This morning was interesting. Jim was out of town for a gymnastics-something-rather, and I was left to head up the sound booth.

By the way, if you’re not on our team (I’m sure there are a couple of “outsiders”, I know Jim has mentioned this on CTM), my name is Daniel and this is my first blog post. Ever. Not even myspace…myspace is really dumb. But that’s for another blog. Maybe I’ll put that on my myspace page later tonight. I’m 18 years old, and I’ve been with the tech team for 6 years now, I guess. Yeah, when it was really bad. But that was before Jim! With Jim, you can get your shower twice as clean with half the scrubbing! Rambling…

“Heading up the sound booth for Sunday Morning services” sounds big, but I really don’t think it was. Jim and I work pretty much side-by-side up there, so the title of “in charge” doesn’t have as much impact as it would at, say, a nuclear power plant. Biggest difference was, we were down one man.

For the most part, it was business as usual…only a few hiccups that we probably would have had anyway. The black video mixer that originally belonged to the lobby computer started double-image/freezing again. After realizing that it wasn’t going to stop anytime soon, I unplugged it at the mixer to make sure it wasn’t the scan converters, then inconspicuously swapped it for the gray mixer during the sermon.

 I was going to put a welcome screen in the lobby, but soon realized that Jim’s laptop was missing in action, and sblobby never had been activated (and it still doesn’t have a keyboard). We ended up using a wide (aka low-maintenence) camera shot just to have something up there, and to have something for the people in the nursery.

 8:00’s words were fine; for some reason, Nina is a “Live” button magnet and keeps taking off the words. (If you’re reading this, it’s all good! We know you’re still learning!) By the way, I may have scared her when I mentioned that we’re going to try ProPresenter and she might have a new program to learn…we’re truly thankful for your help, Nina, especially on days like today!

Eric Miller, a missionary from Africa, was in town today and shared a bit for communion and offering. They had a slideshow of pictures that they wanted put on the screens; we really weren’t sure when but assumed they’d give us a cue of some sort. After Dennis’ team was finished practicing, we tested the ppt. The slides were fine, but there was supposed to be music that went along with the slides. A little PowerPoint tip here: songs are not embedded into the presentation, and require the mp3/wma/whatever file to be in the same folder as the presentation. Even though the neat little speaker icon was on the picture, we had no sound. Mr. Miller’s wife gave us the original CD to play, but we never got to it anyway. I threw it up on the screens as everyone was leaving after second service just to say we did.

 John’s simpler music and the plain words were great. Slow, simple, easy, powerful. It was a great worship “session”, if you will. I would like to note that I tried a new font, Calibri. I mentioned this to Jim once, but it looks good, reads very easily and, well, looks good.

I can’t say that I was sure what Chris was doing…he was off somewhere mumbling something about the “crazy lights” and giving a nice, loud “huh?” when he heard his name, but what else is new?

All in all, it was a pretty good morning. It’s kind of weird to have a problem and not have Jim to turn around to to “Buy this this week” or “Quick! Fix that!” As important as the team is to our success, it’s also important to have a degree of self-sufficiency because people are going to be gone from time to time. Never would I say we’re going to give Jim the boot, but I think I can do it when I need to.

 And that’s all I have to say about that.

Tags: powerpoint, ppt, service, Sunday

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 4th, 2008 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.