Inspiration of the week

Cool Stuff from Redferriswheel's Flickr Photostream Check it out

Tutorial of the week

I love tutorials on the web without them I would be lost. I scour the web every week and try to find the best tuts I can. This is one I did this week and thought it was really cool.



I found this at http://ps-dimensions.blogspot.com give it a try!

Top Ten Tuesday

Every Tuesday I post a top 10 list of things in my life. Sometimes these are just for fun. Sometimes they will reveal some cool websites, apps ect. Either way you will learn more about the way I think. Then again I don't know if that is a good thing or not.



Today's list is my top 10 favorite TV shows growing up (Non-Animated). I grew up in the 80's and 90's so all of the following shows should come fro that time frame.

1. Sports Center- Every Morning I would wake up to it and every night I would go to bed to it. Not much has changed.

2. The Wonder Years- Loved me some Winnie Cooper

3. Star Trek TNG- Every Saturday Night me and the folks would watch Star Trek and eat Pizza

4. Dawson's Creek- I'll hand in my man card now.

5. Seinfeld- Who didn't watch Seinfeld?

6. Boy Meets World- TGIF anyone?

7. Full House- See above

8. Salute your Shorts-

9. The Cosby Show- Funniest TV show ever!

10. Hey Dude- All I have to say is Melody

So what do you think. Did I leave out any great shows from the 80's and 90's? The X-files, In Living Color, Growing Pains and Who's the Boss get a honorable mention.

Monday Thoughts 5-24-09

This a weekly look back on the Sunday Service from Discover Point Church in Conyers Ga, from a production standpoint.

1. Technically simple but technically clean service.
2. Lots of regulars missing but we had tons of visitors, it was a great crowd for Memorial Day weekend.
3. We had 2 Acoustic guitars and 1 vocal, I really like acoustic sets but 2 in a row is too much for me I will be happy to have a full band back net week.
4. Philip did a great job as usual, talking about money is always hard and doing it for multiple weeks is even harder.
5. One Prayer was teased again and I got a few more questions about it.
6. Huge announcement next week. There is about to be a major change to one of the Ministries of DPC.
7. Play Groups is one of the best ideas God has ever given us. I am so excited.
8.Angela (Philips's wife) is like 80 weeks pregnant and will have the baby this week one way or the other. I wish for her sake the baby would hurry up!

Social Media and the Church- Twitter Tools

I have spoken to church leaders about using social media in the church a couple of times and the one thing that seems to come up more often than not is the issue of time. With everything else that is going on throughout the week, taking the time to update Twitter, Facebook or to write a blog seems like a challenging task. The question should not be do I have time to use social media, the question SHOULD be how do I make time use social media to reach people with the love of Jesus.

I work a full time I.T job, have 4 kids under 7, a wife who works 2 nights a week as a nurse and a part time staff gig at my church that takes up about 15 hours or so out of my week. Now I may not be the busiest person in the world, but my life does not stop most days until I go to bed. I have to balance spending time with my kids and wife with both jobs and house work. I told you all that so you would know that this is not being written by some one who sits in a office all day and has all the time in the world. My life needs short cuts. I need short cuts to use social media, not only for the church but for my personal accounts as well. Here are a few I use for twitter:

TwitterFox: This is a Firefox add on that puts little Twitter Icon at the bottom of your browser. When you click on it all of your friends recent updates are put in a nice neat little box in the corner of your browser. You can even update you status, see your @replies and Direct Messages (DMs)

Seesmic Desktop: A lot of people will tell you tweet deck is the best desktop Twitter Application. I disagree but only by a little bit. You can view and update multiple twitter accounts at one time as well as your Facebook page. So if you have a personal twitter and manage the twitter for your church you can update them both with out logging out and logging back in.

TwitPic: The Seesmic desktop allows you to put links to pictures hosted by TwitPic if you don't want to use Seesmic than you can simply go to the Twitpic Site enter your user name, upload pics, write a comment of two and they load the pics to Twitter for you.

Twitter Feed: This allows you to ad an RSS feed (such as your blog or Google reader shared items) to Twitter and every time you update it post a link and a short comment to your twitter feed.

Facebook Twitter App: Allow you to update you Twitter account from Facebook and Facebook account from Twitter. It's really Cool.

Twiggit: A tool that post a tweet every time you Digg a Article on Digg Nation.

Tiny URL: Not a short cut but a URL shortener so you can use less of your 140 characters when you want to post a link

Last but not least this is not really a shortcut but for Stat nuts like me I love to something I can use to track my twitter account so I use Twitter Analyzer. It provides tons of tools to see everything you have been doing on twitter.

Another Tool we will talk about in a later post is the Flock Browser. Without getting too technical its basically the Firefox browser built for Social Networking. Check it out if you get a minute.

I hope these help you use twitter faster and more efficiently. Do you have twitter short cuts that you use in your ministry? What are they? How are you using them? Let me know!

Inspiration of the week

Say what you want about the Music (I like it). The videos are great! Check out one the new Comcast commercials. Awesome!

Top Ten Tuesday

Every Tuesday I list 10 of my favorite things in a category so can get know me a little better and maybe learn something.
On Facebook now there are these post where you can list the top 5 things in your life with pictures. One of my favorite one was the top 5 toys from you childhood so I thought I would recreate it here on my blog.

1. Legos
2. Nintendo (the original)
3. Star wars action figures
4. Thurdercats action figures
5. BMX Bikes
6. Nerf Footballs
7. Transformers
8. Silver Hawk Action Figures
9. X Men Comic Books
10. Upper Deck baseball cards

Monday Thoughts 5-18-09

I wrote on Facebook and twitter yesterday that "God works even when things don't go to plan" and I really believe that. From a production stand point yesterday's service was a hot mess. I can take one little thing but yesterday was a comedy of errors.

1. I produced and showed a video with horrible Audio.
2. We were late getting service slides up because or unusual circumstances
3. The Mike did not fit Jeff's head right so we had issues with feedback because we were trying to keep the gain up so we could hear him.
4. My computer tech slipped and accidentally played a techno song in the middle of decision time
5. With everything that went wrong on my end the Band did fine. They introduced a new song "You are the Light" by Steve Fee.
6. Jeff communicated well in Philip absence.
7. We introduced "One Prayer" Coming soon
8. The lighting was good, I introduced my lighting guy to a new technique this week and he ran with it.
9. Again God does amazing things even when we think everything that could go wrong did.
10. We had a lot of new interest in "Play Groups". Getting people connected is Awesome
11. Pray that Philip and everyone else traveling this weekend has a safe trip home has a safe trip home.

Inspiration of the Week

I love looking at other people's reels. Here is a cool one from Colourmovie.com. Check it out!

Top 10 Tuesday Twitter

Yet another top 10 Tuesday! This week my top 10 people or things to follow on Twitter

1. @AndyStanley
   
2. @amazonmp3
3. @LeoLaporte
4. @THE_REAL_SHAQ
5. @churchcrunch
6. @timastevens
7. @mashable
8. @cmdtv
9. @muggelcast
10. @scottmcclellan

Monday Thoughts

Sorry Took April off to help Discover Point get into the New building. I'm back I hope for good.

I am going to take a page out of my good friend David Collinsworth's book and do a quick review of the past week's service on Monday. Mine will come from a production point of view.

1. Good service, a few visitors. Lots of people filled out communication cards. That is a win my book.

2. Most of my production people are new and are all learning the new equipment (as am I) Rusty my lighting guy did a great job and Matt was very attentive to sound. His ears are getting better!

3. Band preformed Two Hands by Jars of Clay. They did a great job.

4. We announced "Play Groups" yesterday with a lot of positive feedback!

5. Momentum is a funny thing. Right now we have it but it feels like if we let our guard down for a minute we would lose it. NEVER GET COMFORTABLE