It seems everywhere I go today, I see people showing off their iPhones. Of course, I know it is because of where I live, but they seem to be lying out on restaurant tables everywhere in the valley. At Mashup Camp 4 which I am attending this week, of course, there are a bunch of people with them.

I finally got to play with one yesterday for about 10 minutes. Honestly, I was not blown away. The screen is beautiful. The device is thin. And yet it is just huge compared to my Blackberry Pearl. I would really worry about dropping an iphone and damaging the screen. I wasn’t excited about the onscreen keyboard. I tried the safari browser. It is cool. I tried out the phone, calendar, camera and other features. They are nice but I didn’t see anything so revolutionary that inspires me to run out and spend $500 to $600 for one. Maybe if you never had a smart phone this would be amazing breakthrough, but otherwise for me I think it is just a fashion statement.

I am launching a new social website about phones, headsets, carriers and accessories at http://www.5thbar.com.

Please check it out. It has YouTube and eBay integration plus a news aggregator. I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions you might have on it. Thanks!

For those interested, this site was developed using Ruby on Rails.

Last week I took my two daughters on a mission trip to build a house for poor family in Juarez Mexico through our church. The typical family we saw was headed by a single mother with three or more small children and surviving on $7-$10 per day. It was a really eye-opening experience! Our team of 13 people (half of which were under 14) flew to El Paso, Texas. We got picked up by a bus then driven over the border to the Mission Ministries “team center” located in one of the poorest parts of Juarez.

The team center is very nice relative to its environment. It’s a compound with rooms, running water, air conditioning, electricity, dining hall, and a medical clinic. It’s surrounded by tall wall with barbed wire, topped with broken glass, and with a guard dog. Because outside is not so nice. The homes in the neighborhood don’t have running water. A lot of them are just made up of cardboard or pallets. The people burn old tires to keep warm in the winter. There are gangs walking around which make it unsafe to go out at night. It’s dirty, there is garbage and debris everywhere, tremendous poverty and overall it’s very sad.

The Mission Ministries team is just making an incredible difference. So far this year they’ve built about 45 homes for people in the area. Also and perhaps even more miraculous is the personal transformation of the people around this activity. Several of the local people working with us were former gang members, drug addicts, killers, etc. now they have devoted themselves to helping others.

Mission Ministries also provides free medical care to people in the area out of their clinic which is staffed by volunteers. We had a dentist who came with us who worked out of the medical clinic there while we were building the house. We only had one doctor with us, but other teams come with several doctors and nurses. In the afternoons, we were done building at the house (it was 105°F at the construction site) we came back to the medical clinic to help out. My daughters and some of the ladies on the trip gave manicures to the local women who were waiting to see the dentist. We also did some arts and crafts projects and played sports with the local kids.

If you have the opportunity to go yourself, or even to take your children, I highly recommend it. It was a tremendously rewarding personal experience. You will see the difference God can make in action. My kids left inspired to help out and anxious to return again. I posted some photos of the construction and time we spent at the clinic here.