This is partly what I did for the Circuit Staff Meeting, complete with a montage of suitable pictures - alas, as I blogged earlier, things didn't go according to plan....
The colours of Autumn give a new splendour to our world. All is golden, russet, brown; thre is an astonishing patchwork of colours. How wonderful God's creation seems, clad in the colours of Autumn.
Yet those colours represent also the beginning of the end: the leaves fall, plants die and decay, and soon will come the starkness of bare branches and lifeless cold of winter. Our faith journey too has times of coldness, and bleak outlook.
But amidst the impending death of Autumn, there is the hope of new life. Fruit and seeds in abundance contain the spark of what is to come when the world once more turns to spring.
Lord Jesus, we remember the Autumn of your ministry; the time in Jerusalem when new colours appeared: purple, crimson, scarlet. We remember the disciples, afraid in the stark winter following your death.
But we rejoice in the glorious spring of your resurrection, for the seeds you had already planted in the Autumn time, and for being able ourselves to look beyond our winter to the promise of your advent in our world.
Wednesday, 2 November 2011
When Technology goes bad....
Yesterday I was leading devotions for the Circuit Staff Meeting. Or, correction, I was supposed to be leading devotions. With a screen and projector available, I'd done everything on the computer as a presentation - only for the Laptop to decide to throw a wobbly: I've fixed it now, but it took a couple of hours of fiddling as the user profiles had become corrupt and unless you went on in Safe Mode, all you saw was a black screen... given the sound didn't work in safe mode - or the video out - this meant using my own machine wasn't an option.
The problem though was exacerbated by the fact that the presentation I had so carefully crafted was done in OpenOffice Impress.
First of all, let me say that in general I'm all for Open Software. I have an old laptop that would otherwise be useless configured with Ubuntu Linux, and when I upgraded computers back in January I decided to try and live without Microsoft Office and have been using OpenOffice and LibreOffice almost exclusively ever since; and if a Church is looking to do more in terms of projection during Worship but hasn't got the budget for the likes of EasyWorship, then I'd recommend having a look at OpenLP which I have also been experimenting with recently.
Sadly, in my opinion Impress - the Presentation package in Open/LibreOffice - has a particular major flaw that is likely to mean that I head back to MS Office and in particular Powerpoint sooner rather than later. This is the flaw that compounded the problems I had yesterday: that the way Impress handles media files automatically makes it so much harder to transfer a presentation to another computer.
This isn't a new problem and in some ways this makes matters worse: it's known about, and yet nothing has been done to improve the situation.
What happens is that you insert pictures, music, maybe a video into your presentation - and Impress, rather than creating a huge file, saves instead links to the files you are using. As soon as you then copy the presentation to another computer, the links don't work - unless you spend the extra time putting all the files needed into the same directory, and transfer that along with the presentation. This seems to happen even if you try and export the presentation in another format (such as Powerpoint) - and it meant that yesterday, even though I could copy the presentation to another computer, I couldn't use it as most of the pictures and all of the music and video just didn't show up. To be fair, this can be a problem with standard Powerpoint files too - but Powerpoint can at least create a version that includes all of the media using the Package for CD option - Impress just doesn't.
The problem though was exacerbated by the fact that the presentation I had so carefully crafted was done in OpenOffice Impress.
First of all, let me say that in general I'm all for Open Software. I have an old laptop that would otherwise be useless configured with Ubuntu Linux, and when I upgraded computers back in January I decided to try and live without Microsoft Office and have been using OpenOffice and LibreOffice almost exclusively ever since; and if a Church is looking to do more in terms of projection during Worship but hasn't got the budget for the likes of EasyWorship, then I'd recommend having a look at OpenLP which I have also been experimenting with recently.
Sadly, in my opinion Impress - the Presentation package in Open/LibreOffice - has a particular major flaw that is likely to mean that I head back to MS Office and in particular Powerpoint sooner rather than later. This is the flaw that compounded the problems I had yesterday: that the way Impress handles media files automatically makes it so much harder to transfer a presentation to another computer.
This isn't a new problem and in some ways this makes matters worse: it's known about, and yet nothing has been done to improve the situation.
What happens is that you insert pictures, music, maybe a video into your presentation - and Impress, rather than creating a huge file, saves instead links to the files you are using. As soon as you then copy the presentation to another computer, the links don't work - unless you spend the extra time putting all the files needed into the same directory, and transfer that along with the presentation. This seems to happen even if you try and export the presentation in another format (such as Powerpoint) - and it meant that yesterday, even though I could copy the presentation to another computer, I couldn't use it as most of the pictures and all of the music and video just didn't show up. To be fair, this can be a problem with standard Powerpoint files too - but Powerpoint can at least create a version that includes all of the media using the Package for CD option - Impress just doesn't.
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