Church IT – Supporting ministry with IT

Brightened up my Monday morning!

Some inspirational words from David Seah in a blog post.

what I was lacking was the great truth that the right attitude is more than just having discipline. It is also believing that doing any work at all is worth doing well, and choosing to live that way is a mighty testament to the universality of Excellence in all we do.

I think David is well worth reading. He has also developed the Pocket CEO series of printable personal planners.

He also has an excellent example of how to do a personal wiki.

There’s an amusing collection of Top Ten Church Worship Lies over at Music Academy. While trying to keep within the spirit of the post (ie not taking life too seriously) I would like to stand up for all us bassists who would dearly love to employ more effects in our playing.

I’ve got a Zoom 506, not a great pedal (auto-hiss as standard according to one friend with some justifiction) but most of the time I use it just as a tuner, sometimes adding some octaver. It’s so old that Zoom don’t even have a page for it any more! Just a mention in the History section.

How I dearly want to use the distortion/flange effect I used on a recording in my band at Uni. Perhaps I’ll slip in some wahwah here and there and see if anyone notices.

Until then, I shall work on introducing the Ukulele.

Found this

DugDownDeep_Carnahan.mov from Covenant Life Church on Vimeo.

Rather good

Another great from xkcd.com

Why was I throwing myself at the mercy of Adobe’s automated ‘help’ last week?

Well I’ve been helping out moving the church website I used to administer over to a new design and platform. Joomla was just too capable for the parish and was putting people off. Myself included, trying to sort out both sections and categories for a relatively simple site became quite a headache.

Anyway, given the current situation a static website seemed the best plan with Dreamweaver the editor in use. I use Microsoft Expression Web myself so I sorted out the template first and then had a go at transferring it over.

To my delight it worked very well. The template file, .dwt, was opened without any comment and we got started creating pages very quickly.

Dreamweaver was pretty impressive just in some basic editing over a couple of hours, hence I considered the change. It’s a shame there’s no crossgrade path from Expression Web, £400 is just too much to make it a possible buy.

I can’t be sure, but I think Adobe’s Live Chat is automated. What follows should have been a simple request. Or so I thought….

• Welcome to Adobe! You are now chatting with ‘Perkins’
• Perkins: Hello, how can I help you?
• you: hi, are there upgrades for dreamweaver from competiting products?
  specifically ms expression web?
• Perkins: I’d be glad to help you with that information.
• Perkins: Do you have any previous version of Dreamweaver?
• you: no
• you: I’m using ms expression web and would like to move to dreamweaver
• Perkins: Are you there with me in chatting?
• Perkins: As we are from Adobe Retail Sales Chat, I recommend you to
  buy Adobe Dreamweaver, which is a good competitor for all other Web
  Design products.
• Perkins: Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 is a web development tool that lets
  users design, develop, and maintain websites using visual editor or by
  coding directly.
• Perkins: You can create and maintain basic websites to dynamic,
  advanced applications that support best practices and the latest web
  standards and technologies.
• Perkins: We recommend the purchase of Adobe software on our web site.
• Perkins: Because, there are many advantages of buying the software on Adobe.com
• Perkins: Most importantly, you can be sure that you’re getting
  authorized software from us.
• you: yes, but is ms expression web a qualifying upgrade / crossgrade product?
• Perkins: No, from MS Expression Web there is not upgrade path.
• Perkins: What kinds of tasks would you like the software to help you
  accomplish?

I can’t say that this makes the thought of parting with over £400 any more attractive, even after my good experiences with Dreamweaver last night.

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