First Broadcast Using SleepyEngineers.com

This evening I talked Lee through the changes he needed for his Windows Media Encoder to be able to broadcast the service through SleepyEngineers.com. It worked, but not without some problems. Mary was home sick in Arkansas and I was home sick in Kansas City. We both experienced quite a bit of break up in the broadcast. I think it is Lee's slow data card. By the weekend we should have DSL installed at the church and hopefully things will work smoother.

SleepyEngineers.com

Today I signed up SleepyEngineers.com to serve as our streaming media provider. We get a 5mbs streaming pipe for $60 per month. That's 5 times faster than my 1mbs streaming server located in my apartment in Kansas City. I did quite a bit of testing with the new server tonight and it seems to be working well. Now we can broadcast a bigger picture.

Sick Day

I noticed that me throat was feeling funny last night. Today it is sore and I don't feel well.

I drove back to Kansas City this evening.

Second Week Of Live Streaming Video

I thought things went very smooth today with our broadcast. My old server sitting in Kansas City is servering us well as a Windows Media Server.

We had a noisey monitor this morning. After much isolation I narrowed it down to the feed line was plugged into the microphone jack instead of the line jack on the monitor.

Drew's Birthday Party

I spent most of the day at the church working on the sound and video equipment. I took time out this afternoon to go to Drew's birthday party at the skating ring. That place was crowded with people celabrating birthdays.

Getting Ready For The Sunday Broadcast

I spent the afternoon until late tonight working at the church on the sound and video equipment. I fixed a problem with a loud ground loop hum in Carlos's guitar amplifier. I installed a ground loop isolator.

One More Week To Work

As I travel to Arkansas tonight I am pondering my future without a job. I have had a steady job now for over 40 years. It is very hard to think about the future without a job. I guess the Lord using this to get me to pray more and depend on Him instead of my own abilities.

No Broadcast Tonight

As I sat anixiously waiting for Lee to start the broadcast from church tonight I got a call. Lee could not get the audio to work for encoding the broadcast. I told him everything I could think of to check but nothing worked. It seemed like his Roadie USB Sound Card was not working. I ended up tuning into http://ffc.org I enjoyed learning about the dead sea scrolls.

Doctor Whitaker

I had to visit Dr. Whitaker this morning for a routine exaime. He said I was in good shape and sent me to the lab where they drew blood, urine, chest xray, and an EKG. I'm glad that's done.

Total Forgiveness - The Book

Mary bought us a book on CD's to help with the drive from Little Rock to Kansas City. I spent a lot of time listening to it on my return journey to Kansas City tonight. I am sure that this book points out some major problems in my life. I may have to listen to it again and spend a lot of time in prayer over this matter.

Long Day at Church

I got to church this morning about 6:30 a.m. and did not leave until about 8:00 p.m. I did go eat lunch with Mary after the morning service. I was getting ready for the broadcast and publishing video archives of the services.

Brady's Birthday

Lee and I spent some at church getting ready to broadcast the live streaming video from his computer tomorrow.

Tonight we enjoyed pizza at Brady's eleventh birthday party.

Little Giants - The Movie

When Mary and I got to Little Rock this evening we stopped by the church to watch the movie - "Little Giants". I have to say that it is a fantastic movie. Everyone should see it at least once.

Dinner with Brian and Carlin

We had a great time meeting Brian and Carlin for dinner tonight. It brought back many fond memories of geocaching. One of these days maybe life will slow down for us and we'll get to go caching again.

ProFlowers Let Us Down

It's Valentines's Day and ProFlowers never showed up. Mary is dissappointed. I paid $11.99 for delivery and an extra $9.99 for guaranteed February 14th delivery. I should have gone to Sam's and got two dozen roses. It would have been much cheaper and she would have gotten her flowers.

Dinner with Robby & Rachael

We met Robby, Rachael and her brother, Carl, at Cinzetta's this evening for dinner. We enjoyed great food and fellowship. I'm glad we got there a little early. It was very crowded when we left.

Back to Kansas City and Five Inches of Snow

This evening Mary and I drove back to Kansas City after work. It rained hard on us most of the trip. As we drove into town we encounted snow and the road got slick before I knew it. I almost lost the little Honda as we drove into Belton. I'm sure the Lord straightened out my path or we would have flipped the car. Mary got pretty excited when the car started skidding back and forth.

Our Very First Live Streaming Video

I am very pleased. We sucessfully broadcasted our first live streaming video services today. I was able to also capture a video archive of the broadcast.

We spent the whole afternoon tracking down a feed back problem that plagged the audio guys this morning. It turned out to be a signal looping back through the DVD recorder to the house sound broad. All we had to do was turn down the monitor level for the DVD audio into the mixer. We did not need the DVD audio going to the monitor speaker anyhow.

Very Long Day At Church

Lee and I started very early this morning and worked until he was about to drop tonight on the video and audio equipment at church. We finally got around to testing our ability to stream live video through my web server in Kansas City. We think we are ready for the services tomorrow.

Recording Studio Installation

Lee and I spent a hard day at church installing the new recording studio equipment. The project envolves splitting every microphone with one side going to the house sound system and the other side going to the new recording studio equipment. It's now mostly installed. Now we have to learn how to use it and run many tests to be sure the house sound is ready for Sunday.

Off To Little Rock This Evening

Since I took the day off tomorrow to work on the video streaming project at church I drove to Little Rock after work this evening.

Windows Media Encoder

Tonight we finally worked out the bugs to use Windows Media Encoder to stream the audio to my web server in Kansas City to then stream the audio to the world. Now I think we are ready for live video streaming.

Studio MovieBox Plus

I spent the evening playing around with Lee's video camera and Studio MovieBox Plus. I am trying to be ready for this coming weekend to do our first live streaming video of the Sunday church services.

Finally - Live Video Streaming

I spent the day working at home in Little Rock and then drove to Kansas City.

Mary bought me Studio MovieBox Plus from Pinnacle today. I was tired when I arrived in Kansas City but I was still excited about trying out the video capture device that came with Studio MovieBox Plus. I hooked up Lee's video camera and set up the parameters in Windows Media Encoder that I thought would work to stream live video and low and behold it worked.

Now I am hoping we have enough bandwidth at church to stream the video to my web server for distribution to the world.

A Little Problem With Our Live Audio Streaming

Lee had a problem making his laptop work with both Windows Media Encoder and Audicity. We ended up going back to JetCast for the live streaming audio feed from church this morning. I set it all up again this evening and we made the evening broadcast using Windows Media Encoder.

Next step is Live Steaming Video.

No one has been manning the video camera since Mary and I have been going to Crystal Hill so I jumped on it this morning and tonight for the DVD recording of the service. The tripod is awlful. We must get a new one.

Ditch Digging for City Water

My brother David came over this morning and dug our ditch from the house to the road for our hook-up to Central Arkansas Water. Scott and I glued and soldered the pipes together and laid them in the ditch. The inspector, Gary Rowland, came for the inspection and said we had a little problem. We had to change out the pipe going into the house from PVC to copper. He said you can not run PVC pipe into a house. We made the changes and paid him $50 for the inspection. He said he would call in the order for a water meter on Monday morning. Now we just wait and hope they get around to placing the meter.

Testing Windows Media Encoder

When I got to Little Rock this evening we went out to eat and then I just had to install Windows Media Encoder on my laptop and see if I could broadcast through my Windows Media Services Server back in Kansas City.

Almost to my surprise I was broadcasting in less than 10 minutes. Mary tuned into my broadcast and said it sounded fine.

I guess we are ready for the live broadcast Sunday morning.

No. I just remembered we still have to install Windows Media Encoder on Lee's laptop and configure it to work with my server in Kansas City.

Windows Media Services

I finally did it. I got it working. I started working on this a couple months ago.

I started the evening working on Windows Media Encoder and had it working by about 5:00 p.m. I can stream live audio/video to about five people with it but I want to do more.

I spent the rest of the evening trying to get Windows Media Encoder talking to Windows Media Services running on my Windows 2003 Server. After many failed attempts I finally got it working. It's not that hard to set it up now that I know how, but not know anything about it it was pretty hard for me to figure it out.

Lee can now run Windows Media Encoder on his laptop at church in Little Rock and stream the live church services to my Windows Server in Kansas City and then somewhere between 30 to 40 people can listen through my server by just clicking on the Live Streaming link on the church website.

This has been a fun project. I hope it works this weekend.