In an attempt to get myself into better shape I've decided that I need a goal. Sarah got it into her head that she wants to do a triathlon and somehow I've managed to get myself sucked into the insanity. We were eating dinner Monday night with Steve and apparently he'd already said he would do it when I told …
Adobe Community Summit 2007
I've spent this week in San Jose at the Adobe offices for the annual community summit. This is a great event that Adobe puts on for user group managers and community experts. The event serves two purposes for me. It energizes me creatively to see what everybody else is doing and learn what is on the horizon for Adobe software. …
Blogging from SGF
It seems like a tradition that I make a blog post before I get on a plane in Springfield. This week it's off to San Jose for the Adobe Community Summit – two days of training and two days of meetings with Adobe staff. Last year was an outstanding event, and the schedule for this year looks equally good. No …
Google Apps
We're in the process of a major internet infrastructure shift at Schweitzer. By the end of June we should have migrated our connectivity from a T1 (part of which is used for voice lines) and a 100mb fiber connection. The resulting shift has a several of important implications. The first is that our day-to-day usage will be incredibly fast – …
On The Lot – Comedy Shorts
I've been watching On The Lot on Fox. I wasn't sure how well I would like it after the first week, but the show tonight showed that most of the contestants are very good. Now that the focus of the show is the films created by each of the contestants I think it's going to be a lot of fun …
Perian & ProPresenter
Perian is a great tool for playing various media types within Quicktime natively, including FLV. For some reason I'd never bothered to try it with ProPresenter. Turns out that you can natively play an FLV file quite well in ProPresenter. It obviously has the same quality as the FLV, but if you need to use videos published for the web …
Contribute Blog Editing
Contribute may be responsible for increased blogging. Not sure how I’ll feel having it open regularly, but the native editing is VERY slick. This post is really just a test of the functionality. I’ll try posting some pictures at some point too. So far, it’s impressive though. I may get Contribute licenses for everybody in the church that is going …
CS3 Goodness
After a week of having serial numbers for our CS3 licenses the media finally showed up yesterday. It's been a long week as I stripped my Powerbook of all the products that would be replaced by CS3 when I got the serials, assuming the media wouldn't be far behind. I'm glad it's the only computer that got the uninstall. For …
NAB Thoughts
I'm sitting in the Vegas airport waiting for my flight back to Springfield and pondering everything I've seen at NAB this past week. Here are my brief thoughts – some may get expanded entries later. Technologies for Worship Conference – This conference was one of the main reasons I went to NAB this year. I've never been to an official …
Schweitzer Web Update Launched
Earlier this week we launched the updated Schweitzer web site. There are some substantial design updates and major infrastructure changes – switching to the Web Empowered Church platform, which is powered by Typo3. We still have some content to migrate, so this is basically a soft launch (the only announcement is on this blog). We hit some technical snags that …
WEC: Installation & HTTP Compression
Installation of the Web Empowered Church platform was smooth and easy. I was a php software developer prior to entering ministry, so there were no difficulties with the installation. The symlinked install approach even made the upgrade to the 4.1 version of Typo3 very easy. The docs from WEC make the process simple enough that anybody with basic linux web …
Creative Idea Generation
I love Creating Passionate Users and Kathy has a great post that I'm going to have to try the next time we do do a large scale creative idea generating session. It's a Product Design Dinner Party. We generally attack these sessions with a group of people from various fields and with various levels of experience in a round-table set …