AT&T remains elusive on official date for iPhone tethering
As long as I pay AT&T, I don’t think it matters that I want to use my “unlimited” (5GB) iPhone data plan with my laptop. I pay them for Uverse TV/Internet, home phone and two iPhones. They get almost $350/month out of me. Really AT&T, would it be too much to ask you to just allow me to tether my iPhone via Bluetooth. I have done it before with an old Nokia phone so I know it’s possible on your network.
I am testing out ministry management software called Churchdirector.com. We hope to use this for all ministry’s within the church. So far, it looks fairly straight forward. However, I have to “invite” volunteers. It would be nice if I could create an account for them on my own.
I am learning that people really like the opportunity to communicate about many things at all times of the day. In the past few days, I have witnessed or commented on the following:
Individually, all of these things may never be connected. But, in my life, it has kept me close to several different people who may/may not know one another. This has got to be a good way to communicate and evangelize to folks. It just has to be.
What marvelous words, those three are. To bring us closer to God, God enters our remembrance of Him through words that we can relate to that remind us of the beginning of a season, a time, a place, a relationship. It almost has the feel of “Once upon a time” where Eden was that idyllic place that we could truly be ourselves, unhindered by all the baggage that we struggle against since the time that Adam and Eve bit the apple.
So where am I beginning and what will it look like? It has been a long time since I opened my mouth to speak/write the words that God has inscribed there… so long that I find myself hesitating, cringing almost, as I type, a thing I never dreamt I would struggle with. Recovering from an illness several years ago has kind of robbed me of my voice, my confidence, even in every day living. Yet, those who love me most (especially my husband) believe that I have a story to tell.
What story shall I tell? I tap my fingers across the keyboard as if it will spell out the answer. Shall I tell the story of how I was born, raised, adopted and reunited with my birth family and all that came with it? Or shall I tell the story of how my husband and I came to adopt our own two children? Or shall I share how God has acted throughout His Story in each of our lives to continue to invite us into a love relationship with Him? Maybe, it has everything to with all of the above….
I was looking for a way to select all records with a particular field that is empty for my FM Pro app. In SQL, I just enter “SELECT * FROM tbl_my_info WHERE field1 IS NULL”. Pretty simple, huh? Well, FM Pro has its own vagaries. It took way too long, but I was able to find someone else’s post about the same search. Their answer, simply go to the “Find” mode and enter a equals sign (=) in the field of interest. This has the effect of telling FM Pro that you want all records that have this field empty.
There you go. That wasn’t too hard was it?
It has been many years since I have used FileMaker Pro. In fact, I all but swore it off the last time I used it. Why? Well, back then I was still self-employed and one of our first clients wanted to take an existing FileMaker Pro application and turn it into a web app. Simple enough I thought. Wrong boyo! Long and short of it, FileMaker Pro was not good at exporting in a way that MySQL could import. Long project, never finished.
Fast forward to this month. I have been working on getting an existing application to work with new features mandated by our production team. We are outsourcing some aspects of our operation and need to track those persons involved from outside the office. Not too bad. In the time I have been on the project, about two weeks, my appreciation for FileMaker Pro has been reestablished. It may not get everything done, but it works well for the in-house projects so many of use need to get done and off our desks.
It’s the part of putting up a website that I have the most trouble with – designing the template. While can code a website (almost entirely) from scratch, the graphics and their layout are not my forte. So, I rely upon other to do their magic and voila, templates galore. Not exactly. We all know that the hardest part of setting up a ministry website is the dirth of good templates to look over in the first place. Whether you choose Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress or some other tool, each has their positives and negatives. The most important thing is that a template created for one can not be used on another. So, I usually point my friends and clients to template sites that sell them a la carte or as part of a subscription. However, it is up to the designers for that service to create new and exciting templates to keep folks coming back for more. If they don’t create new ones, your brand new subscription can start to look like a poor investment.
Recently, however, one of my clients sent me a link to Artisteer and asked me to take a look at it. On its surface it offers something that I have not seen others will – create one template and export it to Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress.
It’s the inevitable question for any ministry coordinator – “Sorry to call you so late this (Saturday) evening, but I won’t be at church tomorrow, maybe you can find someone else to replace me”. No matter how many times you offer a ministry roster and remind all involved that locating their replacement is their responsibility, it will eventually fall to you at some point. So, what do you do? Well, if you have a “connected” church like mine, you consider the possibility of online ministry scheduling. Thankfully, I am not in charge of scheduling anything other than the youth (and men’s group this year). But, if you are in charge of scheduling the Sunday morning worship, this can be daunting if more than one person can not attend. To that end, I organized a list of possible options for our ministry coordinator. They are:
At this point, our coordinator has decided she wants to try Churchdirector. I will be creating an account and testing it out over the next few days.
As you can tell by the missives below, writing is not how I make money. I can write. Let’s leave it at that. However, there are many that have been blessed by God with that talent – my wife among them. To those folks, I say, “Thanks for the hard work. It keeps my entertained, busy and thoroughly happy to read”. So, how I can help them. Well, I can make recommendations about what works as a writing platform. This morning TUAW posted an article about WriteRoom. While it might be too spartan for me, I can see its allure. Just write baby!
