You can read a few of the stories from the stimulus here: stories.baycommunity.com. They are slowly coming in and some of them are absolutely amazing. There’s one particular story that I like a lot, one that truly reveals the heart of this project:

I just ran across this website and was really inspired. I am not a member of the church, but last week, I was pumping gas in Fairhope and went inside to pay. I never go inside to pay  and I also never pay with cash at the gas station. This time, for some reason, I decided to go inside. The woman in front of me was counting pennies to get enough money to buy a few dollars of gas. I have had that feeling before, of barely having enough to get home. I put down an extra $20 over her pile of change and said, “that is not enough, you need more than that.” The look on the woman’s face was priceless! She was shocked , and so was the attendant. I said, “Jesus loves you” She was still in shock as she was pumping gas, it was hilarious. I just kept saying, “Jesus loves you!” as I got in my car. I road away with the biggest smile on my face. -Amy

Yep Yep.  Not really sure how I feel about this, but its the truth – I am the twitter king of little ol Daphne, AL (of course thats not saying much). And looky there’s Jeff on there too.  Thanks Twitter Grader.

UPDATE: Shan-O the Man-O is also on there now, he bumped Jeff to #5 – uh oh the race is on!

I’ve never seen a show like this one. It was more than a “rock concert,” that term feels so small when compared to what I experienced last night. The production was sick (as if you’d expect anything less), every song had a completely unique look featuring flex truss and giant globes that were inter-projected (maybe a new term, not really sure) and internally lit. I could get technical but I won’t, I’ll just leave it at this… it was breath taking.

If you were there and you’ve got pics up, I’d love to see them so leave a comment.

bonus: Coldplay fans, you need to check this… Viva la Hova. This is what happens when JayZ & Coldplay mix it up. (h/t: los)

2. Watchman Trailer. I’m not a super geek by no means, I’d never even heard of the Watchman graphic novel until all the hype started about the movie a few months back. But after watching this trailer, I’m definitely geeked up about the movie.

3. MacBook Touch. You read that right. It’s just a rumor, but sign me up. 

4. Gabe and Max’s Internet Thing. Hilarious. This could quite possibly make your day. (ht: brody)

5. Rocky Horror remake. I’m not sure this is a fave. I love the original Rocky Horror Picture Show so it makes me a little nervous that MTV is gonna do a remake. If you’ve never seen it in a theater or live on stage you’re missing out. Its a lot of fun.

Hope everyone has an awesome weekend!

I was in the youth sound booth the other day for some reason, and I saw this bad boy which brought back some good memories. This Powerbook G4 was my first Mac, I got it around 2002 and its served us very well. Its worked its way down the ranks, and basically become a 15″ iPod (I need to pick them up an armband for it, that would rock). Yep its been reduced to running iTunes for the youth and children, and knowing it as well as I do, I’m sure it does a bang-up job at whatever is thrown at it.

It’s kinda cool to walk around the office and see history lying around in the form of out-dated gear and technology. I like seeing how far we’ve come as the church, and that we are serious about affecting culture through the language it speaks. When I’m frustrated about how slow I feel we’re moving, it reminds me that we are moving faster than we’ve ever moved to engage our culture in new ways. Thats pretty rad.

Over the last 2 days, I’ve been meeting with the guys from Fowler Design Group about wiping our existing video system and taking us to HD from lens to screen, as well as designing the delivery system for each of our future campuses. Which is our first step in the journey of going to a second site. On top of that, we are in the process of extending our existing building to accomodate more room for youth and kids, as well as a second venue on site, which will technically be our first venture into multi-site. 

So, to step back and look at this, we are doing a lot all at once. A full video overhaul, including lighting, in the main worship space, and then full production (audio, video, & lighting) in the new youth room, the new kids room, and the second on-site venue, all while making plans for our first off-site campus launch some time early to mid 2009. 

So my last 2 days have been working through this, dreaming a little about what is possible. And of course filling my head with more acronyms than I thought existed in the entire world. Can you think of another industry with more acronyms than the video/production industry?

So needless to say my head is hurting right now just thinking about it all. But at the same time, its really exciting. I love technology, especially when its used to advance the kingdom. 

I’ll be posting a lot more details in the future. We are still in the infant stages of this, but as we build this system and our plan for multi-site I’ll be posting as much info as I can.

but if you’ve got an iPhone or iPod touch, you can now check out my blog and see it reformatted to fit your phone.

The best part is, its really easy! So easy I could do it. If you want to make iPhone users happy and if you use wordpress, install this little plugin and wala… its magically delicious. 

We’ve been working with Fowler Inc. on doing our video overhaul. These guys will be taking us to HD and its gonna be so flippin’ sweet. You’ll be hearing more about that in the next few weeks. But the new toy I’m talking about is sorta like the first phase of that overhaul. With One Prayer starting this week, we pushed to go ahead and get one large piece of the system early, the center projector. And man is it a doozy. For all you A/V geeks out there, its a Panasonic PT-DW10000U. It’s a 3-chip HD DLP with 10,000 ansi lumens and a 5000:1 contrast ratio.

This guy is a huge investment, but there’s no doubt that its gonna majorly improve the quality of the media in our services and better speak the language of our culture. It’s gonna be amazing.

If you do use it, and for my guys, they have released some pretty cool updates. You can see the complete list of them here.

But the coolest new feature, the one I’m most excited about is their new iPhone interface. So all of you guys with iPhones can now access our schedules and services flows right from your phone. Unfortunately you can’t edit from the iPhone yet but I’m sure thats coming soon. I know I’m gonna be using this bad boy a lot!