Life & Hope, Faith & Reality
Normal service has kind of been resumed.
Last week was week 1 of ACC’s Funhouse and I thought I may show you a treat. Here’s one of the intro videos that we made.
Also, for those of you who wonder what exactly is involved in a Sunday morning setup at ACC then check out the video below which was shot by Thai Blogger, ACC member and all round good guy Adrian Oliver.
Amongst very little fanfare Dell launched its latest Mac rival (And, no this isn’t going to be a post that laughs at Windows users.) the Dell Hybrid Studio. Now, fair play for them to launch it they’ve obviously found that quite a few people use there Mac Mini’s as a media centre and they probably want a slice of that too.
Except, I can’t quite figure out why you’d buy one. I priced one up, to rival my Mini (all bar the Hard Disk) and it came out to an incredible £573! Before people start to shout at me, I’ve done it properly; No keyboard, mouse, or hard disk just like the Mini. For, fairness I priced up a Mac Mini with exactly the same specification and it came up as £530. Where does the extra £43 go?
They do look, asthetically, pleasing. So, if you’d like to find out more please click here
I’ve had my iPhone 3G up and running for just over a week. And, while it isn’t acting as my main phone yet it giving me a chance to play with all the new features!
A lot has already been written on a lot of websites about it. So, I don’t need to cover any ground there.
So, I’ve been hugely impressed by some of the features, sadly o2’s 3G network isn’t amongst them.
Maps + GPS has been a revelation! It made finding an address on foot in London an absolute breeze! Though I’m seriously hoping that they’ll add Turn-by-Turn in the near future!
3rd Party Applications are a big bonus. As I only have an 8Gb I’m not going OTT on anything! Having said that I’ve got a few favourites Facebook, WordPress, YouVersion’s Bible and Super Monkey Ball.
My final iPhone bonus is MobileMe - Yes, it costs extra and yes, it took it’s time to get up and running. And yes, it isn’t fully “push” like advertised but there’s just something great about modifying a contact or adding a calendar event and instantly seeing it on your Mac/iPhone/Web Browser!
I’ve been trying out a new website called Animoto, which aims to create 30 second video’s. I’m still playing around with it but I’ve embedded one of the videos in here:
Yes, yes. I must be the slowest person in history to have discovered Apple’s Spaces in Leopard but, I never saw a need for it. That was until now. Following some hefty, and occaisionally geeky, conversations with a good friends of mine, Chris, who is, by trade, a freelance web developer I’ve been shown the error of my way.
So, with an hour, or two, to spare I set about playing with Spaces (and VMWare’s Fusion, as an alternative to Boot Camp). Why? Well, it just seems nice to be able to use Microsoft Access alongside iTunes or Dreamweaver. And it works, though VMWare took quite a while to sort itself out!
The other stuff? Well that’s totally geeky and no one wants to read that, all I’ll say is that my iPhone is now beautifully customised and it wasn’t THAT scarey.
You may recall that last December I posted about the feeds that I use regularly, see here, now I thought I’d share a few of the websites I use:
Netvibes - A home page similar to Google’s iGoogle but a little more flexible. Signup is free.
Facebook - The social networking site.
Google Docs - Superb FREE online document creation and editing.
Google Reader - Many have tried, but Google’s reader is the way to subscribe to all the RSS feeds on the internet
Bible Gateway - A great website with plenty of Bible translations all available to read online for free
If you use Firefox, or Internet Explorer 6, then you can add Google Gears to your browser and get access to your docs and reader items offline.
This weekend was one of the rare so far, this year, where Jim Bailey has been out on the road. And one of the even rarer times when we stay overnight. Jim was there to do some training, an afternoon praise party and a morning show. So, on Friday evening we started the 286 mile drive in two seperate vehicles, though more on that later, after a coffee just north of Birmingham we made the rest of the journey in good time and arrived just before midnight, checked in to our hotel and….
SLEEP
Actually I slept so much that at 8:37 Saturday morning the hotel phone rang. It was Jim; where was I, we needed to go in 5 minutes. D’Oh! I don’t think I’ve moved so fast in the morning for a while. Luckily the Church was only 10 minutes up the road. We were greeted by one of the most beautiful building we’ve ever seen outside of the Anglican Church. After we’d been there are a couple of minutes one of the eldership team turned up, another Dave (I think the world runs on them), followed shortly by a few of the wonderful tech team.
TRAINING
After unloading the van we started preparing for the training. For me, this consisted of plugging in a laptop and sound cable. The rig consisted of 1 top and 1 sub aside. Unfortunately the subs were much much bigger than the tops and everything was a mush. Jim and I even considered bringing in our rig for the praise party later that day. The kind team provided me with Wi-Fi access, and plenty of coffee, so that I could 1. get on with some work and 2. wake up!
I’m getting to know the training pretty well, so for me it was just a case of listening in, drinking coffee and…waiting to soundcheck.
SOUNDCHECK
So it got to the soundcheck and I couldn’t get it sounding how I wanted - it was just bass. No sign of a physical Graphic EQ, so I had a better option….gather all the Mini-Jack to large Jacks I could find and use my laptop as a virtual insert over the system. Strangely I had thought about not brining it, however the free Wi-Fi the hotel offered swung it for me! I set up a quick Logic Pro session with an Aux In and a Graphic EQ over it. After wandering round the hall like an idiot making sure things were balanced and double checking my thoughts with Jim’s on the “new sound”. With a “thumbs up” it was time for the praise party.
PRAISE PARTY
As far as I know 25 people came along to the training and numbers were probably just above, and I’m probably way off, this for the praise party. It’s fair to say Jim struggled, this wasn’t this down to the crowd, more down to sweat + in-ear monitors. We’d had a similar problem before and it occurs when Jim manages to hit the pan button on the pack. My immediate fix was to turn it all up (in his head that is) and go onto the stage and hit the button. Still not great, must have been a hot room and water creating a barrier.
Despite these, unusual, issues Jim still did fantastically. In the absence of Rosie I took over some of the Special FX team role. Oh, I love “A Spitting Image”! If you haven’t seen Jim recently you won’t be aware of the chaos that is created during this song. Along with another of Jim’s friends we covered the audience in water and silly string. I will apologise right now to the person I saw put there hood up and promptly squirted them with water, it was VERY childish of me, but slightly funny!
AFTERWARDS
This being a double gig meant that instead of packing up and driving home we moved the essentials into the beautiful main hall and headed off with one of the Churches leaders, Dave Gregg, for a meal and chat. I found it a privilege to be sharing some of who I am and what I’ve seen with both Dave and Jim as well as listening to what they had to say. After a great meal, you can’t go wrong with steak, Jim and I headed back to the hotel for a pint and early night, though to avoid a repeat of the Saturday morning I booked an alarm call.
SUNDAY MORNING
Another early start, though happily I made it up for breakfast (without the use of the alarm call) which to my delight was a fantastic all you can eat fried breakfast, and by 8:45 I was checking out and jumping in the van ready for the short drive to the Church. We arrived first and waited to be joined by the tech team, worship team and others. Whilst they soundchecked I wired in my bits, Jim put his props up and a fantastic guy, who’s name escapes me, laid a different VGA cable for us. We all finished at about the same time ready for Jim’s sound check which is always an odd time because once I’ve established the FoH rig works is silent - who needs extra noise when Jim’s using IEM?
As it was Fathers Day Jim’s plan had been for a re-dedication of Fathers and the importance of our Heavenly Father as the perfect Dad. I know that he did a lot of his classic songs, plus one or two new ones. The Camels, who were on much better behaviour, performed Jesus and got a couple of the Worship team involved (see photo above). Grandad was Grandad and bought his brash attitude on life to Southport, but it was still good to see him! All too soon Jim’s time was over and the meeting descended into what could be described as a family like Holy chaos, prayer going on left right and centre; The old, the young and the middle aged all joining in. This was Church. This was Family. It was wonderful to see
Pack up came, and went. Jim headed off to the big mountains of Wales and I headed back down South. But what a great weekend!
It has been some time since I last blogged seriously about the iPhone. It’s only getting a post now because I don’t understand something.
As I thought I had mentioned I own a cable to connect both my iPod and iPhone to the component connector to the Large TV. I’d been very impressed with the quality that the iPod produced and as a way to get content onto the big screen without an Apple TV it seems a good one too.
Except this afternoon it blew my mind. Let me explain a little.
One of the things I managed to get hold of while in the USA was the 7 Disc box set of Heroes season 1. Slowly I’m working my way through getting the 23 episodes, plus the unaired pilot, into iPhone format. So far I’ve done discs 1 and 2 feeling quite smug and with some spare time earlier I decided to put one on my iPhone to watch on the big screen.
So, I did exactly what I normally would do - plugged the iPhone into the TV. Switched power on to charge the iPhone. Turn TV on and switch to component input. Hit play on iPhone. Sit and watch.
And it started, but looked a heck of a lot sharper than normal. Almost broadcast quality certainly better than the iPod. Which makes me wonder - “does the iPhone have a better video decoder chip than the standard iPod Classic/Nano?”
The settings I used were exactly the same to get it to iTunes so I’m totally confused. Any answers?
So, you may have noticed a few changes around here. I upgraded my installs of WordPress and K2 and basically things kinda went wrong. D’oh!
So I’ve slowly worked through getting things in a way I like them. Changes include the re-thought sidebar to your right which now includes;
A helpful calendar to indicate when I’ve posted.
Direct links to recent posts and comments.
Categories drop down menu.
Online status - you can now see if I’m logged onto MSN/AIM
Also you’ll notice the new artwork in the header it’s all been taken from a Royalty Free website called unprofound.
I’d still like to find a way to integrate my Facebook profile directly into here. Any suggestions anyone?
Yes, this is a hugely geeky post! But sometimes I’m allowed. I have to give a big shout out to Adrian Oliver, who pointed this in my direction from this feed here (please note:it links to a video that’s 20Mb)
Johnny Chung Lee’s concept is great, turn your £30 Nintendo Wiimote into part of an interactive white board. The concept isn’t quite as easy as the video makes out, though I’ve been assured by Adrian that;
I have tried and I got it working
Personally I need a little more instruction. So if like me you need a little more help head to Johnny’s Wii Projects site here where you’ll find the software and also WiiLi.org where you’ll be guided through pairing your Wiimote with your computer.
I think I may try soon, it gives another great reason to buy a 3rd Wiimote, not sure I can justify the projector though….
Bad Behavior has blocked 87 access attempts in the last 7 days.
Recent Comments