon Rondo signs endorsement deal with Band-Aid Brand.
8. Phil Jackson and Derek Fisher both sign on for another year with the Lakers.
9. Lakers will repeat their performance in 2011 for a three-peat!
10. To help celebrate the Lakers victory, PAL Campaign will award 5 lucky fans a free PAL Campaign T-Shirt! To enter for a chance to win, leave a comment on this post with your name, city, favorite player on the Lakers and favorite PAL Campaign T-Shirt!

So as you can all see, not only are things like the possibility of KaZaam 2 and a three-peat on the line, so is the chance for a PAL Campaign t-shirt! Show some love!

Who says that Twitter is just a bunch of self-absorbed celebrities talking about what they had for breakfast? After being introduced to Popple through the Twitter Universe, we got to meet Dan and Kyle at the recent Religious Education Congress. They’re two really great guys, doing amazing things for the Kingdom of God. (Except they have this weird thing for Chocolate milk…) Here’s how a recent conversation with them went. Enjoy!

How did you come up with the name Popple?

We actually started out by making fun of the name Popple.  While doing college ministry we went camping with some friends on an island in the middle of Lake Michigan.  On the far side of that island is a camp site named “Popple.”  It took us a number of hours to hike out to Popple and when we arrived we found a place in which there was no potable water, the water that was there was full of leaches and the camp site was entirely engulfed in a forest of waist high Poison Ivy.  The plagues that afflicted the Popple campsite were almost Old Testament-bad. We ended up making fun of the name Popple so much that it stuck and when we were voting on a band name some months later, Popple kept rearing it’s ugly head and ultimately, we became “Popple.”

Haha, I love the phrase “The plagues that afflicted the Popple campsite.”

I am looking forward to April 23rd next year…Why chocolate milk?

Chocolate Milk has been overlooked for decades. We feel like it needs more respect. Sure, YooHoo and Nestle tried to raise Chocolate Milk’s profile a bit, but we still don’t see Chocolate Milk being served at official dinners for heads of state when they visit our country, we don’t have any well defined Chocolate Milk growing regions or appellations like you see with California or Washington State wines.  We dream of a day when Chocolate Milk is considered an integral part of fine dining. We also own several dairy farms and we import cocoa beans on the side (shhh, conflict of interest).

I agree completely. Serve it hot, serve it cold…it’s sweet nectar from the heavens.

What/who are your inspirations for your music?

We have pretty varied musical tastes. Kyle likes a lot of more rock and I tend towards more acoustically driven songwriters. I’m a big fan of Richie Havens, Tom Petty, The Smiths, Warren Zevon, Fleet Foxes and lately Bossa Nova/Samba music.  Kyle likes bands more along the lines of Muse, Famly Force 5, Foo Fighters and some 90s standbys like Alice in Chains.  Beyond that we both have grown a real appreciation for some of the Christian music that is coming out lately, Gungor, Matt Maher, Brandon Heath and Tenth Avenue North.

How long have you been writing / playing music, individually and together?

We’ve each been playing guitar and writing for about 13 years and we both started playing ukulele about five years ago.  We started Popple about six years ago and Popple has been full time for about three and a half years.

How does Popple represent peace and love?

Popple’s mission is to spread the Catholic faith and that faith is built upon a foundation of loving one another and in turn, living peacefully with one another.  There is a lot of comedy in life, and there is a lot of comedy in our faith, Popple’s mission is to get people laughing and to realize that life, faith, peace and love are joyful things.

What is your favorite PAL Campaign t-shirt design?

Kyle’s favorite seems to be the “Pray together, Stay together” shirt (I think because this week his first child was born!) my favorite is the “Dona Nobis Pachem” shirt because I love the language of the Mass, the language of our faith and the plea/prayer for God to grant us peace.

What a beautiful explanation

Given that the NBA playoffs are well underway, do you have a rooting interest in any particular team?

We’re glad you asked. We’re actually both avid WNBA fans and have officially decided to ignore and even bite our thumbs (Shakespearian style) at the NBA.  So yes, we’re particularly excited to see what Tammy Sutton-Brown has in store for the Indianapolis Fever this season.  In a related note, we both rebuke the Minneapolis Mystics.

Maybe the Clippers would have a lot more success if they changed their name to the Los Angeles Mystics.

What has been your most memorable moment since entering this ministry?

It might be the moment the people at World Youth Day Australia asked to use one of our songs for a Promo DVD which would go out to all of the English speaking attendants of WYD2008.  We were honored!  However, we soon found out that the song they wanted from us had nothing whatsoever to do with our faith, it was an acoustic Hip-Hop song kyle wrote so we could cleverly incorporate the “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” rap into our set – they seemed to just really like the beat.

POPPLE is an amazing group of faith and we’re glad to have finished this interview.  You can see POPPLE in action on their website www.popple.us

Happy Easter Weekend everyone. It’s time to rise again!

It’s been a long time coming, but here is a sneak peek of a few brand new designs. Colors and final art direction are being done on them, but we thought we’d share a part of some to peek some interest. Peace and Love!

The following are the top 10 Worst Technology Predictions compiled by L. Gordon Crovitz of WSJ:

“Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments,” said Roman engineer Julius Sextus Frontinus in 10 A.D. This end-of-progress view has been echoed many times, including by Charles Duell, commissioner for the U.S. Patent Office, who in 1899 said, “Everything that can be invented has already been invented.”

“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys,” Sir William Preece, chief engineer at the British Post Office, 1878.

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” H.M. Warner, Warner Bros., 1927.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,” Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

“Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night,” Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946.

“The world potential market for copying machines is 5,000 at most,” IBM executives to the eventual founders of Xerox, 1959.

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home,” Ken Olsen, founder of mainframe-producer Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.

“No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer—640K ought to be enough for anybody,” Bill Gates, Microsoft, 1981.

“Next Christmas the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput,” Sir Alan Sugar, British entrepreneur, 2005.

With that said, here are some cool pics I snapped with my blackberry (the camera on the storm is pretty good things like this!) of random books and images in the last few days. Enjoy!

1. Sony VAIO FW

The first computer to fall victim to the angel of computer death was my Sony VAIO laptop. It was a gorgeous machine with a 16.4 inch wide-screen view and absolutely stocked to handle my editing and graphic design needs. There was nothing wrong with its performance, except a few minor hardware downsides (keyboard and touchpad).

I connected the laptop to a DLP project to present a slideshow I had created, and left it on top of a projector tray. After the presentation ended, I moved the laptop off the projector and put it on a shelf for the very specific reason of keeping it safe. I answered a few questions, wrapped up with a few comments of my own and proceeded to move the projector tray out of the way to help clean up. My laptop was still attached the the projector by the vga cable, the projector stretch it too far, and in what seemed like an eternity…the laptop fell off the shelf and took a nose dive 5 feet down to the hard, marble floor. My initial reaction was shock, then confusion. After I regained composure, I turned on my laptop to check out the damage.

Hardware wise, the AC port was loose and would not hold the power cord’s input into the computer. Windows started slower than usual and all processes would either crash or take an incredibly long amount of time (if it didn’t freeze before then) to finish. Slowly this symptom would get worse as time went on, and I spent a good part of the night backing up all my documents to an external hard drive.

I now turn on the computer and it’s nothing more than a paper weight.

2. DELL inspiron E1505

With my primary machine in a comatose state. I planned on using my backup computer until I could research and shop around for another computer. I plugged in my old DELL Inspiron E1505, and with 2 gb of RAM, thought that it could suffice for at least another month. It was running beautifully and I began to rely on it more than I had anticipated, installing a lot of my old software on the DELL and putting off buying another computer more and more.

Then it happened one Sunday morning…the blue screen of death.

I did everything I could to revive it but it did not take. I finally had to resort to purchasing a Hard Drive dock and saving out the data from the laptop to recover my work. But alas, tragedy struck again, and I had to retire my second laptop within 30 days.

I am looking at a variety of machines, from ACER to HP to yes… a MAC BOOK. I will gladly take suggestions for any machine you’ve owned or currently own that you would recommend me getting.