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One of our volunteer technology team, Dave Whitcomb, will be playing with his band, As the Story Goes, on the National Mall, July 4th at the 21st Annual Christ on the Mall / FreedomFEST. Check them out if you are in town.

Just came back from a great meeting with Father Michael Sorial and Makar from St. Mary & St. Anthony Coptic Orthodox Church in Queens, NY. They are a growing church interested in using technology to improve communications and efficiency. We discussed three projects to begin with:

1. Telephone System – Currently they have no phone system in place, just a few analog lines placed throughout the facility. I recommend looking at using Asterisk. We use it as St. Mark’s as well as at Coptic Orphans. If you are in the market for a new phone system, I would highly recommend it. I’ll post more on using Asterisk soon.
2. Web Site – They have a static HTML site right now, I recommend using a content management system such as Joomla, Drupal or Plone. We are currently using Joomla and while it is not perfect, we found that it does work pretty well.
3. Church Management System – At St. Mark’s we depend on Fellowship One to manage congregation data, follow up with visitors, activities, contributions, and event registration. Tony Dye maintains a “watch list” of church management systems.

After our meeting, we attended their weekly prayer meeting. Father Michael began with sharing about about Luke 10:38-42, where Martha was distracted with much service and Mary was at Jesus’ feet. I love this passage, probably because it often is a much needed reminder. I know I get caught up with all the projects and work going on, but as Christ said in that passage, “But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part.” We have to make sure to spend that time daily at Jesus’ feet. The prayer meeting that evening was beautiful, I felt as though we truly has come together in one accord before God.

I received our summer camp technology curriculum from School Technology Programs today, we just signed with them. They base the curriculum off of commercial software, but it doesn’t look like it will be difficult to tweak the lesson plans and templates for the open source equivalents. We are going to setup a mini lab for the summer camp and see how it goes. For this year we will still keep Windows on the desktop, but use these apps instead of their commercial counterparts:

• Microsoft Office -> OpenOffice.org
• Microsoft Publisher -> Scribus
• Microsoft Frontpage -> Nvu
• Kid Pix 4 -> Tux Paint

If all goes well, we will have a good case for using K12Linux next year. (If only I can get more of the tech volunteers trained on Linux).

Recently I have seen a lot of Windows clients infected with spyware, especially when Internet Explorer is set as the default browser with Active X enabled. I have been using Spybot Search & Destroy to clean up the machines with pretty good success, but there is only limited support for continued protection. Spybot has an immunization feature, but no resident background scanning like the antivirus apps do. Setting Firefox as the default browser helps too, but some users are stubborn and insist on using Internet Explorer.

Kiltak just posted that Shavlik NetChkâ„¢ Spyware is now free for one year for up to 50 machines. It looks like it has some neat features, such as scanning the network for spyware without requiring agents on each system. We have more than 50 machines, but if NetChkâ„¢ tests out well, maybe we can negotiate a good deal.

I’m not quite sure what to say, I am writing because I know God wants me to. To be honest I am not a big fan of writing, I love to read, but I always hesitate when it comes to writing. I have been inspired by all the great guys out there who have taught me so much by what they have shared on their blogs, I feel the least I can do is to share the amazing things that God is doing at St. Mark’s and what He is doing in my life.

Please pray that God grant me the desire to continue to post regulary and guide me as to what to write. I am hoping to write about the technology and audiovisual projects we are working on and about those we wish to embark on.

This summer is already off to an exciting start. We have a lot of work ahead of us but God has assured us that it is in His hands and He will provide. John Basta, the other member of the tech team, posted unpaid internship positions at George Mason University, which happens to be two miles down the road, and God sent us six interns! Our school, is expanding this year from K3-K5 to K3-6th grade, we will have over 100 students this year. This means we have to add computers, phones, school administration software and a technology curriculum. That is all in addtion to a booming youth and missions program.

With all that is going on, I am learning the importance of delegation and trying to learn how to manage rather than taking on everything myself. I have found that the most important thing I can do is prayer, when I start my day off in prayer and quiet time and then join together throughout the day with my brothers and sisters at the church for prayer I find that there is no challenge that is too great for God.

I look forward to your prayers and comments.