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When we first moved into our current sanctuary in 2001, we set up a wild assortment of connections to feed cassette and CD recording, FM hearing assist, the 70V system for the cry room, and so on. This short-lived arrangement became very cumbersome until we found a good solution that included sensible use of the matrix outputs on our Allen & Heath GL4000 console and the addition of a Rane SM 26B splitter mixer.

I've been checking out TalkShoe lately, mostly due to my interest in the Church IT Discussion Podcast. Even though my IT and church sides don't overlap all that much, I love the format. An hour or more of somewhat moderated discussion between a mix of full-time and volunteer church IT people. I've been listening to the archived podcasts for a while, and finally got a chance to check it out live today.

I didn't want to tied up on a long distance phone call, so I decided to check out my Voice over IP options. I followed the instructions for using the SJphone from SJLabs, and it worked really well, but as it turns out, I did things the hard way.

Okay, this is a silly rant, but Jason Powell said on the Church IT Discussion Podcast to just do it. Blog about something, at least once a week. So here it is...

Last night was another one of those Microsoft days. A friend of mine got one of those cool Treo 700 phones that would drive me crazy, and needed me to come help him get it talking to his Exchange server.

I was recently asked about installing instant messaging clients to allow young teens and pre-teens to join the online chat community. The main question was whether or not the client software was safe. This entry is my response to the question, because I don't think this question holds a simple answer. In today's Internet culture, safety has many different meanings. Because there are unpleasant people who would like to exploit vulnerabilities in our software, there are certain things we need to do to keep our computers safe.

I've become a strong advocate of VMware Server. I composed this collection of links back in June to give a coworker some background info.

It was actually a SecurityFocus editorial by Scott Granneman that got me interested in VMware: (04.12.06) Virtualization for Security. That's what prompted me to download the VMWare server and start testing it out. Then I stumbled upon the ChurchTechBlogs.com aggregator right around the time that Jason Powell and Tony Dye were posting about VMware.

I run Fedora Core on the Linux boxen I manage, and in most cases, they're configured for text-only operation. However, there are cases where running X is desirable, but usually remotely and generally not with all the bloat associated with a full desktop installation. (I've got nothing against Gnome or KDE; I just don't need them most of the time.) For this scenario, I generally use Xvnc and the Blackbox Window Manager.

Greg Nilsen over at If Jesus Had A Website has been running a rather humorous series on ineffective church web site design.

What led me to choose Drupal as a website platform? To answer that, I first need to explain what led me to choose a Content Management System (CMS) in the first place.

I've been creating and maintaining web sites since 1995. Some good, some bad, some in between. Most of this was monolithic design with static HTML, using everything from notepad and joe (I never really went for vi, though I can use it in a pinch) to FrontPage (yeeccch!) and DreamWeaver. I've written vbscript in asp, hacked together some perl (with and without the CGI module), and even dabbled very cautiously into the realm of php.

Any of those would work for me as long as nobody else was trying to publish, and/or I wanted to do everything by hand. Pretty soon, it's time to move past brochureware and static pages and start creating dynamic sites. After all, this is web two-point-oh, right?