Bush League

I am so out of my league in this conference. Not that I don’t
understand what they are saying, but that I am representing such a bush
league IT situation. The guy next to me is talking about needing 22
terabytes of storage for his church and we have, what a single 500MB drive that is
maybe 1/3 full. Oh, and they virtualize all of their servers (plural). Sheesh….I’m keeping my mouth shut for fear that
someone asks me what I’m running.

7 Minute Vendor Pitch

A nice way to do it. Give everyone the same amount of time to zip through their PPT. Nobody gets more time than the other. Vendors: ACS Technologies, Saxon (local Xerox dealer), ServiceU, etc

Intermittent Connectivity

An hour later, the wireless is back up again. Feels like IT….

Church IT Roundtable

I’m attending the Church IT Roundtable in Palm Beach Gardens. I’ve been here for 2 hours and Internet connectivity just came up. …hehehe

Inspired Photography

I’ve been following this guy’s Flickr stream (here I’ve linked to his Blogger page) for some time now and he is, in my estimation, one of the best for strobe work with kids. His photography is wonderfully imaginative and he is creating a treasure trove that his girls will have to value for a long, long time. Don’t know how he does it, but he’s good.

Updates

For some reason I got sidetracked there for a couple of months with some other tech-related project. Whew! Thank goodness that is done. <grin>

Today’s post comes to you from the cafeteria at Camp Kulaqua in beautiful northern Florida where fortunately they have a decent WiFi connection. Dany and I are aquainting ourselves with the new WordPress 2.7 dashboard. So far the results are quite favorable, although I am still getting aclimated to the new interface.

New Health Ministries Website

The Health Ministries team at Forest Lake is making good headway on a new website highlighting the various events and people in their area. The site is being developed by Shelley Veal as a standalone website rather than one that is a subsection of the current Forest Lake Church website. The platform is Wordpress 2.6 and I believe she is currently using the Organic2 theme. It’s coming along rather nicely and is going to stay as a standalone site for at least the foreseeable future. At some point it might get Drupalized into the main church website, though it isn’t obvious what the advantages of that might be at this time.

I like the idea of setting up separate websites for those ministries that have the interest and ability to run on their own. I also like using Wordpress because it is more content driven and less design driven than the standard website platform. Not that you don’t get good design out of a blog OS, but rather that the emphasis is on putting up content instead of twiddling with code and design and various backend functionalities. I find that Wordpress makes a very capable CMS by itself, so the ease of use lets someone get their feet wet on website development without too much floundering around. And since each ministry website has it’s own URL then they can be branding their own ministry at the same time.

Several new church websites will be following this same development path. I want to empower people to promote and develop their own ministry area rather than having to run everything through me or depend on me (ie, wait for me) to get something posted. If they own it, then they can take pride in it and in the process more and more people are developing their skills to share what God is doing with others.

Embrace the Culture

Only a long-time Adventist would get this website. And only one with a sense of humor (not an automatic given within the culture) would find these remotely humorous. I personally want the “I <heart> Haystacks” shirt for myself.

Spectrum Interview Now Live

Woohoo! The interview I recently did for Spectrum Magazine is now live on their blog. The focus of the interview was on how the Forest Lake Church is using technology to further it’s mission. Doing the interview reminded me yet again how much I am a part of a team of dedicated paid and volunteer people who want to expand the mission and reach of a local congregation using the available technology.

What I like about the Spectrum blog is that after the article or interview is posted you get to continue having a dialog with whoever posts a comment rather than it being a one-sided conversation (I talk-you listen). What a great use of blogging technology (built on Drupal no less–see the unchanged favicon) and a way to build a community of discussion online. They are even so brave as to allow unmoderated posting–got to give them credit for that experiment in civilized discourse. I wouldn’t mind seeing that kind of attitude in other sectors of Adventism as well.

Deeper Podcast is Done

Another Deeper podcast is in the can. Well, actually several cans since I create both an audio and a video version. For those who might like to know, the podcast is currently being filmed on a Canon GL-2 and simultaniously being audio captured into Garageband via a PreSonus Firewire mixer. I then do all my video edits in Final Cut Pro using various visual elements from the Editors Toolkit Pro from Digital Juice to make it look pretty. On the audio side of the house I just stay in Garageband and do all my work there since audio is mostly just chopping up the file into pieces and laying down the musical track. On those days when the audio on the camera isn’t that good (because, you know, the camera is sitting 20 feet away and I only have one mic–the one going into the PreSonus–anyway) then I cut and paste the audio out of Garageband and try to synch it up with the video in FCP (which is often a bit squirrelly).

After I get through mangling things up, Mr. Todd Gable comes along and makes it all iTunes-worthy and gets it ready for the podcast world. And after that is all web magic and light.

Future plans are to upgrade to a better camera (Canon, Sony?) and maybe even another mic or two (woo!).

So there you go–nothing fancy, nothing sophisticated, but I’m sure having a lot of fun doing it.

Update: the podcasts are now live on iTunes.