Kerner.net

Everything is Illuminated

We watched Everything is Illuminated  last night.  It's based on the book by the same title, and tells the story of Jonathan Safran Foer – a young man searching for the family that saved his grandfather during World War II, Alex – a Ukrainian that ends up acting partially as tour guide and translator, and Alex's grandfather – who is really the tour guide.

The film is basically a road trip movie with two main plot lines. Jonathan's search and the more interesting story about the grandfather. One of the things I liked particularly about this movie is that there is relatively limited dialog. It's a great example of telling the story through cinematography. It's one of the better movies I've seen recently with regard to cinematography. It also looked great in HD from HBO - not sure if this is upconverted or not, but it was good either way.

The movie wavers between drama and comedy during the first half. Eugene Hutz portrays Alex perfectly and his broken English makes for many comical scenes. I think the funniest part though is that the grandfather thinks he's blind and has a dog named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. who for part of the movie wears a shirt that has "official seeing eye bitch" handwritten on it. The shirt makes the dog more official.

If you haven't yet seen this movie you should pick it up. 

ProPresenter Font Choice

 

Like I said in my previous post I'm tickled to death with ProPresenter for our worship presentation software. There are a couple of features I'd love to see added and I'll write that up in a future post, but so far the quality of the text and background display has been great.

The one problem we're having is probably Mac/PC issue rather than ProPresenter, but  it is a bit frustrating and has me looking for a new display font. We standardized on Franklin Gothic last year for lyric display because it is very readable, allows quite a bit of text per line on our 800x600 display, and it's not Arial or Helvetica. Under MediaShout on Windows we used a 32pt font. To achieve the same projection size we're using 42pt on the Mac with ProPresenter. This difference doesn't bother me a lot, it's more of an interesting quirk.

What's bothering me is that character spacing is different (I'm guessing that the Mac is properly kerning the type whereas Windows just throws it up there). The image below illustrates what I'm talking about. With MediaShout and ProPresenter configured for the same margins, and font size adjusted to achieve the same size letters the lines don't hold the same amount of text. With MediaShout all of the text fits on a single line. Don't get me wrong, this looks better, but I'd really like to maintain the number of characters on a line.

So that brings me to my question. What font/size combo are people using for ProPresenter lyric display?  

Christmas Eve @ Schweitzer & Merry Christmas

I hope everybody has a Merry Christmas today. Sarah and I are headed to the farm outside Purdy. Yesterday was a phenomenal day at Schweitzer, but it's left me very tired. We had five worship services - one yesterday morning, and then four Christmas Eve services. The message last night was about the gift of Christ. My favorite part of the message is that the gift isn't really about Christmas, but about Easter. The music was great as always, but Susan LaBarr's singing of the Child of Love topped the evening for me. It's probably one of my favorite Christmas songs.

This was our second weekend using ProPresenter and it didn't disappoint. We smoothly ran moving a background loop throught the entire day with quick crossfades on text changes and very slow fades on background changes (mainly cutting to black during the candlelight portion of the services).

We've got a slightly green/yellow hot spot in our two main projectors which we need to get resolved if we want the screens black in a dark room. I'm not sure if it's the projectors or the feed, but our rear screen doesn't show it on the same feed so I think it's the projectors. I've been wanting to replace the main sanctuary projectors this year anyway and move one of these to Memorial Hall and the other to the gym.

I hope everybody has a great Christmas! 

Switched to GoDaddy

This is the first post within my new hosting environment at GoDaddy. I finally got tired of the headaches with my dedicated server that required it to be power cycled every so often (I know it has a hard drive issue, and I'm suspecting that one of the dimms has gone bad) - since it's in Columbia it required bugging the colo facility to reboot it. The GoDaddy environment is one of their virtual servers and so far it's been flawless - it's even faster than my previous server.

First Sermon @ Schweitzer

Saturday night I got the opportunity to preach my first sermon at Schweitzer. I've spoken during worship at a couple of churches in the past, but I don't know if I would ever have called it preaching. It was a good experience and other than a few technical difficulties I think that it went fairly well. The message will be on the Schweitzer podcast later this week if you feel like checking it out.

Accepted to Seminary

Just thought I'd update everybody on the seminary application status/process. After a long process getting a transcript from UMKC (I never had a student number there, because I took ONE class in high school) everything got submitted last week. I got notification this morning via email that I've been accepted to Asbury Theological Seminary for the spring semester. I'm planning to take one class each semester and one intensive class in January/Summer for an average of 12 hours a year. Now to figure out how to pay for it.

The Kirks' Wine Party

Last night was Steve and Tammy Kirks annual wine tasting party. It's a great event and one we very much enjoy. Last night was more laid back than in previous years, but it was still quite fun. The concept is very simple. Each person/couple brings a bottle of wine which gets encased in a paper bag with a letter written on it. Everybody gets a small pour of the wine and ranks it 1-5. After all of the tasting the score sheet is turned in, tabulated, and there is a prize for the best red and the best white. Last night was interesting because there was only one white wine - which won by default. Tammy coordinates with several of the guests to have a nice assortment of food (speaking of which, ask me to bring something next year Tammy). My favorite food was the homemade cheese crackers (I want a recipe for those). Tammy and Steve have a very ecclectic mix of friends which makes for a great party.