Friday, July 18, 2008

Tech Needs

This week has been a very hectic one, my wife and I have been volunteering with the Vacation Bible School at Heartland Church this week. We've been in Power Lab giving our kids in our crews the power of Jesus in their lives. It's been a very moving and emotional time for me as I look at these faces and wonder what lies in store for them. I know how attending church and VBS influenced my life, so I'm praying that someday these kids will have the same experience and come to know Christ in a deeper relationship also.

On the tech front, Peggy (my wife) and I had an eye opening experience as we volunteered to help with the Kids For The King (K4K) part of Heartland Church -- our Sunday school times. We were relegated to the sign-in desk and we could see a lot of opportunities. They've progressed very rapidly, from not having any system to working on continually refining the system they have now, but it's still paper based and in it's current form it's not very scalable at all. It's been weighing on my heart a lot and I've already made a flowchart and been bouncing ideas between Peggy and I on how it could work. I had a very wonderful "A HA!" moment last night too when Peggy had the exact same suggestion that I had thought about for getting the kids out of the classroom and to their parents. For privacy and security purposes, I won't divulge any information on how the current system works, but there are a lot of opportunities to make the kids safer and reassure parents also.

In addition to that, a request that has been out there for a while has been to get an ethernet cable or wireless signal down to the older sanctuary at the church. The new part of the facility was built on and there is a long fire-break hall between the two structures called "the Link". The problem is the new facility is concrete walls and the old sanctuary was a brick faced building also, so there are a lot of solid walls to bounce a poor wireless signal through. It depends on the day on how far down the hall the signal actually reaches, and sometimes our youth director can get a signal in his office, and sometimes not. He ends up working down the hall from his office wherever he can catch a signal.

My plan is to at least get a hardwired cable down the hallway to connect the two buildings and then address putting a second wireless router to give adequate coverage in that area. I've tapped the resources of our "Tool Time" ministry to get the manpower to help me run cablign down there. This is a project that has been on the back burner for a very long time and I feel very remiss for not moving forward sooner on it. This would actually be a very good time to tackle the project because our youth team will be out of town in Memphis, Tennessee next week so a nice suprise for our youth leader would be a fully functional network.

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