I’m also going to reduce my Diet Coke / Pepsi Max intake.

Au Revoir Facebook

Teacher

I’ve got a feeling everything is about to change. On Tuesday I start a new job as a teacher, I’ll be teaching ICT, Media Studies and other general form class type stuff at the Belfast Model for Schools. I can see this will bring about many changes in my day to day routine.

What’s going to change?

• Since finishing university 5 years ago I’ve always enjoyed known I was getting home at the same time every night. I’ve a feeling this will change.
• Since finishing university 5 years ago I’ve always known that I didn’t need to take work home. I know this is going to change.
• Since finishing university 5 years ago I’ve not really had much job satisfaction in my work. I hope this is going to change.
• For the past seven years I’ve been working on a computer all day long and spent many a distracted 5minutes checking facebook, email, twitter, digg, bbc etc. This is going to change, I’ll not have time but I’ll not be have time to be bored either.
• For the past 9 years people have been able to phone me at anytime and I was able to answer them right away, often giving advice on something technical. This will not be able to happen as I can’t answer my phone in class.
• My evenings have been my own apart from committee meetings and a little bit of study for university the past two years. My evenings now belong to marking and preparation.

It’ll change in many more ways but all in all I’m very excited and feel very privileged to have this opportunity to share my passion for Information Technology Communication with the next few generations.

Sub Teacher

This year I’m only being paid as sub, which means although I have a full timetable all year I won’t be getting paid for holidays (and there’s a lot of holidays) so I’ll need to tighten my belt on the spending. Generous Dermo will be away for a little while.

I have really felt led in this direction over the past 5 or 6 years and in fact 17 years ago before I found out I was dyslexic I wanted to be a teacher but didn’t think it would be possible and my GCSEs only helped to make the point still further. It was a series of coincidences (or as I believe God’s guidance) that worked together to bring me here. In short:

1. University placement in Education Department at UUJ
2. 1st Job post degree Education Department BBC NI online, met Andy who introduced me to moodle
3. Next job webmaster Girls’ Model
4. Line manager took the PGDFHE route and advised it was possible to do
5. Accepted for PGCFHE/PGDFHE through Education Department at UUJ (my old boss was my course director)

I just hope I can do the job now but thankfully I have loads of people in work who will help and keep me right.

Firstly why do we need ProPresenter on multiple computer when we only really use it on the iMac in the church? Well there’s a couple of reasons:

1. It’s cold in the church meeting room during the week and our church administrator needs to be in constant tropical heat. Remote access to the library allows her to stay in her office.
2. Often Elia or I have to set make sure the songs are there and then add any missing songs needed for this week so it’s nice to do this from home.
3. We sometimes use Laptop computers outside of the main church building.

The plan still has it’s flaws as we need the PC version to be released to allow for Tracy (church administrator) to do this on her PC but hopefully it will be out soon and before the end of the summer, when it’s gets so cold in the church building even I would need to wear a long sleeved shirt and full length trousers.

Anyway it’s actually quite simple, first of you need ProPresenter (if you’re not using this then why waste your time reading this) and secondly you need Dropbox (it’s free).

Setting up Dropbox

You might be wondering what Dropbox is, so here’s my explanation. Dropbox is a little taste of “cloud computing”, that is it stores files you have on your computer on another computer (server) that you can access from anywhere on the Internet. Obviously it’s all protected by encryption and passwords so it’s a safe way to do this. But more than this is you have the same account on multiple computers, Dropbox will automatically synchronise the files from you’re other computer via the Internet on to the the computer you’re now on. To some it’s sounds a little like magic and to be honest I think it’s pretty awesome (you can even access files on your iPhone). You can also watch the videos to get a clearer picture.

As to how to install Dropbox please see their own instruction on the download page. I would suggest that you use a Dropbox account for each person involved and another one for the main shared computer. The raseon for this is some people will already be using Dropbox and any others will want to use as soon as they start using it. Dropbox allows you to share folders between users and therefore can give everyone access to the sync library area without giving access to other files you might use Dropbox.

Setting up a shared folder in Dropbox

1. Create a new folder in your Dropbox folder on your computer.
2. Right click on the folder and select Dropbox > Sharing options … (this opens up your web browser)
   
3. Add the eMail addresses of the people you want to to have access to the folder. The person at the other end will need to accept the invitation.
   

Setting up library sync in ProPresenter

The great think about syncing the libraries is that they don’t overwrite the actually files you use with out giving permission. It’s really very simple and is covered on the Renewed Vision tutorials.

The libraries only sync when you tell them to by clicking on the “sync” button in the “sync” tab in preferences control in ProPresenter, (ProPresenter > Preferences).

So to repeat in clearer English the files don’t actually change in your ProPresenter library until after you have clicked “Sync Files” and even then until after you have selected the files you want to allow to update. The “server” is the Dropbox folder and the “local drive” is the computer you are using’s own ProPresenter library.

Making it all work

So with all the technical things in place you need a standard practise to ensure people don’t overwrite the wrong files, however thanks to Dropbox allowing you access to older versions of files this isn’t that big a problem. I would suggest that everyone get’s trained and given the same set of standards i.e. how to name the songs & how to format them.

For this we name the songs with their first line (and sometime put a title in brackets) and the songs are split up with max 6 lines per screen (preferable 4). We have colour coding for verses 1 – verse 4, chorus, bridge, pre-chorus, endings and each of the verse 1-4 and the chorus have a continuation lable. The colours are hideous but effective.

After each service, it is advisable to save all changes and then sync the library before shutting down (to ensure any changes you made spelling fixes etc. are updated). Also before you go in to edit any songs do a sync to make sure you are working on the latest versions of all song.

Any questions just leave a message below.

iPhone Theme

I’ve also add a theme just for iPhone feel free to pop on an iPhone as have a look. For those san iPhone people I’ve attached an example.

Find out more at Google Paper.

All the most popular screen resolutions and their aspect ratios are listed below but if you think I’ve missed one of done my sums wrongs then please leave a comment below.

800×600 – 4:3
1024×768 – 4:3
1152×864 – 4:3
1600×1200 – 4:3

1280×800 – 8:5
1440×900 – 8:5
1680×1050 – 8:5
1920×1200 – 8:5

1280×768 – 5:3

1280×1024 – 5:4

1366×768 – 16:9
1920×1080 – 16:9
2560×1440 – 16:9

320×480 – 2:3  iPhone

Now get cracking on your wonderful desktops.

body {

	background-image : url(images/blog_back.png);

	background-color : #000000;

	background-repeat : no-repeat;

	background-position : center;

	background-attachment : fixed;

	margin-top:0px;

}

Dermo meets Andrew Shanks

A few years back I tried to switch my blog over to WordPress but I got complaints that it ran too slowly. Lately I’ve been testing it again for work as I feel it would work great as a newsletter style interface. Nicely there are also people out the doing great work to make it do fancy things like take a large image in the text and make it a thumbnail on the home page. On top of that it now runs much quicker. Sweet Action!!!

So I’m switching back over to WordPress for the next wee while, with an added bonus being the ability to write posts on my phone and add pictures from my phone.

Since I’m talking about new beginnings I would like to welcome Andrew Ross Shanks to the world of my blogs, he is the son of Ross and Louise.  He came into the world a few weeks ago and is coming on fine. He should be about my height in 9-10years if his dad is anything to go by.

Muddy Dermo on Focus

Last week I started another new beginning in the form of mountain biking. An eventful first ride seen me following Nev around the forest above Carrick and falling of just over a half dozen times and also going over the handlebars a few times. It was awesome!!