I cannot believe it is two weeks since I wrote an update. It seems to have both flown by and dragged out for ever. I have been very stressed these last couple of weeks, but more of that later.
I have had meetings with a couple of our partners, resulting from the experiment in live radio on the Internet. The result of these meetings is that this area of work will certainly expand in the future. We are looking at more experiments leading to a full time service by the end of the year.
I have been editing a DVD in between. Having got the sequences together, I spent 2-3 days 'authoring' the DVD. Authoring is the process of puting in all the menus and links and what goes to where etc. In a multi-media training DVD this is pretty complex. Anyhow... having spent 2-3 days getting it ready to burn a demo to sent to our partners in the UK I click on the 'Make a DVD' button. Hard disk wirs... dialogue boxes come up on screen saying 10%, 20%, 30% etc up to 99% when its says [paraphrase] 'Croak, you gotta be joking this ain't gonna turn into a DVD for love nor money'. Actual message was 'Unknown Error UkErr01 - cannot make DVD'.
Furious I went to the website to talk to tech support for this commercial software. 'This product ceased to be supported in September 2005, please buy an upgrade'. The upgrade is 250 sterling! I downloaded the demo version of the upgrade, expecting since its an upgrade it will read in all the work I have done: Nope - 'Sorry you cannot import this file the version that made it is too old'. So I had to learn a new package and reauthor the same thing again... GRRRR...
Michael has managed to get the communication with the database working and the start of communication working with the mobile phone. So things are progressing pretty well there. I am encouraged having him doing the programming. He is much more logical and structured than I am which is what is needed in a programmer... I am good on the ideas and concepts and I can programme, but not good on all the 'what if's to test is something goes wrong. I have been his liaison with the project so have been in and out on this over the couple of weeks.
Next week we are handling the streaming of a live event in video and audio from Egypt. Last year there were 70,000 listeners and 20,000 viewers over 4-5 days. I have no idea how many to expect this year. I was in Egypt for this last year, but this year I am not going. An Egyptian colleague will be handling that end and I am handling all the stuff from Frankfurt servers.
The following week I shall be making a visit to Morocco to see some partners there. This will be the first time in Morocco and I am looking forward to it.
So... the stress point... this is something I don't normally write about here as my wife normally puts this sort of thing in her blog, but it has so affected me so much I think I have to have it here. The church we have been attending has adopted 'The Purpose Driven Life' lock, stock and barrel. The problem with the Purpose Driven Life is not that it is 100% wrong, but that it is a confused mix of good and bad. It is a mix of normal Christian doctrine and Southern California mega-church universalism. We have a word for this phenonema its called 'syncretism'. If you want to know exactly what it means, here's a pretty good definition.
Anyhow [as I appear to so often say], some people I am friendly with in the church have seen this too, but the leadership are into it hook, line and sinker and some people are being totally misled and deceived into not seeing all the errors... even the basic tenet is wrong, we should be spirit led not purpose driven!
Not sure where will be going from here church wise. I'm pretty sick about the whole thing.
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