Build your own AMX replacement: part two (or, touchscreens can't swim)

Last time (admittedly, a very long time ago!) I painted the backdrop of my church and its A/V control setup, and gave some of the motivation for wanting a cheaper, more flexible replacement. I had a proof of concept up and running, the design and architecture of which I'll go into later in this post. But I also left you with a cliffhanger: just what exactly did happen on Sunday 10th February, and what bearing did it have on the project?

Somebody had thoughtfully left a glass of water hidden right next to the AMX touchscreen. That morning, the inevitable happened; the touchscreen lost its programming after a short bath, and we were left with no way of controlling our video switchers short of manually dialling in each take, from a different room. The team stumbled through the morning service as best as they could, and I got a phone call at lunchtime: was my replacement system ready, and could I install it right now please?

The answers were no and yes, respectively. That glass of water, strangely enough, was one of the most useful things to be added to the A/V system in some time. ;)

One of the things I had agreed with the church leadership after my week of working in the Parish Centre was that I wasn't going to spend any more than I already had on components for the replacement system. I'd already invested a couple of hundred pounds all told, and knowing what happened to the last few upgrade plans we'd heard of, I wasn't going to commit more until the plan had been given both approval and budget. So when the call came, I didn't have all the necessary components to install a complete solution - I had barely any more than the bare proof of concept from November (though I had been developing the software in that time). Nevertheless, some control was better than no control, so I grabbed what I had and headed to church.

What I had at this point was a Raspberry Pi with the control software installed, a USB hub, and enough serial adapters to connect exactly two devices. A quick committee meeting decided that the most important things were the main switcher and one of the cameras, so those were wired up first; I made a Kanban-style board using post-its to track which devices had been moved to the new system and which were still wired in to the AMX. (Two of those post-it notes, "Please do not remove these post-its" and "thank you", are still there. That's just how our sense of humour works.)

We didn't have a control surface (the touchscreen being the single most expensive part of the system), but I did have an old netbook that was capable enough for the time being. I was also fortunate enough to have received back the router that church had "borrowed" which meant we could connect the server and client machines together reliably. With the help of several of the team, we managed to bring the first phase of the system online in just a couple of hours - finishing just as the 6pm team arrived to set up.

Enough narrative. Show me teh codez.

Because I work as a technical architect, I drew a pretty, if also pretty basic, diagram of the new system:

Essentially, the "controller" running on the server is a big interface onto all the devices in its bucket. It's worth noting that you don't interact with the devices themselves from the client, you ask the controller to prod them for you. This is partly by design and partly a consequence of choosing Pyro: because the devices themselves need access to the serial ports on the physical server, they would need to use a proxy object to be able to be RPC'd. (Actually, I'm not sure quite how much work that would be.)

Having the controller as this union of all device interfaces means that it is the only object that needs to be made available through Pyro. The disadvantage (if it so proves) is that all the devices have to be physically on one server. It doesn't take much imagination to come up with a scenario in which a more distributed system is useful - for example, controlling something which doesn't have serial cabling into the server room. But that can be a future feature when it's needed. I imagine that keeping track of all possible devices on a network is one headache too far right now!

Another interesting feature of the system is the controller's "sequencer". It essentially lets you queue up a sequence of commands to be executed in turn, at intervals of (at the moment and somewhat arbitrarily) a second. The first use case, and the one for which it was included, is the perhaps surprising candidate of the highly desirable "turn the system on" feature: it needs to turn on one power distribution unit, then pause for a short time before turning on the next one, and so on. I have no doubt that more clever things will make their way in here as use cases in future. The ability to record and play back macros is an interesting idea that I'll certainly be looking into in the future.

The code itself is probably the least interesting part of the system. It's up at GitHub if you're interested (the project with all the UI is up separately). More interesting is what we can do now it's running, where I'm thinking of taking it, and how I intend to make sure getting from here to there doesn't accidentally destroy the universe on the way. (The phone calls would be insufferable.) More of that in part 3, which I'll hopefully not take quite so long to write as I did this one!

Build your own AMX replacement : part one

The church at which I serve on the production team has an AMX automation system as an integral part of our audio-visual setup. A touchscreen panel allows operators to control the video switchers, cameras, projector screens, the system power, lighting - even, at one point, the locks on the front door!

The user interface of the AMX system, showing controls for one of our three cameras.

On the whole, the AMX has served its purpose pretty well, but there are two big drawbacks to having it:

• It's a hideous big black proprietary box (literally!). Because you need AMX accreditation before they'll give you a compiler, there's no way for us to change how it functions as the needs and equipment of the church change. Ages ago (before I'd joined the church) we replaced our projectors. Because they were a different make, we lost some of the ability to control them via the AMX - we couldn't update the control codes. Unless we shell out for an expensive engineer ordained by AMX, the way things were at installation is the way they'll stay.
• It's now at least ten years old, and old equipment has an inevitable tendency to die when you least want it to. That's not AMX-specific; that's just one of the fundamental truths of A/V engineering. But because it's a proprietary system, and because it's so old, it's extremely difficult and costly to effect repairs. We had a ballpark quote for replacing it with a modern system with similar capabilities: in the region of £12,000.

Twelve.

THOUSAND.

POUNDS.

Even if the church had that sort of money to spare (it doesn't), even I would be hard-pressed to justify spending it on an AMX or similar system when budgets across the board are strained, and for far more worthy causes. Yet with two major failures in the last two years, leaving it be wasn't a good choice either. Surely there must be some other option?

Well, actually, yes (if the title of this blog post hadn't given it away)!

I have a background in software; I work as a technical architect for a software firm, and have always enjoyed the art of programming. Ultimately, I reasoned, what is the AMX? Just a bunch of serial ports and relays, with some software glue between them and a touchscreen controller. And in true Top Gear fashion, I asked myself, "how hard can it be?"

The answer turns out to be "not all that hard, actually". But that's getting ahead of ourselves. I started the project with three clear aims:

• To replicate as fully as possible the functionality and behaviour of the existing system;
• To do so in a way that was easy to maintain and change as the needs and equipment of the church change over time; and
• To do so wherever possible using standard, off-the-shelf components.

Those being defined, I made a few decisions about the direction to start off in:

• Because they're cheap and readily available (not to mention cool), I would base the system around a Raspberry Pi. Note that, since the Pi runs Linux, it could be easily replaced with any other general-purpose Linux computer if needed later. The Pi also has the advantages of being small and low-powered. Most of the other components I needed to source (USB-to-serial adapters, USB relays, miscellaneous other serial gumph) were easily found on eBay or Amazon for a few pounds each. 
• Though I hadn't really used it much before, I decided to write the control and GUI software in Python. It's a ubiquitous language, and in a church the size of ours it's not going to be too hard to find another Python programmer should I ever move on! There are also plenty of libraries available for all sorts of useful functionality: python-serial would take care of the serial port communication, Pyro would deal with the RPC needed between front- and backend systems, and on the recommendation of a colleague, Qt via PySide would be used for the GUI. 
• To keep things simple, I would write both the backend and frontend code in Python; Android and iOS interfaces might well appear in future iterations, but they're not core functionality so they're stuck on the backlog for now. This keeps the first objective - replicating existing functionality - as the priority.

I booked myself a week off work, set up shop in the Parish Centre, and became the church's in-house software engineer. That was back in November, and at the end of the week I had a fairly convincing proof-of-concept working. I'd also drafted, at least in my own mind, a rough deployment plan, dependent on being given a budget for the more expensive components and on being able to find a couple of days to spend installing it.

At least, that was the plan... and then last Sunday happened. And that's where we'll pick the story up next time.

"Is bad sound a sin?"

That's the question that Gary Zandstra recently posted on his blog at Church Production Magazine. It's taken me a while to get the chance to write this up but the question reminded me of a conversation I'd had a few weeks previously.

Some friends and I - some techie, some not - were having a picnic after an open-air church event a few weeks ago. I was commenting to one of the other techies that the sound mix hadn't been particularly good, and he agreed. Someone else chipped in that, from where they had been stood, all they could hear was electric guitar.

Then one of my non-techie friends said something that the three of us immediately and strongly disagreed with:

"It doesn't matter if it didn't sound good, as long as people were worshipping!"

Having had plenty of time to mull this one over, I still stand by my initial reaction. But, at the same time (and I'm not just saying this so she doesn't feel like I'm picking on her!) I think she was completely right too...

The passage that came to mind when she said it was Malachi 1. There, through the prophet Malachi, God tells of his anger at the substandard offerings presented to him by the Israelites:

"When you bring blind animals for sacrifice, is that not wrong? When you sacrifice crippled or diseased animals, is that not wrong? Try offering them to your governor! Would he be pleased with you? Would he accept you?" says the LORD Almighty. "Now implore God to be gracious to us. With such offerings from your hands, will he accept you? Oh, that one of you would shut the temple doors, so that you would not light useless fires on my altar! I am not pleased with you," says the LORD Almighty, "and I will accept no offering from your hands. (Malachi 1 v8-10)

The days of animal sacrifices are over, but that doesn't render this passage irrelevant. The point remains that God deserves the best we can offer. Christians are called to be living sacrifices (see Romans 12:1) - our very lives become our offering to God, and by Christ we can be made "holy and pleasing to God". The Christian aim of living a blameless life is not (rather, should not be) to achieve salvation - though so often it's seen that way. (How many times has someone tried to summarise all religions as "try hard to be good and hope that $deity thinks you're good enough to get to heaven"?) Rather, having been given salvation through no act of our own, as thanks to God we are called to live to honour Him.

That was a little digression; I'm supposed to be talking about AV, right? But here's the thing: if our worship is technically poor, if it's produced with an attitude of "It'll do", if the mix is being drowned out by one instrument or whatever it is - then how does it form service that is "holy and pleasing to God"?

I want to make another short digression at this point and tell the story of a friend of mine from my first church. He first started getting involved in sound production in church as the person responsible for recording services to audio cassette (remember those?). And he was very happy in that role. Over the years, though, more and more sound equipment appeared at the back of church; and recording the services became just a minor part of the tasks that were required on a Sunday. My friend and I had a conversation a few weeks before I left the church to come to university. He told me how he'd not expected the demands to pile up as they had, and that he was thinking of stopping because he didn't have the technical skill that was now required.

I don't think I'm being mean to say that my friend wasn't able to mix sound very well. In light of the above, then, does that mean his efforts behind the sound desk were "useless fires"? Far from it! Because what ultimately matters is the attitude that we come with; to continue to be willing to serve for so long when you feel unhappy, almost overwhelmed, in the role - that's sacrificial worship!

Back to the picnic, then, and the original statement: does it matter, if people are still worshipping?

I know very little about sheep. If you placed a specimen in front of me, I'd likely have great difficulty in telling if it was a prized lamb in perfect condition or if it had some form of sheep-disease that reduced its value. If the specimen, say, had only one leg and hadn't moved after several hours of intense observation, I might suspect it of not being entirely healthy. But to a shepherd, or to a vet, those subtle symptoms of sheep-disease would be glaringly obvious. I figure, the same is true of sound mixing: the three techies in the group had no hesitation in calling out the symptoms that were obvious to us, but the others had counted the legs, checked for movement, and seen nothing wrong.

But should it matter, when we're not the ones behind the sound desk? On the one hand, the only way any of us improve at anything is from receiving feedback from others (I try and always tell the sound guy at church when it sounds beautiful); on the other, who am I to judge if the "mite" of an offering from my brother or sister is the change they found down the back of the sofa or their entire savings for this month? And why should I interfere with someone else's offering?

Tough call. This blog has comments open; what do you think?

Setting Up Sound for Worship

A friend of mine who's worship minister at a church in London asked me to write down a few notes on how we set up and sound check for services at St Aldates. I figured other people might be interested in it, so I asked if she'd mind me turning my reply into a blog post; here it is!

Before Sunday

The monthly rota will have been E-mailed out with details of who's playing in the band for that service, so the sound guy knows what to expect.

The worship leader might send their proposed set list out in advance, too. Visuals guys love it when you do that :-)

Service -2 hours

Arrival and setup

In an ideal world, a small army of gnomes would ensure that all the required equipment is in place, working and connected before the band arrive. However, since gnomes have very fussy employment requirements, it falls to the lone sound guy to...

• ...put out required number of microphones - vocal or instrument mics
• ...put out required number of DI boxes
• ...make sure everything is plugged in to the right place and there are enough jack-to-jack leads for everyone
• ...put out required number of foldback monitors
• ...make sure everyone who needs it has power sockets available

The drum kit (in its own little cave of soundproofing) is left out and miked up permanently, because it takes ages to assemble and plug in all the mics. We're fortunate at St Aldates to have a permanent AV installation, but other churches may have to also lay out multicores, connect up amps and speakers, and so on.

As I say, ideally all this setup would be done before the band arrive, but realistically the band do help out too!

Service -1.5 hours

Pray

This is the point at which the sound and visuals engineers (the visuals person has turned up by now, right? That's for another post...) leave the sound desk and head down to the band to pray together. This is important! It also helps in getting rid of any partisanship between band and AV team; both need to be working together for the glory of God in the service.

Sound check

The sound engineer runs this part of the process. The aim is to check that everything is working, plugged in correctly, and is giving enough signal to the sound desk. It's useful if the sound engineer has a microphone at the sound desk to talk to the band via their monitors, if the sound desk is a distance away from the stage.

In turn, the sound engineer asks each of the musicians to play their instrument and/or sing into the microphone. (It's nice if you note down their names from the rota, so you can address them directly!) On the desk, the standard procedure is

1. Unmute the channel
2. Move fader to around -10 / -5dB
3. Adjust the gain until the sound that you're hearing is at a decent level

Some sound engineers rely exclusively on the LED meters on their sound desk at this point. They're a useful guide but ears work best! Obviously, if something is peaking at the desk then you need to turn the gain down, regardless of what your ears say. You might need to ask the musicians to adjust the volume or EQ on their instruments in order to get a decent amount of signal. You might also need to encourage them to "give it some welly" - for vocalists this can be difficult early on as their voices won't have warmed up. If the lead worshipper is a guitarist, then get them to play and sing at once - since that's more natural for them.

The sound engineer might also apply some basic EQ at this point. I tend to not do much EQing at this stage, instead waiting until the practice (see below).

If the keys player is going to be using piano sounds and pad sounds, ask them to play both (not at once). Some fancy keyboards apparently let you split these over two channels to solve the issue - pads and pianos sound very different, and the sound engineer needs to make sure that both give a suitable level without peaking. Likewise, if the electric guitar player has a fancy set of effects pedals, try a few.

Once the engineer says s/he is happy with one instrument, they will ask the musician to stop playing/singing, and move on to the next. It's important at this stage that the rest of the band don't try and play over each other. (It's also very difficult to sound check when there are people having loud conversations in the room. O hai, Late Service setup!)

This is the time I normally remember to do an initial check of foldback levels. If you're lucky, then you'll be inheriting the desk in a sane state and only a few tweaks might be needed. If you're unlucky, then a completely different set of instruments were used last time and you need to do it all from scratch! It's really down to the preference of the musicians as to what they have in their foldback. In general:

• Worship leader: their guitar/keyboard, their vocal should be loudest. Maybe some kick/snare drum. Maybe a little backing vocals.
• Drummer: maybe their drums (we use in-ear monitors so that's not as daft as it sounds!). Lead instrument and vocal. Bass.
• Backing vocalists: Backing vocals loudest, leader vocals softer. Maybe some lead instrument. Maybe some kick/snare.
• Keys: The keyboard. In my experience, keys players find it universally impossible to hear themselves in foldback even when turned up so loud you don't need front-of-house. (Any suggestions, anyone?) Lead vocal and instrument. Electric guitar if there is one.
• Electric guitar: if they don't have their own amp they'll need to be in their foldback. Lead instrument and vocal. Bass, keys.
• Bass: if they don't have their own amp they'll need to be in their foldback. Lead instrument and vocal. Eguitar. Maybe kick/snare drum.

Those are really rough starting points, but we'll tweak them later. You also probably don't have that many channels of foldback - we certainly don't! - so there's some compromise needed based on who is sharing a monitor with whom.

Once all musicians have sound-checked, all the appropriate channels on the desk should be on and at about -5dB. In general things will be too loud right now - which is good. If you push levels in the service higher than they were in the sound check, then you risk feedback. The mix will also probably sound a bit naff because everything's at the same level.

At this point I like to make the handover very clear: the sound check is done, the band are free to get on with their rehearsal, so I say something like "OK, Rich, all yours" (where Rich is the worship leader). The whole sound check should take about 10-15 minutes at most.

Service -1.25 hours

Rehearsal

After the handover, the worship leader decides how things happen. It's usually useful for the band to play through one song, after which a flurry of foldback requests will be shouted at the sound engineer all at once. :-)

I use the rest of this time to work on EQ and on the front-of-house mix. My general approach with EQ is "fiddle until it sounds good" mixed with "less is more". One piece of wisdom that was passed on to me (via Dave, via Nolan) is that a fairly tight cut at 250Hz helps make vocals a bit clearer, so I normally apply that early on. I've yet to work out how to EQ the Nord to make it sound as good as our previous Triton (though I suspect all the keys players in church will want to make me suffer for that comment).

Occasionally, a member of church leadership will wander in during the sound check or rehearsal and make comments about the noise. It might be worth either the sound engineer or worship leader having a chat to them about this if it becomes a problem; particularly the point I make above about feedback. At Aldates, leadership will sometimes ask for front-of-house to be turned off once the engineer has a reasonable front-of-house mix, and although this changes how the band hear themselves and means I get less tweaking time before the service starts, I normally comply. And I always try to remind myself that I need humility in those situations where it's so easy to become annoyed at leadership!

Service -0.25 hours

Final setup

Once the band finish their rehearsal there's typically about 15 minutes before the start of the service. We normally put a worship CD on at a moderate level at this point, and I always see it as the last chance for a "bio-break" (trip to the bathroom!) before the service starts. Once done there, it's time to check battery levels in the handheld radio mics and put them at the front of church (making sure they're switched on!); prep one or more lavalier (clip-on/tie) mics depending on the speaker's preference; double check those battery levels; and pray over all the little technical details that will inevitably need to be sorted during the service.

Service +0 hours

End of the service

Have a CD cued and ready to play as the band finish. Make sure the song is appropriate to whatever's going on at the end of the service up front - if there's some intense prayer ministry happening and the band just finished on a quiet note then a loud guitar intro might not be the right thing to play!

Service +0.25 hours

Set-down

This is the part that people tend to forget! It entirely depends on what other services or activities are going on in church that day - for example, if there's another service starting soon with a similar band you won't want to put cables away only to get them out again.

If there are no more services or events that day, then the goal is to leave the stage and sound desk in the state you'd have preferred them to be in when you arrived. To me, this means a relatively blank stage (though I might leave foldback monitors set up): microphones and DI boxes put away; mic and music stands folded and put to one side; cables coiled, tied and hung up on the appropriate peg. We have an M7CL, so unless I've done something outlandish like softpatching I'll generally just leave the sound desk in whatever state it is at the end of the service.

So... that was a new experience...

Tonight I led worship at the Oxford Prayer Room. It was my first time leading worship in public (eg with people I don't know in the room). Inspired by another Oxford-based blogger, I'm going to analyse the evening here, warts and all... I probably shouldn't analyse tonight publicly, or with the probably self-critical method I'm going to employ. I almost certainly shouldn't be writing this blog post at half past midnight [Edit: It's now 1.15am...] when I need to be in work early tomorrow. I'm going to ignore both of those suspicions for now. It would make for a boring post if I didn't.

First let me say OW OW OW OW OW OW. It currently hurts using my left fingers to type, and I hope that my left arm won't be too stiff in the morning. I've never played guitar for such an extended period of time before - after about 40 minutes cramp set in and I had to let Claire take over at that point until I could grip the guitar neck again.

I'd asked Claire to help me lead, mostly because I am very aware of the limits of my musicianship and she clearly has an anointing that I simply don't have. I don't say that in a self-deprecating way; but I know that my skills don't primarily lie in playing music or singing (of which, more later). I've never played music with someone else before (well, not anything like this and certainly not for years) and I think that showed. I know the Aldates bands do spend the time practicing with one another, helping them to gel musically. Claire and I hadn't even practiced together before tonight, and things were made more difficult about ten minutes in, when we suffered a Technical Problem.

If you have ever shared a sound desk with me, you'll know that I don't do technical problems. If I have to leap into the power room mid-service and repatch half the system to work around a problem, I will; if I had to kneel on the floor holding a loose cable in place while operating the visuals computer keyboard with my face and the DVD player with my left foot, I would. Probably. It comes with the territory of being an A/V engineer and programmer. But in this new arena, I simply didn't have the tools and skills to deal with the fact that, ten minutes in to what turned out to be a 90-odd minute session, my guitar strap broke.

"That's hardly the end of the world," you've probably just thought to yourself, and you're right. A quick requisition of a chair to sit on and I could carry on just fine; except it made things just that little bit more difficult. Trying to look around at Claire to signal a chorus or a repeat was awkward; she wouldn't have seen the usual leg signals even if I'd had the spare mental capacity to remember to give them. And as for trying to work out what chords she was playing during the times when she improvised was (especially for a non-keys player) impossible. Mostly, Claire was able to follow what I did just fine, but then she has the advantage of knowing both instruments well!

The high probability that anything I played to Claire's lead would be in the wrong key, then, meant I mostly didn't play while she was leading. But what I did try to do is improvise with my voice, rather than the guitar. Now, I don't have a spectacular voice. My parents always tried to discourage me from singing - though in their defence, this was through those teenage years when male voices become difficult tools to wield! Still, it really touched me when, a few weeks ago at church, someone standing next to me told me that I had a wonderful voice and it was so nice to worship next to me. Without that, I probably wouldn't have volunteered to lead tonight, although I'm still not sure I understand all the reasons why I did!

I was quite pleased with how well my voice managed on some of the songs, but - and I think this is a confidence thing - I'm well aware that for probably 40% of the time, I was horribly out of key. Again with the lack of tools thing - how do I fix that mid-song? I noticed a tendency that I had of trying to sing songs an octave lower than I'd practiced, for fear of not hitting the right notes; all that resulted was that I hit the same wrong notes, just an octave lower. When I managed an octave jump for the third verse of David Crowder's "Alleluia, Sing" I was actually really surprised with how my voice sounded - to me, at least, much better than the lower first two verses.

I also liked being able to use the prayer room in worship. There's a wall in the room on which people have written the names of people they know and prayers that they would come to know Jesus. As part of the worship I read out each of the names that were up there, asking God to break in to their lives. I don't know any of them (save one), but God does. I hope that that prayer can be used in some way.

Much like this post, the session went on a little longer than I'd expected. I'd only really prepared enough for the 40 minutes my wrist lasted before cramp set in, but Claire and I were there for another 45 minutes on top of that. (While my memory for song lyrics is necessarily quite extensive, the same is not true of their chords!) I am truly grateful that Claire was there. She certainly helped me to enter into God's presence this evening - and after all, that's what worship is about. Not that we can make our own ways into the presence of God, but that Jesus has made it possible at all, and somehow we can commune with God as we sing and pray. It becomes not about the singing, the praying, the words, the chords, the visuals or the sound mix; it becomes about Jesus, and Jesus alone.

So Jesus, take those songs and prayers; you deserve so much more than the little I was able to give, but every beautiful chord and every bum note are yours.

On leading and serving

Things aren't perfect.

OK - hopefully that wasn't news to you. The question I pose to you is: when things aren't perfect, something goes wrong, or something is not done that needed to be - how do you react? I've seen about three different approaches recently, and I think it's a matter worthy of comment.

Take this scenario: at work (I work at a software firm) someone makes a commit that sets the build on fire[1]. Thanks to the wonders of version-control and continuous integration software, you can see exactly what set of changes was made, and who made them, to break the build.
At this point you have three options: you can leave it, and hope that someone else picks it up - or maybe somebody else is assigned to that area of the code, so they'll pick it up instead. (Fair enough, particularly at work.) Or, you could run an svn blame and find out who 'owns' the line responsible, then shout across the office, "${name}, you set the tree on fire!"

Maybe, and this is your third option, you could find out how the build is broken, fix it, then commit that fix (and receive the adulation of DeciBot[2] when it announces "All watched trees are now green").

Put like that, I guess it's reasonably apparent which is the best of the three options to take. But so often - and now I'm not just talking about work - people pick the wrong one!

I was reading Joel Spolsky's blog the other day; the entry entitled "My Style of Servant Leadership". In it, Spolsky tells a story from his time in the Israeli army:

Anyway, on my first day of work for the sergeant major, I didn't know what to expect. I was sure it was going to be horrible, a suspicion that seemed to be confirmed when he took me to the officers' bathroom and told me I would be responsible for keeping it clean. And then he said something I didn't anticipate.

"Here's how you clean a toilet," he said.

And he got down on his knees in front of the porcelain bowl -- in his pressed-starched-spotless dress uniform -- and scrubbed it with his bare hands until it shined.

To a 19-year-old assigned to clean toilets, which is almost by definition the worst possible job in the world, the sight of this high-ranking, 38-year-old, manicured, pampered disciplinary officer cleaning a toilet was a shock. And it completely reset my attitude. If he can clean a toilet, I can clean a toilet, I thought. There's nothing wrong with cleaning toilets. My loyalty and inspiration from that moment on were unflagging. Now that's leadership.

Those that know your Bible will already be thinking of Jesus' words to his disciples, after an argument breaks out over which of them is the greatest. Get this:

"If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all." (taken from Mark 9: 35, NIV)

Those words from Jesus - the very instrument of creation, the incarnate God of the universe, who washed his disciples' feet.

You can try the ostrich approach - that is, bury your head in the sand until it (hopefully) passes. You can take the "assertive" approach, and bang some heads together until (hopefully) everyone sees things from your point of view (or at least are speaking to each other again). Or, you could step out, and do something to serve them. There's truth in the cliche that actions can speak louder than words; how different things would be if, instead of shouting matches with harsh words thrown in both directions, we all opted for serving matches, both sides wanting to do things for purely the other's benefit?

That's both simplistic and idealistic; in truth, even in the best case it's rarely two-way, at least not straight away. But, leaders, persevere - not just because it's effective (it actually works!), but because it's the right thing to do, out of love for those you are serving. And it's not an easy road - because to serve others is to necessarily sacrifice some of your own ambitions and plans. Then maybe, just maybe, for the briefest fraction of time, you'll get a glimpse of better things to come. And when you get that glimpse, don't stop there - keep hold of it, keep "cleaning toilets", and perhaps you'll get there in the end.

Perhaps, God willing, we will.

[1] Note to non-software engineers: this essentially means 'someone breaks the program you're all working on'
[2] A friend of your friend, the DecisionSoft Continuous Integration watching IRC bot

5th Week: Learning a New Language

"And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days." -- Joel 2:27-29, The Bible

I've been running visuals for the Late Service at St. Aldate's. In an "ordinary" service this would mean getting the words of songs on screen at the right time, and keeping the speaker on-camera - straightforward stuff and all things I've done so often, they've become reflex. (Watch me during a service I'm not on AV, if you don't believe that...) The Late Service has gone beyond that, using video backgrounds behind the song words to aid the worship.

"Uh-huh, what's so special about that?" you may (or may not) ask. There is the ever-present danger of doing it for the sake of doing it, for the technical challenge, or even to "liven up" the worship - to which you might well reply "So what?". Background visuals can be just a "nice touch" but I always strive for more than that; to become as much a part of the worship as each instrument in the band, as each heart of the congregation. What I do behind the sound desk is my worship to God, my offering laid out on the screens that everyone can see. (That, by the way, is why it upsets me when I have to put up things that I know are low-quality. I want to give God more than that.)

Tonight, as Owen was playing and singing "For greater things have yet to come, and greater things are still to be done in this city" I felt God say, "Look outside. Outside the doors." Outside? How could I do that? The collection of loops we have is limited and there wasn't what I wanted to show. I went for the only "outside shot" I had available to me: across the entrance foyer and out through the front doors. And someone promptly walked across the shot and out of the building.

It struck me (as I walked to hand in work to the comlab at 1.15am) that what I was doing was learning a new language. As with any language, when you start you have a limited vocabulary - and when you want to express a specific thing, you can be scrabbling for words, hoping vaguely to get your point across. Here, the language was pictures, the point was God's heart, and my attempts to communicate were in desperation the closest thing I could get to the picture in my head. But that's OK - any language takes time to learn. And I know the point was gotten across (thanks Emily).

I really want to develop this further - I want to take a camcorder out and just walk around Oxford for a day, for one. The more words you have in your vocab list, and the more you learn them, the more expressive you'll be in the language. And the more new words you add, the less likely you are to fall back to the very basics - "Bonjour, je m'appelle James, j'ai vingt ans, j'habite a Oxford..." has a certain equivalence with those time-lapse clouds. They have a place, but there's so much more to French (right, Jenny?)

Oh, go on then.


And as for my vocab list? It'd be really useful if the thumbnail menu we have actually linked in with VLC to select what video was playing. And seamless looping in VLC would be nice, too... The former, at least, I've already prototyped.