Every day this week has felt like a chore just to blog. Sometimes I enjoy it, but lately it has just been "one more thing to get done so I can sleep!". You know, because I'm so dedicated and all that. I'm still deciding if I want to stop daily blogging or not. I am thinking about starting up a completely fictional blog--kind of where I write a new part of the story each day/week/whenever. I'm really good at making up details and stories (some people call this lying but I call it dramatic concealment of facts).

I woke up this morning (after staying up so late again) bright and early... at 10AM. I forgot to set my alarm again. I remember waking up at 5AM when Tim got up because I heard his bathroom shower making a weird noise and I sprung out of bed thinking something was wrong. Then I remember looking at my alarm clock and thinking to myself, "Hey, I never set that, I should do tha...zzz". So, yeah.

I got up this morning and milled around the house for a bit and then left. I headed to RadioShack on Woodruff Road so that I could buy the right kind of fuse for the mover light that I worked on last night. I also wanted to buy some connectors and tools. Every few months, I like to go to RadioShack and buy some things with my own money to give to the church. 90% of what I buy gets "borrowed" and never returned by various ministries/events in the church, but at least it is helping out somewhere.

Today, I bought the fuses (or, at least what I thought were the right size fuses... only to later find out they wouldn't fit). I also bought some 1/8" to 1/4" adapters and cables since the band members are always needing more of those. I can't determine if I am buying crappy cables or if they are breaking them, or both. But either way, the cables are needed to make ministry happen. So, I bought them. I also picked up a soldering iron since the one we had at the church was pretty much worn out, and I know that Andrew really likes soldering, so I thought I'd buy one so he didn't have to bring his own personal one in all of the time. I also bought a tiny Maglite flashlite since I am always borrowing one from Jim Peterson and thought that'd be useful to have in our tech arsenal of tools. I actually used to have a nice Maglite that I kept in the control room but I think somebody "borrowed" that one too. Oh well.

After I was done shopping at RadioShack, I went to the Oriental House and waited until noon to celebrate Andrew's birthday. I passed the time by reading blogs on my smartphone and listening to the radio. I'm also still listening to the new Coldplay album and trying to learn the songs so that people will think I am cool and hip.

I saw Matt pull in to the parking lot a few minutes before noon, and Andrew showed up right on time. It was just the three of us for lunch today. I suppose one could argue that I am more popular... since 9 people joined me for my birthday lunch... but then again, it's not like I was able to talk to all of them.

Our table order number today was 17. If you recall from Wednesday's entry, the number was 25 and I was turning 25, which we thought was impressive. And everybody thinks Andrew looks 17, so somehow it fit today, too.


I ordered something completely different today at Oriental House. I got the steak bowl combo. I wish I had known it came with so many mushrooms.


For those that know me well, you know that while I enjoy mushrooms, they do not share a mutual interest in me. For a long time, I avoided them simply because one way or another, they would fight their way back out of me. So, I avoided most of the mushrooms today.

When I got back to the church, I was excited to try and fix the mover light by putting in a new fuse. I got out the fuses that I had bought but realized they weren't the right size. I did revel in that I had convinced the store manager to give me a discount on the fuses though. So, at least I bought some fuses for cheaper even though they did me no good.

I met with Eddie for a bit today to discuss some web ideas and options for our website. Before I was hired on as church staff in June of 2005, I had already been contracted out (along with my friend Rex) to design and develop Southside Fellowship's web site. We worked on it from February 2005 until it launched in November 2005. I still have all of my design and production notes from working on that site.

That site is now old, in terms of design and interface. Several things about it annoy me--mainly that any time we want to provide a rich document, it is done via a PDF, which, as an end user, is not always the best format to read in. I suppose it's great if you want to print it out and read it on paper though. We also want to be able to leverage capabilities with our new church management system, Arena, and provide more customization features and link member data to the site, do online registration, etc.

I had a lot of opinions on the subject (including things we ought to be doing like staff blogging, RSS/syndication feeds for all content, video integration, etc.) and we discussed those ideas for a while. Eddie and I have a lot of impromptu meetings like this that just happen. He was just part of a meeting to discuss possibly redesigning the web site, and I think the sole purpose of the meeting was to determine if I should even be a part of that, which I thought was kind of funny. Southside already has a .NET developer on staff... he just happens to be the media director and does nothing with computers/programming for the church. We're talking about me here if you're not following.

I asked Eddie that if another meeting took place, to let me know because I'd like to come present some ideas and at least propose some possible solutions, even if I am not allowed to participate in bringing them to fruition. I think everyone would enjoy having me work on the project, but I think again most people realize that I am probably best serving the church in my current role as media director.

That was kind of a tangent. When I came back to my office, I found Andrew working on the light cues and plots, which I thought was great. He had a few questions about the mover lights and the cues in general for Sunday services. We went on a search to find Matt and thought we'd find him upstairs when he wasn't in his office, only to later remember he was in the weekly pastors' meeting.

On our way back downstairs, I went to the catwalk to take a look at one of the other mover lights that wasn't working. I forgot that all of the mover lights were connected to the DMX chain in series, so, when I disconnected mover #2, it made #3 and #4 not work anymore. Of course, #3 wasn't working because I had unplugged it on Sunday. It does this weird thing were it makes constant noise when in its "home position" and I got tired of people coming and telling me about it, so I just decided to start unplugging it every week.

I also repositioned a couple of lights while I was up on the catwalk for Andrew who was at the light board, and then I came back down to my office. When Matt got out of his meeting, he came to check the order of lyrics on the computer in the control room and then talk to Andrew and I about lights and video for Sunday (our followup "tech talk" that we have been trying to do regularly each Thursday).

Zack, one of the students that I mentor, stopped by the church today when he got out of school. He made a video for his media arts class at Southside Christian School and wanted to show me some of the things he did for it in After Effects, including using a rendered bullet he made in Blender (a 3D program I am just beginning to learn) to simulate someone getting shot. It looked pretty cool for what it was--a handycam shot. I was impressed.

While Zack was there, he also helped me install the fuse into the mover light. I figured that either putting the fuse in would work or it wouldn't work (I know... undeniable logic, right?) so we put the fuse in and then pu the entire fixture back together, except for the cover, so that I could watch the power supply when we plugged it in. When I plugged in the light, something else sparked on the power supply, the fuse blew again (it was a fast-fuse) and I was back where I started. In other words, I tried to save the church $5,000 by replacing a $0.89 fuse, but was unsuccessful. Now I have to figure out how much it will cost to service the light and then decide if that is worth paying for on an old light. Hey, at least I tried. That's probably more than other people would have done. I've actually saved the church a good bit of money over the years by always fixing things when they break instead of buying new/sending it off to get "professionally repaired". There are some things that I won't service myself, but if I can figure it out, then it's worth the time. At least, I think so.

Rob Marks, the children's ministry pastor, stopped by a little bit after 4pm to record a voiceover for me for a video that I'm putting together for Sunday. It took a few takes as I coached him on voice inflection, etc. When he came in, we were talking and he saw my Canon Powershot on my desk and asked if I could show him how do to do the color accent feature that I was using on it. It took me a minute to follow how we got to that subject until I realized he must be an avid reader of my blog. Just another one of my many anonymous readers... you guys can all feel welcome to leave comments.

Recording the voiceover with Rob did not take very long. When we were done, I helped Andrew with the positioning of the teach lights for Sunday. Even though the bullnose where Charlie preaches from is always in the same place, I have never really liked the lighting for it. It seems to have dark spaces on the ends of the bullnose, and the color is never what I like. The main problem is that we're using ETC Source 4 PAR's to light it... and not ERS's (ellipsoidals). We don't have enough ERS's though to do anything about it.

I left a little bit after 5pm today. As I was getting ready to leave, Paul Tedder came and talked to me for a few minutes, and then Matt asked me to help move the keyboard that was on the stage out to a guy's car. Matt has been working on a project for this guy, John, who is Charlie Boyd's neighbor. So, Matt introduced me to John and then John and I carried the keyboard out to his SUV and then I went back inside, grabbed my stuff, and headed home.

I sat around for a few minutes when I got home but didn't have much time before I had to head back out to go to Rodrigo Rodriguez's house. He invited me back over tonight so that I could help get some more of his songs onto his YouTube channel. I am (begrudgingly) getting better at iMovie, which is really the only video editing software that he has on his iMac. We were able to get 5 more songs online tonight, which took about 4 hours because I was rendering in MPEG Streamclip, editing in iMovie, and uploading to YouTube all at the same time. We took several breaks while the computer was rendering, because there really wasn't much else that we could do. It was neat to hear more of Rodrigo's life story while we were waiting on the computer to render the video.

I left his house around 10pm after getting the last song from one of his DVDs put online. Part of me wanted to just take the rest of the DVDs and put them online in my spare time, but I think Rodrigo is enjoying learning and I am having fun hanging out with new people too. I've always enjoyed getting to know new people better. I'm just not that good at it yet.

Anyway. This blog post turned out alright, I suppose. Still not one of my greatest entries or anything. Tomorrow will be a fun day. It's Friday, and I like seeing how everything comes together on Fridays. I've got some video editing to do for Sunday, which I'll probably spend most of the day on. In the evening, I'm going to the Salamone's house for dinner. Frank and Susan are the hosts of my "20-something singles community group", which I enjoy being a part of. Lately, it has felt like the "20-somethings engaged people and JOE" group, but, that's just life. My friends get engaged. I stay single, for whatever reason. But hey, all in God's timing, right?

Later,

Joe