Normally I don't end up writing because I don't have time. I generally think through what I should write and write the blog entry in my mind before starting on the computer. I have been going over and over in my mind what to write. Never coming to a conclusion. I still haven't but my wife reminded me that people wanted to know...
Life at the office has been the kind of normal rough and tumble of things... In turning the blog entry over in my mind I was thinking about what I do . About 15-20% of my time is financial administration, another 15-20% is general administration, 30-40% is technical, 20-30% is promotion/publicity/fundraising, 20-30% is project administration, and 20-30% is creative project work.
If you add up the worst case scenario you get 170% and best case 120%... the trouble is I never have a best case week! So what do I drop? The administration/fundraising and the technical are necessary to enable the creative to take place and projects to take place. If I dropped the projects my workload would become sensible [80% best case, 110% worst case] and I would go nuts within a few weeks.
Oh... and we lose Paula our administrator in a years time. She will be returning to the UK with her family. We very much need to replace her. Tomorrow she will be spending some hours with immigration department hopefully sorting out a question about a visa for one of the people coming over to help us. If she wasn't doing it, I would have to. She sorts out all supplies for the office, does some of the accounting, office cleaner, resources etc etc... before she joined us these were either adding to my list or not getting done.
We have had a programmer over for a few weeks and he has been working on our most significant web site. The new developments are going well. I spend on average between half an hour and an hour per day working on different aspects of this site with the programmer, and have over the past couple of weeks spent over an hour per day communicating with the content team on this site.
We want to improve the interaction with the visitors to the site - many of them have expressed an interest in knowing more about Jesus, we now have to enable that to happen. Its not just as simple as 'OK, here's what its about, make your mind up...' That would be the western propositional approach. Within the Middle East it is a relational approach that is needed. Having said that, the post-modern generation are more relational than propositional. Facebook is an example of this social networking. It allows individuals and groups of people to interact.
I'm reading a book at the moment by Thomas Freidman entitled The World is Flat. In one chapter he talks about visiting Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. He asked what the most frequent searches were. No surprise that sex hit top of the list, but the second was God and third jobs. Our aim is to create a social network of people searching for God and let them interact with followers of Jesus so they can come to know the God who first went searching for them. The fact that we've had over 1400 people asking for Bibles shows the thirst.
There are times recently when I feel overwhelmed. There is too much to do, and too little time. I end up chasing things that don't bring fulfillment but are necessary. I sit and wonder why we lack so many human resources. Jesus said 'Pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers...' We do that alright!
At our Friday evening group one of the members was talking about a leadership seminar she had gone to recently. She felt that they had mistakenly confused management with leadership. When she said that, it was like a light going on in my head. That's the problem we face. Peter and I are leaders but not managers. We need a manager. The problem is that managers want to control and then lead... this is the dilemma the church has got into when it confuses management and leadership. I have observed all over the place this happening. The Lord inspires a leader or leaders. They need managers to help. The managers eventually take over the leaders and everything dries up, running like a well oiled machine but going nowhere.
So I come back to not writing because every time I start to think then the thinking takes me in a different direction. I miss a clear thought that I want to put down what we are doing at the moment. Tomorrow I will start another week... will it be a 170% week or a quiet 120% week I wonder.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Banks... hmmm...
OK, so another week another bank. Actually my rants about banks have gone quiet for a while.
I have been trying to complete our end of year balance sheet and I&E sheet. One of our bank accounts in the UK should have internet banking but doesn't. I have called the bank a few times. Each time they say they have sent out the 'welcome pack' and we should have it. We don't. Today they said 'Ah, its too long now, you will have to re-apply'.
It shouldn't be a big deal, but it is because my partner in the UK moved house at the back end of the year and two of the statements were lost in the move. So... aiiiieee... oh well.
I've also been preparing budgets for projects this week... along with gantt charts for the project planning. I feel like I am trying to put together a jigsaw to get the projects to interleave correctly. Well, more like trying to put together six jigsaws at the same time. Now, if you ask my family they will tell you I don't like jigsaws. I rarely do them. I find them frustrating. I found this planning frustrating. Oh well... another week...
In between I have been discussing stories with a script writer for a series of short films we hope to make in 2009. That was enjoyable, though I actually prefer the next stages of film making [shooting and editing] more than the story planning. And that brings me back to the start. We need funding for these films, the funder needs our end of year balance sheets and I&E , and I cannot complete that till I get the bank reconciled and I cannot do that till the bank gets Internet banking working for me...
I have been trying to complete our end of year balance sheet and I&E sheet. One of our bank accounts in the UK should have internet banking but doesn't. I have called the bank a few times. Each time they say they have sent out the 'welcome pack' and we should have it. We don't. Today they said 'Ah, its too long now, you will have to re-apply'.
It shouldn't be a big deal, but it is because my partner in the UK moved house at the back end of the year and two of the statements were lost in the move. So... aiiiieee... oh well.
I've also been preparing budgets for projects this week... along with gantt charts for the project planning. I feel like I am trying to put together a jigsaw to get the projects to interleave correctly. Well, more like trying to put together six jigsaws at the same time. Now, if you ask my family they will tell you I don't like jigsaws. I rarely do them. I find them frustrating. I found this planning frustrating. Oh well... another week...
In between I have been discussing stories with a script writer for a series of short films we hope to make in 2009. That was enjoyable, though I actually prefer the next stages of film making [shooting and editing] more than the story planning. And that brings me back to the start. We need funding for these films, the funder needs our end of year balance sheets and I&E , and I cannot complete that till I get the bank reconciled and I cannot do that till the bank gets Internet banking working for me...
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Publicity, success and failure
This morning I was sitting reading some information from a big Christian organisation. It was the organisation that my son works with. He has been visiting us for 3 months and today he returns. We may not see him for 2 years. Its always hard for parents to say goodbye, but saying it to your 21 year old son, knowing its likely he will be 23 when you next see him was difficult for me.
As I looked at the publicity for this Christian group I remarked to my son that though we needed it we don't have anything like this. 'Oh, you must be a more spiritual group', he replied. Christian publicity is always jam packed with success stories. Cover to cover. We're so busy we don't have time to write our success stories. Even if we did it would feel uncomfortable. Not that we aren't successful in the way that other Christian groups measure things. Earlier in the year we did some calculations and found we had more interactions with our audience than the most successful Christian TV station in the region. But we don't write such things generally. Why? Partly because we don't have time and partly because we don't think it was the way of the person we follow.
Yesterday I was looking at the description for a new sound mixer on the Internet. Along with the specification there were quotes from many of the 'power users' of the system. One of the target audiences for this mixer were 'houses of worship' and the audio director of a large California church was singing its praises. Specifically he liked the ability to integrate to the recording system and produce a 'best of worship' each month. The technology was neat, but I didn't know what to feel about the thought of a monthly 'best of worship' album. I sat and wondered what the carpenter of Nazareth would have made of this. What fishermen called from their nets would make of this.
When we share the love of God with people who don't know His grace we are challenged to consider how to do it. Some people don't think about the how, they just rush in like a bull in a china shop claiming their way is justified in the Scriptures. Others mix and match so that the style is barely discernibly different from the culture of the people they are trying to communicate with. In a sense if God says 'do it this way' then regardless of what we feel we should 'do it this way'. But I think Scripture shows us clearly that God wants us to be friends not automata. I have a pinochio string puppet in my office that I use to illustrate that difference. Friends talk. They discuss. Abraham remonstrated with God over the people he was concerned about. He was a friend of God.
We are planning a video series now, hopefully to complete within the next 24 months. A series of stories that communicates the love of God in a way that will encourage people to think and to respond to Him. Its taking a lot of discussion and planning. There are two aspects to this - the planning of the content and filming and finding sponsors to help with the costs. The first part is interesting, the second part a chore. A necessary chore. Not that I dislike meeting people and telling them about what God is doing, but I feel distracted from all the rest of what we have to do. And our publicity is nothing compared to the group my son works with. We are small. We struggle and struggle to do what we do and frequently feel we are failures more than successes. We are overwhelmed with what we have to do in the areas of administration and technical support.
As I sit here thinking and chatting with our Father I wonder... what did He feel when he let His son go to this earth knowing it would be 33 years before He was with Him again? He was not overwhelmed with the work like we feel, yet he couldn't sit back and wait for his return, He still had work to do. I wonder about His measurement of success... no colour brochures, no history of success followed by success. Indeed read the Scriptures prior to His son coming and it reads like the script for a disaster movie with sparks of success followed by troughs of failures.
When we say we follow His son, I wonder how much we really do. And the trouble is... I like successes: I tend to be enamoured by the big flashy offices of the successful Christians... and I sometimes feel like chucking it all in and joining one of the success stories, even though I know in many ways they are only a veneer. I am tired of spirituality being measured in terms of 'blessing'. Job is one of my favourite books. I am fearful of following the Messiah. His road led to death. That's how God measures success. And its painful.
Next weekend is the time eastern Christians remember the death and resurrection of the Messiah. His success was to leave behind a small group of frightened failures... failures who turned the world upside down as they communicated the simple truth - God loves us. He always has done and always will do so. Nothing we do can change that. He doesn't ask us to do anything. He doesn't measure our successes and failures. He just asks us to turn to Him. He did it all. 2000 years ago.
Today we walk with Him. And He walks with us. Success or failure. And we need to communicate the simple truth with our generation: God loves us. He always has done and always will do so. Nothing we do can change that. He doesn't ask us to do anything. He did it all. 2000 years ago.
As I looked at the publicity for this Christian group I remarked to my son that though we needed it we don't have anything like this. 'Oh, you must be a more spiritual group', he replied. Christian publicity is always jam packed with success stories. Cover to cover. We're so busy we don't have time to write our success stories. Even if we did it would feel uncomfortable. Not that we aren't successful in the way that other Christian groups measure things. Earlier in the year we did some calculations and found we had more interactions with our audience than the most successful Christian TV station in the region. But we don't write such things generally. Why? Partly because we don't have time and partly because we don't think it was the way of the person we follow.
Yesterday I was looking at the description for a new sound mixer on the Internet. Along with the specification there were quotes from many of the 'power users' of the system. One of the target audiences for this mixer were 'houses of worship' and the audio director of a large California church was singing its praises. Specifically he liked the ability to integrate to the recording system and produce a 'best of worship' each month. The technology was neat, but I didn't know what to feel about the thought of a monthly 'best of worship' album. I sat and wondered what the carpenter of Nazareth would have made of this. What fishermen called from their nets would make of this.
When we share the love of God with people who don't know His grace we are challenged to consider how to do it. Some people don't think about the how, they just rush in like a bull in a china shop claiming their way is justified in the Scriptures. Others mix and match so that the style is barely discernibly different from the culture of the people they are trying to communicate with. In a sense if God says 'do it this way' then regardless of what we feel we should 'do it this way'. But I think Scripture shows us clearly that God wants us to be friends not automata. I have a pinochio string puppet in my office that I use to illustrate that difference. Friends talk. They discuss. Abraham remonstrated with God over the people he was concerned about. He was a friend of God.
We are planning a video series now, hopefully to complete within the next 24 months. A series of stories that communicates the love of God in a way that will encourage people to think and to respond to Him. Its taking a lot of discussion and planning. There are two aspects to this - the planning of the content and filming and finding sponsors to help with the costs. The first part is interesting, the second part a chore. A necessary chore. Not that I dislike meeting people and telling them about what God is doing, but I feel distracted from all the rest of what we have to do. And our publicity is nothing compared to the group my son works with. We are small. We struggle and struggle to do what we do and frequently feel we are failures more than successes. We are overwhelmed with what we have to do in the areas of administration and technical support.
As I sit here thinking and chatting with our Father I wonder... what did He feel when he let His son go to this earth knowing it would be 33 years before He was with Him again? He was not overwhelmed with the work like we feel, yet he couldn't sit back and wait for his return, He still had work to do. I wonder about His measurement of success... no colour brochures, no history of success followed by success. Indeed read the Scriptures prior to His son coming and it reads like the script for a disaster movie with sparks of success followed by troughs of failures.
When we say we follow His son, I wonder how much we really do. And the trouble is... I like successes: I tend to be enamoured by the big flashy offices of the successful Christians... and I sometimes feel like chucking it all in and joining one of the success stories, even though I know in many ways they are only a veneer. I am tired of spirituality being measured in terms of 'blessing'. Job is one of my favourite books. I am fearful of following the Messiah. His road led to death. That's how God measures success. And its painful.
Next weekend is the time eastern Christians remember the death and resurrection of the Messiah. His success was to leave behind a small group of frightened failures... failures who turned the world upside down as they communicated the simple truth - God loves us. He always has done and always will do so. Nothing we do can change that. He doesn't ask us to do anything. He doesn't measure our successes and failures. He just asks us to turn to Him. He did it all. 2000 years ago.
Today we walk with Him. And He walks with us. Success or failure. And we need to communicate the simple truth with our generation: God loves us. He always has done and always will do so. Nothing we do can change that. He doesn't ask us to do anything. He did it all. 2000 years ago.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Flying forward
I'm sitting in the airport waiting to fly to Beirut. It's 00:30 - just past midnight. It seems this is the first free moment I have had this year. I am way behind on my blogging. Last night I completed the blogs for my sailing... I try to record each trip so I learn how I am getting on. But my media work is less similar. I guess the only thing I can learn is that we need more people.
So what has happened in 3 months? Working backwards from today...
We just said goodbye to Luke. Luke is from Canada and is helping out another media team. He came to us for a week to work on a new scheduling/playout system for Internet radio. When we first developed Internet radio playout we were thinking of the radio sounding much like the BBC World Service, where there are scheduled programmes and people tune in at a certain time to listen to the programme.
What we have found over the years is that people tune in ephemerally... and for short periods, usually in the order of 15 minutes. Since most of the programmes are 15 minutes long this means they catch the end of one and the beginning of another. They don't get a single programme from start to finish. If they want a whole programme they go to the 'on demand' stream where they hear it from the start when they want to hear it.
Anyway the upshot of this is that instead of streaming to a schedule which takes a long time for the programme presentation department, we will be doing a more eclectic mix of programmes based on a rule based template where the computer will chose which programme to put out when. Luke will be programming this system for us and our partners.
This last month we have had John out from the UK. He spent the entire month watching TV. Sounds like a teenager's ideal job, but John is retired and the TV watching he did was copying loads of master tapes to hard disks so we can make DVD masters and stream the programmes on the Internet. It was a labour of love for him, as the programmes are in Arabic or Farsi and he doesn't speak a word of either language, but the tapes had to be monitored as they were copied to make sure there were no problems.
Actually there were problems and sometimes it took two or three attempts to get each one on the hard disk. The problem is partly due to the age of the master tapes and partly due to the fact they have been stored at room temperature. Room temperature in Cyprus can easily exceed 30C during the summer and sometimes gets close to 40C. This is not good for magnetic tapes. Or DVDs.
Before that we had Alison and her family out. Alison came for a busman's holiday: She is an accountant and came to do our end of year accounts. It was quite a task -we had changed accounting systems during the year and so it meant pulling figures from both systems and merging them together. But first there were end of year currency variations to enter, end of year write-offs and accruals to deal with and so on... and we changed currency on 1st January from Cyprus pounds to Euros. Still it was all completed, even if it did take longer than expected. Without people like Alison, I'm not sure where we would be!
Alison brought with her the equipment for a new telephone system for the office. Our old one had been causing grief for some time. The new one is VOIP based and much much better. When the equipment came I was the person to get it all going on one of the new servers...
...new servers? At the end of last year I had tried to upgrade one of the packages on one of the main servers in Cyprus. Only I couldn't, because that version of the Operating System was now out of date [the version of Linux we use is only upgradeable for 24 months]. So I installed a new version on a spare server, intending to migrate the pair of servers that were now out of service date across. Only I found that we had a hardware problem with the spare server.
So at the beginning of the year, Peter and I decided to replace both of these old servers with brand new ones [they were about 3 years old anyhow and lacking power]. So that involved a lot of work for both Peter and I in the upgrading.
In between all this we were trying to bring online a new Flash Media Server in our main cluster. This is going well, and we are seeing how good the new Flash Video Streaming will look.
Oh, and I forgot [but shouldn't] we had a programmer over in Cyprus for a month working on one of our web sites...
Well... if that sounds like we have been sitting around idle, I also did a short trip through the UK to the USA early in the year. The trip was both planning and visiting a major donor who we hope will fund two projects this year. One of those projects is an apprenticeship programme we dearly need to free up Peter and I for other things.
So what has happened in 3 months? Working backwards from today...
We just said goodbye to Luke. Luke is from Canada and is helping out another media team. He came to us for a week to work on a new scheduling/playout system for Internet radio. When we first developed Internet radio playout we were thinking of the radio sounding much like the BBC World Service, where there are scheduled programmes and people tune in at a certain time to listen to the programme.
What we have found over the years is that people tune in ephemerally... and for short periods, usually in the order of 15 minutes. Since most of the programmes are 15 minutes long this means they catch the end of one and the beginning of another. They don't get a single programme from start to finish. If they want a whole programme they go to the 'on demand' stream where they hear it from the start when they want to hear it.
Anyway the upshot of this is that instead of streaming to a schedule which takes a long time for the programme presentation department, we will be doing a more eclectic mix of programmes based on a rule based template where the computer will chose which programme to put out when. Luke will be programming this system for us and our partners.
This last month we have had John out from the UK. He spent the entire month watching TV. Sounds like a teenager's ideal job, but John is retired and the TV watching he did was copying loads of master tapes to hard disks so we can make DVD masters and stream the programmes on the Internet. It was a labour of love for him, as the programmes are in Arabic or Farsi and he doesn't speak a word of either language, but the tapes had to be monitored as they were copied to make sure there were no problems.
Actually there were problems and sometimes it took two or three attempts to get each one on the hard disk. The problem is partly due to the age of the master tapes and partly due to the fact they have been stored at room temperature. Room temperature in Cyprus can easily exceed 30C during the summer and sometimes gets close to 40C. This is not good for magnetic tapes. Or DVDs.
Before that we had Alison and her family out. Alison came for a busman's holiday: She is an accountant and came to do our end of year accounts. It was quite a task -we had changed accounting systems during the year and so it meant pulling figures from both systems and merging them together. But first there were end of year currency variations to enter, end of year write-offs and accruals to deal with and so on... and we changed currency on 1st January from Cyprus pounds to Euros. Still it was all completed, even if it did take longer than expected. Without people like Alison, I'm not sure where we would be!
Alison brought with her the equipment for a new telephone system for the office. Our old one had been causing grief for some time. The new one is VOIP based and much much better. When the equipment came I was the person to get it all going on one of the new servers...
...new servers? At the end of last year I had tried to upgrade one of the packages on one of the main servers in Cyprus. Only I couldn't, because that version of the Operating System was now out of date [the version of Linux we use is only upgradeable for 24 months]. So I installed a new version on a spare server, intending to migrate the pair of servers that were now out of service date across. Only I found that we had a hardware problem with the spare server.
So at the beginning of the year, Peter and I decided to replace both of these old servers with brand new ones [they were about 3 years old anyhow and lacking power]. So that involved a lot of work for both Peter and I in the upgrading.
In between all this we were trying to bring online a new Flash Media Server in our main cluster. This is going well, and we are seeing how good the new Flash Video Streaming will look.
Oh, and I forgot [but shouldn't] we had a programmer over in Cyprus for a month working on one of our web sites...
Well... if that sounds like we have been sitting around idle, I also did a short trip through the UK to the USA early in the year. The trip was both planning and visiting a major donor who we hope will fund two projects this year. One of those projects is an apprenticeship programme we dearly need to free up Peter and I for other things.
Monday, January 07, 2008
What is reality?
The last month, apart from time off for Christmas, has been focusing on four things:
In order to move forward and do the important rather than just maintaining things for others we determined we needed to do two things: 1) train one or two other people to help 2) cut back on the things we had been doing for other organizations. The trouble is this would have a significant detrimental effect on other organizations - we shared this with one and they were not sure how they would get round the problem.
We had two colleagues over from Egypt for a couple of weeks working on the update for the website and the planning the other website. The update is to create a themed feel to the site so that we have Christmas and other seasonal themes, rather like Google. It gives the site an 'alive' feel. We also had some extra facilities to integrate, allowing chat rooms and other interactive features to be brought into the site. It worked well and we are very pleased with the result. We now have over 7,500 members - that's people who have signed up to regularly participate in the site - so we are very encouraged.
One of the colleagues we had over was really concerned about the cutting facilities for other organizations. He suggested we look at expanding the training, making a fully fledged apprenticeship programme. Well, we looked at this and it did seem a wise and helpful way forward. We then looked at funding it and assuming all the partner organizations agree to help with will move forward into 2008 with 4 apprentices. By the end of 2009 they should be able to have taken over the lions share of supporting all these facilities.
Peter and I had been doing lots of planning and budgeting anyway - this was an expansion rather than something totally new on our agenda. Planning and budgeting is one of those amazingly important and time consuming activities that seems to get nowhere, but without being done you really do get nowhere! What it has left me with is a number of grant applications to complete before I go to the USA later this month to share with funding agencies who have already expressed an interest in our activities.
The other site we were working on is a totally new one - a web 2.0 site. What's web 2.0? It's almost 100% interactivity within sites. No longer to you read, listen and view material - your interact with it. In this case the site will look at feel more like a virtual reality computer game than a website. But it won't be virtual reality it will be actual reality. We have no idea about the reaction it will get - so far people who have seen previews are very impressed. For us its a big step into seeing if people who prefer oral culture find it easier interacting with this sort of... well... not a site really, more an environment. Watch this space!
One of the colleagues will be cominng back here in February to work further on the site with us [he is continuing in Egypt now] with an aim that it will be launched in March. In the mean time, Peter will fly to Egypt to look at setting up the apprenticeship programme there. I am making a quick trip to Jordan and then over to the USA... so in actual reality we are doing a lot of traveling too. I enjoy traveling, but sometimes I think the virtual reality of being able to travel at the speed of light would be really helpful!
- Planning for 2008
- Budgeting for 2008
- Completing the update on one website
- Planning next stage on another website
In order to move forward and do the important rather than just maintaining things for others we determined we needed to do two things: 1) train one or two other people to help 2) cut back on the things we had been doing for other organizations. The trouble is this would have a significant detrimental effect on other organizations - we shared this with one and they were not sure how they would get round the problem.
We had two colleagues over from Egypt for a couple of weeks working on the update for the website and the planning the other website. The update is to create a themed feel to the site so that we have Christmas and other seasonal themes, rather like Google. It gives the site an 'alive' feel. We also had some extra facilities to integrate, allowing chat rooms and other interactive features to be brought into the site. It worked well and we are very pleased with the result. We now have over 7,500 members - that's people who have signed up to regularly participate in the site - so we are very encouraged.
One of the colleagues we had over was really concerned about the cutting facilities for other organizations. He suggested we look at expanding the training, making a fully fledged apprenticeship programme. Well, we looked at this and it did seem a wise and helpful way forward. We then looked at funding it and assuming all the partner organizations agree to help with will move forward into 2008 with 4 apprentices. By the end of 2009 they should be able to have taken over the lions share of supporting all these facilities.
Peter and I had been doing lots of planning and budgeting anyway - this was an expansion rather than something totally new on our agenda. Planning and budgeting is one of those amazingly important and time consuming activities that seems to get nowhere, but without being done you really do get nowhere! What it has left me with is a number of grant applications to complete before I go to the USA later this month to share with funding agencies who have already expressed an interest in our activities.
The other site we were working on is a totally new one - a web 2.0 site. What's web 2.0? It's almost 100% interactivity within sites. No longer to you read, listen and view material - your interact with it. In this case the site will look at feel more like a virtual reality computer game than a website. But it won't be virtual reality it will be actual reality. We have no idea about the reaction it will get - so far people who have seen previews are very impressed. For us its a big step into seeing if people who prefer oral culture find it easier interacting with this sort of... well... not a site really, more an environment. Watch this space!
One of the colleagues will be cominng back here in February to work further on the site with us [he is continuing in Egypt now] with an aim that it will be launched in March. In the mean time, Peter will fly to Egypt to look at setting up the apprenticeship programme there. I am making a quick trip to Jordan and then over to the USA... so in actual reality we are doing a lot of traveling too. I enjoy traveling, but sometimes I think the virtual reality of being able to travel at the speed of light would be really helpful!
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