Jim Walton has some great ideas and suggestions on his post anyone interested? A quote from his post on some of things the organization could cover:

• technical writings on a variety of topics, contributed by many of us
• a cool logo that members could display on their own sites, blogs and email sig, ‘proud member of the ultra cool church tech club’ or whatever
• a forum with a variety of moderators
• a way to connect churches needing tech expertise with ministry minded, technical consultants who are willing and available in their area, either on a volunteer or contract basis
• provide churches without the resources to have expertise in-house, a resource to find answers and direction on technical issues

While I definetly am not an expert I certainly am passionate about technology and its effect on the church and the benefits it can have in ministry. I look forward to learning more, sharing, and being involved with others in this area. I think it’s important that though we may be at different church buildings we are all part of the same church and our competion is not with the church but the world. If we can go about our daily lives with this thinking and passion we can all do great things as we work together.

I remember the first time I say that saying on a tshirt and how humorous I thought it was. The longer I’ve been a Christian the more I realize that it is true. Now to the reason for this post if you haven’t been reading Gary Lamb‘s blog than you need to, his passion for God, his church, and church planting is overwhelmingly evident. Today’s post tells the story from today and how “Satan is a punk” (my words). Pray for Ridgestone, Gary, their setup crew, and the theater as they need to take ownership for what they have done towards the church.

Cool article in the December issue of Baseline this month. If you don’t already get this magazine you can get a year free subscription here. You can get this month’s article here.
Some great comparisons between churchs(megachurchs specifically) and corporations and how they relate to their customers.

I remember when I first started playing with computers and you didn’t have to worry about viruses, spyware and adware, the only problems were the 640k Ram and 4 Megs of memory. I was reminded of these times reading Jason Powells post Large Scale Defrag … how? Part of that article is below:

Just got my Dec issue of WindowsITPro mag today (great mag btw). In it is an eye opening article on the performance degradation that can occur by letting your disks fragment. The article is sponsored by Diskeeper, but the dude who wrote it is not employeed by Diskeeper. If you didn’t already know…the Defrag tool in Windows is a scaled down version of Diskeeper…wonder how much Bill paid to get that in every copy of Windows?

I remember when your computer got slow you only had to run a defrag and typically you would back up to speed in no time. I remember being able to schedule your defrag and disk cleanup in the scheduled tasks and everything being taken care of. I read Jason’s post and figured I’d be able to find the same automation for our current computers, no such luck. I looked around for some open source programs or scripts but nothing seemed to work. Finally I found the script that analyzes how many volumes you have and the defrag need and then runs the defrag, and best of all it can then set to run as desired with Scheduled Tasks. In case you were wondering you can download the one that fits your needs from Compu-Docs on their Defragmenter Scripts page.

Saw this over at Church Tech Matters, What color should your blog be? I was back in the mood to post tonight after some time off and this was one of the first reads of the night and amzingly these usually end up pretty accurate. Is it true?

Your Blog Should Be Blue

Your blog is a peaceful, calming force in the blogosphere. You tend to avoid conflict – you’re more likely to share than rant. From your social causes to cute pet photos, your life is a (mostly) open book.

As part the part of the creative team that handles publicity and technology I am usually looking for creative ways to publicize new sermon series. Back in August Churchnerd had a post titled Does God know my name? Graphic which at the time seemed like a cool idea so I do as every Bloglines user does and I checkmarked the Keep as New box. Well a few weeks later as we’re planning we decide we are doing our current series “Knowing Jesus” it comes back to me about this graphic so I head back to the computer pull the graphic and start planning. We gather again the next week I throw out the idea and the ball begins rolling and it ended up being pretty cool. I’ll show you through the name tag craze:

1. Each weeks title is a different name of Jesus: Jesus the Messiah, Jesus the Teacher, the Healer, the Tempted, and the Redeemer
2. The weekend before the series starts everyone at church gets tagged (it’s pretty cool to see 1300 people all wearing nametags). At the end of each service the announcement is made and everyone is to place their nametags on the two giant nametags that we have created to be our wall pieces.
3. Each week create a not quite so giant nametag for Jesus…The Messiah that covers the nametags with the congregations names. This changes each week to match the Name of Jesus for that week.

Filed in: creative church

As I’m sure you know by now, the knew Firefox just came out. If you haven’t tried out Firefox the new one is even better then the old one. If you haven’t already gotten it, download it now here. As Brian Glass points out in his post Firefox is now one of the only browsers supporting SVG/ javascript simulation.

I’m sure this is because of my newness to blogging but as I was trying to give credit where credit was due, and share some of the great blogs I mentioned in my inaugural Happy Thanksgiving post I went back and realized that none of the trackbacks worked. It seems that the trackback links on posts are not what you want to link to, but the permanent link as you would one of your own posts. The trackback link is actually used to let the owner of the post that you are referencing know that you are linking to them. After figuring this out I found a great free resource that will do you trackback pinging for you it’s called the Wizbang Standalone Trackback Pinger. I’m sure there are other resources out there but this is what I found and it’s super easy to use.

Recently attended the free Microsoft Connections Event in Orlando. I was first impressed by the fact that it was free, not something we normally think of when talking about Microsoft. Unfortunetly did not find the event overly useful. What was described as being a seminar covering work essentials including, Outlook, Excel, and Publisher. Though Outlook was covered thouroughly especially with Business Contact Manager I found little of the information useful for anyone other than the most basic users. Excel wasn’t covered at all, and Publisher and Powerpoint were both covered in little over 5 to 7 minutes and basically it was to use the Microsoft templates.
I am looking forward to another free event from Microsoft, the Launch Tour 2005, which not only is free they give you a free SQL server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005. I’m scheduled for the data platform tract which hopefully be useful in integrating with Shelby to allow us to better use our information.