Hope you're enjoying this late night post. Of course for you, my faithful readers, I suppose it is not late at night. You probably have the luxury of reading it during the daytime. And of course, I suppose you don't really know if you're enjoying this entry or not since you just started reading. I guess I should finish this greeting/introduction and move on with my day.

I got up this morning at 10AM. I knew that I was going to be working late, so I wasn't exactly in a rush to get in to the office in the morning. I came in at 11AM. 11:08AM, actually. I knew I had a meeting but it didn't get synced to my phone (I keep my Outlook calendar and my phone which runs Windows Mobile synced to each other so I always know my schedule wherever I am). As soon as I got to the church, I got a text message from Jes Arellano (the youth staff ministry assistant) as I was getting out of my car asking if I was coming to the meeting. I said yes, went to my office really quick to grab my clipboard/legal pad and pen, and went back to the youth offices in the trailer behind the church building. Everybody else (Josh, Laurie, Ruthie, Nate, and Jes) were already there.

This meeting was mainly to start discussing details and plans for the upcoming annual golf tournament and fundraiser that Vapor (the name of the youth ministry) is hosting this year to raise funds for middle and high school student mission trips this summer. We've done this for the past couple of years and I always thought it was a cool idea except that I don't play golf or anything like that.

This year, the structure is a little different. They are still having a golf tournament but they are having the auction at a ticketed formal dinner evening at an entirely different location the night before. The two events aren't really even connected to each other, which I thought was a good idea to help distinguish and draw a different crowed of people than just those that would play golf.

I pretty much dominated the meeting time while I was there with discussions about ministry highlights for the formal evening and the tournament. We all discussed a bunch of creative ideas on what the videos might look like. When we had clearly reached a good stopping point of discussion on the video and technical aspects of the events, I was dismissed from the meeting
(around 12:15), which was good because I had a lot of other things to get to work on.

I went to my office and loaded up the video announcement project and continued to work through the editing. It can take several hours to go through the footage and pick out the good takes, good clips, etc. to use. Nate called me at 12:35 to see if I wanted to go to lunch "with everyone" to Quizno's. I walked out back to meet up and Josh, Matt, Nate, and I piled into my SUV (I'm the designated--and dedicated--driver, apparently) and we went to Quizno's. Matt suggested getting our food to go and eating at Nate's house which was close by, so we did that.

While we were all in line ordering our food, my friend Kevin who used to serve on the tech team came walking in. I was surprised to see him. I haven't worked with him since Jingle Jazz.

We talked for a minute or two and then I ordered my sub and waited on the other guys. My friend Brian Schlarb showed up and he came along with us to Nate's house to eat lunch. We ate in Nate's basement. I ate a meatball sub but it was pretty messy. I narrowly avoided getting the marinara sauce on my sweater. And by narrowly I got it on my jeans instead. It was nice to eat at Nate's house though instead of a noisy restaurant. I wish I could eat lunch at my house. I would do that all of the time for work. Too bad I never really capitalized on that living in my apartment, which is only like 4 miles away. Soon, I'll be living in a house in Simpsonville, and it will take me like 20 minutes to drive to work. Can't do that for lunch.

We got back to the church around 2pm. Matt gave me an extra hour to work on the video announcements before he came over to edit with me. Generally, I will get most of it in place and Matt will come in and help give it some finishing touches. To be honest, I really like just doing it and crafting it myself, but it's fun too to work together and make something creative. It can be frustrating to try to finish someone else's creative idea, but Matt is good about making it a team process and listening to my ideas too.

Around 3pm, I took a break and helped Andrew troubleshoot the headset intercoms. We rewired them a couple of weeks ago but the past two Sundays have been frustrating since a couple of belt packs are having issues with volunteers not being able to hear me and me not being able to hear them so well. We tested the ones that were having issues but it all sounded fine to me, so I'm not sure what the problem is.

Matt came by at 3pm and we worked until 5pm to sequence it all together. Matt took a couple of breaks while we were working to help Andrew with a sound test in the worship center. Brian came and talked to me for a few minutes while they were doing that about a visual idea he had for Sunday to reinforce the concept he will be talking about. We talked about that for a few minutes and then I went back to working on the video announcements.

They came together nicely but ended up being four and a half minutes long instead of three minutes long like we had planned. There wasn't really any content that we could remove though. All I have left to do is the graphic/animation stuff.

I walked out into the worship center and Matt and I talked for a few minutes about Sunday, specifically the lights and video for the Valentine's love song-medley prelude and the post-message stuff. I wanted to know the exact song order and who would be standing where, etc. so that we can create light cues and I can direct cameras easily. We talked for a few minutes and then Matt had to get going.

I had called my dad earlier in the day to see if he could help me with a project. We had made plans to meet at my parents' house out in Piedmont at 5:30. I called my dad at 5:20 to let him know I was running late and would be there as soon as possible. I wanted to try and make some heart-shaped gobos out of aluminum to mount into some lights to give a more creative look to the stage for Sunday. I went upstairs to the catwalk and grabbed a couple of lights and some filters and headed out.

Tim called me to see if I could pick him up on my way to my parents' house, so I swung by our apartment, picked him up, and continued on the way. We got to my parents' house a little bit after 6pm. We came inside and talked to my mom and dad for a while. Tim and my mom left a few minutes later to go get some dinner. While they were gone, my dad asked me to show him how to send pictures from his cell phone to his computer without having to send them over the cell phone network and spend money.

I took a look at his phone and figured out I could send data wirelessly via bluetooth to his nice new Dell laptop that he bought back in December. I paired the devices and taught myself how to send a picture real quick so I could then show my dad. I thought sending it wirelessly was pretty cool but my dad was looking for a way to just connect the phone to the computer via the USB cable and have a "drive" show up. So, I showed him how to do that instead.

A few weeks ago (the night I went out to test my new camera lens), I bought my parents a micro-SD card to fit into their phones to transfer files. I put that card into the phone and configured the phone to save picture data to the phone and then showed him how to transfer existing photos to the card, and then how to configure the phone to connect to the computer so it would show up as one big drive. That was pretty easy too.

My dad and I then went outside to his big workshop to create some aluminum cutouts. I should have taken a picture of the workshop but I didn't. Here's a really old one from 2003 from my archives.


Anyway. My dad has so many tools. We used a belt-saw to cut out some aluminum to the same dimensions as a standard filter and then cut out heart shaped parts in the middle.



The results were less than gratifying because I brought medium-flood lights with me. I should have brought spotlights. I'm dumb. Oh well. At least it was fun to hang out with my parents for a while. Tim and I left around 8:45 to go home.

I dropped Tim off at the apartment and then headed back to the church. I'm going to Greensboro, North Carolina this weekend so I wanted to make as much progress on the video stuff as possible tonight so that I can focus on lighting tomorrow and leave around 2:30pm to take the three-hour drive to Greensboro.

I got to the church around 9:30pm and started working. I spent a few minutes thinking of creative ideas for the opening animation for the video announcements and then started making it. Luckily, After Effects didn't crash on me (I don't have a lot of system memory) but I was trying to do something I had never done before so it took me a while to figure it out. Around 11:30, I took a break from working on the video (having basically made no real progress by that time) to work on another idea that I had.

While I was out in my dad's workshop tonight, I saw one of my old computer joysticks sitting on the top shelf lining the workshop. I got out a stool and got it down and my dad said I could have it so I brought it with me. I thought it might be cool to install it on the computer that controls the light board, so that I could use it to control the pan/tilt on each of our four mover/intelligent lights.

I installed the joystick along with some joystick-to-mouse software (which was no easy task because the ETC Emphasis computer we have is locked-down to just basic operation, even though it is obviously just running Windows XP) and within a few minutes, had that working. It looks pretty cool and makes controlling the movers a lot simpler, but I don't know how practical it really is.

I left the church a little bit after midnight and came home. I would have kept working and pushed through the night but I told Tyler and Andrew that I'd be at work at 9AM so I should probably get some sleep. I'm trying not to stress about all of the work I still have to get done. I still have a few more hours to put in on the video announcements, plus I have to do this animation thing for Brian Onken's message this Sunday which will take a few hours also. I still have to set up all of the cameras where I want them for Sunday, and finish all of the light cues too. Part of me is thinking I picked a bad weekend to go out of town, but, every weekend is this busy. I'll probably just have to come back home earlier and get it done late Saturday night. No big deal.

Later,

Joe