An inflammatory heading I know but at least it’s one that will hopefully draw folks into a discussion.

Of recent months and possibly even the last few years if I’m honest, I have felt uncomfortable in ‘Church’ as we know it. I started my life as a good Catholic boy, was an altar boy for a while, knew my catechism off by heart, said my hail Mary’s and so on and so forth. Later on I wa to rebel against all things God and Church before finding my faith and returning to be Jesus follower and not a doctrine or theology follower. (more…)

I’ve been waiting on a developer to produce a new WordPress front end for ChurchTechy.com – however they seem to be a little delayed so I’m playing with various free themes from around the place.

I like this one at present and it has a dark version as well so if you’re a regular visitor then it could be that one day it’s light and the next time you visit the dark one. Or even something entirely different. Don’t panic though it’s just me playing until I get my proper one.

Talking of  developers.

….. Does anyone know of a good developer who is very au fait with OSCommerce? If so, we (as in my Church) may have need of their services. All suggestions please via the contact form or email directly to me, thanks.

According to my newsletter this morning “there are now over 25,000 websites that accept OpenID as a means of registration or login” – well now they can add one more.

This humble little blog has installed the OpenID WordPress plugin. I’ve been using it myself for a little while and wondered if anybody within the WP community had created a plugin for it. Well no surprises that there is at least one available.

Don’t know what OpenID is all about or haven’t got one and think you need one? Then pop on over to teh MyOpenID site and grab yourself one.

p.s. should you fancy a username.churchtechy.com OpenID then let me know what username you want and I’ll fire out an invite

As I type this I’m sat in a hotel room in London. The same hotel that I was thrown out of this morning along with my colleague.

What had we done? Absolutely nothing except to rely on on our company to properly book us a hotel for a week whilst we are on a training course. Fortunately I have friends in London and if worst came to worse I’d go and bed down with them – however I can’t really offer my friends floor space to someone they don’t know.

In this thought my company has no blame. It would appear that we use the services of a third party to book our hotel, travel, etc so after 3.5hrs on a train, the last thing you want to be told is that you don’t have a room. My colleague was all for getting back on the train and heading home. Fortunately the hotel had space last night but not for the rest of the week – so we turned up at the training centre with suitcases, etc in tow only to be told later that the 3rd party had “persuaded” the hotel (Travelodge as a by the by) that they do indeed have room for us and if necessary they would have to turf other folks out!

It all boiled down to the 3rd party having clout and my employer having a potential 40,000 employees that they could have staying at this hotel chain and that is business nobody in their right mind would want to do away with. So we turned up at the check in desk to have a suitably humbled duty manager welcome us back – though not that humbled that he didn’t offer any concessions or similar!

Ah well, the course is so far enjoyable and will help cement knowledge, etc – for those of a min, it is the “Securing Networks with ASA Firewalls” course from Cisco all shiny and new with the exam only having been available for a month or two.

More next week, maybe.

Let me set this out.

Those that read this blog will know that my eldest went off to university almost two weeks ago. However he may as well have been at home as the number of emails, texts and voip/video sessions are in the double digits every day.

They’ve varied from “how do I reheat frozen egg fried rice” to “I’ve got a clash in my schedule what do I do about it” – however by the far the most frequent contact has been via voip, especially video calls. We use skype in the house because I was given some free voip to landline call time and not out of any fondness for the company. To my wife the video chat sessions have been a blessing as she’s been able to see our eldest daily and make sure that he’s ok. Although it was easy to set up and advise her on use she still thinks my skills are fantastic – and I’m not turning down any brownie points.

But all this has set me to thinking. How best should I promote voip within the Church? Specifically to the leadership? Along with this goes questions like what company, what hardware / software, what benefits, why and so on. Voip is still very much in its infancy at present in the UK and certainly I know of no other Church in the area that is using it – I hope I’m wrong in this presumption though. Most of these questions can be answered by a bit of research but the one that I’m struggling with is the why.

So why should I push the Church in this direction when I can’t adequately answer all of these questions for myself? Can any of you help me out? Do you use voip and if so why and what are its benefits? Are you still tied in to a PABX or are you utilising your internet connectivity? How do you find the voice quality? Questions, questions!