I love Saturdays where I don't really have to do anything. Of course, sometimes, I have Saturdays where I should do things but I don't and stay lazy all day. Today kinda felt like one of those days.

I stayed up late last night and then slept late this morning. I laid in bed a long time after waking up, enjoying that I really didn't have much to do. I should have spent the time cleaning the house, but I just didn't feel like it. I watched some movies on tv and spent some time trying to be creative in After Effects on my Macbook, coming up with some announcement slides for Sunday morning, but ended up not really coming up with anything. Some days, I just don't feel that creative. It happens.

I put away most of the laundry that I did yesterday. I also repeatedly went into Tim's room to try and make him clean it up. Tim definitely has more "stuff" than I do in his room. My bedroom still looks like I might be moving in. All I have is my bed and a nightstand for my alarm clock. That's it. In the closest, I have some clothes and a few things, but other than that, the room is pretty empty. In Tim's room, however, he has a 8-foot long table for his computer desk, and a 4-foot table for his tv, as well as a closet full of things, a big bed, a little student desk that he puts drinks and stuff on for when he watches his tv, etc. Plus piles of clothes on the floor and whatnot. And he likes it this way. I can't stand it, but for the most part, I realize that it is his "space" and it should be how he likes it, although I still want to see his room clean and organized.

I remember growing up that Tim and I were always different with our levels of organization. We shared a bedroom as twins until we were in middle school and my dad turned the bonus room upstairs into a bedroom even though he probably wanted it to be a study/office for himself. My dad's cool like that. Anyway. Tim and I shared a room and my mom could always walk in and tell who had cleaned and who hadn't because my things all had their place and Tim's things looked like they all shared one big place. The floor. We just share different opinions on what "put away" looks like. So, if people ever try to tell you that twins are all alike... there is one way that Tim and I are different.

So, back to today. I pretty much lazed around all afternoon. Is lazed a word? It better be, because that's what I did. A little bit after 5pm, I decided it was time to get some dinner. Tim and I headed to Pete's of Simpsonville, which is right down the road from our house.


I'm pretty sure that every town has a Pete's somewhere. I know of at least 5 just in my area. Either this Pete guy has a great franchise or somebody is making a lot of money on his name. That's all I'm saying. All of these restaurants are the same... they serve hamburger plates, cheeseburger plates, etc. And a lot of other things on the menu that I'm sure everyone is afraid to order or try.

Tim and I decided to get our food to go and eat at the house. I became fascinated with the big aquarium that is inside this Pete's restaurant. It almost made me want to eat my food there just to keep watching the fish.


Tim and I ate back at the house, which was probably a better decision since we already had drinks at the house, and watching Discovery Channel shows about fish is probably just as exciting as watching real fish anyway. We watch the Discovery Channel a lot, actually. Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs are a couple of my favorite shows on that network.

After dinner, I laid on the couch for a while watching tv. Tim and I also played my Nintendo Wii some in the den for a while. We're still not sure what we're going to do with that room. Right now, it just has the tv and Wii, two old rocking chairs, and a portable fireplace. Pretty empty otherwise. Maybe I could turn it into a dining room. That might be cool. I'd probably have to get a table and some chairs though, because people probably don't want to sit on the floor. Unless we're eating asian food or something.

Around 7:30pm, I left the house to go to my friend Robby Wisnewski's house. I've known Robby since high school, but we were never really friends in high school. In fact, I remember meeting him in high school and thinking, "this guy would never be someone I would call a friend". But God always knows what's up. And we're good friends now. Robby is such an encouragement to me in my walk and he has such a heart for missions and seeing the Gospel spread to every man, woman, and child not only here in Greenville but around the world.

Driving to Robby's house was rather uneventful. I took the "scenic route". And if you don't believe that, then, I got lost. I managed to get myself un-lost and over to Robby's house in about 20 minutes. We spent about an hour just talking about life and church and work. Have you ever noticed how the number one question people ask when they talk to other people is, "How's work going?" or, when meeting someone new, "So what do you do for a living?" We live in a world where what we do for work is the primary focus.

Robby works at SourceLink, a direct mail company here in Greenville, where I also worked for 3 and a half years. So, we know a lot of the same people. We talked for a while about that and then I updated him on some things I've been working on at the church lately. After about an hour, we decided to watch a movie and hang out in his basement. We watched the movie, "Bangkok Dangerous" with Nicholas Cage. I think Cage is a great actor but sometimes doesn't pick the greatest movies to be in. I thought this movie wasdecent though. The ending was a little lame and his character motivation changed somewhat, but I still enjoyed it, particularly the director's use of color to set the mood of each scene. See, I bet a lot of people never notice stuff like that.

I stayed at Robby's house just hanging out and talking until about midnight and then I came home. Stay tune tomorrow for my final daily post, "Best of Resurfaced." I can't promise it will be a great read, but it should be entertaining.

Later,

Joe

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Today was a nice slow day at work. I didn't come in until just before 11AM. I spent most of the day working on video editing. Andrew focused on finishing up the light cues, which was really nice because I didn't have to focus on that at all. I don't think he enjoys it as much as I do, but sometimes I get so busy in a week that I just have no creative energy left to write a bunch of light cues.

While I was capturing some video for a project, I passed the time by cleaning up my desk. I had been using this really small (and really quite useless) dvd player that was hookd up to my VTR. I liked having a small console player but it would only play maybe half of the discs that I put in it. For a lot of discs, it would never load the menu and would give me the "waiting" symbol forever and never do anything else. So, I finally decided to replace it today. I didn't have an extra player so I just took my favorite one from Room 113 that I like to use a lot. I guess I'll have to replace that one soon.



If you look closely, you can see a green goblet with "Jojo" written on it, sitting on my desk. I made that myself back in December 2007 when my friend Mike from Florida came to visit. We actually made 4 of them using Christmas glasses and sequin stickers from Wal-mart. I always thought it'd be fun to have a "chalice" to drink out of, even though it was really just a joke. We had fun making them though and it made for some fun pictures back in the day. Now it mostly just sits on my desk and I drink out of it every now and then.


Around 1:30pm, I went and got a quick lunch from Salsarita's, which is right next to the church. I ate a small quesadilla at my desk and then went back to work. Andrew left around 2:30pm and I stayed a for a few more minutes and then left around 2:45pm to go home. I probably could have stuck around but I felt like I'm starting to come down with this cold that is going around my circle of friends so I thought I'd just go home and lay down for a while.

When I came home, Tim was still in bed asleep. When he gets sick, it always hits him hard and he needs sleep. When I get sick, sometimes I hardly notice it until it's almost over. We're just different like that. I laid on the couch in my living room for a while watching tv classics such as "I Dream of Jeannie" and "The Cosby Show". Then, I did some laundry and took a shower.

I woke Tim up around 5pm so that he could shower and get dressed and ready to go to the Salamone's house for dinner tonight. Frank and Susan invited us over to celebrate their son Zack's birthday as well as to just hang out, which I thought was nice.

We got to the Salamone's house around 7pm. Susan was still setting the table when we came in, so Tim and I helped with that while waiting on Frank to get home from work. We had lasagna and salad for dinner and it was great. We also had some sweet potato cake which was really good. I had never had that before.

Frank, Susan, Tim, and I played this game called "Sequence" which I really enjoyed, even though Tim and Susan beat Frank and me twice. Tim was surprisingly good at the game. We ended up staying at the Salamone's just talking and hanging out until about 11pm and then I enacted my role as "the closer" and we said bye and left. Tim was starting to yawn a bit and was tired after having been sick for most of the week, and Susan was starting to come down with a cold too so I figured there was no need to stay super late. Nobody likes a guest who doesn't know when it's time to leave, anyway, and if there's one thing I'm good at, it's knowing when to get out of somebody's house. Haha.

I stopped by Jack in the Box on the way home because Tim really wanted a milkshake. When we got home, we both watched some tv for a while. That was pretty much my day. Sometimes I feel eloquent and full of words, other times, not so much.

Be sure to check back tomorrow. I'm going to be posting a "best of" post, with links to some of my favorite posts from the past year of blogging. And it will be my last daily post, so I guess I should make it a good one.

Later,

Joe

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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

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When I woke up this morning, I was not feeling so great. I think I may be getting sick. We will see. I decided to lay in bed for a little while and then just come in for the afternoon since I'd be working late anyway. Gotta love Wednesdays.

On my way out of the driveway, I checked the mailbox and saw that the Charter cable bill had come. I was somewhat anticipating there to be a problem again with this month's bill since last month's had mysteriously had the Showtime package added to it (without my consent). I expected the bill I opened today to be around $120. Instead, it was like $12. I checked all of the numbers and either they made a mistake or they comp'ed me an entire month's bill, because the balance forward (which is supposed to be $0 if I have paid up to that point) was a negative amount (the exact negative amount that I paid for the last bill). I'd like to think it was for having to wait like 6+ hours for the technician to come out and set up the cable, but it's probably more likely just a mistake. So, I guess I'm going to have to call and find out about that. I suppose I could just pay what the bill says, but I don't really want to get charged twice as much next month or something like that.

I picked up lunch on my way in to the church and spent most of the day in my office, working. I did some research last night on dual-head video cards for a new computer that Eddie wants to put in Room 202. I made some recommendations of cards on NewEgg, and then Eddie picked one of those, and I bought it today. I selected overnight shipping so hopefully it will arrive at the church sometime on Friday so that we can install it before Sunday.

My brother Tim came to the church around 1:45pm. He wanted to borrow a wireless handheld microphone and some other stuff for some kind of event at Southside Christian School. I let him borrow the wireless handheld from Room 202 and a long VGA cable.

I helped him carry the stuff out to his car and then I walked over to the church "copy center" to check my mailbox. I go over there all of the time to check my mailbox and it is always empty. I found Jes and Lindsey in there working on some kind of booklet project. Jes was cutting envelopes with the cutter and Lindsey was taking the envelopes that Jes cut and then using an exactoknife to cut off the edges. Or something.

I stayed in there and talked to them for a while and then went back to my office. On my way back, Alysia, one of the Fellowship Kids (children's ministry), found me because we were supposed to meet and talk about a promo for Look Up Lodge for this Sunday. Last April (April 6, to be precise), we showed a promo for the summer camp at Look Up Lodge for our children's ministry based on some edited footage from an existing promo video for Look Up Lodge. I thought the actual promo video from Look Up Lodge was poorly made so when I made that promo last year, I cut out a lot of the footage and shortened it down to just a minute or so. Alysia and I looked at it again and decided to just re-use what we already had and update the voiceover at the end with the accurate event dates and registration details.

After we were done looking at that video, Alysia left and I decided to take a look at the Varilite mover light that I took down from the catwalk yesterday. It stopped working on Sunday so I wanted to try to figure out what was wrong with it. While it was on the catwalk, I couldn't see/reach the control panel, so I wasn't even sure if it was powering on at all. I decided to mount it to one of the short truss pieces that I had, and get it free-standing so that if I managed to get it to power on, it would have enough room to swivel around and move (it does that when it first turns on).

I mounted it to the truss which was kind of difficult considering the fixture weighs like 75 pounds. I realized once I mounted it to the truss that I needed to counterweight the truss to keep it from falling over. I managed to hang some bricks on the other side which helped some but not really. I ended up propping it up with a stool. In other words, I just wasted time with all of the mounting since I couldn't properly counterweight the thing.


I plugged it in and it did nothing. Absolutely nothing. I wasn't really surprised, since that's how it was behaving when it was mounted on the catwalk, but I was hoping it would be making a noise or something. Nope.

I took it back off of the truss and put it back on the floor of the office. Sometimes I wish I had a better workspace to look at/fix things than my office, but I'd rather work in my office where there are lights than work in the Worship Center where I'm not allowed to have the lights on.

I did a bit of audio editing today on a voice mail message that Matt got on Sunday. Several months ago (I'm not really sure when), Matt's wife, Whitney, was shopping at Wal-mart and struck up a conversation with a guy in the parking lot and ended up giving the guy a copy of Southside's "He Has Done It All" CD based on the Galatians series that we re-capped last April. Early Sunday morning, this guy (his name was Christian) called Matt's extension at the church and left a long voicemail about how this CD really encouraged him and God has really taught him a lot through listening to the songs and scriptures on the CD, even when he was ready to take his own life, the songs and words came back into his head. So, anyway, this guy left a long and touching message. Matt forwarded it to me and I recorded it onto the computer and we cut out some of the pauses and unncessary parts and shortened it down to play it tonight for the Worship team.

Around 4:45pm, Andrew called me to see if I wanted to meet him at Moe's for dinner. I jumped in the car and headed over. I called my mom on my way there and sang the last part of "Happy Birthday" when she answered, pretending that she had taken so long to answer that she missed the rest of the song.

I met Andrew at Moe's. There was practically nobody there, although it was before 5pm.


We ate dinner quickly and then we both went back to the church around 5:15pm. When we got back to the church, we had at least an hour before the worship team meeting, which started at 6:45pm. I went up to Room 202 and played around on the keyboard for a while. Actually, a long while. Around 6pm, I turned on the rest of the sound system and tested the CD of the voicemail message that I had edited earlier to make sure it was good to go.

Andrew came in and hung out in the tech booth in Room 202 with me for a while. I had to stay in the booth to run the audio while the team met tonight. That's usually what I have to do every Wednesday night, but I don't mind too much because it allows me to serve the entire team. Plus I get to avoid social interaction, so, what's not to like.

As we were closing up, Matt asked us all to break up into groups of 3 or 4 and pray for each other, which I always like doing. James, Andrew, and I all shared some things going on in our lives that we needed prayer for. I opened up by jokingly saying "I have this annoying assistant at the church that really tries my patience..." (Andrew).

When we were done, I went downstairs to get ready for sound check. I talked to Chad Boyd some (he plays electric guitar in the band). Chad is an avid reader of my blog and will probably be really disappointed if I decide to stop blogging at the end of February. I'd like to keep going, but I think I need a break. I'm not sure for how long. We will see.

After helping with soundcheck some, I decided to take apart the Varilite mover light I had worked on earlier to figure out why it didn't work. My first thought was that made a fuse had blown or something. I had never taken apart one of those movers before, so it took some time to figure out where everything was.

I finally found the fuse/power supply area.


It looked like the fuse was blown.


It took some work to get the grill/cover off of the power supply, and sure enough, the fuse was blown.


It was a 3.15 amp 250 volt quick burning fuse. I checked my supply of fuses and as luck would have it (whatever that means), I was out of 3.15a250v fuses. I had the empty case for them though.

I thought I'd look around and see if I had any other fuses of the same size. I remembered seeing one in a VCR that I took apart a couple of years ago (remember that photographic memory I have? see, it really works), so I went and got that VCR out of the storage room. I took the VCR apart (it was one of those DVD/VHS players) and pulled the DVD drive out of the way so that I could get to the fuse.


I put that fuse into the mover and plugged it in but it didn't work. I figured a lower-amp fuse would just blow quicker... but it didn't do anything.


I'm going to go to RadioShack sometime tomorrow and buy the correct replacement fuse and see if it works. If not, I guess we're not any worse off than before, but if it does work, then I just saved the church a lot of money, just by being resourceful and using some of my electronics skills. I really enjoy taking stuff like that apart and trying to fix them.

I remember as a kid, I used to take cheap electronics like radios, old computers, tv's, etc. apart and seeing what I could make work by putting it together just a little bit at a time. I built a robot out of vacuum and computer parts one time but it never really did work. It did get me a spot in the school yearbook though that year (I was in second grade).

A little bit after 9pm, I left to go home. As I was pulling out of the parking lot, I decided to stick around at the church a little longer and see if anyone wanted to hang out. I parked on the East side of the building and went inside. I found Robby and Ruthie hanging out and talking but it looked like they wanted to be alone so I talked to them for a few minutes and then went back into the gym/worship center. I was really hoping that some people were going to hang out at Brixx or something but it didn't look like anyone was up for that, so, afer staying a few more minutes, I went home.

So, that was pretty much my day. Not super exciting or anything. Tomorrow will be a fun day. It's Andrew's birthday so we'll be going to Oriental House again for his birthday lunch. I'm also going to Rodrigo Rodriguez's house in the evening to help him with some more video stuff.

Later,

Joe

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Today was such a good day. I've never really been the type to wake up on my birthday and expect it to feel different, or expect to feel older or anything like that. To me, my birthday is just like any other day except I get a little more attention and people sing to me instead of me singing to them like I normally do.

I woke up and went back to sleep. My birthday present to myself. I came in to work around 10:15AM this morning. I had a few minutes in my office before I had to go to the worship planning meeting at 10:30AM. That meeting went fairly well. We spent a few minutes talking about this past Sunday with the special stage setup, worship set, etc. Matt had to go to a doctor's appointment at 11 so we had a quick meeting today.

We talked for a few minutes about something I've been suggesting for a while now--flat screens in the front area of the building. I've always thought it'd be a good idea to set up a few flat screens in the cafe/commons areas and the registration centers so that we could replay ministry highlights, announcements, etc. I spend 40+ hours sometimes on editing the short spots for only a few people that actually get into the service on time to see them. It's not that I really care that much that "lots of people see my work", but it'd be nice to see it get used for more than just the one time showing it in the service. It would also give us more opportunities to use the cafe as a multi-purpose room since it would have video capabilities to go with the existing audio capabilities. The only problem is that flat screens and the technology to provide content to them costs money. Money that we probably don't have right now. Oh well. Maybe in the future.

After the worship planning meeting, James and I went to Matt's office and had a bit of a tech talk but mostly just talked about music, life, video games, and whatever else came up. Around 12pm, we left to go meet Andrew at Oriental House for my birthday lunch. I had invited a few people and most of them showed up as well as a few other people too. There were 10 of us altogether and the people at Oriental House did a great job serving all of us.

I really enjoyed having lunch with friends that I work with, and Andrew bought my lunch too, so that was nice. We agreed that he'd buy my lunch on my birthday today at Oriental House, and I'd buy his lunch on Thursday at Oriental House. So, it all works out.


Our table order number was 25. And I turned 25 today. That seemed kind of ironic. Maybe the people at Oriental House knew because I go in there all of the time. Or maybe it was just by chance.

Jasper showed me this cool function on my little Powershot while we were at lunch that I had never even played with--color accent. It can pick out a color on the fly (samples it from whatever it is pointed at) and highlight that color by desaturating everything else outside of that color tolerance. I've done the effect before on the computer, but it's neat to see a little point-and-shoot camera do it on the fly.


We all got fortune cookies when we got our bill too. I got a little bit creative with the fortunes that were all piled onto the table.


When we got back from lunch, I worked on sending some emails and trying to get caught up on my inbox and contacting volunteers, etc. I don't send one to every person each week but I like to single out one or two people from the team each week that I thought did a stellar job and send them a note of encouragement just so they know that I appreciate them. I can remember doing each of those positions as a volunteer so I know how much it means to have someone on staff that notices their good and hard work. And our tech team is the best. Some of those guys would be there every week if I let them.

I helped Andrew some with the setup and we took down the cross on the stage. I messed up one of my favorite ties while lifting the cross up from the floor onto the side stage loft, which was pretty disappointing, because it was one of my few ties that goes well with my gray shirt. Oh well. I guess that means I get to buy some new ties!

As I was working in my office, Andrew came in and asked if I could come out and help him move a platform, which was really just a ploy to get me to come out so the staff could sing happy birthday to me. I was slightly surprised to see that many staff members all congregated together, but I did hear most of them standing in the Worship Center, so I knew something was up anyway.

It felt great to be on the receiving end of having "Happy Birthday" sung to me. I only regret that they sang in the dark (we don't keep the lights on in the Worship Center), so I couldn't really see everyone.


I spent the rest of the afternoon working on projects in my office, updating my task list, and writing notes for things to do this week. For as electronic as I try to keep my life, I still do a lot of things on paper, namely via steno and legal pads. I love those things. Steno pads are portable, and I've used legal pads for as long as I can remember. Yellow for some, white for others. When I worked at SourceLink, I had folders and folders of handwritten notes and task items that I used for each project. It was a convenient offline way for me to stay efficient. Plus, it made me look super-organized and busy when going to meetings.

Today was by far the busiest and most active day I have ever had on Facebook. I had so many people write on my "wall" wishing me a happy birthday. Some were people that rarely talk to me, others were close friends just using a convenient tool to wish me well. I had a lot of text messages and calls too. It felt great to have so many people remember and recognize my birthday. I guess turning 25 is supposed to be some kind of milestone. I kept a record of every message that came in and made sure to personally respond to each one in some way, because I figured if I was on the other end of the communication, I'd sure enjoy a response. Generic messages are ok for some people (i.e. "Thanks for all of the birthday wishes everyone!") but I just enjoy using the opportunities to reconnect with people. I guess you could just say I'm a social person like that.

Andrew worked on the light plots today while setting up the stage and I helped some with that. I was actually really glad to see him taking the initiative to do that since lighting is always an area that I have wanted to improve but have never really had the time to concentrate/focus on it. I spend so much time during the week with video and overall organizational stuff that I rarely get to actually focus on lighting plots and design.

Around 5pm, I got out the hydraulic lift we have at the church so that I could take a look at the mover light that stopped working on Sunday. I was going to have Andrew help me take it down from the catwalk, but the lift needed to charge and I didn't have time to take it down before going to dinner at 5:30pm.

Today was International Pancake Day at IHOP, probably in honor of my birthday. I made plans last week to meet Rachel and Dan there for a birthday dinner. As I pulled into the parking lot, the place was packed out. There was not a single parking space in the restaurant parking lot. Every car coming in was driving through and having to back up and turn around and go back out and park elsewhere just to come to IHOP. I saw a bunch of cars trying to do multiple point turns in a tight area at the end of the lot to turn around. I decided, having an SUV, that I'd just turn around where I was at. So, I pulled forward and to the left, and then just backed up onto the grass/sidewalk and turned around in one point. I parked in the HH Gregg parking lot next door to IHOP on Woodruff Road.

I met Rachel and Dan and Lauren inside. Lauren had gotten there a lot earlier than the rest of us and got a table already. Jami came in a few minutes later and Dustin ended up joining us too. Dinner was great. We all had the free short-stack of pancakes and I also ate some chocolate-chip pancakes. It was way too much food. I couldn't even eat it all. Someone in the restaurant paid for our entire bill too, which was cool. I don't even know who it was. We tried to find out and they wouldn't/couldn't tell us. So, either someone knew it was my birthday, or they saw my cowboy hat in my car when I parked. Just saying.


So, after dinner, I drove back to the church to help finish with the stage setup. Jami and Lauren followed me to the church to help with the stage setup, which was kind of nice. Andrew and Dan were pretty much already done minus wiring a few things up, so we helped with that. Jami also helped me get the broken mover light down off of the catwalk so that I can inspect it in my office later this week. The last time I had to take one of those off of the catwalk, I carried it down the narrow stairs on the loft to the catwalk and almost fell when doing it. This time, I decided it'd be a lot safer or at least a lot more fun to use the lift and carry it down with me in the lift, so that's what I did. The constant swaying back and forth from the lift was a little disconcerting, but I got used to it.


Jami and Lauren left around 7:45 to go to Walmart to pick out movies to watch. I invited them over to see the house and watch a movie since they weren't able to come to my big house party last Saturday. I stuck around at the church to help finish the stage setup and do a quick sound check before leaving.

I met Lauren and Jami at Wal-mart and we perused the discount DVD movie bin for a while. Jami started organizing the DVDs, which took a while.


We finally made some selections, bought some candy, and left. They followed me over to the house and we ended up watching "Remember The Titans", which I already had at the house. We were all quoting the movie since we've all seen it so many times. We also talked a lot during the movie, which was ok since, again, we had seen it so many times.

Today was really a great day. One of the best birthdays I've had in a long time. I can remember in past years always getting depressed on my birthday just because I felt like I was in a phase of life that wasn't for me, or that I thought I would have accomplished more by then, or something. I've never been the type that embodies the attitude of "man, I'm getting old" (or "older" or whatever), but I definitely am guilty of attitudes like "man, I thought I would have had a girlfriend or dated by now" or "I thought I would have been a home-owner by now" or "I thought that my opera career would have taken off by now". You know. Important things like that.

Anyway. Tomorrow will be a fun day. It's my mom's birthday. I like to think that Tim and I were the best birthday presents she ever got. Because, you know, who doesn't totally love spending their own birthday the next day in the hospital after childbirth. I'll be working all day but hopefully I can pop out of the office for a little bit to go wish my mom a happy birthday.

Later,

Joe

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I stayed up so late last night watching Robocop movies. Yeah, I said Robocop. I stayed up until like 4AM. And having already had like no sleep the night before, that wore me out. I slept until 11AM. I got up and took a shower and cleaned up my room. I really didn't have much to do today.

After eating some lunch, I left the house and drove to the apartment one last time. My mom did a great job of cleaning the place (I didn't even know she was going to do that for us) but there were a few places that I needed to finish cleaning. So, I got to the apartment around 1pm and worked for about an hour on cleaning.


Here's the once-famous Cooking with the Boys set.

I had do some cleaning on the cabinets in both bathrooms, and then I spent the rest of the time cleaning the stove in the kitchen.


I could not get them any cleaner than this. I tried with all of the tools in my arsenal, which mainly consisted of used and fresh paper towels, Lysol multi-purpose spray, and what I hope was a sink/dish brush and not a toilet brush.

There was also a stain on the carpet in the living room that I could not get up, no matter what I used. Not even a Rainbow vacuum would lift this stain.


If you're wondering what the stain was, it's fruit punch. This one time, I tipped my Moe's cup over on the floor when I fell asleep on the couch, and it sat like that all night. And I never could get it up. I put a floor speaker there to avoid embarassment at my social parties. I thought about making a metaphor about that stain and covering it up to sin in our lives and covering it up, but I don't really think anyone would try to cover up their own sin with a sound-system speaker. Maybe I messed up my own metaphor. I'm not sure.

When I finished cleaning everything (including wiping down all of the cabinets and doors in the apartment), I drove up to the office and turned in my keys. Shannon turned her head and closed her eyes and held out her hand to take them. They really did not want to see us go. But hey, you can't pass up house-living to stay in apartment, especially when you feel trapped in your level of auditory expression by the neighbors living above you.

We talked for a minute while Shannon looked through my file and then we went back to the apartment to do a walk-through inspection. I didn't really care to participate in the inspection, but she invited me to come along, so I figured I might as well. Shannon noticed the red punch stain. Everything else passed on the inspection. Hopefully they'll have other ways to get that stain out (I suggested painting it white... but that didn't go over well), otherwise I'll probably have to pay to replace the carpet. Or, at a minimum, I won't get my deposit back. Sigh.

I headed back to the house after the inspection was done. I sat around for a few minutes and headed out just before 3pm to go to Rodrigo Rodriguez's house. Rodrigo was the guest guitarist who came and played at Southside Fellowship back on February 8th, and I am helping him get some of his performances put onto YouTube to expand his audience reach. As I was driving to his house, he called me and asked if we could reschedule since he just got back in town from a gig in Florida. So, we rescheduled for Thursday and I turned back around and went home. I thought about driving around downtown Simpsonville and taking some photos, but then decided it'd be more fun to go home, lay on the couch, and eat pop-tarts. Yep.

Tim came home around 4:30pm from work. I spent about an hour trying to stream a movie off of Hulu but it just wouldn't buffer. I don't get it. It's 2009. If people really want to leverage video on the Internet, we shouldn't have issues like that. It's frustrating.

A litle bit after 6pm, Tim and I left the house to go meet some of my family for dinner at Ruby Tuesday's. Tim's birthday (and mine too) is tomorrow, my mom's is Wednesday, and my uncle David's is Wednesday. It's a big birthday week in our family.


As soon as I came in, I did my usual "take photos and ignore social interaction". It helps me adjust. Don't judge.


We all got cards from people in the family. I like getting cards. I'd never admit it publicly, but it makes my day (perhaps even my week or month) when I get a handwritten note in the mail. Hint hint.

I tried to get the employees at Ruby Tuesday's to come sing to me but they wouldn't do it. Instead, they brought us free sundaes.


I asked our waitress to take a group photo (well, really, I just made it blindingly obvious that I wanted a group photo taken and she offered). I had to crop it so it'd be framed right, but I appreciated the effort.


Dinner was great. Look at that photo. I'm probably the only guy I know who willingly wears a tie when he feels like it, for no real reason. I tell people it's "because I look so good in them", which I don't even think is true. I just like wearing them.

Tim and I left and drove back to the house in Simpsonville after dinner. When we got home, I pretty much made Tim clean part of the house while I worked on putting things away in the kitchen. He didn't want to and I kept coming back and making sure he was on task. I figured since I had taken care of finalizing all of the apartment details, that he could at least chip in and clean the house. Tim and I differ on the word "clean" too, I think. And that's ok. As long as his definition of clean only applies to his room and space, and he applies my definition to the rest of the house. I'm definitely not a perfectionist either, but I have my moments where I want things to be spotless.

I played some Halo tonight with a few friends. That was fun. I also spent some time organizing my iPhoto library and picking out some good photos that I've taken over the past year or so that I want to get printed up and framed to hang around the house. I thought it'd be funny to have a collage of pictures of me doing different faces but wasn't sure if that'd be weird looking. You know, to have a bunch of pictures of just me all over the place.

Tomorrow is going to be a great day. It's my birthday and I'm getting a bunch of people together to come to Oriental House with me for my birthday. It's also International Pancake Day at IHOP. Let's be honest, they're probably doing that just for me. I think I'm going to go there for dinner with Dan and Rachel. Oh yeah, and it's a regular Tuesday so we have a lot of stage setup to do along with meetings and probably some video-taping in there somewhere.

Later,

Joe

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I woke up at 5:45AM this morning after falling asleep sometime around 2AM. I really do stay up all night worrying about the dumbest things. When I woke up, it felt so good to just lay in bed. This is sort of a problem I have. I tend to fall back asleep. I woke up again at 6:17AM. I wanted to be at the church before 6:30AM this morning. I dressed in a hurry and rushed to the church. I met Brad Roberts, one of the sound team volunteers, who was waiting for me on the East side of the building since he didn't have a key to get in. I hated that he had to wait on me, but at least he was only waiting a couple of minutes.

I brought all of the equipment in the control room online and then worked on the light cues until about 7:40AM (after I tested all of the videos for the morning, of course). I should have just gone in last night and written all of the light cues but I didn't feel like it.

I stayed up last night worrying about who was going to be there to run things and really thought I'd be running the switcher and lights (nearly impossible), switcher and slides, or slides and lights (also nearly impossible). Like I said before, I worry about some of the dumbest things. I should have just trusted that God would provide. And He did. David, a new volunteer, came and ran slides this morning. Tyler showed up after being sick all week with bronchitis to run the lights. And Gewan ran the video switcher. That's right, after running the switcher for every single service for 17 weeks in a row (not including during Jingle Jazz, which I also ran it then), my reign was over.


Gewan said that if I was living to run the switcher every week in 2009, then my priorities were in the wrong place. That's probably true... but really the only reason I was in that position for that long is because I was investing my time in increasing the quality of a certain area (camera direction and switching).

Anyway. During each service today, I helped with video playback and really just observed everyone work. During the first service, we had an interesting issue with one of the "mover" lights. We have four Varlite VL1000TS lights that we can control from the light console, move them around like spotlights, etc. We use them all of the time for creative sets, gobos, etc. During the second song in the first service worship set, the 2nd light lost control and pointed up at the speakers. On a normal week, it probably wouldn't have been as big of a distraction, but with only having lights on the cross, this was pretty noticeable.

I walked out to the light console and watched as Tyler reconciled the problem by turning off the light. I hate being the guy who comes out and yells/takes over when a problem occurs, so I rarely take action unless it's a big priority and is disrupting a lot of people. Tyler turned off the light (the light intensity control is separate from the moving capabilities). He couldn't get the light to move, so I decided to go up to the catwalk and take a look at the light.

When I got up to the light on the catwalk (which wasn't the easiest feat with all of the lights off, but I managed to do it without tripping over anything), I realized it had no power. I pulled the power plug out and put it back in. No change. Normally when the light loses power and resets, it will calibrate itself and swing around in a full motion and return to its home position or the position the light console is telling it to go to. This light did nothing.

While Charlie was preaching during the first service, Tyler and I went around to every single electrical breaker panel in the building to see if any of them were tripped. We've never lost power to those outlets before on the catwalk (that are dedicated for the light electronics) so I wasn't even sure where the breaker for it was. After checking like 12 panels and not finding a single one tripped, we gave up and decided to just rewrite all of the cues for the morning to not use that light anymore and then take a look at it after church.

The second service went really well. I took some pictures of our setup with the cross which I thought looked really cool.


During the third service as I was playing back the video announcements, I re-situated myself in the chair and my elbow hit the spacebar on Video Toaster while the announcements were playing, which caused it to do a video transition. Normally this would not be a big deal because the default transition is a cross-fade, and a cross-fade between two identical sources is not visible. Today however, the selected transition was a big alien monster claw that grabbed the video, pulled it down, and threw up the second source. Yeah, that was kind of visible. I think it happened during a funny part so people probably thought it was intentional, but it definitely was not.

After church was over, I closed up a lot of the stuff in the control room and then Tyler and I went up to the catwalk to look at the light that was having problems.


We couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. We even tried using one of the other light's power cords and another outlet. The light is just dead. Now I have to do some research and find out if it's cost-effective to fix a light that is 7-8 years old or to buy a new one. Or not buy one or fix it at all, which would really be unfortunate because we use them a lot.

Tyler posed for a "sad-face" shot with the light, because this light has served us so well for the past few years.


I left the church around 1:15pm to go home. My mom had called me yesterday and told me that when she left the house party, she had gone to my apartment (after taking Tim's key) and cleaned the entire place. My mom is the greatest. I stopped to check out the cleanliness and noted a few areas that still needed to be cleaned. I wasn't really in the mood to clean them today so I took a few pictures and then headed to the house.

I took this picture on my way out... it symbolizes doors closing in our lives that lead to new phases of life... or something. Or, it might just be a picture of my old apartment door.


When I came home, I ate some lunch and laid down on the couch for a while. I was feeling pretty tired so around 3pm I went to my room to take a nap. I fell asleep around 4pm and woke up again at 6:30pm when my parents came over for dinner.

We all ate some pot-roast barbecue for dinner. My mom also brought over a birthday cake since my birthday is this Tuesday. My twin brother Tim's birthday is also on Tuesday, but it's hard to get excited about that. My mom's birthday is on Wednesday. Andrew, my assistant at the church, has a birthday on Thursday. It's a real birthday week, for sure.


My parents left around 8pm. I got out my Macbook Pro and did some writing. As I was sitting at the table in my living room, I got a video chat request from my friend Justin DeGarmo. We ended up doing a three-way video chat with me, Justin, and Jeff Looney, another friend from high school. Jeff just moved out to Colorado, so it was cool to catch up with him.

Video chats are cool.

So, tomorrow is my day off. I'm going to stay up late tonight (because I can) and then sleep in (again, because I can). I'm going to go to my apartment at some point and finish cleaning, and then turn in the keys. Sigh. I'm also going to Rodrigo's house later in the afternoon to help him with some more video stuff.

Later,

Joe

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Today was a great day. I woke up at 6:45AM, thinking it was kind of early, and noticed my alarm clock blinking. I fell asleep last night with my nightstand pulled closer to my bed, and I must have pulled the power cord out of the wall for the clock just enough to reset it. So, in my "just woke up" stupor (which is never really that bad), I reset my clock time and the alarm and went back to sleep.

I woke up again when the alarm went off at 9. I felt refreshed and rested and I got out of bed and started getting ready for the party. I spent some time cleaning the house (more straightening, really) and then headed out a little bit after 10AM to go to my apartment. I wasn't sure if anyone would get there "early" (before 11AM) and I wanted to be there waiting on them, you know, because I'm such a polite host and all. And they are offering to help me move. Even though I only have two couches to move, and they're light enough I could probably move them myself.

I sat around in the apartment by myself which was actually pretty boring because there was not much to do. I passed the time by catching on my blog reading from my phone. I love having a mobile smartphone where I can do that on-the-go. My dad showed up right at 11AM. I wanted to wait a few minutes to see who else would show before we started moving the couches, but my dad was ready to work so we moved the first couch. As we were loading it into the truck, Andrew Stoeber and Brian Schlarb showed up. We let them load the second couch onto the truck. You know, so they feel like they helped. My friends Dan Sims and Rachel Richards showed up right as we finished loading the second couch.

There was literally nothing else to load up. We were done in 5 minutes.


Everybody followed me to the house, so I had this long chain of cars following me. I took this picture on the Interstate, which I thought was pretty impressive.


A lot of people showed up to the post-moving party today. We got the couches unloaded and in place, and started playing Rock Band almost immediately.


In total, 17 people came over today, which I'd say was a pretty impressive party. I asked my parents to go pick up some pizza while I hosted the party. As people came in, I tried my best to give introductions since I had people from my various "circles of friends" come who had never met each other before.


My sister, Gina, came over today and brought one of her cute little beagle puppies, Henry, with her. Having that dog in the house made me want to get a dog. I guess I'll have to ask my landlord about that, who also happens to be my mom. This dog loved people and getting attention, but constantly looked like he just lost his best friend. Happy dog but a sad face, at least in photos.


After we all had opportunities to play Rock Band, I organized a Rock Band Competition, which was fun. Some people had left by that point so we were only able to organize three bands. My band, "RimROCK!" was awesome. We named ourselves that because that's the name of the street this house is on, and I thought it was fitting.


There were two other bands, "The Dry Heaves", and "The Awesome Band". We tried our best to keep score but I think people found out that I didn't have a real prize so we all sort of lost interest in the competition and just started playing for fun again.


People started leaving slowly around 4pm. Mark and Melissa (some of my friends from SourceLink, where I used to work), were the last to leave. Clay hung around for a while and helped me arrange the living room like I wanted it. I wasn't really sure how the place would look with the couches so when we brought them in this morning, I just had Brian and Dan place them anywhere they'd fit, which worked for the party, but it wasn't want I wanted.

We tried a few arrangements and eventually came up with this.


After settling on the setup (which I'm still not completely sold on but will work for now), Clay and I went to get some dinner. He lives like 5 minute down the road so he knew the area better than me. I drove to Fairview Road and we looked around for places to eat. I found a Moe's. You can guess where we went. And don't guess like Hardee's or something. We got some Moe's and brought it back to the house to eat while watching a movie. I was a little disappointed in the quality of my burrito from this Moe's. Hopefully it was just a fluke.

Tim joined us and we watched "Iron Man" in the living room. That's a fun movie to watch. When it was over, Clay looked at all of the pictures I took today with me on my Macbook and we talked for a while and then he left around 8:30pm to go home. I played some Halo with James Brush and a few of his friends online for a while but then decided to call it a night.

Overall, a great day! I was glad that so many people came over. I'm sure my neighbors were starting to wonder if this was going to become a regular ritual, what with the 20 cars in the driveway and cul-de-sac and whatnot. I'm just excited that I can play my video games and watch television at a reasonable volume and use my sound system without getting yelled at by the neighbors.

Tomorrow is going to be a busy day. I should have gone back to the church and finished all of the light plots for Sunday, but I just didn't feel like it. I'm not really sure how tomorrow is going to go. My friend Tyler, who is on the schedule for lights, has been sick all week and may not show up on Sunday. I also found out tonight that Ben's whole family is sick so he will be at home taking care of them. It may be one of those mornings where I run 3-4 different things at once. We will see. It doesn't really stress me out that much anymore, but I don't like letting that become "the norm" that volunteers are exposed to, because it only emphasizes the point of view that their job function isn't important when one person can simply do 3-4 positions if someone doesn't show.

I am looking forward to tomorrow being a great day of worship with our focus on the cross. I hope that people enjoy the metaphor and are reminded of why we do what we do.

Later,

Joe

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Today was a long day. I had some trouble falling asleep last night on the cold floor, even though I normally enjoy sleeping on the floor. This house creaks some too, so every time I moved around, I could hear Tim's bedroom door shaking, and, being the good brother that I am, I tried to not bother him as much as possible since I knew that Tim gets up a lot earlier each day than I do. Well, except for Sundays. I always beat him on Sundays.

I woke up this morning around 9AM and got to the church a little bit after 10. Andrew was already there working, but I didn't have much for him to do today. My primary focus was to work on the video announcements. In fact, I even skipped lunch to work on them.

Andrew worked on getting some lights set up to shine on the cross on the center of the stage while I was editing. I helped him test the placement of a few lights. Around 2:15pm, Mark Hudson, Lindsey's husband, stopped by to work on the light board with me. He is interested in volunteering with lights on Sunday mornings and we need more operators (need 2-3 more regular volunteers, really) with the light board so I was glad he came by.

Mark and I worked on the light cues for about an hour and 15 minutes or so. I gave him an overview of the console, its basic functions, how to write cues, some standard operating practices etc. and he picked it up really well. I think he is going to stop by again on Sunday morning for more training.

I finished up the video announcements during the afternoon, but I had to make a decision that I haven't made in a long time... to just re-use something I had already made and just "wrap it up". I hate doing that because I always feel like I'm not giving it my all or my best, but, on the other hand, spending 10-12 hours trying to come up with more creative titling and effects for a video that probably only 30% of the congregation will look at may not be the best use of my time. The one thing that really annoyed me with this week's video announcements was the audio... I had Matt wearing a lavelier microphone but it sounded awful. Nasally, really. And Matt wasn't sick or anything. It was probably my fault for the mic placement... but he was wearing a sweater vest. So, not much I could have done about it anyway. I did some EQ work and notched out around 1.4kHz which helped some but not a lot.

Sharon Thomas, one of the adult ministry assistants, stopped by my office to see if she had filled out a request to use the sound system out in the cafe for an event there tonight. I didn't recall seeing one but decided to just give her a quick overview of the system there anyway. I showed her how to turn the system on and how to use the microphone, and then went back to my office.

My mom called me this afternoon to say that she, my dad, and Tim had moved everything but the two couches to the apartment. They set up the washing machine and the dryer, and even set up my bed with fresh sheets. My mom is great. Back in December during Jingle Jazz week, when my life was really really stressful and I had been staying up all night working plus helping Tim with some medical issues, my mom came over to my apartment and washed my sheets and made up my bed for me twice in one week. It was so comforting to just come home to a fresh bed that one time when I had worked from Tuesday at 8AM (after only getting 3 hours of sleep) until Wednesday at 10AM and went home to sleep for a few hours before coming back to run the first night of Jingle Jazz. Thanks Mom.

Anyway. Back to today. Around 6pm, my friend Doug Whitley showed up along with his family and a few friends to do another character performance. You may recall one of the last times that I helped him with this. By the way, I totally love being able to link back to previous days in my life. Show me any other blogger who can do that. Doug was doing "Moses" tonight so that we could record it onto DVD for him to use as a resource for his ministry.

His two sons, Doug and Charles, worked as the camera operators. We got everything set up and ready to go. I put "Video Taping in Progress" signs up on all of the doors to the Worship Center just in case someone wanted to come walking in while we were taping. I sat in the control room the entire time that Doug presented.


We finished around 8:30pm and after taking a few character photos, the Whitley's invited me to their house for dinner. Before we ate dinner, I beat Doug III and Charles in Halo. Twice. I even let them team up against me. It was probably a little unfair because they rarely play, and I've been playing practically Halo every day for the last 5 years.

Dinner was great. We had steak and potatoes. You can't beat that. Doug told me all about his trip to Australia a few years ago and it was neat to hear about some of that culture and sights. They are always telling me of cool places I could go and visit. You know, if I ever took a vacation or anything.

After dinner, we all had some strawberry shortcake while Charles and I played "Nazi Zombies" on Call of Duty 5, which was a challenging game. I left around 12:15AM to go home. When I got back to the house, I found my room straightened with my bed set up and fresh sheets on it. Now I'll be able to sleep well, hopefully.

I'm really looking forward to tomorrow. Even though I really don't have much to move, I'm hoping lots of people still show up for the party / "extravaganza". That reminds me. I should probably go buy the snacks and food at some point.

Later,

Joe

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Today was definitely a great day. I bet you are all reading in great anticipation for when I start off an entry talking about how bad my day was.

I slept at the house last night instead of in my comfortable bed at the apartment. I set up a blanket on the floor of my bedroom and slept there. Growing up, this room was always my grandfather's room (we called him "Pa-pa"). I remember as a kid sneaking in to his room and seeing what toys he had in his closet that he and my grandmother had picked up at yard sales to give to us grandkids. Every Wednesday, they used to have something sitting out for us that he had picked out at a yard/garage sale somewhere.

During the night, I got really cold because the vents were closed in my room, so I didn't really sleep that well. I set an alarm but I didn't set it the AM/PM part right so my alarm never went off this morning. I woke up at like 9:30 and started getting ready for the day. As I was getting ready, my friend David Koepper called me to catch up. I invited him to my post-moving party extravaganza on Saturday but he and his wife Erika will be out of town and can't make it. I do live within a couple miles of him now though so we're pretty much neighbors, which is kind of cool. We talked for a few minutes and then he had to get going since he was driving.

I got to the church this morning a little bit after 10AM. I had a meeting at 11AM, so my primary goal was to get as much progress done as possible on the video announcements editing before then. I had some some basic editing yesterday and color correction, but no audio EQ or normalization and I still had to remove the bad takes, unusuable clips, etc. and get it all organized.

I worked for a bit and then Eddie came by my office to ask me a question about a computer projector. We talked for a few minutes and then I went back to work. At 11AM, I had to stop and go to my meeting. Somehow or another I got signed up to participate in the bi-weekly (which, apparently, means twice a month, and not twice a week as you'd think) meetings for the upcoming Vapor golf tournament in May. You may recall from the last meeting that I pretty much talked the whole time about ministry highlights and video work. I learned in this meeting today that the gala/dinner has been cancelled, so we went through the task list again and talked about ideas to promote the tournament which was moved from May 4th to May 11.

I tried to take a few candid photos during the meeting but some people don't understand the word candid.

Ruthie gets it. Jes, not so much.

I get it. Obviously.

Nate and Laurie get it. Josh, not so much.

That meeting lasted about an hour and a half. We were all crammed into Jes's office. I'm going to be honest, I passed a lot of time during the meeting sending text messages and surfing the Internet from my phone under the guise of "researching something". I was also kind of self-conscious about the mustache that Josh pointed out that I had. I was going for "goatee" but I guess it just looks like a creepy mustache. Oh well. The meeting was over around 12:30pm.

Josh decided he wanted to go to lunch so he invited me, Nate, and Ben to join him at Moe's. I love Moe's. I think I've said that before. I've been offered a job at every single Moe's in this area, which I think is pretty impressive. Lunch was good today but we were all distracted by a scene out in the parking lot. Some woman got arrested while like 20 people from Moe's stared out and watched. We had no idea what was going on or why she was getting arrested, but apparently people like to stare more at those types of incidents more than traffic wrecks. Just saying.

We got back to the church just in time for the pastor's meeting at 1:30pm. The rest of the staff doesn't really know what they do in there, so I always joke and say they watch movies. I always ask Matt, "What movie did you guys watch?"

I worked in my office on the video announcement editing. Andrew was there and I had him work on a few projects. With our stage setup like it is this week (with the band on the floor), we decided to pull out a section of the bullnose that Charlie preaches from and put it away, to make more room for the band. I didn't want to use our normal teach lighting plot since it would have lit up an entire section of the floor where there was no platform (since we got rid of one of them). I asked Andrew to take down two lights and mount them on the bar in the middle of the room (that we haven't really used since like the end of November) so that we could have a more focused and front-lit teach lighting plot. I helped test the lights while he hung them.

Matt came by around 3pm and we worked on editing the video announcements together for about an hour. They came together quickly but I still have a lot of fine-tuning to do tomorrow. I want to throw in some animation at the beginning and do more color correction. When we were done editing, Matt and I had a follow-up tech talk that we like to do on Thursdays, where we discuss lighting options and ideas and any final video/sound needs, which I will then take and make sure that volunteers are well-communicated and that we are ready to go for Sunday. I am here to serve, after all.

One thing we noticed is that all of the music stand lights spill a lot of light into the room. Each light has a 40-watt frosted bulb in it. I had the idea to hook all of the lights into the lighting system, so that we could dim them and control the brightness, so I had Andrew work on setting that up.

I left the office a little bit after 5pm to go home. I went straight to the house. I ate some cereal for dinner (Cinnamon Toast Crunch... it's really good). I am the only person I know that likes cereal this way... but I like it when it soaks up the milk and gets soggy. Of course, I'm also the guy that likes cold/old pizza and leftovers too so who knows.

I watched tv for a while and played Rock Band for a while too. I really like being able to have my nice sound system on to enjoy the bass when playing Rock Band and not have to hear a banging sound from neighbors living above me.

Around 7:45pm, I left the house and went to the apartment. I really wanted to try to bring my mattress from the apartment to the house so that I could sleep on it. Tim was still working but I told him to meet me at the apartment when he left so that he could help me load it up.

On my way in to the apartment complex, I checked my mailbox to see if I had any mail, but apparently they've already reset my mailbox and no more mail will be delivered there. It was kind of a sad moment, really. What will I do now that I won't be receiving tons of junk mail each week?


When I got to the apartment, I started looking around to see if there was anything else that I needed to go ahead and bring over to the house. I took a look out on the back porch and totally forgot I had these rocking chairs out there. I guess I never really went out there.


I wonder where I got those from. I forget. They look nice. Maybe I will put them in the den until I figure out where to put them.

I also found my name-tag sticker collection on the back of my bedroom door that I forgot about. I don't really know why I started this collection but somewhere along the way, I thought it'd be fun to stick them all on the door.


"Awesome". I remember that day. Everybody called me Awesome and for a day, it was true.

I tried to load up my mattress into my SUV but it didn't fit. Nowhere close. I tried to bend it and force it in but still, it was definitely a no-go. Having to carry the entire mattress back inside the apartment was kind of discouraging.

While waiting on Tim to show up, I decided to go ahead and disconnect the washing machine and dryer and at least get those ready to move. I got the dryer disconnected and moved out of the laundry closet but the washing machine hoses were screwed on really tight and I didn't have a wrench. And despite popular opinion, I don't have super strength, although I did pick up the front of a car once.

Tim showed up a little bit after 8:30pm and we decided to load up his tv into my SUV to take over to the house. We had tried to take it before but it was too heavy to move. I think the real problem was that it was too hard to try to coordinate carrying it with Tim. I managed to carry the thing (which probably weighs close to 200 pounds) to my car and then unloaded it at the house by myself. In fact, by the time Tim got back to the house, I had already carried in the tv, set it up in his room, screwed the coax/ethernet jack plate into the wall, and set up the cable and powered up the tv. That's how great of a brother I am.


We unloaded a few more things from my SUV and Tim's SUV (like the rocking chairs, some hangers, etc.) and that was it. I'm really looking forward to Saturday and having my couches and bed moved in. I'm also really looking forward to having all of my friends over for a party. I really don't know who all is coming but I hope a lot of people show up because I'm going to be buying a lot of pizza.

And, of course, sometime next week, I have to super-clean the apartment and get it ready for turn back in. I am really hoping to get my deposit back but unless we can get some of those stains out of the carpet (one of them is blood), we probably won't be getting that deposit back.

Tomorrow will be a long day. I'll be working 9-5 at the church wrapping up video stuff for Sunday. In the evening, I'll be shooting video of my friend Doug Whitley presenting his newest Biblical character, Moses, so that he can have that on DVD for his ministry. And after that, I have to clean the house and get things ready for my party!

Later,

Joe

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Today was kind of a slow day, even though it was a Wednesday. I came in to the church around 10:30AM because I thought I had a meeting at 11AM. I worked fiendishly at my desk until 11AM, and then walked halfway across the gym before I stopped and thought to myself, "You know, my phone never reminded me of this meeting and neither did my workstation". I checked my calendar on my phone and sure enough, the meeting was at 11:30, not 11AM. I are smart. So, I went back to my office and kept working.

I imported the footage from yesterday's video announcement shoot into a new project. It always takes a while to import and index HD footage, at least on the computer in my office anyway. While I was working, my friend Brian came by to talk to me. He was driving by the church on an errand for work and decided to stop in and hang out with me for a minute or two.

At 11:30 (the actual time of the meeting I was supposed to have), I went to Mike Hawkins' office. We were supposed to meet and talk about a refined structure for future baptism testimony tapings and the whole interviewing process. Mike was in another meeting so I had to wait for that to finish first.

Mike, Dawn, Art, and I met in the downstairs conference room and talked about just some overall frustrations with the current procedure and some thoughts to improve it. Without going into specifics, there have been a number of times come up where we hit snags when shooting the actual testimonies that could have been avoided if we had a little more advance communication.

Some take-away's that I took from the meeting included making a DVD of "good examples" of testimonies to show to people who want to get baptized, so that they can get a feel for what their final testimony will look like. Hopefully, this will avoid parents and kids memorizing their entire testimony so that they can blurt it out in 30 seconds on camera and get it over with. I want to make the whole process more creative so that it's more about telling a story about their journey of faith rather than just 30 seconds of "convincing me you're a follower of Jesus".

When that meeting was over, Matt and James invited me to go to lunch with them. I drove this time and we went to Zaxby's (the good one near Five Forks not the "ok" one near The Parkway). I feel blessed to work at a place that is surrounded by 3 different Zaxby's restaurants, two of which are within like 2 miles of the church. That's pretty awesome.

All three of us had the "kickin' chicken" sandwich for lunch. James said it was the spiciest thing ever. It had some kick to it, but I think calling it the "messy drippy sauce that makes your bread soggy and chicken taste weird sandwich" might have been more accurate. I was doing good to not get any of it on my shirt, which I succeeded in keeping my shirt clean.

I sort of have this problem with spilling things on my shirt. In fact, I used to spill something on my shirt every day at lunch. It was a big downer every day beacuse I knew it was going to happen, even if I didn't want it to. So, most of the time, when I went to lunch, I'd just let something spill on my shirt just to get it out of the way.

In late 2005, I decided I didn't want to suffer from that problem anymore, so I made a proactive effort to avoid it. Sometimes it meant wearing napkins on my shirt. Othertimes, it meant leaning way over the table and eating slower. And I had to avoid eating salsa altogether for a while.

Anyway. Lunch was good. James has the funniest noises and exclamations when he eats good food. It makes me laugh. On our way out from lunch, we saw Ruthie and Laurie from the church waiting in line to eat at Zaxby's. I encouraged Ruthie to get the kickin' chicken, to see if she could also avoid spilling any on her shirt. I'm not sure if she accepted the challenge or not. Probably not.

On my way back to my office, I saw Jim Peterson (the church facilities manager) working on a project for me in the worship center. We've been running forward cameras for the last few weeks on a regular basis. Every time we use them, I've had to run extension cords from the camera locations out the doors of the worship center and into the hallway to plug them in. Those are literally the closest receptacles, besides the ones on the stage of course, but it's inconvenient to run a cord to those, not to mention it'd probably look sloppier than running it out into the hallway.

I had the idea to just tap into the two end receptacles on the stage floor which we never use and extend the down underneath the stage to the floor, so that we could then just plug the cameras right into those. Jim worked on that for me and had them up and going in no time.


I spent the rest of the afternoon working on a variety of projects from organizing my notes to cleaning my hard drives and editing video. I had to capture a few DVDs but the little DVD player on my desk wasn't recognizing any of my discs so I had to go get a nicer DVD player from one of the classrooms. There's this one player that I always grab because I like it a lot. I bought it myself with my own money. I had bought a few for different classrooms a while back with church funds but one of the units never worked. When I returned that DVD player to Wal-mart, they gave me cash in return, which I stuck in my wallet, promptly forgot about, and later spent on something else. Probably goobers or skittles, knowing me.

A month or so later, I remembered and was like "Crap..." so I went and bought a really nice DVD player with my own money that cost more than what I was refunded before. Anyway, long story short, that's the player I always use when I want to test something or need another player because it works great. I should just take it and keep it at my desk but I don't.

Around 4:45pm, I went upstairs to Room 202 to set up some microphones to record Matt's second session of "Artists are Crazy!" with the worship team tonight. During the first session, he asked a lot of questions and a part of it felt kind of like a discussion. When I listened to the first session CD later, I realized that I couldn't really hear anyone except Matt. For tonight, I took our two Shure KSM44 LDC microphones and set them up in stereo in the room and patched them into the CD recorder along with a microphone that Matt was going to speak out of for the recording.

Andrew invited me to join him for dinner at Oriental House at 5:30. I had to leave the church around 5:15 just to get there in time because traffic is dumb. The food was so good there tonight. Andrew and I pointed out to each other again that while the service is nice there, having them ask you 20 times while you eat if you want more to drink is kind of annoying. Parts of me wants to say yes, but other parts know that there's no way I can explain to them that I'm drinking 80% Sprite and 20% Coke. It makes a pretty tasty Ginger-Ale if you've never tried it.

When we were hrough with dinner, we both headed back to Southside Fellowship. On the way in, we stopped at the copy center to scan in a few drawings of a project that Andrew was working on for his sister's wedding coming up in May. He wanted to draw a palm tree and turn it into a vector image in Illustrator. I gave him the idea to draw it in pieces so that he could manipulate it in Photoshop and then convert it to a live trace/live paint in Illustrator. It ended up working pretty well. I actually ended up making the entire thing for him in Illustrator based on his drawing and I think it looks nice.

I went upstairs around 6:20 to make sure things were good to go for the worship team time tonight at 6:45. I loaded up a blank CD into the CD recorder and made sure the microphones were good to go. I also loaded up a video on YouTube on the computer in the tech booth. That computer is kind of junky. It ended up not even playing the video correctly because it ran out of virtual memory (which means it didn't have enough real memory either). Computers are frustating sometimes.

Matt talked tonight about Artists and "Servant-hood or Stardom". He mentioned that three barriers to being a true servant were (1) Having an attitude of superiority; (b) Having selfish ulterior motives; and (red) Having confidence in our giftedness alone.


I took a lot of notes as he was talking (while also listening to the recording mix on some headphones at the tech booth and adjusting the mix as needed). I think this is an area that I really struggle with. I'm not always clamoring to be up on stage and be seen, but I definitely want people (and sometimes certain people) to know at times what I've been up to, sacrifices I took, etc. to make things happen. You know, like when I randomly tell people, "Yeah... I'm so tired this morning...... " (long pause because they are not interested) ".... I was at the church until 2AM this morning and then came back at 6AM to get this done." Did my admitting that to them really help the situation? Did it do anything to enable them to serve better themselves, or did it only serve to make me look like a dedicated individual in that moment?

The sarcastic and funny part of me argues that just me talking to them enabled them to serve better themselves but obviously I'm just joking. The second point, however is what I'm getting at. Almost every time I do or say something like that, I realize what it was that I just did. I took away the focus on what was accomplished and how God was glorified in an attempt to make someone look at me and say "Wow Joe, you did THAT?"

This is an area of my life that I am continuing to improve on. It's one of the reasons why I think I'm going to stop blogging when this blog turns one year old. I have other fantastic blogging ideas in the works though, so don't get too depressed kids.

Anyway. After Matt was done talking, we closed in prayer. The band went downstairs to start getting ready for practice. I stayed upstairs and put away the extra microphones and then went downstairs to help with sound check. Matt really wanted Andrew to play with the band this week since we have a smaller more acoustic worship set, so he asked me to call Brad, one of the volunteer sound operators, to see if he could come in and run sound this Sunday. I was hesitant to call since Brad wanted to take a break for a while, but I called and Brad was willing.

Andrew ran sound for most of the sound check and then Matt asked me if I wanted to run the sound board so Andrew could play with the band. It was one of those questions where the answer was already determined whether I answered yes or no. I really don't like to run sound that much, for a variety of reasons.

I am technically competent at the sound board. I know how it works. I know how to manipulate the settings (at its core, it is basically a computer anyway). I know how to use effects and adjust gain and run a basic mic and do some equalization. However, since I am rarely behind the sound board at any time, no one really has any confidence in my abilities. If it takes me any little bit longer to do something than it would take a regular operator, than someone starts coming back to "help out".

I also don't really enjoy running sound because I've discovered I'm really more of a visual person. There have been Sundays where Andrew and I discussed the worship set and he'll say something like, "Did you notice how Matt used different chords on the piano for that last song in each service?" And I'll respond with something like... "I never even heard the piano playing... but did you notice the light reflecting off of James' guitar was making circle shapes on the ceiling?"

I'm a visual person. It ties into my photographic memory stuff too I think. I do have a wide range of frequency hearing (really high pitched noises bother me a lot and I'm overall pretty sensitive to loud noises) but I'm not really a musician. I desire to be one, but I think I'm going to eventually have to accept that there are just some things that no matter how much I want to be good at them, I won't ever be.


Anyway. I ran sound for most of the practice and left the church around 9:40pm to go home. I stopped by the apartment and grabbed a bunch of stuff (mainly clothes and bedding materials and bathroom stuff) and came to the house. I'm going to be sleeping here tonight. I got tired of the whole driving back and forth thing.

So, that was my day. What was up with the crazy amount of rain we had in Greenville today anyway? I always feel depressed and sad when it rains, even though I spend most of my days inside. That line from "Men in Black 2" always come to my mind...

Agent K: When you get sad it always seems to rain.

Laura: Lots of people get sad when it rains!

Agent K: It rains because you're sad baby.

Something like that, except my name isn't Laura.

Later,

Joe

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Today was a good day. I say that a lot. I'm a really optimistic person. It takes a lot for me to consider a day to be a "bad day". Every day is a gift from God, right?

I woke up this morning at 8:30AM. I felt so nice and warm in my bed. I fell back asleep and then woke up and laid in bed staring at the ceiling. Before I realized it, it was after 10AM. I jumped out of bed and got ready for work. I made it to the church just in time for the worship planning meeting.

Everybody but Brian was there today. We talked about last Sunday and then Charlie touched on where he'd be preaching from this Sunday. Matt talked in detail about the plans for the stage and worship set, with the cross being the only thing on stage with all of the band being to the side or on the floor and out of focus.

After the worship planning meeting, Matt, James, and I went to Matt's office to have our usual followup "tech talk" where I basically ask questions about Sunday like "Are there opportunities to do IMAG/camera work?" "How do you see the lights looking during this song?" and "Are you going to eat that piece of chocolate?" You know, important questions.

We ended up going out to the worship center to look at the stage and decide where we wanted to put the band. The three of us discussed a few options but ultimately decided on only having the cross on the stage and having all of the band on floor with everyone else in the room. It should look pretty cool on Sunday when we have only the cross lit up.

When we were back in Matt's office to finish up the meeting, Art came by and asked if I could give him an overview of the audio/video equipment in Room 202. I think he tried to use it on Sunday and something wasn't working right. Art, Paul, and I went upstairs and after they explained the problem, I explained why it behaved that way and how to make it work next time.

Matt, James, and I went to lunch together today. We headed out toward downtown Simpsonville. Matt drove and I lost the "shotgun" call and had to ride in the back of his Malibu squished next to the baby carseat. It wasn't too bad though. First, we stopped at Horizon Financial so Matt could drop off some financial papers. Then, we went to lunch. There's this great Mexican restaurant, Anita's, on Main street. I had never been there but it was so good. I had a quesadilla and Mello Yello. That's right, Mello Yello. James asked me how I knew they'd have that to drink. I figured, they didn't say they didn't have it, so that was enough for me to ask for it. After we ate lunch, Matt ordered a sopaipilla for the three of us to share and it was really good. I had never had one of those before. When I asked what it was (while we were waiting for the dessert to arrive), Matt told me I had to wait and be surprised. Instead of doing that, I just pulled out my cell phone and looked it up on the internet. Nice try, Matt.

After lunch, I wanted to show Matt and James "the house", so we headed over, since it was just down the road anyway. The house was really cold because Tim hadn't left the heat on. It was literally like 50 degrees. I thought it felt great but Matt and James were freezing. I showed them all of the rooms and then when Matt saw Rock Band set up in my living room, he said, "Well, we're already here, let's play a song".


If you look carefully in the background of that picture, you can see the smoke detector that I installed by myself on the wall. Yep. And if you're not already impressed, then I guess I'll reveal that it's really just two screws put into drywall anchors and it's hanging on that. It took like 2 minutes. But if you didn't already know that, let's keep pretending that I'm an awesome handyman.

Playing just one Rock Band song turned into playing three songs, and we were there for about 20 minutes. I played the drums so that James and Matt could play the guitar. We played "Baba O'Riley", "Livin' on a Prayer", and "My own worst enemy". We left around 1:45 and headed back to Southside. When we got back to the church, I started working on setting up to shoot video announcements for Sunday. We figured with the different stage set and everything, that'd it just be easier to have video-based announcements. Matt wanted to shoot "something natural" and decided to shoot out in the cafe at the front of the building.

Shooting in the cafe is one of my least favorite places to shoot since it has a bad echo, all of the cafe appliances make noises, and people are always coming in and out of the doors near the cafe. And, of course, the copious amounts of daylight that pour in from the big window in the cafe.

But other than all of those things, the cafe has a beautiful decor and looks really nice. James and Andrew helped bring out the gear to set up the lighting while I checked with Dawn really quick to make sure there was nothing else scheduled for the afternoon out in the cafe.

With James and Andrew helping, we were done setting up within an hour. At 3pm, I had to go to a meeting with Lindsey and Kerry to talk about putting some of the Liberia partnership videos on the website, and to talk about a ministry highlight video for Habitat for Humanity. I met Lindsey on the way in to Kerry's office. When we came in, I found Kerry reading my blog, which I'm sure added to the excitement of his day because my blog is fanstastic. Don't lie. You totally agree.

During the meeting, we talked about the Habitat for Humanity build coming up in April and some ways to highlight and bring that information to our congregation. Then, we spent a few minutes talking about the LAMP videos and putting them on the website. At 3:30pm, I had to cut the meeting short and go out to the cafe to shoot the video announcements.


Shooting the video announcements went pretty well. We finished shooting them in under an hour, which is pretty good given the location and the script. When we were done (around 4:30), Sue came in to the cafe followed by my aunt, Marlyn, who came by the church to get a disc of the pictures that I took at Rolling Greens on Saturday. Apparently everyone there has been talking about all of the great pictures that "the photographer" took and they want copies.

Matt also came in to my office when we were done taping so that I could show him the announcement slides from Sunday that I made in After Effects. While simple, it's kind of the direction I want to move in for pre-service announcements (instead of doing them in PowerPoint, which just looks boring and uncreative). He liked them a lot and challenged me to continue to be creative with what I make for stuff like that.

James helped tear everything down in the cafe and put it away. We were done in 30 minutes. I went to my office to work on a few things and then went upstairs to see how the Vapor music practice was going. Their drummer backed out on playing tonight and they had asked Andrew to play for them, which meant he wasn't around to work on the stage setup as much during the afternoon. I listened to them play for a few minutes, talked to a few other people, and then went back downstairs. Andrew came down and Nate came with him to help get some of the stage work done.

As I was working in my office, my friend Brian stopped by and showed me his new Macbook which looked really sweet. The new models are made from one solid piece of aluminum so there are no seams. It looks nice. It kind of makes me wish I had waited like three months before I bought my Macbook. Oh well, that's how these things go.

Dan showed up right at 7pm to help with the stage setup. Andrew had to leave around 7:30 to go upstairs to play for Vapor. Tim came in a few minutes after Andrew left and we were done with the setup around 7:45pm. We did a quick soundcheck and then worked on setting up the cross in the center of the stage. I got out a drill and screwed the cross into the makeshift base that we have for it, while Tim and Dan held the cross so it wouldn't fall over. It's a pretty big cross so it tends to get top heavy. It kind of puts things in perspective for you though, if you stop and imagine what it must have been like for Jesus to carry a cross. I lifted it off the catwalk and down to Tim and Dan by myself, but it was hard to move.

We finished up a little bit after 8pm. I closed up everything and went home. Home being to the apartment. I basically drove there, grabbed my laptop and some clothes that I didn't need to keep at the apartment, and headed to "the house". I stopped and picked up dinner on the way over. When I got to the house, I had Tim help me bring in some of the clothes and things I brought over, and then we watched tv in the living room. I eventually turned on the heat because even I started feeling a little chilly with the house falling below 50 degrees.

I spent some time tonight organizing the closet in my bedroom. I also set the wall plate in the living room for the extra coax and ethernet feeds so that it looks nice and neat now. Things are coming together one piece at a time.

It's 11:30pm now. I've still got to drive back to my apartment, because that's where my bed is. I could sleep here, but I need to take a shower and all of my bathroom stuff is at the apartment. So, until Saturday, I'll probably continue to drive back and forth... spending the evening at the house, and then driving to the apartment to sleep. It sounds lame, but, I don't really mind.

Later,

Joe

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I woke up this morning at 10AM feeling refreshed. It was nice. Tim and my dad were busy taking his bed apart and trying to get it out of the apartment and in to the back of my dad's truck to take over to the house. I helped them take the bed apart and then grabbed my DSLR bag, my laptop bag, and headed to the house.


I stopped at Jack in the Box on my way over and picked up some breakfast. I'm always very cordial and friendly when I go through a drive-through, for several reasons. (1) Maybe that person has had a bad day and I'm the only one will be nice to them that day; (b) I find that if I enunciate clearly and talk in a pleasant voice, they respond much more nicely and get my order correctly; (red) it makes me feel good to talk nicely to other people. That alone makes it worth it.

You may have also noticed that when I write lists, I write them like this (1), (b), etc. instead of (1), (2) or (a), (b). This stems from a long-running joke between me and my friend David Koepper. We used to write emails to each other during the day when he worked at YMCA and I worked at SourceLink and would try to summarize everything in lists. (1), (b), (red), (square), etc. It was funny at the time. The habit kind of stuck. I don't do it in reports or anything. Only when I'm trying to be funny. Or annoying. Or both.

When I got to the house, my mom was already there working in the kitchen, cleaning the stove. I set up the cable modem and router so that when the Charter technician came out "between 11AM and 1PM", it'd be ready to go.

Tim and my dad arrived a few minutes later and started unloading things. I found my mom cleaning the bathroom with a toothbrush so I pretended I was a drill sargent and told her (in a yelling voice) to clean every bit of the floor until I could see my reflection in each tile. I laughed. She did not. For whatever reason.


Check this out. This house was built in the 70's, back when shag carpet was popular. I remember when it had shag carpet as a kid. I also remember the sad day they got rid of it. I did find a small piece of it in the bathroom though that never got replaced.


Tim worked on getting his bed set up and made while my dad worked on the sink in the kitchen. My mom kept cleaning. I installed 4 smoke detectors in the house, one in each bedroom and one in the living room, and one in the kitchen. Tim and I are still trying to decide what to do with the "den". We are toying around with the idea of making it a movie theater room, but I can't really afford it right now anyway, so maybe it will just stay empty.

Tim and my dad also set up our new mailbox today. I think it looks pretty nice. I wanted to put "Big Papa" on the mailbox, but my parents thought that was a bad idea. I guess it's a good thing, because we wouldn't want everyone in the world knowing where Big Papa lives.



My sister, Gina, came over around 12:30 and stayed for about an hour. She brought one of the kids she takes care of as a nanny. I think the baby was scared of all of the strangers in a strange house. I was just glad the baby didn't poop on my nice area rug. I hear they do that.

My parents left around 1:30pm to go get some lunch. I stayed at the house. The Charter cable company technician was supposed to be there by 1pm but was obviously late. I called to find out where the tech was at and spent a few minutes on the phone with customer service and they eventually told me they'd have to call me back when they found out where the technician was. Naturally, I never heard from them so around 2:30pm, I called again and was told the appointment had been rescheduled for "sometime between 3 and 5pm". Awesome.

My parents had brought me back a lunch, so I ate that at the house and then left around 3pm. I left a note for the cable technician that basically said "I waited on you for four hours. Call me at this number--I am at work." And I left the house.

I went in to the church. I wasn't supposed to work today. I think I avoided doing anything actually work related. I needed to come in and grab my income tax form from the church that I had left in my office. I was supposed to go with my dad to get my taxes done tonight by a friend of his, but it never made it on my calendar. I had already told Mary and Rodrigo Rodriguez that I'd go to their house tonight, so I had to just get all of my tax stuff to my dad and let him do it without me. C'est la vie.

While I was in my office, I also made a DVD of Rodrigo's third service performance (the same one I put onto YouTube). I started it transcoding but it was getting closer and closer to 4pm. I wanted to go back to the apartment and change clothes before going to the Rodriguez's house tonight, so I left the church, went home and changed, put all of my income tax papers in one place for Tim to find, drove back to the church, grabbed the DVD, and then drove back to the house in Simpsonville. So much driving in so little time.

Of course, when I came to the house, the Charter technician had still not arrived. I was disappointed but not surprised. I found my mom working on the dryer in the laundry closet. Tim was still cleaning in his room and then Tim and my mom worked on his bathroom some more.


I got a call from the Charter technician around 4:30 saying that he was on his way. He showed up around 5pm. I really wasn't upset that it took all day for a technician to come out. I was just frustrated that I had not been well-communicated with and had to spend most of the day waiting on someone. He was not even the guy that was supposed to come out originally, he said. I showed him the connections in the house and what all needed to be terminated, and he got to work. I think he had to connect the line going to the house up on the pole first. If it wasn't considered cable theft, I would have done that 6 hours beforehand.


The technician came back in the house and I showed him the line that we had run from the back bedroom to the living room to connect in. Truth be told, I would have preferred to do all of the connections up in the attic, but having a three-way splitter right next to the tv in the living room is not all that big of a deal. And as it turns out, the tech said I saved myself a lot of money running the line instead of having the cable company do it, which costs at least $50 just for them to look up in the attic or something (probably for liability reasons).

He terminated both ends of the line and hooked everything up. The signal coming out of the digital cable box to the tv was kind of fuzzy, and after some troubleshooting, we determined there was something wrong with the cable box itself. The technician replaced it with another box and it was crystal clear and good to go. The internet worked right away too and he was finished by 5:40 or so. I stuck around the house for an extra 15 minutes and then left.

I was supposed to be at Rodrigo's house (loft apartment, really) at 6pm. I pulled in to the loft apartment complex and saw my friend Troy Corley (Ruthie's brother) out working in his truck. We talked for a few minutes and then I went inside and up to the Rodriguez's place.

It was nice to meet Rodrigo. His wife Mary cooked a stir-fry dinner for us while we looked at computer stuff. Rodrigo wanted me to show him how to take some clips off of DVDs and put them on YouTube. He is a really talented guitarist who served our church in a great way, so I was happy to be able to return the favor. After eating dinner, we worked for a few hours and I showed him how to take clips off of the DVD, edit them, and upload to YouTube. The whole process was very time-consuming because ripping DVDs just takes a long time.


I left their house around 10pm to come home. They gave me a bunch of Rodrigo's albums to listen to, so that was nice. I'll probably let my assistant Andrew listen to them too since he enjoys great music as well. I'll be meeting back up with Rodrigo next Monday to put more videos online for him. He wants to learn how to do it, so I'll be showing him how over the next few Mondays. The only real problem is that his editing software is iMovie... and I have no idea how to use it. I guess I should start learning. I stumbled around in it tonight to make a video, but I can only pull so many "Joe is awesome" moves in a month before I run out.

I'm at "the house" now writing this blog. No internet at the apartment. Tim is sleeping here, and in a few minutes, I'll be driving to the apartment to sleep there. I would sleep here at the house but I don't have a bed. And as much as I love sleeping on the floor, well, there's no point. I can drive to the apartment in a few minutes and have a nice bed.

Tomorrow will be a good day. We're having the worship planning meeting as usual and then I may get started early on the stage setup. I think this is the week we're going to clear the entire stage and just have a cross in the middle of the stage and do a low-key worship set on Sunday.

Later,

Joe

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Even though Sundays are such long days for me, they're still one of my favorite days of the week. My other favorite would have to be Friday. Or maybe Wednesday. Possibly Monday. Thursdays are definitely out though.

I woke up this morning at 6AM. I didn't really get a whole lot of sleep but perfected the toss and turn, rolling over and disappointing myself that it wasn't 6AM yet. I got up, got dressed, and went in to the church.

I got to Southside Fellowship around 6:30AM. I came in to the worship center and turned everything on like I normally do. I loaded up the animated announcement slides that I had made earlier in the week, and looking at them on the projector screens, I didn't really like the "wiggling" effect that I had put on the camera in After Effects. I decided to re-render it without it. Disabling the expression was the easy part. Waiting 30 minute while it rendered again was not as fun.

Matt was gone this morning so James led us in worship. We did a cover of "Washed by the Water" by Need2Breathe for the prelude, and it was fun to direct some IMAG for that. The camera operators did a great job but I didn't really know the song so my direction was terrible, and thus, it probably didn't look so great on the screens. Before the first service started, I scrambled to set up a back camera on the stage pointing at the drums, and I ended up not even really using it.

All of the services went really well. We had some new people show up for training again today so that was nice. We also had some frustrations with the intercoms again, which is really starting to irritate me, especially when I can't recreate the problem during the week, and it continues to be a recurring issues for the volunteers, one that I would really like to fix.

I ran the switcher again for what must be like the 16th week in a row now or something. That's pretty impressive, although it is no where near close to my "most consecutive Sundays here in a row" record. I haven't been gone a single Sunday since March 16, 2008. Maybe I'll make it a whole year without being absent. Of course, that probably says two things... (1) I never get sick... at least not on the weekends; (b) I never take vacations... at least not on the weekends.


Between the 2nd and 3rd service, Mary Rodriguez, the wife of the guitar player (Rodrigo) that came in last week, found me and talked to me about the YouTube clip of his performance from Sunday that I put onto Youtube (which you can view here). They liked it and asked if I could come over to their house and show Rodrigo how to put some clips online, and invited me over tomorrow night. That should be fun. I'm looking forward to getting to meet Rodrigo since I didn't get to meet him last Sunday when he played for the church. Oh the joys of being a media director and always being cooped up in the control room for the entire morning.

After church was over, I put away the cameras and coiled up the cables. I used to do a lot of that on Mondays but since I don't come in to work on Monday anymore, I always make sure I have everything put away on Sunday so that it doesn't affect anything else going on in the gym/Worship Center during the week before I come in on Tuesday. As I was putting away some cables, Lana Bennett, a teacher at Southside Christian School, stopped and asked me if I knew where Tim was. Tim was supposed to help her son with a PowerPoint project or something. I told her I was meeting Tim at Moe's for lunch and that I could have him give her a call, so she gave me her cell phone number (which I remembered without even having to write it down, because I am awesome).

I met Tim at Moe's around 1:15pm and gave him the number, but I don't think he wanted to call it. We ate lunch and as we finished, Lana and her son Landon came in to Moe's to see if he could help with the project. We really didn't have much time this afternoon to help with a project like that, and Tim still seemed unwilling, so I asked Landon to get out his laptop and I'd show him how to do it right there at Moe's. I spent about 20 minutes tutoring him on how to use PowerPoint 2007, how to make new slides, bulleted lists, custom animations, etc. I think I make a pretty good teacher.

When Tim and I left Moe's, we went back to the apartment to move some more furniture and things over. We loaded up my SUV with my area rug for the living room, some clothes, an end table, lamp, etc. We put the kitchen tables and chairs into Tim's SUV and also brought over all of the pots and pans from the kitchen. You know, the ones I like never use since I rarely cook at home.

We spent the rest of the afternoon unloading everything from both vehicles and putting it away. I helped Tim terminate both ends of the two CAT5 lines he ran from his bedroom to the living room. I also "tested" the speaker system and played some Rock Band. I had Tim go out on the street and listen while I played at what I considered to be a moderate volume, to see if he could hear it. He reported back that he could definitely hear "something" but couldn't tell what it was. I guess we'll see if any of the neighbors complain.


Around 5:30, I left to go back to the apartment. I talked to my mom on the way over about moving plans for Saturday. With just about everything moved already, minus my bed, the couches, and the washer/dryer, I didn't see a need to have 20 people over to help move. So, I emailed everyone that replied back saying they would help and gave them an update of the situation. I'm still hosting a post-moving party at the house though, and I hope a lot of people show up. If you read this blog, feel free to come over. Just email me and I will give you my address. We'll be playing Rock Band and eating pizza. And probably doing other stuff too.

I headed out from my apartment and went to the Salamone's house to meet with my community group tonight. I really enjoyed getting to see everyone again, although besides the two new people that were there, everyone else consisted of Jami, Lauren, Dan, and Rachel. I see them all of the time. We talked about this morning's message where Chris spoke through Mark 6:1-13. After a while, we split up into guys/girls groups to talk and share prayer requests. I mentioned moving into the house, and after we were done praying, I ended up giving a mini-lecture on electrical circuits, AC vs DC current, how to wire up receptacles, what grounding is, etc. I'm not really sure everyone was paying attention, but I was too much on a roll to stop talking.

Jami, Lauren, Dan, Rachel, and I (being the ever stable fifth wheel) went to Perkins for a late dinner. I was really in a mood for some pancakes, so that's just what I ate. I also had some sausage links, which Dan pointed out looked a little bit like a cigar, so I held it like one. Kind of like Hannibal from the A-Team, eh?


"Sarcastic Joe" was out in rare form tonight and rolling with the punches. Sometimes I wonder if other people find him as annoying as I do. By the way, is it weird that I refer to parts of myself as other personalities? That's not weird, right? You do that too, right?

I left Perkins around 11pm and came home. When I walked in to the apartment, I found Tim passed out on the couch. He had slid his tv from the floor all the way into the living room and hooked it up to the cable to watch tv as he fell asleep. I watched with him for a while and then turned off the tv, re-connected the cable modem, and let him sleep.


Tomorrow will be a fun day. Charter Communications will be coming over to the house "sometime between 11AM and 1PM", which, in my experience, means sometime around 3PM. A technician is supposed to hook up the cable connection so the house will be ready to go when we "officially" move in (which, basically, I think, means the first night that I sleep there. I'm not sure). I think Tim and my dad are going to take Tim's bed over there tomorrow, so I guess that means he's moving in tomorrow.

Later,

Joe

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I slept in until 11AM and it felt great. Of course, I was up past 3, but that's probably beside the point. Tim came in and asked if I wanted to move some more stuff to the house. We started loading up my tv and the stereo system into Tim's SUV, and put some other things into my SUV. I drove Tim's Durango to the house since it had the big tv in it and he drove my Trailblazer by SCS so he could pick up a tape measure, and then met me at the house.

When I got to the house, I found that Tim had already run the coax and CAT5 lines. I was surprised. He had called my parents yesterday and the three of them ran all of the lines to Tim's room. I was fully expecting to work on that all day today, but it was already done!

Tim and I unloaded everything that we brought over and then decided to go to Lowe's to pick up some of those drywall anchor boxes, so that we could attach faceplates to the wall and make them look nice and neat.

On the way to Lowe's, we passed a Ryan's Steakhouse. I've said before about how I'm pretty sure there's a Ryan's next to every Wal-mart. Look, here's proof.


We bought the drywall boxes at Lowe's but they didn't carry any Leviton products (the faceplates and plate connectors for CAT5 and coax ("f connector") so we had to go to Home Depot. On the way to Home Depot, I had to cross the highway to turn in to the store. Two cops and an ambulance stopped in the middle of the road to let me cross. I can't prove it but it must have been because I had my cowboy hat sitting on the dash of my SUV. Either that or it was because traffic had built up to that point and they had to stop anyway.

We bought everything else we needed at Home Depot and then headed back to the house. We stopped at "New China Buffet" to get some lunch. I had been there before but didn't really enjoy it this time. I guess it was because it was a Saturday. The food didn't taste that fresh, but maybe it's not supposed to at a chinese buffet. I'm not sure. They did wish me a happy Valentine's day though, which was nice, albeit mispronounced.

When they gave us our check, we got fortune cookies and Tim didn't get a fortune inside his cookie. He was really disappointed.


When we got back to the house, I installed the anchor plates. They worked well.

I spent a few minutes arranging the tv set and getting some of the equipment hooked up. The cable company is supposed to come out on Monday to hook up the cable. I'm going to get them to terminate the new coax ends for the cabling going to Tim's room, and hopefully we can get all of that connected and working on Monday afternoon.


I had to leave the house around 3pm to head back to my apartment. I was supposed to be out at Rolling Greens Village, a retirement community, to take photos for their Valentine's event at 4pm, so I needed to shower and change into my black clothes, which I normally wear when I'm shooting an event. Of course, it took a long time to dry the clothes, and I had to pull my pants out of the dryer when they were still damp and put them on just because I was running late.

I stopped by CVS on my way over and picked up some batteries for my camera flash, and got to the main office at Rolling Greens just before 4:30pm. The event didn't start until 6pm, but I wanted to be there a little bit early just in case. My aunt, Marlyn, works there in resident services as the transportation director. I came in and she showed me around and where I'd be shooting.

The primary reason I was there was to take photos of the singles and couples coming in by a "sunset" backdrop, part of the whole "Love Boat Cruise" theme of the evening. I took about a hundred photos just like this one:


I really enjoyed the evening. I like spending time with elderly people. They seem to enjoy life so much. The doors opened at 6pm and it was funny to see so many people clammoring toward the door at once. It was like a mad rush. You'd think something priceless had just gone on sale or something. Nope, just a buffet.


As the evening progressed, I stopped taking "Sunset photos" and moved toward just shooting the evening. They had two guys there dressed as captains of the "ship", which really helped to sell the theme of "The Love Boat".


I took a lot of photos and transferred them to my Macbook all evening and printed the portraits out on an HP photo printer. It made so many of them happy to have photos instantly to take home.

A lot of times, when I am in a strange place, surrounded by people I don't know, I tend to be VERY quiet and reserved and not a talkative person. Tonight though, I found myself interacting with people I didn't know, being personable and friendly, which drew a lot of people to want to have their picture taken. I got a lot of hugs and kisses from some of the old ladies who were so happy and having a blast. I even got offered a job by one of the staff members to be their official photographer, which would be so much fun because I love hanging out with old people. I also enjoyed seeing so many of these people living in community and having

I left around 8:30pm after everyone had pretty much gone home. When I got back to the apartment, Tim had already eaten dinner (from Kyoto Express). That sounded good, so I left the apartment and drove to Kyoto's to get some dinner. I talked to the hispanic guy for a few minutes that always recognizes me when I come in. I also talked to another employee who was stocking the sauce cups at the counter. I'm really bad at sensing when people are just talking to say "hi", or when they really want to carry on a conversation. You know what I mean... they say something like "Yeah man I've had a tiring week..." and I say, "Well, it's almost quittin' time!" and then I turn back to what I was doing. They keep talking. I turn back around, "Oh yeah, well, at least you get a little break tomorrow..." and I go back. They keep talking. I don't mind continuing to talk, but I know that people are busy and sometimes don't really want to talk. I ended up talking to this other guy for a few minutes while waiting on my food.

When I got my order, I went back home and ate at the kitchen table and listened to whatever Tim was watching on his tv in his room. And that was pretty much my day.

Tomorrow, I'll be directing tech at church and probably moving some more things over to the house in the afternoon. I want to squeeze in a nap too since I hardly ever get any good sleep on Saturday nights anymore. My community group is meeting tomorrow night too, and I'm looking forward to that.

Later,

Joe

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I stayed up again last night catching up on tv shows that I missed earlier in the week. I forgot to set my alarm and woke up this morning at like 10:30. Oops. I picked up lunch on my way in to the church and got there a little bit after 11AM.

Before I left the office yesterday, I started rendering my pre-service announcement slides, which took about an hour to render. I watched them today and was pleased with how they looked and didn't feel the need to spend any more time on them.

I didn't really have a lot of other things to work on today. I want to do some creative camera work on Sunday but couldn't set up any cameras since the gym is being used tomorrow morning for kids games. Oh the joys of a multi-purpose room. Sometimes I wonder if we spend more time and resources on chair setup/teardown, having activity lights, fixing equipment that gets hit by balls, etc. than we would just having a separate gym (or not having a gym). I'm not good with numbers like that.

I did spend some time today cleaning up the tech closet. It's one of Andrew's recurring organizational tasks to keep the closet clean, but sometimes I like to clean it myself so that things get put where I like them. Plus it saved him some time so he could work on other things for me.

I like organizing and cleaning. I'm not really obsessive-compulsive about it though. I like it when things are neat and orderly but I favor functionality over cleanliness. That's why my desk is always a mess. The only reason I remember where things are is because of my photographic memory... I see a picture in my head of where I put that item, and then I can find it. When I have time though, I enjoy getting things back to an organized system.

Here is part of the tech storage closet. Everything is nice and labeled and it's so easy to find. I love having things organized like this. I keep this closet locked and only a few of us in the building have keys to it.


A lot of other staff people like the idea of coming in to a closet like this and having access to pretty much any cable, connector, or device they might need. Of course, I argue that the reason we have so many things available and easy to get to is because I take the time to keep it organized. It does take work to keep it this way though.

Anyway. I really didn't have much else that I could work on today. I'm waiting on some other resources from other people for a few video projects coming down the pipe, so I really couldn't work on any video editing or anything. Nothing that I really wanted to, anyway.

I left the church around 3pm. I headed out to my bank ATM to get some cash and then went downtown. I parked in the parking garage on Richardson Street and met my friend Jeremy at Marble Slab. Jeremy and I made plans earlier in the week to go to the Winter Jam concert at the Bi-Lo Center. The concert draws a fairly big crowd every year, bringing in a variety of different Christian artists/bands to perform.

As Jeremy and I were sitting at Marble Slab, we saw Toby Mac walk by the store twice. I wouldn't have recognized him but Jeremy pointed him out. I don't really care about meeting celebrities or anything. To me, they're just people that I dont know but have seen before. I've had plenty of opportunities in the past to meet "famous people" but the idea has never really seemed that exciting.

Jeremy's friend Phil joined us around a little after 4pm at the Marble Slab and then the three of us walked down to the Bi-Lo Center to wait in line.


The doors opened at 6pm, so we had to stand outside for about two hours. The time passed quickly though. When we came in and got seats (it was general admission), I wanted to sit higher up and in the center of the room, not to the side. You know it's always going to sound good from the sound board operator's point of view, so why try to sit anywhere else?


I really enjoyed the concert. Parts of it were loud but that's ok. The only thing that really bothered me the entire time was that they had projector screens hanging down and no content on them (at least, no correlating content) during the musical performances from each artist. Most of the time, it was just a image or banner of that particular artist. If I was running it, I would have brought in 4 or 5 cameras and done some IMAG. Just saying.

There were a few artists that I had not heard of before, and some that I had heard their music but never knew the artist name. I don't really listen to a lot of contemporary Christian music, but I think most people know that. I love it but don't really listen to it a lot unless I'm in the car or something and it's on the radio.

I took a lot of pictures and video during the concert. They weren't that fantastic, since I just took them with my little Canon Powershot and not my Rebel XTi DSLR. Everyone at the concert was pretty much just waiting for Toby Mac to come out. They always bring him out last and everybody went crazy and cheered really loud when Toby and the Divercity Band came out.



The concert was over around 10:30pm. Jeremy, Phil, and I walked out and back to our cars. I saw this Moe's truck on the way out and just HAD to pose for a photo. I love Moe's. Oh yeah, I was also the only person that I saw in the entire arena wearing a cowboy hat, which I thought was pretty impressive.


Jeremy and Phil were going to the "after-show party" for Toby Mac at The Channel. I opted to go home. Getting out of the parking garage was quick since I had parked on one of the exit sides (I had to drive up and then drive "out" to get to one of those spots).

On my way home, I stopped at Gewan's house to borrow his DSLR battery grip. Gewan has been my friend for a long time since we started working in tech stuff at the church back in 2001. We loan each other stuff all of the time. I had to call him and get directions to his new house since I had not been there before. I found it without getting lost. He gave the battery grip and I talked to Gewan and his wife, Hope, for a few minutes and then I went home.

Tomorrow will be a fun day. I'm going to sleep in and then Tim and I will be moving more things over to the house and working on the cabling some too. In the evening, I'll be shooting some photos at a retirement community event. Hey, it beats sitting around at home on Valentine's Day (Singles Awareness Day), for sure.

Later,

Joe

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I stayed up so late last night and I shouldn't have. I was kind of wound up from staying up late writing, watching tv, and thinking. I started feeling sick around 2:30AM just from staying up so late. I finally fell asleep. I set my alarm for 9AM this morning but since I didn't really have a pressing reason to get to work early, I decided to sleep a little longer, which was a good call.

I sent Tommy Schwendler a text message to see if he had plans for lunch, and we made plans to meet at Bucky's Barbecue. I had that for dinner last night but didn't really mind eating it again for lunch. I met Tommy and Nate there at noon for lunch. It was good to eat lunch with some friends and just chill before going to work. I could definitely get used to that. I always go out to eat for lunch each day, and on the days when I know I have to eat by myself, I end up putting myself in a sad mood just from thinking about it. You'd think I would be used to being by myself by now, but there are times I just want to be around other people.

Anyway. After lunch, the three of us headed back to the church. Tommy and Nate followed me in his car. I took this picture and the wind almost knocked the camera out of my hand, which would have been bad because I use my Canon Powershot all of the time.


When I got back to the church, I got a phone call that Noel, a consultant with Sennheiser (they make microphones) was there to see me. He called me yesterday and said he was in the area and wanted to stop by and just talk to me. We spent several minutes talking about some new technology that Sennheiser is working on and I gave him an overview of our needs and what we use wireless microphones for in the building. It really wasn't anything more than a networking meeting but he was a really nice guy and we exchanged business cards. He offered to let me demo anything if I ever wanted to, so that was nice. I mean, I'm sure it costs something, but it's always nice to know that I can demo a product in my own setup before having to buy it.

I spent most of the afternoon working on some animated announcement slides in After Effects. The sad thing is that they're only like a minute long and I literally worked on it all day. It took me a while to come up with ideas for what I wanted to do, and of course I had to put up with the software crashing a couple of times but that usually doesn't upset me because I'm used to it by now.

Nate stopped by while I was working to ask some questions about a website he's working on, so I had to stop and help him with that. I also helped Andrew work on the light plots. Nothing really moved or changed on the backstage since last week but one of the downlights stopped working so we had to take another fixture and put it in the other one's place and position it. And when I say "we", I really meant that Andrew did all of the work and I just supervised.

Russ, one of the new camera volunteers, stopped by to get some practice with one of the cameras. I didn't really know he was coming but it wasn't a big deal so I just turned it on for him and went back to my office. I should have used it as a training opportunity and I didn't. I was too focused on my primary project (the slides) and missed out on an opportunity to help a volunteer become better at a task. This is why I'm a terrible leader.

Andrew left around 5pm and I kept working until about 5:15 and then I went home too.


I went to my apartment and sat around for about 20 minutes and then left again to go to Moe's to meet my twin brother Tim and my friend Brian for dinner. I found Tim waiting in the parking lot so I talked to him for a few minutes. Brian showed up righat at 6:15 and the three of us went inside.


Today is Abraham Lincoln's birthday. Check out Tim with his top hat. For Lincoln's birthday and all. The people at Moe's loved it.


Dinner was good. I love saying "Welcome to Moe's!" when people come in. It never gets old. At least, for me, it never gets old. Maybe everyone else hates it. Either way, they never speak up about it, so I never stop.

We finished eating a little bit after 7pm. I was going to go speed-dating tonight at 7:30 but I chickened out. Part of me was afraid of getting rejected, and another part of me was afraid of the social uncertainty. Introductions are what I'm worst at. And another part of me was self-concious that I still smelled like Bucky's Barbecue from lunch. So, I didn't go. I'm a loser. It's probably why I'm still single.

I talked Tim into going over to "the house" so that we could run some cabling. He wants to put his HDTV in his bedroom. I have tried to talk him into putting it in the "den" and having his own tv room (it'd also fill up the extra room that I don't know what to do with) but he didn't go for it. His room does not have any coax lines. In fact, the two cable lines that are in the house are only in the den and the living room. I'm not sure if the cable company installed them this way or if somebody else did it, but somebody basically just drilled holes in the floor near the baseboard and shoved a coax cable through it from underneath the house. In other words, it looks... not so professional. It's tolerable, but I don't like it. I'd much rather run a cable from the attic and drop it into a box on the wall.



So, that was our plan. I drove to the church and grabbed a bunch of tools and wire and stuff and drove out to the house. Tim went back to our apartment and grabbed a few more belongings to bring over and met me at the house. I brought a studfinder with me and found out that there was a horizontal stud woodpiece maybe 12 inches above the receptacle. Even though we have top wall access from the attic, getting past that stud would be impossible. Not without tearing up the drywall, anyway.

We walked outside the house and looked underneath the crawlspace to consider running ethernet lines in the same manner as the coaxial lines, but I really didn't want to do that. I went back up into the attic and fed a fiberglass rod down inside the wall from the top until I hit the horizontal stud, to verify it was there. I was all ready to start knocking holes in the wall and running cable, but Tim decided he would rather wait "until daytime", which was disappointing to me since we had driven all the way out there and I had gathered all of the tools to get some work done to basically just turn around and go home.

So, that was my day. Kind of depressing. I try not to let myself get down a lot but it happens. Tomorrow will be a good day. I'm going to work and then cutting out early to go to the Winter Jam concert at the Bi-Lo center with my friend Jeremy, which is always fun. And it's like $10, so, you can't beat that. Hopefully we'll get good seats.

Later,

Joe

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I got up at 10AM this morning and went in to work around 11AM. I've been trying to come in a couple hours later on Wednesdays when I know I have to be there so late. It keeps me from getting frustrated since the day is so long.

One of my goals to complete this morning was calling Charter Communications since I had a question about my bill. I noticed when I got the bill this month (which is always dated for the end of the previous month, yet I seem to get it a week and a half later and am only left with maybe a week to pay it, which is kind of annoying in and of itself) that they had added Showtime to my plan. I'm not opposed to paying for premium movie channels, but I did find it kind of annoying that they added that to my plan without asking me about it, and it's not cheap either-$15 a month additional for a Showtime channel. It seems foolish these days with all of the free (and legal) opportunities to watch movies on the Internet via Hulu, etc. Why pay for something like Showtime on my cable service?

I called Charter customer service and was immediately connected to an operator. After they verified that I was who I said I was, I asked why the service had been added without my authorization or without any notification. The way it was explained to me was that the "pricing rates" had changed recently and the plan I was filed under had been moved to a higher plan that had Showtime, or something. The operator also explained that a lot of people had been calling with similar complaints about how it had been added. When the operator removed the option from my service, I then asked what new balance should I pay on the bill since I obviously didn't order or ask for the Showtime elective service but was told I had to pay the full amount the bill stated and that I'd be credited for it next month.

Anyway. Around 12:30pm, I headed out to lunch. Josh Amos asked me earlier in the day if I could meet him for lunch to talk about tech options for the upcoming middle and high school youth retreats. I went out to the youth offices in the trailer behind the church building, where Josh and Tyler were talking. The three of us headed out to lunch. Tyler rode with me and Josh followed us to Five Guys Burgers and Fries. That place makes good burgers but I just can't help but feel that every time I eat there, my heart is cursing at me on the inside for it. That's all I'm saying.

As we were eating, Jami Farnum joined us. We talked about options for the middle school retreat first, and then the high school retreat. I've grown rather unwilling of letting the youth team borrow equipment from the worship ministry simply because it never seems to get taken care of and protected in a manner that I would deem appropriate. And I told them this at lunch. With limited equipment and supplies that other areas of the church depend on, I wasn't sure if I could risk letting them take some of it off-site to a retreat in another state.

While we were talking, Jami stood up and ran out the back door. The rest of us were kind of confused but then realized what was going on. He had seen a tractor-trailer truck getting on the entrance ramp to the Interstate flip over while going on the turn. And here's how Jami and I are different: He grabbed a cell phone and called 911. I grabbed my camera and started taking pictures. Don't judge me. As a result of my picture taking, you get to see what it looked like. And we all know how people like to observe car wrecks.


We finished up our lunch meeting shortly after observing the truck and realizing the driver was probably ok. I gave Josh a few options of equipment he could use for the middle school retreat, and we're going to meet again in a couple of weeks to discuss options for the high school retreat. We will see how that goes.

Tyler rode back with me to the church and then he had to leave to go to class. I went back to my office and kept working. I finished the baptism DVD master for the 4 baptisms that we did at the beginning of February. I had done most of the work last night but I must have forgotten to save the project. Over the night, my computer did an automatic Windows Update. I hate it when it does that. It force-closes all of my applications and reboots and installs the updates. That is so annoying, especially since my only options are either "automatically install" or "turn off". So, when it rebooted, I lost my work and had to do it all again.

I also spent some time today researching options for a wireless translation system. For the past few weeks, we have had a growing Hispanic group of people attending the church, and someone has been sitting with them translating the service into Spanish while sitting next to them. We are looking at options to buy a system so that someone could transmit the audio to wireless receivers, allowing those that needed to hear to sit wherever they wanted to, and allowing the person doing the translating to sit where they need to in order to communicate effectively and not be a distraction to others. Most likely, that will end up being my office, since it's at the back of the worship center. We will see.

I worked on a few other projects today, including emailing new volunteers and trying to schedule more training and looking at my team assignent matrices to see where they might fit. Andrew showed up around 5:30pm today. We were both kind of hungry but waiting to eat dinner. Matt had scheduled to provide food for the band and worship team tonight from Bucky's BBQ. I was kind of bored just sitting around, so I went and found Dawn (Matt's ministry assistant) who was going to go pick up the food and I offered to go get it to save her some time. And to give me something to do.

Andrew rode with me and we went to Bucky's really quick to get the food. Kelly, one of the guys that works there, told me I had just missed seeing my parents and brother. They eat there every Wednesday, apparently. I paid for the food and we loaded it up into my SUV and drove back to the church and took the food upstairs.

Tonight during our worship team "mental gel time", we all had dinner together. Well, together at separate tables. We had a lot of new people join us tonight, including new vocalists and new instrumentalists. We had assigned seating at the different tables, with each new person surrounded by existing team members. I was assigned to a table of all vocalists, probably because whoever did the place assignments knows of my secret singing abilities.

We had paper with questions so we could get to know the new people better. I did a great job of introducing myself to Tara, a new vocalist at our table, asking questions and learning more about her. When we were all done eating, we came together as a group and then gave "reports" on the new people we had met. My entire table of people came up on stage and I grabbed the microphone and delivered my report like a proud elementary school student who had just finished a book report. As we went through the sheet talking about "How this person came to Southside", "Family facts", etc. I started making up stuff about Tara toward the end of the report because it sounded funnier. I wonder if anyone noticed.

We learned a lot of things about all of the new people tonight. After we were done with that little ice-breaker, Matt talked for a few minutes and then we broke up into groups. The vocalists stayed upstairs and the band went downstairs to get ready to practice. I stood around on the stage and helped get through soundcheck.

My friened Brian Schlarb stopped by to hang out with me for most of the evening. He even ran the slides for me and we sat and talked for a while. I'm trying to convince him to come run stuff with me on Sunday mornings.

We pretty much stayed in the control room, running slides and singing along with the band (and admiring at our ability to sing better than them, although that was probably just inexperience that made us feel that way). The practice went on for a long time tonight. We were there until 10pm.

I had to stop and get gas for my SUV on the way home. When I got home, I got out my Macbook and laid down on the floor in my apartment living room to watch "Fringe" online since I missed the new episode last night. While I was watching, I saw a spider crawling past my arm. I captured it with a bottle cap and let it sit there until I was done watching Fringe, and then released the spider into a bigger plastic container so that I could see what kind of spider it was.


As near as I could tell, it looked like a brown recluse, but I'm not really a spider expert. Bugs don't really bother me that much as long as they do their thing and I do my thing. It's when we have to interact that I feel the need to squish. I was going to let this one live but he seemed so agressive that I wasn't confident that it wouldn't just jump up and bite me. I was pretty sure it wasn't radioactive and pretty sure I wouldn't get super powers as a result, so the prospect of being bitten didn't seem exciting. I've never really liked spiders that much. I think it's because I saw the movie "Arachnophobia" as a kid and was convinced that things like that could really happen. You know, with spiders as big as houses and whatever.


I ended up stabbing it with a plastic fork, which was hard to do because this thing moved fast. Not as fast as my fork though.

So, that was my day. Tomorrow will be a good day. I've got some projects that I'll be working on at the church and I think I'm going speed-dating in the evening. I can honestly say I've never done that before. Hopefully it won't be awkward.

Later,

Joe

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Today was a very productive day. At least, it felt productive, anyway. And isn't that all that really matters? I got to the church this morning around 10:20AM. If I gave a more exact time, I'm sure it'd just be weird, so we'll just round it to 10:20. I went straight to my office, grabbed my clipboard, and headed to the worship planning meeting.

I was the first one in today, followed by Brian, Chris, and then Matt. James was out sick. Charlie came in a few minutes after we started. We talked about this past Sunday and how everything went. In short, I'm pretty awesome at what I do. But really, I can only give credit to the team and those God has placed around me. We moved on to talking about this Sunday. As we were closing the meeting, Brian said something about a Pepsi ad. I then commented, "Have you noticed how the new Pepsi logo looks kind of like the Obama logo?", which led into like a 20 minute discussion about our current presidential administration. Maybe I should not have said anything. Note to self.

Matt and I went to his office and had our followup tech conversation, to talk about details for the service. He's going to be out of town so James will be leading worship on Sunday. We talked about the stage setup and the song order and made plans for lighting and camera work. I could get used to this whole planning in advance thing. It really helps me to be more effective each week.

Right when we finished meeting (just before 12pm), Matt, Dawn, Laurie, Josh, and I got together to meet and talk about ideas for Jingle Jazz 2009. Yep, we've already started planning. This is the first time that I am really being included on the front end of planning. In the past years, it has all been planned and then I get informed about what we will be doing maybe 4-6 weeks before the event. I didn't really complain about it, but I guess someone thought it'd be fun to bring me in on the front creative side, which I really do enjoy.

We all piled into Dawn's minivan and went to this place called "Friends Restaurant". Supposedly they serve lots of fresh food and stuff, so that's why Matt wanted to go there. I ordered a cheeseburger and it was tasty. The people there were really nice too.


I won't be sharing much details here as we plan. We will be meeting monthly though, I think, so that should be cool. We spent about an hour today talking about theme ideas, staying mostly on the top level of the creative aspect and how a particular theme might look in the room, types of songs, program order, etc. Here are some of my notes from the meeting... although it's more a shot of my pen. Secrets, secrets.


We got back to Southside Fellowship just after 1pm. When I came back to my office, Andrew was already there and Nate was waiting for me at my desk so I could show him something in After Effects. About a year and a half ago, I made this really cool looking animated Vapor logo using a flowmap and foam effect (along with a particle playground effect in the background) to make it look like the Vapor "V" logo was building itself out of bubbles. It took me about 20 minutes and I really didn't perfect it or anything since I was just trying out an idea. Like most things that I don't spend a lot of time on, the Vapor team really liked it so Nate wanted to learn how I made it.

I opened up the project and walked him through it layer by layer and described the effects I used and how they worked. Of course, I had to reteach myself some as we went through since I didn't exactly remember what I had done to make it work that way. We spent a few minutes looking at that and then Nate left and I went back to work.

I got permission today from the guitarist that came in on Sunday (Rodrigo Rodriguez) to post some video of the service from Sunday online. I thought it might be a good resource for people at Southside as well as for him since he didn't have any video on his website.

We had a lot more frustration (at least, I did) on Sunday with our intercom system. At one point, something popped so loud in my headset that it actually made my eardrum hurt. I think the problem may be related to how we are using "Portacom" belt backs with our existing "ClearCom" control unit. We've had the Portacom system for years. It's not great but it works. The ClearCom system was purchased when we moved into our new facility in 2005. I like it a lot but it's expensive to expand. I tried to do some research today on connecting the two systems together successfully. My research efforts proved unsuccessful. My Google search returned several results, with the top result being my own personal blog. I opened up the result to see if I had anything particularly helpful to say to me to help me solve my problem. But, I didn't. It was kind of funny though that my keywords led me back to a previous blog entry that I wrote myself.

One of the projects that I wanted to tackle this week was the recurring ground loop we had in the control room. I've tried to work on this a few times in the past and have had limited success. Part of it is because a lot of our system setup is a variety of old and new equipment and very much just a hodge podge of equipment. Some of it I like a lot. Others, I just use because it's what we have.

When we moved the video setup to the desk farthest from the door in the control room, it was a great improvement but the cables behind the switcher looked like a total mess. While trying to figure out the ground loop issue today, Andrew and I also decided to tackle the mess. Andrew had the great idea to run the wires inside pvc piping, which we could also use to separate the electrical cables from everything else which might help with any electrical interference issues. Piping is cheap, so I figured it was worth a shot.

Here's what we started out with.


Pretty messy. I let Andrew do most of the work on disconnecting it all and running the wire through the pipes while I worked on some other things. My dad came by the church around 2:45pm to show me a new truck that he bought at the car auction today. He always shows me what he buys even though I am not interested in buying it myself, mainly because he knows I like to drive other vehicles besides my own and I do interact with a lot of people that may potentially want to buy it from him, which is how he makes a little extra cash.

I looked at the truck and inspected the engine and the cab and the truck bed, the tires, etc. Other than being high mileage, it was in great condition. If he had not told me it was high mileage, I would have thought it was a brand new truck, that's how good it looked. I drove it around the east end of the parking lot at the church, testing the brakes, 4 wheel drive, etc. Hey, if I'm going to recommend a vehicle to somebody else, I want to know for sure what it can do. That's how much I stand behind my word. That and it gave me something to do in an afternoon that would have otherwise just been dull with me sitting at my desk all day staring at the computer screen.

I did some research today for Southside Christian School. Somebody on staff there emailed Matt asking about our projector screens and he forwarded it to me. I pulled out the documentation/detailed quotes on all of our equipment that we purchased back in 2003 after "the fire" (which, really, I only have by chance because I found it underneath a pile of trash one time) and got the information on where we bought our projector screens, the size, model numbers, etc. I also made a few recommendations on what I thought would work well for what they wanted to do ("put a projector in the gymnasium"). Not sure if they will use my recommendation or not. Probably not. But that's ok.

I worked with Andrew on the control room reorganization project. Here's what "we" did (all I really did was hook up the switcher again and test everything).


The pipes do help it look somewhat neater, I guess. I'm mainly worried that now it's just going to be that much harder to troubleshoot if we ever need to, but here's hoping we won't need to. I'm still pretty sure that we're the only church in Greenville though that has a carpeted piece of plywood for a production desk. Note I said "only church". I'm sure there are like a hundred roller rinks that have carpeted sound booths. Haha.

At 5pm, I had to go upstairs to Room 202 really quick to show Sharon, one of the ministry assistants, how to play a DVD. I always find the sound board up there with the weirdest settings. I think some people just keep pushing buttons until it eventually works, and then forget that all of the buttons they pushed earlier changed a lot of other settings that they didn't know about. It happens all of the time. I looked at it right away and got the DVD working for her and showed her what to do next time and then went back downstairs. On my way down, Laura (the church Publications director) heard me "dinging" the bell on the elevator, so I taught her "the game". Yep, more and more staff are learning my elevator game and trying to beat my score. The only bad thing is, what if someone ever really gets stuck in there. All we're going to think is, "Man, that person just beat my high score..."

My brother Tim showed up as Andrew and I were finishing testing everything in the control room. We eventually determined that one of the tv monitors was causing the ground loop. I replaced it with my extra production monitor (the Polaroid flat screen that I bought myself a couple of years ago but keep at the church).

I think I might take the extra tv monitor and put it in my office and run a program feed from the switcher to it. We are considering acquiring a translation transmitter system for some Spanish-speaking people that have started attending Southside recently, and might be using my office for the translator to sit in and listen to the message and be able to communicate at a moderate volume without disturbing other people. I can't say that I'm in love with the concept of more people coming in and out of my office on Sunday mornings, but, it is the most convenient option right now, so, it's not that big of a deal I guess.

Tim and I went to Zaxby's a little bit after 6pm for dinner. I finally got the chance to use my gift card that I've had for a while. You know, the one with 61 cents left on it. It took the cashier like 4 times to get the card balance to zero... but at least I saved 61 cents. It probably cost Zaxby's more on the paper though that the machine printed each time the balance came up. Oh well.

I really like the signs around the restaurant at Zaxby's that describe the different sauces, sandwhiches, and related food items. This one made me laugh as I read it across the room.


Tim and I came back to the church right at 7pm. I let Andrew, Tim, and Dan finish the setup for the stage, which wasn't really a whole lot since most everything stayed the same. I helped do a quick setup and then back to my office to keep working. We had a baptism service a couple of Sundays ago, and every time we have baptism, I always record the actual baptisms and edit that back in with each person's original testimony that we videotaped and then I produce a DVD for each family. It really doesn't take too long but sometimes I use the oppotunity to get a little more creative and teach myself something new about the software that I have to use.

So, I spent some time tonight making a cooler looking DVD menu design. I also had to render each of the clips out to the proper codec for the DVD authoring. If you're following along on my blog, you'll recall that I already did the actual editing for each testimony when I recorded the footage and edited it the same Sunday morning and showed them all again during the third service. So, all I had to do tonight was re-export and work on the DVD menu.

At 9pm, I stopped and went upstairs. Tommy had stopped by earlier in the day and wanted to show me some videos he had been working on. Tommy is so talented and gets to spend a lot of time being creative with video. It makes me kind of jealous, I'm not going to lie. I wish I could spend 40 hours a week just editing video. I bet it would be a lot of fun and I could make some cool things. He showed me a promo for the upcoming high school "winter retreat" (in March). It was almost 5 minutes long so he wanted my opinion on what to cut. I think I gave some constructive criticism on the pacing of the edit that would help make it better. He also showed me another video he's working on as a testimony/grace story of one of the students, and we analyzed the lighting/coloring and I gave some suggestions on how to improve the coloring in post-production.

I left around 10pm to come home. A bunch of people were going out to Brixx pizza and asked me to come along, but I had already eaten dinner and knew it would be too big of a temptation for me to not eat again. And, if not eating, I'd end up at the end of the table, probably not being included in conversation, and looking for ways to get up and leave. Just being honest. Ruthie agrees with me.

Tomorrow is going to be a fun day. It's Wednesday, so it will be a long day. I'm probably going to come in later in the day though so that I can serve the band faithfully while they practice at night.

Later,

Joe

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My days off are turning out to still be rather productive for me. There's always been something in my personality that has told me, "If you're not busy working on something, then you're not doing anything worth your time". It's hard for me to want to relax. I find that I generally have to run myself completely down before I even want to stop, and even then it's only because I have to. I'm working to improve this about myself. I'm not perfect. Although I am pretty close. Just kidding.

So, part of not really caring about a "day off" was the whole "what's the point of not doing anything for a day" mentality. I mean, what difference did it make to anyone else whether or not I chose to take a break?

Anyway. More on that later as I think about it.

I stayed up late last night even though I was feeling tired when I came home from Dan's party. I ended up going back to the church around 11:45pm. There was some kind of AARP Driver's Education class in there or something today and they needed a lapel microphone. My friend Bob Milks had asked me if I could get one in there for him to use since he was teaching the class. The only good working lapel we had was one of the additional wireless units in the worship center. We bought two new wireless units back in August to enhance our capabilities in the Worship Center, but find that we don't really use one of them on a regular basis. A few weeks ago, I had Andrew take the one we don't use regularly out of the rack so that I could keep it reserved for video productions, since it's handy to have a wireless lapel microphone every now and then. Of course, we needed it this past Sunday since we had 10 singers all on stage at the same time, so Andrew had to put it back in the rack.

I came in and got the microphone out of the rack. Then, I promptly got distracted playing around on the piano for about 20 minutes, and then went and found the wireless lapel belt back. I looked in a few places since it wasn't where I thought it would be and finally found it buried in the bottom of the wireless microphone box we keep at the sound board. I took the unit upstairs to Room 202 (where the event was), and set it up on the board up there. I found the entire sound system still on, which wasn't really surprising because even though I tell everyone to turn it off, it gets left on all of the time. The amps will probably give out one day as result, but there isn't much I can do about that if people don't follow procedure. I'll admit, I've left it on a few times myself, but usually I end up going back upstairs (and sometimes, on occasion, driving all the way back when I've already gone home) when I remembered that I left it on.

After testing the microphone and setting the levels (while singing "In the Sweet By and By" in my old-school Gospel singing voice which is quite spectacular), I turned off the system and went home. I ended up staying up so late watching tv that I felt sick. I managed to catch up on my sleep during the night though. I tossed and turned and woke up a lot, but still got some pretty decent sleep. I woke up around 10:45 feeling refreshed. I laid in bed for a while reveling in the fact that I didn't really have to do much today.

My dad called me a little while later to see what time I'd be coming out to the house. We made plans last week to move a refrigerator from my parents' house to the house that we're moving into. I don't know what happened to the "old" fridge in the house, but it's gone. I told him I'd be at the house a little bit after 1pm.

I got dressed and headed out from my apartment around 12:30. I stopped by the McDonald's near my parents' house on the way to get some lunch, and later remembered why I don't like eating from there. I gave some of my food to the cat that I like at my parents' house, and even she wouldn't eat it, which is probably a bad sign.

My dad had just finished painting the hood for the oven from the house, which was good because it looked terrible before the paint-job. I looked at that while walking around holding my McDonald's fries (oh yeah, I'm eating fries again) and drink. My dad backed his truck up to the back porch, and I got out the handtrucks and we put the fridge on the truck. I thought it'd be better to lay the fridge down flat, but my dad thought it'd be better to let it stand up tall. I wasn't the one doing the driving, so I really didn't care that much.


I did take some pics while we were driving. I was supposed to stay behind my dad the entire time in case something happened. I'll be honest, the idea of "something happening" and me being behind the truck to help take care of the issue wasn't exactly appealing, because the only thing I could think of that would happen would be the fridge falling out and, you know, impaling my Trailblazer. And me. And my strapping good looks. And I'd probably spill my drink in the process too.

A few times, I got up beside my dad to take pictures of him driving. Yes, I was driving and doing this at the same time, but I think I've already covered my opinion on the safety issues. I still remained relatively focused on my primary task (driving).


We took a different route to the house than I would normally take, although it was probably quicker. My parents have always called this route, "through the country". We used to go to my grandparents house (which will soon be "my house") all the time, at least once a week growing up and always took this route when coming from Piedmont. "Through the country" basically means driving on Highway 86 through downtown Piedmont (which takes about 30 seconds, haha) and then staying on Highway 86 until it hits W. Georgia Road until you end up in Simpsonville.

When we got to the house, I parked on the street (well, on the cul-de-sac) and my dad backed his truck down the driveway so we could unload the fridge at the carport (fancy way of saying garage without walls). Of course, in backing into the carport, I think he forgot that the fridge was taller than the roof of the carport. Oops. He pulled forward to see if he had hit something and started to back up again and I pointed out the fridge was sticking up like a foot taller than the roof. It dented the fridge slighty but the house was fine.

I got up in the bed of the truck to get the fridge down. Of course, I stood up as I got in the back of the truck, forgetting again that the carport roof was low since I was standing on the truck. I hit my head on the roof. Hard. It hurt like the dickens, although I'm not sure where that phrase came from. I can only surmise that Charles Dickens used to hurt a lot of people. Probably with his less than stellar writing. I'm just kidding. I don't know anything about Charles Dickens. What larks, Pip. What larks.

We got the fridge out and checked out where it was supposed to fit before bringing it inside.


As we brought the fridge inside, it was a tight fit against the door and we scratched up the front of the fridge pretty good since we had left the key inside the deadbolt. Of course, we almost broke the key off in the door in the process. Oh well.

After getting the refrigerator inside, we also put the oven hood back up. That took a little bit of manuevering but we got it. I held it up and used a drill to put the screws back in place, and then stripped the wires and let my dad reconnect them. Before leaving the house, we decided to look around the back of the house. There's an old tool shed in the back yard which I was pretty much convinced was just full of old junk and buckets. I was pretty close. Nothing of real value in there.

As my dad was getting ready to leave, he asked if there was anything from my apartment that I wanted to bring over to the house while he had his truck out. At this point, I'm pretty much ready to bring over whatever I don't want to use at my apartment anymore, which is a lot of furniture and electronics. The house isn't really secured yet (we are waiting for blinds to be installed) and there is a key hidden on the property somewhere (can't quite tell you where that is, now can I?) so my parents advised me not to bring over anything valuable just yet. I hold a loose opinion on what is "valuable" that I own... since most things are just that--things, but I suppose it is a good idea to be smart about my investments.

We ended up coming to my apartment and taking over a table from my bedroom and the coffee table from the living room. Kind of random but that was it. On the way to the apartment, I made a few phone calls. I'm shooting an event at Rolling Greens on Saturday (yep, Singles Awareness Day). It's some kind of assisted living home and they're hosting a Valentine's Love Cruise or something. My aunt works there as the transportation director and asked me to come shoot the event. At this point, I don't really know if I'm getting paid, but I don't really care. It gives me something to do on what would otherwise be a dull Saturday evening.

I also called my friend Gewan to see if I could borrow his DSLR battery grip for the event. He has the exact same digital SLR camera as me (the Canon Rebel XTi) so we are always trading and borrowing accessories.

After my dad and I unloaded the tables at the house, he went home and I went back to my apartment. I got back just before 5pm. Tim was sitting around watching tv. I asked him how his day was as I laid on the couch watching tv with him. My assistant at the church, Andrew, called me to see if I had dinner plans, which I rarely do. Even before he said it, I knew the place to eat would be Oriental House. We're both nuts about that place. I brought Tim along with me and we met Andrew at 5:30pm for dinner.

Andrew writes a blog almost-daily like I do. Some would argue that I am his muse since I do write every day and he didn't start up his blog until after he met me. It's always a little weird when we get together because we talk about our blogs and when I ask "so what did you do today", I know I'm going to read about it in detail in the blog later, which can make for some boring in-person conversation.

Dinner was fantastic. Tim didn't talk much at dinner. I had some General Tso's chicken, and either it was particularly spicier tonight, or my tolerance for spicy food was particularly lower, but it was great. A little sweating never hurt anybody. Tim and Andrew sat on the same side of the booth, which was good because one of my favorite things to do after eating in a restaurant when sitting in a booth is to turn sideways and stretch my legs out on the bench in the booth. Sometimes I prop up one knee and rest my arm on it while talking. It's my "I'm comfortable with my social setting and the people around me" pose. If I don't do it with you when we eat, well, assume what you will from that.

Tim and I came home after dinner. I sat around on the couch for a while surfing the internet while Tim watched some tv. I really didn't do much for the rest of the evening. I tried to experiment making my own bokeh hood for my DSLR, but I don't have the right kind of lens to do it, I think. I had some interesting results but I think I'm going to have to just get a standard 50mm lens to do it, which is good because I've been wanting to get one for portraits anyway.


So, that was my day. Not super exciting, but I got some things done and still found it relaxing. I'm looking forward to coming in to work tomorrow refreshed and ready to tackle projects. I've got a few goals set for what I want to accomplish tomorrow. Let's see how many of them I can get done.

Later,

Joe

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I had a fun and relaxing weekend. I waited to write my blog entry until now because it does take some time to write, and I valued my sleep last night over writing an entry. Strange to hear, I know. So, Saturday morning, I got up around 9:30AM. Rex and Catie's dog, Sasha, came barreling down the stairs to wake me up on the couch.

We didn't really have any plans Saturday to do anything except sit around, play some StarCraft, and just relax. I was talking to Rex about an idea I wanted to try out--making my own lens bokeh, where you basically cut a custom shape and cover up the front of the lens on the camera, and the out-of-focus lights will take on that shape. Kind of cool.

So, we headed out a little bit later to go to Target to buy some construction paper and scissors. After Target, Rex and I decided to get some lunch. We drove around a few places but then decided on the local Brixx pizza. I had some pasta. At a pizza place, I know. It was so good.

When we finished eating, we drove around a few neighborhoods in the area and looked at houses. There are a lot of nice neighborhoods in the area. When we got back to Rex and Catie's house (they live in downtown Greensboro, on a downtown street rowhouse, actually), Rex and I played some StarCraft. Yes, again. You can probably skip the whole next paragraph because you know I'm only going to talk about the game and you'll get bored.

We played this new map that I had never played before, so I had the uncertainty of "fog of war" (where you can't see any areas you haven't "explored" yet) so I didn't know the layout. Rex and I played against three computers, and one of them quickly came in and wiped out my entire base. But not before I snuck some of my buildings and guys out. I completely rebuilt on a separate spot of the map (with Rex's help/protection) and built up a sizeable force to then attack the enemy computers. I ended up doing some decent damage but ultimately, we lost. It took 2 and 1/2 hours to lose though.

The entire time we played, Sasha laid in my lap and slept. That dog sure likes me.


Catie came home after her work meeting. We all spent some time chilling in their office, and then started up another game of StarCraft. Yeah, I know, we're nerds. Around 6:30, Rex and I went downstairs to clean up the kitchen so that Catie could cook dinner. We put away all of the clean dishes and then washed the dirty ones, cleaned the stove, and wiped down the counters. Catie cooked pretzel chicken and mashed potatoes while Rex and I watched "Bender's Big Score", the Futurama movie that came out a couple of years ago. It was hilarious.

Dinner was fantastic. Catie can cook really well. Around 8:30, I decided it was time to get going, since the drive home was kind of long. I'd like to say the drive was rather unventful. It was, so, I suppose I can say that. The drive was rather uneventful. I had to stop and use a public restroom on the way home. I suppose you could consider that eventful, but not really. I got home around 11:45pm. By the time I unpacked and took a shower, it was almost 1AM, and I didn't really want to stay up too late writing a blog entry so I just went to bed instead.

I fell asleep quickly and got a few hours of sleep. I woke up this morning at 6AM. I was tired when I woke up and I almost fell back to sleep. I got up and got dressed and headed out. Sometimes when I am worried about oversleeping, or want to save time the next morning, I go to bed partially dressed. Don't judge me, I'm just being honest. So, I woke up this morning and put on my black shirt, took care of my perpetual bedhead situation, and headed out.

I got to Southside Fellowship just before 6:30AM. I went in to the worship center and started bringing all of the equipment online in the tech booth. I worked on setting up the forward cameras for the IMAG today while watching the video announcements on the projectors to make sure everything was good to go. It's always good to test on the live system.

I spent about 15 minutes looking for the youth HD camera but couldn't find it. I looked in the youth trailer, my office, and the youth rooms upstairs but couldn't find it so I just called Tommy. I think I woke him up when I called, but he had the camera at his house, so I was kind of a jerk and I made him bring it in. I really needed it this morning. Tommy didn't really mind though. At least, that is what I told myself so I wouldn't feel so bad after making him get up after only 3 hours of sleep.

I spent the rest of the time before the first service started getting the cameras ready and configured, communicating with volunteers, and testing everything else. We had 5 cameras going today and it looked really nice. We had the two normal cameras in the back of the room, two additional cameras on the floor toward stage left and stage right, and then I had one camera on stage pointing at just Matt on the piano for a standard shot which looked pretty cool.


We had some new volunteers return today for additional training and observation. Both Tonya and David came back to observe slides, and they both had a chance to operate it live too for some experience. Russ and Joel also came back today for more camera training. Lindsey (ministry assistant at the church) and her husband Mark came by today to observe Tyler on lights and they may possibly be helping out there, and Canon, a teenager, came by to observe Zack run the video playback. I am excited to get to work and serve with all of these new volunteers on the teams.

I think everyone enjoyed the video announcements today. I did some pretty cool (yet simple) things in After Effects that I think came across well for title/transition slides. Not my best work or anything, but new and fresh and creative, which is what I was going for. I like to learn new things, and using that program continues to challenge me to learn new things. Here they are if you want to see them. Feel free to watch them in HD on YouTube... it looks nice.



The IMAG and camera work today was excellent. All of the services went really well. The third-service was the best video/camera-wise but that's mainly because by that time, we've perfected our art and are just executing. Ron, one of the camera guys, did a great job moving his camera to a better location and actually ran the camera handheld for most of the morning and I didn't even know he wasn't using a tripod. That's how stable it was.

Here are some pictures from the Valentine's prelude song medley that we did today.





I wanted to post some of the creative camera work with Rodrigo Rodriguez (the guest artist/guitar player had performing with us today) but I don't think I have copyright clearance to do that. Or, at a minimum, I didn't ask for it, so I probably shouldn't post any of it. Here's a picture from the DVD though. This guy was really talented and humble and also, talented.


Between services today, I did a fair amount of running around and fixing/adjusting things. People kept coming and asking me to do things and I had to turn a lot of people away and tell them to just email me about it later because I couldn't think about it right then. That's one of the downsides of being in a booth and being approachable--when I'm focused, I need to stay focused and think about directing tech for the worship center services, not about other problems in the building, dvds that people want copies of, computer questions they may have, etc. That's why I don't come out of the control room sometimes. Nothing personal folks. It's just my brain can only hold so much at once and I like to stay focused. I am good at multitasking though, but in that tye of environment on Sunday morning, I only have so little time to accomplish a lot.

Anyway. Everything went very well today. I spent a lot of time cleaning everything up after church, putting away cameras, trash, etc. Tim offered to pick up some lunch on his way home, which was nice because all I wanted to do was go home and lay down. On my way out (around 1pm), Nate stopped and asked if he could show me something he was working on in After Effects that he needed my help on. We walked out to the youth trailer/modular and he showed me one of his renders and what he wanted to accomplish, so I think I'm going to be helping him learn how to do what he wants to do later this week.

On my way home, I called Ruthie and tried to convince her that a local news station had seen our Valentines video interview and wanted to bring us in as guest reporters/interviewers. She didn't fall for it. I should have made up more intricate details, which I often do when trying to prank someone or fabricate a story for fun. We did talk for a minute about her recent speed-dating experience at Liquid Highway (local coffee store chain) where she was on the news. I am considering going to the next speed-dating event. It might be fun, you never know. The only problem is that its hosted in a coffee shop, and I don't drink coffee or anything so I'm sure I'll feel awkward. Maybe I can buy one cup of coffee and pretend to drink it. Or just get an empty cup and fill it with water and pretend its hot. Who knows.

I came home and ate some lunch and laid on the couch for a while. I went to my room around 4:30 to take a nap but decided that an hour-long nap wasn't that enticing. I had to be at my friend Dan's place at 6pm since a few of us were getting together for a small party for Dan since his birthday is tomorrow. I packed up my Xbox, Rock Band/Guitar Hero instruments, my DSLR camera, and headed out.

I got to the house around 6pm. Dan's fiance, Rachel, lives in the house part, and Dan lives in an apartment connected to the side of the house, which is kind of cool when we all want to get together, everyone can just go to the same place. I got out my DSLR and took some pictures while we were hanging around. I'm not sure if I've posted a picture of Dan and Rachel on my blog before, so here's some faces to go with the names.


We ate dinner, played some Halo, and ate some ice cream and cake while singing happy birthday. My deep operatic vibrato made a slight appearance but I was slightly busy taking pictures that I didn't really concentrate on singing that much.


We played some more Halo but it really was no contest. I thought it'd be fairer to put Dan, Jami, and Dustin on one team against me... because I have been playing Halo for like 5 years and they're all brand-new to the game, but we did two versus two instead.

I left around 8:45 since I was feeling pretty tired. I came straight home. So, that was pretty much the last two days of my life. Try not to get super excited. I'm still debating what this blog will look like after its one-year anniversary. I may decide to not blog every day (or at all). Feel free to leave your comments on what you think I should do. I think that if "enough" people told me in writing that its worth my time to write every day, that I could keep doing it, but otherwise I have way too many anonymous readers that I'm not really concerned about upsetting or losing if I stop blogging every day. Not that I'm against anonymous reading (I read lots of other peoples' blogs and never comment on them). I'm just saying that I can't take your opinion into consideration if you never voice it. That's all. And it takes a lot of energy to want to do this every day, when sometimes, I'd rather just not do it at all.

Anyway. It's 10:45pm now and I just remembered I have to go back to the church to hook up a lapel microphone in Room 202 for an event in there tomorrow. I don't really want to go in on my "day off" or get a phone call, so I better just go take care of it now. 5 bucks says I get distracted and end up playing around on the piano for 45 minutes.

Later,

Joe

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So, my plan this morning of course was to be at work at 9AM. That meant getting up at 8, packing for my short weekend trip, getting breakfast for everyone, and then being at work by 9. That didn't happen. You want to know why? Presumably so, because you're reading a blog about my life. Well, I woke up at 9. In fact, my alarm went off at 8 and I shut it off and rolled back over. I'm terrible at that. It's my worst fear to do that on a Sunday morning... and I have before.

I let Tyler and Andrew know that I was running late. I jumped out of bed, got dressed, packed some clothes (I'm a guy... it took me like a minute to pack... but it's not because I keep my clothes separated by accessories/colors or anything) and went out the door. I got out of my apartment complex and realized I forgot my cowboy hat. I had to have that for my trip, so I turned around and drove back to my apartment to get it.

I picked up some chicken biscuits on my way and still made it to the church a little bit after 9:30AM. My main goal today was to finish the video announcements for Sunday. I also wanted to work on the lights with Tyler but decided to just let Andrew and Tyler focus on that while I rendered video.

I ended up throwing away everything I worked on last night for the video announcement opener. I just didn't like it. I get like that sometimes when I come back with "fresh eyes" to look on a project, and it usually turns out for the better. The new intro that I made was kind of cool. I used some expressions in After Effects (I am teaching myself how to use those) and made the camera wiggle a little bit while it was parented to a null object that I moved around (think of the null object as a dolly track for the camera, with the camera being what the user sees in front of them).

I did the entire project in HD so it took a while to render the animations. My computer is slow at rendering so I took breaks while doing test comps and renders to help with the lights. At one point, Tyler asked me to sit at the piano so he could see what the lighting looked like. I posed for a picture while pretending to play the piano and sing. Look at me, I'm a natural. I really do want to take piano lessons. Does anyone want to teach me? I can trade for computer lessons... or "being awesome" lessons, or something...


Tyler is so creative with lighting and design. I love having his expertise on the team. I also really like that I can just give him some basic notes and he can go from there and turn it into detailed work. That means less thinking for me and less work too.

I worked nonstop through lunchtime on the video announcements. I delegated the animation project/illustration for Brian's message to Andrew since I knew I wasn't going to have time to get it done before leaving at 2:30pm. I gave Andrew a few concepts/ideas on how to approach it using Adobe Premiere and then let him take care of it.

I finished the video announcements and did a final render. There is something wrong with the codecs on my computer I think, because everything I render that is downscaled from HD to SD ends up looking blurry when it didn't before. Computers can be so frustrating sometimes.

At 2:30pm, I finished everything I could do so I left. I wanted to set up the cameras for Sunday and get them calibrated and white-balanced to the lighting on stage, but there's some kind of event going on in the worship center ("gymnasium") tomorrow morning, so, I can't exactly set up expensive cameras where they can get hit by basketballs and kids. I guess I'll have to set those up on Sunday morning.

I left the church and headed straight toward Greensboro to spend the weekend with my friends Rex and Catie Morgan. I made great time driving there and didn't really have to speed. I pretty much just drove as fast as everyone else on the Interstate. I think the key was making it past Charlotte before the rush hour time. I only got stuck in traffic for a few minutes but it wasn't too bad.

I spent most of the trip driving and also checking/writing emails on my phone, twittering, looking at Facebook, etc. Don't worry, I'm a safe driver. I read really fast and I can glance at something and keep a visual picture in my head (remember, I have good photographic memory) so that helps with reading things while on the go. This is kind of funny--my sister was on the news the other day when they were doing a story about "texting while driving" and they asked her if she ever used her cell phone while driving. It's a good thing they didn't ask me.

I got to Rex's house around 5:15pm. He was still at work, but Catie was at home. Their dog, Sasha, was also super-excited to see me. She always is. Catie said that besides her and Rex, I am really the only one that Sasha likes to sit with and pays attention to all of the time. I guess it's just my bubbly personality.


Catie had to leave to go to work so I sat at the house for a few minutes until Rex came home. We sat around at the house for a bit and then decided to go out and get some dinner. On our way out, we packed a bunch of big cardboard boxes and trash from Rex's garage into my SUV that they've been needing to dispose of. We found a big dumpster at the old apartments where Rex and Catie used to live and threw them in there. I wasn't really sure if that was frowned upon or not, but I don't think it really matters.

We went to Zaxby's for dinner and it was good. As always. Rex and I talked a lot about what he's been up to at work and then I shared some about how tech things have been going at the church, direction I see the tech team moving in the next year or so, and how God has been working through Southside.

When we were through with dinner, Rex and I went back to his house and played some StarCraft. I love that game. We had a couple of bad games to start off where the computers rushed us but then got a good game that lasted for about an hour and a half. The highlight of the game was Rex launching 6 simultaneous nuclear strikes on one of the enemy computers, knocking out their entire base in 5 seconds. It was awesome. I'd continue on talking about it, but I don't want you to think of me as a nerd.

Around 11, we left the house to go visit Catie at Green Valley Grill, where she works as a server/waitress. Rex ordered a drink from the bar and we chilled there for a bit and talked to Catie some and met a couple of her friends from there. Catie had to work until closing, and I didn't really want to stand around for that long, so Rex and I left. We went to Harris Teeter to buy breakfast food for tomorrow (technically, later today, I suppose) but neither Rex nor I are real big breakfast eaters so it was hard to pick out what to buy.

We came back to the house and chilled for a while, listening to some music and watching videos on YouTube. Tomorrow (again, technically, later today, but, whatever) is going to be a fun day. I'm really not sure what exactly we're going to be doing, besides, of course, playing lots of StarCraft. For me though, that's one of the most relaxing things I can do--spend a weekend with a couple of friends with no itinerary, playing games.

Later,

Joe

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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

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Today started out kind of slow for me. I got up at 9AM and forced myself to stay up and not fall back asleep, even though I didn't really go to bed until like 3AM (caught up on some tv shows online... I really should be more diligent about not watching those as I go to bed, as they only keep me up). I sat around the apartment for an hour or so and then got dressed and headed out.

My first stop on my way to work was to my bank to change my address. I wasn't sure of the procedure to change the mailing address on file with my accounts, so when I approached the teller, I just asked. She asked me for a proof of residency or something but wasn't sure of the proper procedure either. One of the other tellers, Jodi, recognized me and was like "Oh we know him just change the address, it's no big deal". That was kind of nice... although what if it was someone who looked like me? I guess I just have an innocent looking face. What do you think? Would you trust me?


So, they changed my address for me and I left. That was all I needed to do there today. I stopped by Wendy's on my way to church, planning to just work through lunch. I am by myself a lot on Wednesdays now so I figured I'd just eat lunch and make it a long day of working. I got to the church around 11AM.

I started working on the video announcements for Sunday. I've got to get everything for Sunday done by lunchtime Friday because I'm driving up to Greensboro, NC this weekend to hang out with my friends Rex and Catie, which I am really looking forward to. Normally I work a lot on Friday night and on Saturday to finish things up, but I won't be able to, even though this Sunday is shaping up to be a big day!

I brought in the footage to Premiere from the hard drive recorder. The audio sounded pretty clean and it looked ok for the most part. The red backlight looked nice but all of the shots were kind of dark. I think I may have underexposed the footage some. Here's a before/after shot of Art Ringger (he reads my blog daily, so I figured might as well give him a shoutout) with the footage. I think that I was able to brighten it up significantly and improve the color.


I white-balanced the camera before I started but this camera tends to output a little bit green, I have found. It's not really a big deal because I can always adjust the color some in post-production. The only annoying thing is that one dead pixel. Can you spot it? Look at Art's left shoulder. It just sticks out, right there.

At 12pm, Matt knocked on my door (I have started shutting it to help me concentrate when I'm working) to see if I wanted to go to lunch with him and James to Jersey Mike's. I went along. I am usually the one who drives when we go to lunch, although I'm not sure why. I don't even really like driving, although I am exceptional at driving in reverse. Just ask the DMV. They should know, I took the drivers test 5 times to get my license and aced that part every time. The driving in reverse part. I failed parallel parking a lot. Who does that anyway.

I got a mini sub at Jersey Mike's but still spent like $7, however that works. I think I got scammed. But it was good. I kept it simple today with roast beef, turkey, provolone, and spicy mustard. And onions. I love onions and they love me. One time I ate part of an onion like an apple. That was a little off-subject.

When Matt sat down without his coat on, I greeted him with a "What's up, Sweater-Vest" and made him pose for a picture.


You can also see here that Matt brought in his own chips, which I think may be frowned upon in the restaurant business. I argued that they weren't losing any money if you weren't going to buy chips from them anyway. No one at the store said anything. We ate a quick lunch and got back around 1pm.

When we got back to the church, I spent the rest of the afternoon going through the footage for the video announcements, editing out parts that are usable, deleting what we don't need, etc. I worked for about 2 and a half hours but didn't really make a lot of progress. I spent some time trying to improve the contrast on some of the clips where a few of the pastors were wearing dark shirts. Charlie was wearing a black shirt, and against my black background, he literally looks like a floating head with floating arms to the side. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that, other than add artificial lighting gain and blow out the contrast so that you can see the shirt. It will make the background lighter too though. Boo.

I called Charter Communications today too to schedule a transfer of my cable service from the apartment to the house. I was hoping to convince them to do a connect at the house sometime soon and do a disconnect at the apartment toward the end of the month, but they said they had to disconnect first, than reconnect at the new residence. So, first I scheduled a disconnect for "sometime after February 15". I figured anytime after that would be fine. They scheduled it for the 16th. Then, we scheduled a connect appointment at the house. The furthest connect date was Februray 11th... a few days before the disconnect. So, either I persuaded them with the power of my words (and my cowboy hat was probably involved somehow) to do a connect before a disconnect, or they messed up. Either way, having them come out to do a connect on the 11th is going to be pretty inconvenient because I'm going to have to move the cable box and cable modem out to the house on that day in order for them to test the service. Boo to the second power.

I also contacted Duke Power and scheduled a stop-service on the electricity in the apartment for the end of the month. I wanted the power to stay on for a while after we moved out so that I could have electricity on to clean, etc.

Around 3:30, Tommy stopped by my office to borrow an adapter for a video shoot he was setting up for. I took a break and went out to help him get things set up. He was using the firepod that I fixed for them and connecting it to their Macbook to record the audio. The shoot centered around a discipleship time with Ruthie and a couple of girls that she disciples. Tommy wanted to basically set everything up and then leave so that they could talk without him being there distracting and interrupting.

I helped him get the cameras set and offered some suggestions on lighting as Ruthie and the girls came in. We had to spend a few minutes figuring out an audio problem and electrical noise with the camera. Ruthie borrowed my camera and took a few pictures. Here are some of the best ones of me, because, hey, this is MY blog, after all.



We started the recording and then left. Tommy came back to my office with me. I had about 20 minutes until I had to leave to meet Andrew for dinner, so I looked at the video announcement footage some more and then caught up on my blog reading for the day. I read so many blogs. Church leadership blogs, friends' blogs, professional video production blogs, and sometimes just random blogs that I find interesting. It's so easy too to have them all in Google Reader--I never have to go to each site to check for new entries. I just log into one place and Google Reader grabs all of the new entries for me. I subscribe to my own blogs too. I'm not going to lie... if I get bored, sometimes I read my own blog entries and they make me laugh. I think I'm hilarious.

At 5pm, I left the church to go meet Andrew at Oriental House for dinner. That place is so freakin' delicious. Is it ok to say freakin'? I suppose if we took the derivation of every exclamatory word they would all somehow lead back to a word we would choose not to use... so I'm going to substitute it with an entirely different word: delightfully. Delightfully delicious. I'm still trying to find ways to squeeze in usage of my new word that I made up the other day, "Splendarrific". You know, for when a moment is both fake (Splenda) and awesome (Terrific). Splendarrific. But there is nothing splendarific about Oriental House. Authenterrific maybe.

So, yes, dinner was great at the Oriental House. They're all about service there so different servers will keep coming and asking if you need anything, particularly drink refills. Within a span of about 2 minutes, we had three servers ask if we needed refills, so finally Andrew let one of them refill his drink and I asked for napkins. Third time's the charm, I suppose.

We left Oriental House around 5:45 and drove back to the church. I took an alternate route than the way I came, because traffic can be bad on Roper Mountain Road in the evenings sometimes. I thought we were going to have our "mental gel time" with the band/ensemble at 6:30, but that was cancelled to give more time for vocalist callback auditions and for the band to get ready and practice. I probably should start reading my emails for detail more often so that I don't spend all day anticipating to not have that time at my disposal.

I sat in my office for a while but found it hard to edit video with all of the AWANA kids screaming and being loud in the gym, along with the AWANA leader on the microphone leading them through the games. I always get a kick out of the discipline system they use... if the kids aren't paying attention, the leader will start counting on the microphone, "1!..... 2!..... 3!....4!" until the kids focus and pay attention. As far as I can tell, they just keep counting higher and higher and then scold everyone that they had to count that high that time. One time, as a joke, I decided to test the system and I yelled "ONE!....TWO!" from the stage and all of the kids stopped in their tracks and stopped talking. I laughed but none of them did. Oh well.

Andrew drew some more on the dry-erase board in the office. He can draw well. I, on the other hand, cannot. I can, however write with both hands. I'd like to see him do that. Anyway. Here's a picture of the dog he drew, wagging its tail, and the cat that I drew, which was apparently pooping. Don't judge me.


Band practice started around 7:30. I stood around on stage talking to some of the band members and then made myself available to fix issues with sound check as they came up. I introduced myself to one of the new band members who's son signed up to help with tech stuff. I totally forgot to contact him last week, and didn't want them to get to feeling that "we have all of the help we need", because I am always looking and recruiting if people are willing to serve. The more people we have, the more we can do. I only wish that I could schedule people to serve individual services instead of for the entire morning. I think more people would sign up to serve in a rotation if they weren't commited for the entire morning, but the problem is that we only have 10-15 minutes between services, and if they're running late or I have to fix issues, there is basically zero time to communicate technical things, and every service would feel like the first service... a dry run every time with no rehearsal.

Anyway. I started doing some light plots as the practice got underway but had to stop and run the slides for the vocalists. My friend Brian stopped by to hang out with me for a while. We talked for a bit and then I ended up showing him how to use the software so that I could go point some lights on the catwalk. When I came back down, I met Canon, a teenager who wants to help out with tech stuff on Sunday mornings. We talked for a few minutes and then I encouraged him to come back on Sunday morning so he could observe and get some training. Sunday is going to be busy!

Dan and Rachel stopped by after helping out with middle schoolers upstairs. Dan got a new schedule at work so we talked about that for a few minutes and then they left to go talk to somebody else. Ruthie stopped by as Brian and I were standing around and listening to the band and vocalists practice the Valentines song medley for this Sunday, which I think is going to be so much fun. Ruthie recorded this interview on my camera with me and Brian about Valentines Day, or, Singles Awareness Day. Be amazed at my ability to make up things on the spot.

I left around 10pm after talking to some other guys who had been helping out tonight with the middle schoolers as well. They invited me to join them at Brixx but I didn't want to stay out super late again.

Tomorrow, I've got some meetings as well as more editing I need to do. I really want to get it all done so that I can enjoy the weekend with my friends and not have to worry about work, even though I probably will worry anyway. I'm a champion worrier.

Later,

Joe

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My day at work started off this morning with an all-staff meeting at 9AM. I got to the church around 8:45, and had a few minutes to eat some breakfast before going to the meeting. When I came up to Room 202, where we usually have our staff meetings.

Art asked if I could set up the CD recorder to record Brian's message this morning in the meeting. He mentioned that they had trouble using it on Sunday so I looked at the settings and found that someone had turned down the auxiliary sends for the recording on the wireless mic channel so it wouldn't work. That happens a lot--random people changing settings. It's always a struggle for me to know how to react to issues like that... on the one hand, I'd like to be able to always go and check and make sure equipment is always working for people... but on the other hand, that issue happened because someone was playing with knobs and/or knew what they were doing and forgot to put it back where it went. I'm not going to lie... it may have been me since I recorded something last Wednesday and I tend to turn down all of the aux sends that aren't being used in case a channel is noisy or something. In fact, now that I think about it... it probably was me. My bad. Nevermind.

The all-staff meeting today focused on the last four of Southside's Core Values. If you follow along in this blog, you'll remember when we talked about the first three values. The first three are Magnifying Grace, Enjoying God, and Loving Others. The last four are Depending on the Spirit, Understanding the Scripture, Living in Integrity, and Advancing the Kingdom. I always use the word "MELDULA" (beginning letter of each value) to remember them... I think that's what the pastors use too.

Art talked for a few minutes and then Brian got up and shared about the last four values. I did my best to follow along but I think they were short on handouts because I didn't get one. I think I was the only one that didn't get one. Matt sort of shared his with me... if you can call keeping the handout on the otherside of his notebook where I can't see it, "sharing".


I fidgeted around with my phone some during the meeting but then sensed I was being a distraction so I stopped. As Brian brought the meeting to a close, I got up and sat at the tech booth so that I could stop the recording on time and finalize the disc. I'm not sure how good the recording will sound... we only used one SM85 sitting on a mic stand "near" where Brian was sitting. It picked up levels and I'm sure is "listenable" but not really all that great. I'd love to be able to spend time setting up high quality recording instruments for stuff like that. I'm all about creating extending resources.

After the all-staff meeting, I went downstairs to my office, grabbed my clipboard, and headed straight to the worship planning meeting. Everybody was there today. I was the first one there. Brian came in and saw me drawing a stage layout on my notepad and asked what I was drawing. I used to really love drawing when I was young but lost an interest for it when I was criticized in middle school for being terrible at it. Now I'm awful at drawing. And handwriting too. But that's a topic for another discussion. Brian and I talked for a few minutes about drawing and "art" while everyone else came in.

We talked about last Sunday to start off the meeting. Charlie really liked the baptism testimony videos. It's always encouraging when Charlie has specific comments as to why something I did looked good or worked well. He is always challenging me to "take it up another notch". It's never "you are at this level and I want you at this level immediately", but more of a team-approach, "I see you at this level but know you are capable of going up another level, let's give it a shot". And we do. Sometimes things work, and sometimes they don't.

I was specifically encouraged that the leadership/worship team liked the baptism testimony videos because I think this was the first time that they turned out the way I really wanted them to. In the past, I always wanted to do multiple takes with different angles, etc. to help craft the story and make it more interesting than just a "30-second fast blurb of why someone wants to be baptized". Of course, with young children, it's always more difficult, but this last set of baptisms (it sounds weird treating it like a "batch" of baptisms... but sometimes that's how I think about it) turned out really well. And every time I am able to execute an idea that I have with the tools at my disposal, I like to think that gives the leadership more motivation to push me to do more.

Anyway. We talked about the rest of the service for a bit and then moved on to this Sunday. Valentine's Day (or, as I call it, "Singles Awareness Day") is next Saturday, February 14th. This Sunday (February 8th), we will be doing our traditional pre-service Valentines love-song medley. We've done this the past few years and it's always been a lot of fun for the congregation. Matt picks a few favorites and arranges music and the band/singers perform bits of different songs in a medley. I pretty much begged Matt to do something with his fantastic Aaron Neville impression, which is really quite good. It's not as good as my impression... but hey.

I'm excited about the opportunity to do some creative camera work for the song medley as well as other aspects in the service. We're bringing in a classical guitarist, Rodrigo Rodriguez, a classical guitarist who travels around the nation playing, and who apparently lives in Greer, SC. He will be playing a few instrumental songs during the worship set, so that will be fun to highlight with cameras. And I'm looking forward to hearing him play. I like classical guitar but don't tell anybody.

After talking about the rest of the plans for this Sunday, Charlie and Brian continued talking about Sunday's message and James, Matt, and I went to Matt's office to continue our post-planning tech talk, which we have started to do pretty regularly. I decided today to put together a notebook similar to what Matt and James use, to plan out in advance for services. I never really saw the value in it in the past, since I never really knew what was going to be going on each week until like late Thursday before that Sunday, but as we have grown as a church, we have started getting better at planning in advance, and I think it's a logical step for me to start keeping a more organized approach to the tech things that I want to accomplish.

I asked Matt a lot of questions about tech-things for this Sunday, stage layout plans, etc. We drew out a diagram and I made some lighting and video notes based on that. We talked until about 11:30AM. James and I (along with a few other people) were going to go to Denny's for lunch today since they were offering a free breakfast until like 2pm. I didn't really want to go because I figured it was going to be packed out and busy. James agreed. Plus Matt wanted to film video announcements for this Sunday at 2:30pm, which pretty much negated plans to drive across town, so it all worked out anyway.

I decided that I wanted to set up my new favorite "black background" look like I did for the baptism testimonies to tape the video announcements today. I like that look. It's plain, simple, and easy to do. Doing a green-screen would be fun too, but it just takes too long to set up and light. Before going to lunch, I went upstairs and got out some black curtains and white fabric with spring clamps from Glenda's area (the white fabric is mine, I just find it easier to leave it with all of her fabric in the storage area... that way, anyone who needs it can use it, and I just get it when I need it). I took all of that to Room 202 (my new favorite shooting room), and then went down to my office to check a few emails before going to lunch.

James and I made plans to go to Waffle House. I guess the whole "pancakes and breakfast" thing was just stuck in our heads. Nate and Tommy came along too. We went to the Waffle House on Pelham Road, which is always a weird one to go to since you have to drive through a hotel parking lot to get to it. Doesn't really seem like they planned that one out too well.

I brought along a magazine that I subscribe to, Event DV (for event videographers), and read it while we were sitting at Waffle House. Our waitress, Sheika, was really nice and had the greenest eyes I had ever seen. I wonder if they were contacts. I almost asked but didn't. I did see on the menu that they had this one item--"Papa Joe's". I almost ordered it because of the name... you know, since I have so many friends that call me "Big Papa". In fact, I'm in a wedding in May, and on the program, they are putting "Big Papa" instead of my name, which I think is hilarious. You know somebody is going to be reading that and they will see that and just be confused for the entire wedding.


Lunch was good and very filling. I haven't had waffles in a long time. I notced while I was at lunch that I was pushing my glasses back up on my face at an unusual rate, and then realized they were bent from when I dropped them yesterday. Fantastic. These frames were expensive. I got them about a year ago. I tried to bend them back myself but didn't really do much and almost popped out the lens again. I guess I'm going to have to get them repaired soon. Until then, my face will look crooked since the glasses aren't sitting on straight. Oh well.

We left Waffle House around 1pm. When we got back to the church, Tim was waiting for me in the worship center, and Andrew wasn't very happy that we didn't invite him to lunch. I told him to get over it. Just kidding. Tim was there to get some "more upbeat Christian music" from me. I wasn't really sure what that meant. Upbeat like... Christian Rap (which makes me laugh)? or like... Christian Techno (not sure what that is)? I decided to give him some old-school Audio Adrenaline and some Newsboys Remixed, which I think will fit what he was looking for--something upbeat to play at the beginning of a chapel session at Southside Christian or something like that.

After getting Tim the music, I walked up on stage to see how things were progressing with the stage setup, and then had Andrew and James come help me set up for the video announcements upstairs. It all came together quickly with the three of us working. I hung the black fabric while James and Andrew got out the ladders and helped set up the lights. We had everything to go by 2:30.

I went and found Matt and we started taping. The concept of the video announcements (besides to welcome new visitors and give some basic information) was to interview each of the pastors and get quick blurbs of information about what they like most about their wives (the best food-dish their wives make that they like, what do they admire most physically about them, and then what do they admire or respect about them spiritually). I added a lot of camera movement and zooming which I think when combined with the quick editing/cutting I have in mind should be quite hilarious.

We managed to bring in all 11 pastors and get them all on tape. Well, on hard drive anyway. I don't shoot on tape anymore unless I have to... which, is pretty risky sometimes, but, eh. It saves the church some money since I wouldn't re-use tapes and I hardly ever for most shoots fill up an entire tape. It's a negligible amount but I suppose every little bit counts these days.

We finishing shooting a little bit after 4pm. I turned off all of the lights and started letting things cool down. I usually just use generic extension cords when setting up quick shoots so the cords get kind of hot too. I suppose it'd be a hazard if I was leaving it set up for longer than a couple of hours. I took a few pieces of equipment downstairs and then sat in my office for a few minutes.

I decided to return the wireless microphone that the Vapor crew brought to me last week to fix. I think Andrew fixed it. At least I think he did. While I was up there, Nate asked me if I could set up the new computer in their tech booth (that Eddie installed today) with all of the song backgrounds that we use downstairs in the worship center. I looked at the computer for a second, memorized the computer name and address, and then went downstairs to the EasyWorship computer in the control room, turned it on, and copied the video files and backgrounds database to that computer upstairs. It took about 10 minutes to copy so I waited on it and then went back upstairs to copy the database over to the actual location.

I also loaded up a custom animation of the Vapor logo that I made for them about a year and a half ago in After Effects. It looks pretty cool. Their logo is a "V" made out of vapors/bubbles, so I took the logo and made bubbles come up from the bottom and form the logo using a basic flowmap and particle playground. It literally took me like 20 minutes to make and everyone thinks it is the coolest thing ever.

I walked over and got a soda from the Vapor cafe and sat with some of the guys playing pool/billiards (what's the difference?) for a few minutes and then went back downstairs. I helped Andrew with some of the stage setup and then carried some of the equipment from Room 202 back downstairs. I worked in my office for a while longer, walked back to the stage, etc.

My friend Brian stopped by around 6pm. He tried to buy a laptop online yesterday but was worried it was a scam so we spent about 40 minutes tracking down some information and calling his bank trying to make sure everything was good. I think as long as the money gets re-deposited into his account tomorrow, he's going to just stop communicating with the sketchy online place and save more money and buy a computer straight from the manufacturer. That's what I always do... not worth trying to save a few dollars when there are so many sketchy online retailers out there that just want to take your money and ship you a box with heavy metal in it.

After Brian left, I came out of my office and found Jami Farnum and Chris Armfield working on a cool project--an enclosed light inside of a plexiglass box that they could plug in and make it glow. I gave some suggestions on types of dimmable lighting and construction ideas that might help but I think I mostly just got in the way of a good conversation. I'm good with stuff like that.


I pretty much let Andrew finish the stage setup for tonight. I went back upstairs and finished putting away all of the equipment. I took everything out of Room 202 and set it out in the hallway. When I came back from putting away the fabrics and clamps that I borrowed from Glenda, I saw two adults standing by the equipment. They saw me pick up one of the boxes and I asked them if they wanted to help me carry it all downstairs. I remember a time when I used to be shy about asking for help... but now I am pretty blatant about it. "Want to help me do this?" If they say no, I'm no worse off. If they say yes, then I just saved myself 10 minutes of work and maybe made a new friend in the process.

They both helped me carry everything downstairs. The guy's name was Tim and I think it was his wife who was with him. Tim recognized me as the guy who sang in Vapor last week. Hey, at least it wasn't as "the guy who did the robot on stage in church that one time two years ago"... which sadly is how most people know me. Or "the guy who wore the top hat in church last week" which wasn't even me.

When we were done carrying stuff downstairs, I joined Andrew and Dan who had arrived to help with setup. I plugged up the bass rig and then worked on untangling cables in the storage closet. It's always been a superb skill of mine to untangle cables. I'm good at seeing patterns in the cables and not just knots. It helps a lot.

We finished setting everything up around 7:30 or so. Dan and Andrew helped me get the chairs and tables in Room 202 back to where they belonged and then Dan left. Andrew and I left in the back parking lot at the same time. I stopped by Moe's on my way home, and watched some good classic episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on tv. Why can't that show be on all of the time?

That was pretty much my day. I was hoping to be in bed sooner than this, but, that's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. Tomorrow will be a long day. I'll probably come in a little bit later since I'll be working so late. My main goal tomorrow is to make contact with all of the new volunteers that came in last week and set up return training schedules. I'm also hoping to hear back from some other new people that didn't get back with me last week. I love it when new people join our team because each person always brings new energy and creative ideas to the team.

I'm also hoping to make decent progress on editing the video announcements. I'm going to go all out and make it gaudy and flashy with little valentines hearts. It's going to be fun.

Later,

Joe

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I woke up this morning at 9AM feeling refreshed and rested. Today was my day off of work, so it felt nice to not have to go in, or even think about work today, which is actually hard for me to do. To not think about it I mean. I made plans to meet my dad at "the house", to work on installing the GFCI circuits in a few places around the house.

As I was getting ready this morning (mainly fixing the proverbial mess of bedhead that I have each morning since I have so much hair), I dropped my glasses. As I dropped them, I watched them fall and I yelled out "OH CRAP". Is Crap a curse word? Anyway. It's my only pair of glasses in my new prescription so I try to take really good care of them because, you know, being able to see is important to me. When they hit the floor, one of the lenses popped out. The frames seemed fine and nothing else broke, but trying to fix your glasses while not being able to wear your glasses to see is like some kind of cruel joke. I managed to unscrew the sidepiece and get the lens back in but it took several minutes and was a hamper to start the day.

Like most things, I didn't really let that get me down and I kept going with everything else I had to do. I jumped in the car and looked up the closest Home Depot to the house so that I could swing by there and buy a few GFCI outlets to install. On my way, I called my mom to ask her a couple of things (and to just say hi, since I'm a good son). She answered my question and also told me that my dad had sold another vehicle yesterday (he goes to car auctions in Statesville and Atlanta when he drives for a rental car company and will sometimes buy a vehicle himself to bring back to Greenville to try and sell locally to make extra cash). My mom gave me a few details about the sale, telling me the guy was from Ashville and the whole deal seemed kind of sketchy but it checked out alright.

After I got off the phone with my mom, I decided to prank call my dad pretending to be the dealership that bought his vehicle yesterday. My dad never checks the caller ID so I figured I had a good chance of catching him off-guard. It worked. I talked in a low rumbly voice and made up a fake person name and dealership and asked some questions about the vehicle's identification factors, etc. and stated that I would be in touch again soon once I touched base with my supervisor. And then I proceeded to ask my dad if there was anything he needed at Home Depot while I was there, and then he figured out it was me and wasn't super thrilled I think. I was trying not to laugh the whole time. He laughed once he realized he had been pranked, but I think he's going to set his phone to a different ringtone when I call now. Which means, I will be calling from a different phone next time. Haha. Just kidding.

I drove and found the Home Depot, parked, and went inside. I found the GFCI circuits and they were expensive. I was expecting to pay maybe $4 or $5 apiece for them but they were actually about $13 apiece. Boo. I was only planning to buy 5, but after I factored in 5 single receptacles with included faceplates, I found it was a few dollars cheaper to buy 2 packs of 3 receptacles (6 total) and 6 single separate faceplates. So that's what I did. It was still like $80 though. Boo to the second power.

I stopped at Jack in the Box to get myself a chicken biscuit before going to the house. I figured it would be awhile before lunch and I was kind of hungry. I got to the house just after 11 and my dad and I got to work. I walked around and decided where we would put each outlet, and then we tag-teamed and installed them. My dad did the wiring on a few while I flipped breakers and tested, and then I wired a few while he flipped breakers. We averaged about 15 minutes per receptacle because we had to figure out the breakers, test with meters, etc.


We finished installing all 6 around 1:30pm. Some of the wiring in the house is kind of weird. Like, why are the receptacles in the front room, both bathrooms, and one of the bedrooms all on the same breaker? That seems weird. And some of the ones on the other side are wired in series from the rooms in front of it. I guess that's 70s wiring for you.

For lunch, my dad and I went to Henry's smokehouse in downtown Simpsonville. I ordered a sweet tea with my drink, even though I normally don't drink it. And this tea was so strong and bitter. I added sugar and that didn't help. In protest, I poured out the entire cup into the trash and got water instead. I guess that was $1.49 well spent.

We finished up lunch around 2:30 and I left to go home. I stopped by McDonalds and got an ice cream cone. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I strongly resisted the temptation to drive in to the office since I didn't really have anything else to do. I drove home to the apartment instead, hooked up my Xbox, and played some Rock Band. I downloaded a track, "Baba O'Riley" by The Who, which is a lot of fun to play. It has like a minute and a half prelude though, which gets boring after a while with all of that piano music and drums with no guitar to play.

Tim came home around 4pm. We talked for a few minutes when asked him about his day, and then we decided to go to the house to check out the work that Dad and I did today. My mom told me that I could start bringing stuff over anytime before we "officially" move, so Tim and I took some of my stuff over there. Nothing really valuable, just clothes that I'm not wearing in this season and some of my equipment boxes.


Ok, we also moved my Atari 2600, which is valuable. So valuable that even though I love playing it, it sits in the closet all of the time. I need to rewire it some day and remove the modulator on it so that I can hook it up to a newer tv without having to use the coaxial input. You know what I'm talking about.

Don't argue that I could just buy one of those newer "all-in-one" joysticks that play the old Atari games. There's just something cool about having the old system. In fact, Tim and I are thinking about using the extra bedroom or the den area as a "gaming room" so when people come over and we host parties (you know, because, we are totally socialites and whatnot), it'd be cool to have one space where that happens without it totally taking over the party. I think it's a good idea. The main problem with the concept is that I don't have enough furniture for that many rooms. Does anyone want to donate a decent looking couch that doesn't smell like boogers?

Tim and I locked up and left the house around 5:15 and came back home. We watched tv until a little bit after 6pm when my dad showed up. Tim eats dinner with our parents pretty regularly. Every Wednesday night and every Sunday night, usually. They weren't able to do it last night, but my dad came up tonight to go to dinner with Tim. And, since I wasn't doing anything, I came along too.

My dad picked us up in a white Dodge Durango that he bought at an auction recently. That's one thing that I've had to get used to in the past year or so... never knowing what vehicle to look for when my parents come up. This Durango was nice but it smelled like a cheap hotel room. Cigarettes and fabric spray. Not a good combination. It as obviously pre-owned by a chain smoker. It gave me a headache just to ride in the car. On a side note, I will never understand why people smoke cigarettes. I've never smoked anything but the concept is just strange to me. And they stink. Now, I will say, that I've been around some people that have smoked cigars, and I found that smell to be rather sweet and not too bad, but cigarrettes... gross. I'd rather just avoid it all.

Anyway. We went to McAlister's Deli for dinner. The hostess at the register (or whatever the proper term is for the employee that works at the register taking your order... cashier? that doesn't seem right) was really nice and I convinced her to give me a free piece of pound cake. I didn't even have my cowboy hat on. Maybe it was just my charm this whole time and not the hat. No, I refuse to believe that. This must have been a fluke.

Dinner was good. We sat at what was quite possibly the noisiest table ever made, creaking and wailing every time pressure was applied to one of the corners. You'd think the table's favorite pet had just died or something. And of course, Tim didn't help matters--he is always finding creaks in doors and cabinets and will sit there and make it creak until I yell at him to stop. Just a game we play, I guess.

My dad let me drive the Durango back to the apartment complex on the way back from dinner. It was a nice drive but the windshield wipers were terrible. I might as well not even had them on. When we got home, I turned on my Xbox and played some Halo 3 with James Brush and a couple other guys. I haven't played in a long time so it was fun to play, but we did terribly. It took me a few games to "warm up" but we still lost like every game. And my rank went down to a 40 again after I worked for months to get it to a 41. Oh well. It's just a game. It's just a game.

I played for about an hour and then decided to stop. I like playing video games but I'm not addicted to them. I don't think I'm one of those guys who can play and then stop and realize it's been 5 hours or something. I'm very much aware of the time I put in and usually reach a point where I've had enough fun and want to do something else.

So, that was my day. I have to be at work tomorrow before 9AM since we have an all-staff meeting. I can't ever remember which meetings they want me to set up microphones and record, so I will probably just set those up tomorrow and record it anyway just in case. For lunch, I think a bunch of us are going to Denny's because they are supposedly giving away a free Grand Slam breakfast between 6AM and 2PM tomorrow. To be honest, I really don't want to go that badly for a free breakfast. I'm sure the place will be packed out, the servers will be frustrated, and it won't be a very enjoyable dining experience. I just know it. And I'd rather have a great dining experience than free food. Wouldn't you?

Later,

Joe

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I don't sleep well on Saturday nights anymore. Maybe I would if I went to bed earlier and gave myself enough time to unwind before it was like, you know, 4AM before I actually fell asleep, I wouldn't have that problem. I woke up at 5:45AM this morning and got ready to head in to the church. I pulled in to Southside Fellowship around 6:20am, excited with all of the extra time I would have to get ready for services.

I turned on the equipment in the control room and made sure things were tidy and cleaned up for the new volunteers that would be observing today. As I brought the equipment online, I started testing the videos for the morning. All of the baptism testimony videos looked blurry and pixelated for some reason. I guess that's what I get for not testing them on Friday or Saturday like I usually do.

I went to my office to re-render them, and ended up spending an hour just to get them to work. I tried different export settings and every single option looked bad. Finally, on a whim, I decided to make a new standard-definition project and imported my high-definition sequences into that project, which of course took a long time. I re-sized all of the footage to fit the new aspect ratio (4:3 instead of 16:9) and did a test render. The first one looked great, so I ended up re-rendering all 4 baptism testimonies that way. I was thankful that I didn't have like 12 videos to render, but it was still kind of a pain and not really what I wanted to spend my extra hour on before people started showing up this morning.

Everything went really smoothly this morning. I spent some time reading Philippians 2 after getting a text message from my friend David at Summit Church who was praying for our team this morning.

I ran the switcher today, continuing my record streak of most weeks in a row running the switcher. It's a pretty impressive record, but I suppose it will have to end one day. You know, like if I ever take a vacation... or... get sick... or something. During the first service, we had two new volunteers, David and Tonya, observing and training on EasyWorship. Rick did a great job teaching them how to use the software while I focused on running everything else. We also had a potential new camera operator, Russ, training with Brad for most of the morning who seems interested to come back and get more training. I like that.

Tim came in to the church today wearing his top hat. I told him he has to stop wearing it and wait until February 12, but I think he likes the attention. The only annoying thing is that a lot of people at Southside Fellowship either don't know I'm a twin or have never taken the time to distinguish which one of us is which, so Tim said he had like 15 people say "Cool look Joe!" to him today. I still enjoyed calling Tim, "Abe" all morning, and trying to get him to speak in a presidential voice all of the time.

Zack came in to the control room during the first service, but since it was kind of crowded, I gave him my camera and had him take some pictures of the orchestra on stage. I took some pictures also during the second service. I value the time in our worship services and never want to make it a "paparazzi" moment, but good pictures of our services are so helpful when making videos, it'd almost be worth it to have someone taking pictures for an entire service each week. I wonder if other churches do that. Shooting video would be helpful too, but, I'm too busy to try to do that every week, plus we use the same camera a lot in the service that I'd use to shoot the secondary footage.

How many Charlie Boyd's do you see? (Look closely)

We had one person get baptized today during the first service, and three during the second service, and no one during the third. So, I recorded both the first and second service baptisms to my miniDV VTR deck and then took the deck and captured the tape back onto my workstation during the second service and edited the actual baptisms in with their testimonies to play back for third service. I always do this the week after baptisms, and I prepare a DVD to give to each family, so in a way, having to do that today saved me some time later on this week, because I won't have to capture the DVD to do it. The tape did have some artifacts on it (not sure if it was a dirty tape, dirty tape heads, or just the fact that the VTR is old and worn out), so I may recapture from the DVD anyway. We will see. Of course, if I had been smart, I would have hooked up the hard drive recorder via firewire to the VTR deck and just recorded straight to that, bypassing a tape, but, I didn't even think of that until I started writing this blog. Oh well.

The third service went pretty well. Playing back the baptisms from before was kind of a cool concept. It makes me wish we had better cameras but it didn't look that bad. Rick was running the slides this morning but had to leave after the second service due to a family issue, so I also ran the slides in addition to the switcher during the third service. Jake was helping with video playback so we tag-teamed most of it. After we were done playing the baptism videos, Jake left so I had the control room all to myself, which felt kind of weird and lonely. I used the extra computer I had set up for training to remotely connect to my workstation in my office and I got the sermon audio put online that way, which saved some time.

We had so much food in the control room today. I used to pick up two dozen donuts every morning but lately have found it much easier to just pay Tim to pick them up on his way in instead. So, we had those two dozen. David Rushing stopped too and brought a dozen donuts. We had 36 donuts to divide among like 10 people. In other words, we had lots of extra donuts left over.

After church, I closed up everything and got ready to go. My friend Robyn from community group was waiting to go to lunch with me. We made plans like two weeks ago to go to Kyoto Express. I went there last Thursday but was looking forward to it again. I've written many times about how I like Oriental House over Kyoto Express, but I guess there will always be a special place in my heart for Kyotos. And it's called cholesterol. Just kidding.


I enjoyed lunch with Robyn. She shared some stories about things happening at her work lately, and it was just good to catch up. I'm still trying to remember how the lunch conversation drifted to spiders and bugs... but it wasn't me, I promise. My stance on insects has always been, "As long as I can see them, it's not a problem". It's when they're crawling on me and I don't see them that I get bothered.

Anyway. We finished eating around 2:30pm and I left to go home. When I got home, my friend Dan called me and we talked for about 20 minutes, catching up on what all has been going on this past week. Part of my community group hosted a super bowl party tonight, but I was invited to another party, so I couldn't go. We talked about that and some other stuff. I think Dan's mom reads my blog every day even though we've never met. I know of a few people, actually, that read my blog often even though I don't know them. Part of that feels strange, that there are people out there reading about my life that I don't know, but it's cool too that they take an interest in my life. At least, I assume that's why anyone would read the blog. I lead a fascinating and interesting life, I know.

Jared Tuttle, one of the tech team volunteers who invited me to teach the film classes a few weeks ago, brought me a DVD of the final student films this morning. I was excited to see them, since I had to miss the last day of the class and couldn't see them when they first premiered. So, after I got off the phone with Dan, I popped in the DVD to watch. I definitely forgot that I was in one of the students' films. That was when I was making up lectures every time they said, "action!" Haha.


They were all interesting to watch, but mainly because I had an active interest in the class, since I helped to teach it. I'll be honest, as I sat there, I started fast-forwarding through a lot of them because they dragged on for a bit. Part of that was probably because I was a terrible teacher and didn't communicate good movie-making skills to them. The other part was probably because I was a terrible teacher and didn't communicate good movie-making skills to them. Did I say that twice? Whatever.

I left my apartment around 5pm to go to a Super Bowl party at Duane Mallory's house. Matt asked me to bring two big bags of tortilla chips, so I stopped at a Bi-Lo grocery store on the way to the Mallory's house. I think I underestimated how busy Bi-Lo would be with people buying things for various football parties. I found some chips, bought them, and headed out. On my way out of the store, I saw Mark Moody, one of the community pastors at Southside Fellowship. We talked for a minute and then he took me over and introduced me to his brother, Aaron, who just moved down to South Carolina from Maine. Aaron used to do a lot of video editing as a career, and Mark has been telling me about his skills so it was good to finally meet him. I'm hoping to be able to pull Aaron in on some editing projects soon. We will see.

I got to the Mallory's house around 5:30. When I came in, their little dog, Jake, was happy to see me, although I had never met him before. Throughout the night, that dog went nuts whenever it saw me, jumping up at me, trying to sit in my lap, and lick my face. I guess I'm just a likable guy. For pets, anyway.


Everybody else showed up a little bit after 5:30 and we had a good number of people there. This was not the only Super Bowl party that I was invited to, but it was the first one that I was invited to, so that's why I went.

I found a good seat and settled in to watch the game.





Andrew brought a cheesecake for dessert that he had made. It was really good even though it had cracks in it that Andrew seemed embarrassed about. I don't really know anything about how cheesecake is made but I like to consider myself a connoisseur of eating them. If that counts.


I enjoyed watching the game, but I really don't understand all of the rules of football, so I tend to get a little bored sometimes. I enjoyed a lot of the commercials. I'm not sure when the whole goal of the commercials became centered around "most comedic content", because, to be honest, I enjoyed the ones that weren't funny the most. The audi ad was great. The Star Trek movie trailer was fantastic.

I stuck around at the Mallory's until about 9:30pm, and then I went home. When I got home, I watched the rest of the football game on my own tv, mainly so that if other people asked me about it tomorrow, I could speak intelligently. About the game, I mean. I also watched the one-hour episode of The Office that came on after the game. That show is hilarious.

Tomorrow is my day off of work. I'm going to be catching up on my sleep and then going over to the house that I'll be moving into (trying to move away from calling it "my grandmother's house" because that seems to warrant an explanation as people think I'm moving in with my grandmother) to work on the electrical outlets. I'm supposed to meet my dad there at 11AM. Other than that, I'm not really sure what else I'll be doing.

Later,

Joe

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