You may recall that I had purchased the Kindle 2 last year, but ended up returning it after a few days. Here’s why. I’ve now had the Kindle 3 for about two weeks, using it pretty much every day.

Here’s what I’m liking about it and why I am keeping it this time:

1. Better screen. According to Amazon, it has 50% better screen contrast than the previous version. The screen is whiter, and the fonts are blacker and sharper. You can actually see it under a microscope here to see the difference in fonts. For me, the screen has made a huge difference. It looks so much better, and being e-ink, you’re not tiring your eyes out at all reading on it. Could it be better? I think it could be. I imagine that they could make the screen even whiter and the fonts even darker. I think they’re about 2 versions away from being completely perfect, but it’s at the stage right now where I definitely felt good about it and wanted to jump back in.

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In light of the recent tragedy in Japan, I thought I’d post a few links on how you can donate quickly and easily.

1. Text REDCROSS to 90999 to give $10 towards the earthquake and tsunami relief. This is a free text message for most carriers. Click here for more info.

2. Text 4JAPAN to 20222 to give $10 towards the relief on behalf of World Vision. To give more click here.

3. Text SUPPORT to 85944 to give $10 towards the relief on behalf of ADRA. To give more click here.

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This is part two in a series. To check out the first one click here.

I’m going to walk you through our journey of how we raised $5,000 to partner with Charity: Water to build a well. I’ll share the good, the bad, and the ugly, and then I’ll share some parting lessons that I learned in the process.

It all began last December. I was speaking and dreaming with one of our church leaders, when we came up with this idea to partner with Charity Water to raise funds to build a water well. Every year leading up to Christmas we do a big push for a special giving campaign that goes towards evangelism or some mission project. So we thought, let’s do Charity Water this year for our giving campaign. We had about three weeks to go, and I was convinced that we’d be able to make our goal. So here’s what we did to set it up.

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Did you hear the news? Our church is building a water well! See the final page here.

That’s right, this past Christmas we partnered with Charity: Water to build our very own well. In the next post I’ll address how we actually did  it and give all the details with lessons learned, but for now I just wanted to share a brief nugget on why we set out to do this.

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The short answer is…because I have an iPhone 4. I’ve been trying to think of a really good reason why I should get the iPad 2. I don’t have the first generation iPad, and I have to say I haven’t missed it. I can’t think of anything I would want to do on the iPad that I can’t already do on the iPhone 4. As a matter of fact, my iPhone 4 already has a better screen (retina display) than the iPad. Sure, on the iPad there are bigger and more functional apps than on the iPhone, but if I really want to do some fancy stuff, that’s why I have my MacBook Pro.

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Have you ever had an idea or thought of some to-do that you have to work on while away from your desk?

I know for me, it seems like these things pop into my mind at the most inconvenient times. If i’m at my desk, of course, I’ll just write it down in my notebook. So what are some options?

One option that I’ve tried in the past is to make a digital note on my “Notes” app on my iPhone. So I’ll pull it out, and begin pecking away to jot down the idea or to-do. Guess what? For me, anyway, this hasn’t worked very well. I found that I’ll write it down and just forget about it. Days later I might think to myself “hey! I think I wrote something down in the Notes app. Maybe I should check it out.” But the truth is that I often just forget about it. Also, this doesn’t work very well if you get the idea while you’re driving on the road and have 30 seconds at the red light.

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Have you ever lost an important document before?

Perhaps you’ve been in the process of writing, when all of a sudden, you get some glitch in your word processor and you lose some content? It’s happened to me before and every time it’s made my heart drop. It’s really painful.

A few weeks I began working on a really important paper and I couldn’t afford to have anything go wrong with it. So here’s my really simple method to automatically backup your documents.

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