This is a big Sunday for the tech ministry at Sugar Creek. We are going digital. The Digico is installed and this will be the first Sunday running it for the services.  All is tested and ready to go and John is charged with making sure all works correctly. Over the next few weeks we will train the volunteers on the job. I think that they will be back running the shows soon as they become comfortable.  We have had two rehearsal with the digital system and both were successful and the musician said they can hear a difference in the monitors.  We have not even installed the version 2 Avioms yet. More to come on that next week.

We have a new (at least new since I have been producing) CG operator for the Edge service…welcome Janet.  The Digico took up a lot of time this week, but I did get to add some curtian slashes behind the drums.  I’m really looking forward to hearing the difference in sound quality over the next few weeks as well as how the A1 take to the new system.

I can’t tell you how lost I would be without Quicksilver.  OS X is very cool but it is not the same without Quicksilver.  Now that QS is open source I love it even more.  I have been using QS from about the day I got my mac and what makes it great is that I’m still learning things.

I find myself thoughout the day needing to connect to different servers and using the Finder Connect to Server option.  Little did I know that you can just type the URL into QS using the text input option and then hit enter and you are connecting.  That is awesome.  To enter text mode on QS just type a “.” to start.  Go QS!!!

Many people know that I have been a big fan of open source software for a long time.  I have been using one form or another for about 10 years now.  Windows was my bread an butter back in the 90’s.  Starting in the year 2000, more and more of my work was moving to open source solutions in the form of Linux and PHP web applications.

Back in 2005, I decided that it was time for me to try out Apple’s OS X and I was hooked.I couldn’t just use the operating system, I had to learn how to code OS X applications.  Wow was that a great experience.  Cocoa is one of the nicest development frameworks I have worked on.  I was somewhat suprised to find out that there was not many good open source Cocoa applications. So I decided that I would write one.  I released MacHash in 2005.  It has been on the back burner for a long time.  I’m bringing it back and will start releasing new versions soon.  If you want more information click here.

Today I have many open source applications that I live by day in and day out:

Adium (iChat could learn much from this application)
Growl
Quicksilver
Cyberduck (Best Mac FTP client)
Firefox