Life, Church, Family, Technology, and the occasional “et al”

Well, things went smoothly today. The service was focused on the topic “Forget Not His Benefits” and was set up with a lot of music surrounding three fairly short devotions on the promises of God. Simple and effective. Not as dramatic as Ryan had this morning, but very fitting.

I replaced the old D-link wireless router due to it needing more and more resets. I just want my equipment to work. The replacement is a Netgear wireless router with 802.11g support. That will make my connection a bit quicker to the laptop from work. It seems to be working nicely (so far!)

I’m running sound for church tomorrow. Things should be fine, but a lot of the regulars are out of town (hence my running sound). Because Labor Day has become the “last chance for Summer” holiday, we historically have one of the lowest attendance days of the year. The past few years, we have switched to a single service for this weekend.
One nice feature of this is that I get to run sound while Jacob, my youngest son, is playing bass guitar for the first time. I’d like to take credit for his talent, but I think guitar skills skip a generation. He does a very commendable job of getting the notes right, the rhythms nailed, and throwing in a few “fancy bits” for effect.
We won’t be having Sunday School this week, but I will still be able to look up a few of the incoming 5th graders to frighten. Mike (my co-teacher) and I have a reputation of being a little scary, but it’s mostly just a show.

This is now week three of Sammi working – <insert appropriate joyous sound here…>! She has learned much about office work, especially the power struggles that take place. I am reminded of the following:

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”
— Henry Kissinger

It holds true for offices too.

Sammi is now on file with Kelly Services and they’ve already sent out her resume to a client! Gainful employment looms on the horizon. Who knows what will ensue…

Cal covered some difficult scripture in the sermon today. The last part of Matthew 5 where Jesus expands the murder and adultery portions of the law into the heart issues of anger and lust. Also looking at how dealing with the physical issues may be simpler, but when the real problem is the heart issue, you’ve got more/harder clean-up work to do. And when was the last time that your right hand caused you to sin?

I got called in to work at 4:00 pm on Sunday because of a series of problems. In the course of this event, I have rediscovered a few things:

• Patching (even if it’s required) can go wrong – be careful
• Backups might not have worked – double check
• tapes can be overwritten – turn on write-protect
• get input before you do something that commits you to a multi-day restore

I’m sure there will be more before this all settles down, but I’ve got to get back to it.

I’ve just updated the Tigard Christian Church website. Now the waiting begins… The big question is “when will they notice?”

After a couple of months of fiddling around with Mambo Open Server, deciding on structure, and importing/creating content, it’s time to release the new web site for Tigard Christian Church to the public! I’ve shown it to a couple of groups (who were very supportive and helpful).
This update came about after absorbing about a year of Mean Dean’s HealYourChurchWebsite. I’ve tried to use many of the principles that he preaches there, but there is still room for improvement. Mainly, I wanted to set things up so that others could provide content – and give the site a general update.
Take a look at the new site here until the big change.

I’ve done it! My personal blog is now on Wordpress. The move was simple. Set up was fast (as soon as I remembered my password to get into mysql). Migrating old MT based entries went smoothly. All in all I would say it was painless. Of course I still have to go style shopping, but that’s all part of the fun!

Time to change over to WordPress from MT.  This will be a good place to try new features, styles (style changer?), plugins, etc.

I need to take a look at http://spambayes.sourceforge.net for home use, and possibly for TCC.  It provides bayesian filtering for Outlook

The website for Tigard Christian Church is in need of some healing!  I’ve installed the Movable Type package, and am starting to put things together.  First, I need to decide the structure -

• Home – welcome message, what’s happening, notes from Cal, service times
• About – mostly static pages – Index, directions, contact, events, service description, staff,
• Resources – links, ???
• Ministries – Children’s blog, Youth blog, Music blog, Missions page
• Forum – link to PHPbb based discussion groups

All with the same header/footer information, including navigational links, address, copyright statement, usage policy link (footer), bread-crumb navigation (header),

I’ve installed Sokkit for doing some php/web testing and development.  30 days and counting!

There are folks around who will be upset at the Second Coming – primarily because “We haven’t done it that way before.”

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
Robertson Davies, “A Voice from the Attic”, 1960

Time to put in some new features. particularly adding the mt-plugin code which will make it easier to add new features. Maybe later today.

Blogstyles This needs more investigation for adding features to MT.

We’ve had three days of frozen weather and frozen traffic around here, and folks are starting to go kinda nuts. It was nice to get out today, even though most people didn’t make it to work. 4-wheel drive is good.

Hmm, maybe this one will autopost.

This is the second entry. Maybe this one will show more features.