God Is In Charge

Some of the headlines that I read nowadays would have really scared me a few years back . . . but it's all a part of God's plan and he's in charge at all times. The latest things that seem to be showing up on our radar are the number of newspapers struggling and going under. There are a number of cities losing major newspapers. It's hard to think in terms of balance in reporting of information -- one editorial I read lamented the loss of actual reporters, most news being regurgitated from blogs/etc.. from people pointing and clicking for the info. That combined with the economic woes, and other despair would is leading people to think desperately and seek a way out. I just know that no matter what the circumstances, God is always on his throne. Now is the time for the church (that is the body of Christ -- all of his followers regardless of religion/denomination/etc...) to stand together and share the gospel with as many as we can before we lose that opportunity. Eternity is a very long time.

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Too Cool For A Mac?

This is just a funny little barage in the Microsoft marketing campaign . . . where's Seinfield and Bill again? LOL

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-18438_7-10205757-82.html

I really enjoyed this commercial . . . she's too cool for a Mac . . .driving her little VW around . . . oof. I know every time I show someone how the Mac works and they know the pain/agony they've experienced on the Windows side of things . . . there's a new convert. I was a died in the wool Microsoft fantatic . . . I can remember going to the IE 4.0 launch parties . . . all the "wow" stuff . . . and the endless promises. I bought my first Mac in December 2007 (an iMac/Intel) and despite the price, the OS/system/features/etc... all pointed to a much better value over any Windows based system I had ever owned. I've done it all, from white boxes (generic) to big brand ones (Gateway/Dell/HP/Sony) and I'm still blown away by Mac's usefulness. I have a very old G3 Mac at work that I still use on a daily basis. My Sony Vaio laptop choked under just the restore disks for Windows and updates . . . . writing off perfectly good hardware.

Someday I'm going to swap to a Mac based laptop -- but for now my Dell Inspiron 1100 will trundle along nicely using Fedora Core 9 (Linux). I don't consider myself cool or anything for using the best technology, and in the court of frugality, I realized that my time is money. I've spent $THOUSANDS$ dealing with Windows issues. Go get yourself that $699 HP there Punky . . . and I'm sure it'll be at the GeekSquad counter getting virus protection updates and malware fixes soon. *Sigh*

Kicking Tech Team Into High Gear

If anything, I'd consider 2008 a year of getting our bearing and moving forward a bit. In 2009 I'm definitely looking forward to getting a solid tech team together and spearheading a lot of projects. To the best of my knowledge, we have no budget, so we've had some creative liberties here and there (and a road trip or two) to make things work. The child check-in program is working great, but I have future plans for it. The web site re-do is still on the back burner, and we just recently had space made available at church for a dedicated tech room area.

The first thing we need to work on is getting people involved and plugged into helping with various tech related activities. The promotional video to get people interested has been created and will start being shown.

One topic that I'm investigating currently is video creation. Currently we have the equipment to do videos of the sermons on Sunday morning, but the problem stems from post-production timeframes. For an hour long service, you would need to include the Powerpoint slides and other things, including the potential for multiple camera angles. This is all possible but the time to do this on a consistent basis with the limited resources (namely talent/time) is overwhelming. The way to circumvent that issue would be to do the processing on the fly -- mixing a live "show" to tape. The 9 AM service could be used to for notes/etc.. and then the 10:45 the actual live recording. Multiple cameras and the Powerpoint slides could be mixed live and recorded -- greatly reducing the time it would take in post-production time.

Slight hiatus

I've been out of the blogging here for a while because of the holidays and the rapid work we were doing on the new child check-in system for Heartland Church. The new system is called "Solomon" for his wise wisdom, and the interesting story of how he determined a birth mother. Akoloutheo was just too much of a mouthful . . . I think this new name fits the program much better. Here's the new page on it: http://solomoncheckin.blogspot.com/

Technology At Work

I'll be the first to admit, I'm not a full-on geek. I can't speak Klingon and I don't have lust over the latest microprocessor that hits the market. I use technology where it makes sense and I try to justify it the best that I can. I only recently changed from using a mix-mash of calendars/post-it's/etc... to using Google Calendar for all of my important information. I was syncing my Palm 700WX to my iMac and attempting to keep all that straight, but then adding my wife Peggy's info to the mix . . . oof! Instead I opted for Google Calendar and now we both have PDA type phones and use the mobile portion to keep track of everything.

That lead me to the thought for today, on how best to use my time. I get a 30 minute lunch, but I've been pretty guilty of just plowing through work without taking that time. I desperately need to get things moving on the Heartland Church web redesign, as well as the children's check-in system and putting some of that time to good use would be an excellent way to do it. I decided to put in a calendar reminder that sends me an SMS message at 1 minute till lunch, and another reminder at 30 minutes after . . . that way I'll remember to switch gears and then to stop what I'm doing and go back to work. I think that'll be a great way to handle things.

On the web redesign front, last night I delved into the custom pages part of Silverstripe, the CMS (content management system in this case) of choice. I was able to create a "staff" type page from the online guides. I quickly zipped through getting that up and going in the time we got home from care group while Peggy worked on addressing information for the FamilyLife "Weekend To Remember" marriage conference. We are the promoters of this great conference for our church and are working hard to make this year a very successful year for it. We attended last year before we were engaged and it was fantastic, and with the movie "Fireproof" in everyone's minds, it should be a great incentive.

Results Driven

I have to offer up some praise to God in all he's done . . . because of him working through members at Heartland Church people have became members of our church. My wife attended the Class 101 on joining our church this past Saturday and 5 out of the 9 in the class were there because they had found Heartland Church Blue Springs, MO on the internet. God works in many wondrous and mysterious ways . . . who'd have though that because of circumstances in my personal life I would have had the time to drive the new work forward on our web presence? I'm very blessed by many great fellow workers in this online ministry at our church. As we move forward with an even better web presence; I pray that God will continue to allow us to reach out to our local community and bring people to not only our church, but to a relationship with God and his church, the universal church of Christ followers.