ChurchIT – Supporting ministry with IT

I tend to think that good preaching/teaching should consist of both comfort and challenge. It’s that latter that I’ve received over the last few days, probably with good reason.

First there was Ian’s sermon on Sunday. The text and recording should be going live on the recorded sermons page soon. The emphasis was on living well even when it doesn’t seem convenient or even make sense. I picked up a similar message when I was listening to the Stuff Christians Like audio book on the train.

That rather pricked my conscience into doing my Bible notes, and they didn’t let up either. Firstly I caught up on the weekend’s WordLive notes on Proverbs 6 about the ant. I’d only been thinking the other day about re-reading Bill Hybel’s Excellent book on Proverbs called Making Life work (link to Amazon). It’s one of the most challenging books I’ve read and so worth reading more than once. I must confess to having frittered away quite a lot of time recently. It’s far too easy to get sucked into playing browser based games or reading web comics. Maybe I should be handing the OpenDNS passwords to my wife so that she can block all those unhelpful timesink websites.

Finally there was today’s reading on Mark 6:6b-13 on WordLive. What challenged me was how little the disciples were to take with them on their mission. I went on a press trip last week and probably took almost as many gadgets as I did clothes (certainly by weight), and that was without a laptop.

Would I be willing to go to a strange place without loading the local GPS maps onto my phone? I didn’t last week.

Would I go without money? Not last week; I loaded up with local currency and made sure I had my credit cards with me.

Would I share their boldness? Perhaps. I’d certainly like to think so.

Funny thing is, I’m not resenting the challenge. Hopefully it’ll be an opportunity to grow.

This was a quite exciting find. It’s a plugin for OpenOffice that gives it the ability to access MySQL databases online.

Databases for websites such as this one are something I regard as a means to an end rather than something I’m an expert in. The usual tool, phpMyadmin, is very powerful but not always the  most friendly to the newcomer. An alternative that works with a familiar program got me quite excited.

Installation is as simple as installing any other OpenOffice extension although you will need to do this from a different program in OpenOffice than Base, unless you are willing to create a database first.

After that, there’s an option for MySQL in the ‘Connect to an existing database’ menu. You can test the connection before finishing the wizard. A useful touch I’m always pleased to see as it avoids significant frustration in the event of typos.

You can find my day job review and the download link here.

OK, I probably shouldn’t get excited about such things, I’m only human.