Miscellaneous Topics from Pastor Scott

Here’s a tidbit that will warm the cockles of every computer geek’s heart!

At our church we have 1 computer that runs our Song Show Plus. It handles announcements, words to songs, and all projection duties.

Yesterday we replaced the CD player and tape deck with a second computer. We had a 5 year old computer that lacked an operating system. I installed Ubuntu Linux on it and that’s the computer we used.

The computer will play a cut off of a CD okay, but the main use is that we will rip to mp3 all music we use. Over time we will build a library of mp3’s and the Ubuntu computer will be the mirror for the Song Show Plus computer — that is, the Windows box will do the video part of the service and the Ubuntu box will do the audio.

Here’s the kicker - after everything was working, I gave a quick training session to a couple of people who use the system each week. After walking one person through the ripping in-playing process (which she understood immediately) I said to her, “How do you like Linux?”

She answered, “what do you mean?”

I said, “that’s not a Windows computer, its Ubuntu Linux.”

She looked confused and said, “What’s the difference?”

I think that exchange says a lot about how the ease of operation of that operating system.

As I told one fellow, one big difference is that Ubuntu is FREE!

After doing my post on “who is the church” I came across: this article from Keith Drury. I remember reading it but didn’t realize how much it had influenced my thinking. It is one of those deals where I started off saying, “Keith Drury wrote….” then in a month or two said, “I read somewhere” to, after a year or so, “I’ve been thinking.” So, to give credit where credit is due, I thought I had better post the link here!