old school inspiration

One of my loves of art is mixed media. this video is super sweet. Its a mix of 8 bit computer graphics and stop motion. Its pretty impressive. I always thought it would be cool to go to a gallery of art like this. Has anyone ever seen an art exhibit that was only electronic art on big HDTV's instead of canvas?

Solving Anxiety

So I found a little app a few days ago that I just LOVE. Its called Anxiety, and yes it actually is helping me relieve Anxiety. While I hope to do a screencast on the subject in a few days, I will just quickly talk about what is so awesome about this program. The number one great thing about it that I like is that it is FREE.

What this program does is sit on my desktop and always let me know what I have to do on my task lists. The problem with how os X deals with lists is that I am not always looking at my mail or ical so I can't always see whats up. I like that Anxiety is easy to close and open as well. It just sits up on the menu bar when I need it out of the way.

A little trick I found out when setting up anxiety is that you can force it to put all your tasks from all your ical calendars into 1 list. That helps a lot of course. The other issue I had was a lot of my events are in my ical as dates, but are not actual todo lists. After a bit of searching around I found out all you have to do is drag and drop an ical event into the todo list and you are done! So nice! I love that drag and drop.

The other thing I managed to was use busy sync and google cal to txt my phone 15 min before any appointments I have with people. Last week I almost missed 2 appointments so I look forward to putting this feature to the test!

I hope to cover this whole workflow in more depth with a screencast in the near future but if you are self starter and this appears interesting to you, then try it out!

Mandatory Update

So I have not been doing much updating. This whole thing was somewhat started as a social network experiment that I would classify as successful. One reason I have not been updating is because I have not felt like I had anything to contribute. I do realize after talking to a few people for the last week that I do have a lot to contribute. Our church is in a unique position, we are not big enough to have a lot of tech resources, but we are too big to use a lot of solutions for individuals.

So I am watching TV on hulu.com right now, so I am not about to do any updates that require thought right now I will be making a goal of doing weekly updates on this site. I want to talk about our foray into google apps, how we are doing podcasts, how I plan on expanding our podcasts, how I solve emergencies, purchasing, and generally make things work with little or no time.

I also plan on not only typing like old bloggers do, but also including some pics, videos, etc. Hopefully I can come up with a real name for this site and put some spice into it :)

busy time of year

I mentioned to my wife that things are going to be really busy for the rest of this year and I had a lot to do. Being the helpful and thoughtful wife she is, she sent me this link: Enjoy!



(btw: its actually really helpful and gave me some great ideas for changing how I do some things)

Are you making a video, or a video for church?

So I had to quick run into work tonight to finish up a video project for this weekend. After seeing a few posts today on CMN about titles, intro's, graphics, etc I thought I would share my thoughts on presentation. These thoughts are what I think and not what you have to follow. I just hope they give you something to think about when you cut videos for a service.

My main point of concern is when I see a lot of videos that are created for church services. I see the videos are completely self-contained. They have opens, closes, graphics, etc.

What I have been internally debating about is, should videos be edited like this? When a video is completely put together with intro/graphics/ending I wonder if the video is used wisely. I know it shows a lot better on utube/sermonspice, but I don't know if that is what we should be going for at church.

My thought is this...rather then a mini-movie kind of package, what happened if the videos were shot as a newspackage instead?

When the speaker intros a video, do we need another intro in the video? Isn't the advantage of church media the face that it is "multi-media?" You have the pastor, the video, the potential hand-outs. Why be so redundant with everything? Why have a video intro/ending when the pastor is just going to do all of that anyway? Why have graphs and pictures that are on the screen for fleeting seconds when you could print those out?

Anyway, I just thought I would throw that on the table for discussion.

COMMA 2008 is OVER!

So our big 2008 creative summit is finally over! It was a long week. GDHOUK told me his wife figured he put in almost 108 hours in. I on the other hand used my much less years of experience to only do around >calculates amount< ummm...not near 108 hours. That is for sure! I am to young to work that much!

cool things I experienced over the 2 day event:

Confetti Canons - Never used those before! Those where a lot of fun!

u252. That band is amazing! I felt so refreshed after only listening to them for about 25 minutes. They are probably one the better Christian worship groups I have ever heard. I pretty much never get excited about any Christian worship group, but they where very powerful.

The local church - We had hard-core Catholics, Lutherans, Reformers, and Independents all working together. This year we let COMMA participants all join together and be part of the music. Some came from hours away just to be part. It was really cool. We had pastors from various area churches and denominations all sharing together and helping each other out.

Talent - We had world class national speakers and musicians. What people got to hear during the conference was amazing. Our conference was $50. We had more talent available to the attenders then many conferences that charge $200+ would normally have. To this day I can't figure out how come our conference isn't packed out.

Toys - Hands on editing, worship software usage, lights, audio. It was all there. Our audio class was great. We had 6 sessions where they fed 8 channels of audio into mixers. Then the class participants where able to mix and eq the signals, and learn how to record them etc. Next year we are going to do testing and certifications.

Both days where really amazing and I can't wait to see what happens next. Thanks to everyone who made it all happen!

Guns, Police, Safety

So tonight I saw something weird. A huge white early 90's ford pickup drove around our church. It would pull up to the doors and shine its lights in. My house touches the church parking lot, so at first I thought he was just turning around. Then I saw him slowly drive around the building. On the far side of the church he then stopped for a bit.

At this point, I didn't hear him drive off, so I quickly thru on some different clothes and headed out to see what was up. I inched across the field. At this point it hit me. My kid was at home by myself, I am in an unlit field, and I have no weapons. For all I know, 2 jerks could jump out of the truck, beat me up, flee, and my kid would wake up and not be able to find me as I bleed to death 15 yards away from the house.

That is when it hit me: I don't care that I have a kid, I think I should have a gun. Also, I think that if you live in a state that forbids the carrying of pistols, you should be able to sue the state/police every time you get robbed.

If some crack head decided he was going to go into my house, there isn't much I could do. I don't like the fact that our legal system says I can't defend myself.

I think it would be really cool if someone gets mugged in my state and they sue the police for failing to protect them....