It has been an awfully busy week. I have had several blog posts to put up, but they include pictures and I have nott had any time while sitting at the computer that has those pictures.
Anyway . . .
I was dealing with an Olympus Camedia Zoom 750 that I use with the maglock photo ID cards and it was causing me a huge headache.
You can connect it to a computer by USB, but the computer won’t recognize it’s memory card, Olympus has no software for it on the web site, the company that set up the equipment only provided drivers for it to run with the Identicard software, and then I couldn’t get some pictures off of it for anything even when using a card reader.
Fortunately, Tim (a media tech guy at the church who is heading to another church out of state) was able to get his Mac to recognize the card through the card reader. I was thinking about the data formats for these cards so I did a bit of research this evening and found a good article with tips on maintaining your camera’s memory card.
Causes of Memory Card Corruption
There is more technical info about different memory cards here: What is a Memory Card?.
Sure this info is easy to find, but I not really stopped to think much about camera memory cards.
Of course, I still love my good ol’ Panasonic PalmCam PV-SD4090 (PDF)with a 120MB SuperDisk floppy drive. Alhtough the two Lithium Ion batteries are suffering from old age issues and I can only find 3 of my SuperDisks and I rarely even find 1.44mb floppies anymore for this slow 1.3 megapixel camera I still like it a lot. After all, how many cameras have you ever used to do back-ups from a dying computer and had its storage the only lifeboat for many of your important files. It’s kind of like an old friend here in its ripe old age of 5 years.
I have been reading some of Tony Dye’s posts about Church Databases and struggling with our own inadequate systems, and I have been thinking over some areas where church info could be better managed.
We use EventU from ServiceU.com for our church scheduling. I have a long list of complaints about it, but the worst one is a missing option. The Security Hosts and I need to know what is going on around the building. We need to lock up and lock down, we need to direct people to where they need to go, we need to know when people don’t belong there. For this reason I make sure we do searches with all options selected: Not Yet Submitted, Pending Tentative Approval, Pending Resource Approval, Pending Final Approval, Pending Web Approval, Approved, and Rejected. The missing option is the one we need most:
Should have been Submitted, But Wasn’t.
In a smaller church most people know what is going on even if it doesn’t make it on any official schedule. In a church of several thousand with a ministerial and office staff of more than 60 it is hard for the part-time evening security team to know what is going on.
I wonder if the solution might be the Church Log which would be known as the CLog. With that word in mind, I would refer to it as the *”Wooden Shoe” process. I admit it is a lousy pun, but there is something useful behind it.
CLog would be a community blog or collaborative software (groupware?) for churches to coordinate resources and schedules.
Options could include:
- Wooden Shoe Schedule It?
- Wooden Shoe Discuss It?
- Wooden Shoe Share Resources?
The idea is to get people discussing plans and ideas in an open area for everyone on staff to know what is going on. Current scheduling systems and email are terrible for this.
Do you know of any systems that are up to this?
* Explanation of a bad pun: The Church Log is abbreviated to CLog which is a type of shoe typically made from wood. “Wooden Shoe” is used as a pun for “Wouldn’t You” as in “Wouldn’t You Schedule That?”
Published on
January 14, 2006 in
Techie.
Interested in some free Microsoft Software? Church Tech Matters and Christian Web Masters both have some interesting links available.
Sunshine at CWM posted about free downloads of Microsoft Visual Studio Express Editions. This means Visual Basic, Visual C++, VisualJ#, SQL Server 2005, Visual Web Developer 2005, and more. The tools require .NET 2.0 and the web development looks like it needs a Windows server to reach its full potential (No Apache/MySQL support, so I will probably just have to pass.)
Church Tech Matters also has a batch of links related to free Microsoft software.
Paw Paw Man’s car goes on Rampage
A man gets his car stuck in the mud.
He then places a toolbox on the accelerator to help him when he pushes it out of the mud.
The car gets out and takes off reaching 100mph and even getting airborn when hitting bumps.
There is something important we can all get out of this story . . . Paw Paw is a funny name for a town.
Not everyone on the church staff is technologically inclined. That is why I did up a message to everyone about using Blogs in Ministry. Several of them did not know what a blog was or where to find them.
I started uploading sermons after Thanksgiving when we started our series on Narnia, but I didn’t actually link it from the church web site until we had several sermons in there. I wanted people to find it and immediately have lots of content to look over. I mentioned it to the people on staff, but I am sure 70% ignored what I said.
Then came a story about Podcasting packing the pews which I found on both Church Marketing Sucks and Strategic Digital Outreach. How could I convey to the people on staff that people are going to churches because of website audio?
Apparently I didn’t have to. In less than two weeks after I placed the link on the site someone mentioned to the preacher that he came because of the sermons he heard on the web site. This surprised our preacher, he didn’t know his sermons were up there. So, he found out about their effectiveness the same time he heard about their existance.
Just wait until all the blogs go live.
This has been nice, the WMF patch is showing up in Windows update and people are being prompted to install it.
I think I know what I will be doing if I end up having to babysit the building this Sunday afternoon.
I’ll be taking a walk down the halls making sure all the computers have this update.
Then I will probably be doing it the next week with the next release of patches. Unless of course ther is nothing critical.
If your computer is not doing the automatic update then be sure to set it up. Updates are typically managed through the “Help And Support” button on the “Start Menu” if you have forgotten where it was.
Microsoft has moved the release of their patch ahead to today:
WMF Microsoft Patch
The patch listed below is no longer necessary (as far as I know), but the other info is useful.
Remember to uninstall the previous patch before you use the new one.
I’m glad they did this.
I don’t believe I have ever seen this before, and it caught me off guard.
I went to pay my AAA Visa (through MBNA America Bank) today and saw that I owed nothing. Since I have been using the card and this is always the time I pay it I knew there had to be something. There was a “Last Statement” balance listed there so I searched through my payment history to see if I had just paid in advance by accident (I do that occasionally). Nope, my last payment was $100 less than my last statement balance.
After digging around a bit I noticed a link about a “Payment Holiday” which meant I did not have to pay at all this month, but I would get finance charges on what I left in my account.
So, instead of the typical $15 minimum payment they were letting me go with a $0 minimum payment. I am glad I am not a sucker.
This credit card (and many others) urge people to just pay the minimum. Spend $15 this month, that is all you need to pay. The next month, of course, you are deeper in debt even without spending anything.
So, what does this have to do with a church?
Continue reading ‘The Church and the Credit Card Payment Holiday’
UPDATE: January 5, 2006
Microsoft has moved the release of their patch ahead to today:
WMF Microsoft Patch
The patch listed below is no longer necessary (as far as I know), but the other info is useful.
Remember to uninstall the previous patch before you use the new one.
If you read the Windows Zero Day WMF Exploit then I am letting you know that you might be able to go online again.
I just got back in town last night and so I am catching up on the info. I have some links from the Internet Storm Center at sans.com have som
They have been posting regularly about it in their diary, but it is easy for the recent links to drop and be lost.
I have gathered them here:
- A big WMF Exploit FAQ (A Must Read)
- An explanation of workarounds and patches
- An easy to use .msi Hotfix installation file (uninstallable through Add/Remove Programs)
- Information about how the WMF exploit is being used
- A plea for using the patches
It looks as though Microsoft may not be releasing a patch fomr Win98 or WinMe. Someone else may, but this may urge people to move on.
Added: You can get the original .exe file from http://www.hexblog.com/, the site is doing better since it was taken down to bare html and load balanced.
There are some things just not worth fighting about. One of those things was the argument over whether or not BIG churches should close their doors on Christmas Sunday.
1. It was not productive: A church of 20,000 is not going to change its schedule due to some bloggers.
2. I caused dissention: The church is not about fighting.
So, while I watched some of the argument take place on blogs I had visited I stayed out. I was curious at how Christmas Sunday would turn out here at Christ’s Church in Jacksonville, FL.
Continue reading ‘Mega Church = Mini Christmas’