Vision

Blogs and other social read/write media are great for staying in touch across the miles.  But don’t forget to interact with those closest to you, you know, the people you see every day, like your family and/or church group. This picture from a business e-newsletter I received today sparked these thoughts. So, now I’m going to go wish one of those amazing people in my life, my mom, a wonderful Mother’s Day, in person!

An encouraging bumper sticker I saw today.

I found this picture of an older gentleman taken during the 1890’s over on Virginia Tech’s image archive website. The person himself has no meaning to me, however I was just struck with “something” about this photograph. Full length portraiture is not as common nowadays. Our family has a similar looking image of my great-uncle as a young man. So stoic, quiet, peaceful and meditative. Maybe I’ll try to recreate something like this on my next portrait shoot.

I went for a walk today and came across this sign.

I figured some shots from 4 years ago down in Colorado would be good to use in testing out the Simple-Viewer photo gallery plugin.

I discovered the PicLens Firefox Plugin today and was impressed with its abilities to pull photos from a Picasa

Web Album or Flickr collection and on the fly create a fully 3D photo browser.

From the website:

PicLens provides an immersive full-screen experience for viewing photos on the supported sites listed below and on sites that support Media RSS.

Sites that support the PicLens Firefox Plugin

Apparently there is a plugin that will enable its use with Wordpress as well, but it requires PHP 5 which I don’t have on my hosting platform right now. I may give it a spin at a later date.

I upgraded the Wordpress installation on this blog to version 2.5 today.  There are more changes in this update than in any previous one that I’ve encountered.  My favorite is the media browser that allows you to view all your uploaded audio/images/video in a very elegant way.  Of course the entire admin section has been re-designed.  It is much cleaner and loads faster, though it took me a few minutes to find some of the common features, since I didn’t know where to look.

Overall very impressed.  For its simple elegance, Wordpress remains my favorite Content Management System to work with.

Yesterday evening and this morning our church enjoyed the company of a number of SMBI students who are on their Western tour singing at various churches here on the West Coast. I had wonderful conversations with some of the students and particularly enjoyed meeting blogging friend, Hans Mast.

The music was absolutely beautiful, but more importantly, it really focused on the importance of each one of us going out and sharing Christ with others. I was challenged and deeply blessed.

I didn’t shoot any video, but this is a similar performance of the song Days of Elijah that the group shared with us.

For anyone happening to read this blog living in the Western US, I’ve included their remaining itinerary below:

I read an excellent post over on javalon’s xanga this morning concerning work. It’s worth a slow thoughtful read.

Here’s a quote:

Work cannot be merely something we must do to make money, to gain the ability to enjoy leisure time, or to propel us to “higher” things. No, work should be the expression of our creative energy being used in service of humanity (which cannot be separated from our service to God).

Work really does have value and it is not all tied up in economics. One of the best most rewarding jobs I had paid minimum wage, but the value I provided in the service of others can’t be measured in dollars and cents. Some of the greatest inventors, missionaries and people that changed the world, worked voluntarily. Jesus was a transient who didn’t own his own home or any form of transportation (they borrowed the donkey for that famous scene where he rides into Jerusalem), yet he changed the course of history and helped more people in 3 years than any of us could in a lifetime.

For the last five years, I’ve been recording all the messages preached at my home church on audio tape, experimenting occasionally with different forms of digital audio.

At the beginning of this year, I took the plunge and started publishing the morning sermons as an audio podcast using Wordpress and Feedburner.  Here is my current (very inefficient) workflow:

1. Record the morning message  on audio  tape.
2. Create tape label in Avery Design Pro, print and paste on the master tape and 1 copy for the tape lending library.
3. Record audio from tape to digital with laptop using Goldwave Audio Editor.
4. Save as 16bit 44.1khz .wave audio and burn 1 Master Audio CD.
5. Rip MP3 version at 44.1khz 24kbps variable bit rate stereo and upload to the  website.
6. Create entry for recording in Google Spreadsheets and link to audio file (for printable database).
7. Create Wordpress blog entry at newhopemennonite.org with full link to audio file (Feedburner takes care of the rest of the podcasting goodness).

So, what I’m looking for, I think is an efficient way to incorporate live recording direct to digital.  Maybe the best way is to just use a laptop and record direct to Goldwave or Audacity, though this may present its challenges in correct line levels etc.  A standalone MP3 recorder would probably work.  Problem is, which one?  Any of you anonymous readers have ideas?