1. I left the GPS on for my trip on the airplane. I sat next to a window and was able to track the speed, the altitude, the direction, and follow the map as the plane soared from Hamilton to Winnipeg to Saskatoon. That was fun. I recorded the log file of the trip so I can play it back and watch the journey anytime!

2. Joanne found her first GeoCache in Saskatoon a couple of days ago. It was along the South Saskatchewan River. She was quite excited about it— she took a nail file.

3. I’m getting the opportunity to show ServiceBuilder to a pastor from a local church (Lakeview) today.

4. I’ve found a new passion to read the Bible. I have been praying the God would renew my passion for ‘his Word,’ and he’s answered that prayer. The John Piper book I’m reading, When I Don’t Desire God, has certainly helped rekindle me.

Lots of other great stuff has happened and is happening. I’m getting lots of rest too, which is wonderful.

~Jason

Here’s the premise: some distant world sent a spinning drum on a crash course with out sun. It was comissioned thousands of years before earth had humans crawling around on it.

When they could get close to it, human astronauts landed on, then climbed into this gigantic drum to find an entire world inside. Continents, islands, cities, even a marvelous sea was inside this drum, held to the outside walls by the steady gravity-creating spin along it’s axis. The world was apparently dead and frozen as a result of the icy temperature of space. But once in our solar system, it began to thaw. This thawing caused life to start crawling to the surface from tunnels deep below the surface.

Humans had only a few weeks to explore, before this world, which they named ‘Rama,’ would crash into the sun. Before this final collision, however, Rama adjusted course, and careened out of the solar system as suddenly as it arrived.

If you like Sci-Fi, you’ll love this.

~Jason

• Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights (amazing beginning, gets really boring)
• Rick Warren: The Purpose Driven Life (twice through, love it.)
• I Robot (excellent)
• Robert Ludlum: The Bourne Identity (excellent- must read)
• Robert Ludlum: The Bourne Supremecy (just okay)
• Erwin Raphael McManus: Seizing Your Devine Moment (pretty good.)
• Jules Verne: A Journey to the Center of the Earth (terrible)
• John Steinbeck: Grapes of Wrath (pretty good)
• Arthur C. Clarke: Randezvous with Rama (really interesting)
• Jack London: Call of the Wild (Terrific)
• John Piper: When I Don’t Desire God (Amazing!)
• Bilquis Sheikh: I Dared to Call Him Father (Remarkably entertaining)

See here for lists from each year, if you’re curious.

~Jason

It was hard not to be selfishly disappointed that our meeting didn’t happen, but I’m sure we’ll reschedule. I feel pretty silly feeling bad about that when he’s hurt himself so badly.

~Jason

On Wednesday I had the good pleasure to visit the AGC head office to demonstrate ServiceBuilder. They hooked my laptop up to their video projector, and I walked them through the various processes of my software. I felt a little nervous, first of all, because I didn’t want to be taking unreasonable advantage of the relationship my church had with them to market something for personal profit. The other reason I was nervous was because I really believe in ServiceBuilder’s core benefits, and I wanted to give it a fair demonstration.

They were quite enthusiastic. They made a couple of good suggestions too, so that it could be even more beneficial to churches and other organizations, (like the AGC). One of these suggestions has already been deployed.

They offered to write a cover letter to show to the churches which belong to the AGC, heartily recommending ServiceBuilder as a way of planning services, staying organized, scheduling people and making the most of a volunteer force, as well as contacting various groups within the congregation. They observed that it could be used even for children’s ministry to plan kid’s programs!

I’m so excited! Apparently they will give it some face-time on their web site, and offer it to their pastor’s within the “pastor’s pack,” which goes out monthly.

I couldn’t have asked for more. I hope it continues to flourish, and that more churches will benefit, and grow as a result.

~Jason

So if you can spare a couple of minutes, go post a message on the new message board! I’d love to get some traffic going through there! Let me know your thoughts about the new site!

Thanks,
~Jason

This has some negative outcomes, specifically that peopel don’t always know what they’re doing in four months.

So I added a new export feature to the web schedule. When users go to view their schedule online, they can click a link to import these items into their calendar software. (Outlook specifically, though the tab-separated-values text file will probably import into most calendar programs).

Hopefully I have less problems with people forgetting when they’re scheduled.

~Jason

Thanks!
~Jason

It’s a mystery to me
That deep within my heart
There is something more I need
To fill the yearning part

Nothing satisfies
I’ve tried to set it free
And trying is the word for it,
The trial of the century

Time has ceased to move
And we’re in that moment now
I fill my chest with deep breaths,
With thanks, and wonder how?

My shoulders drop, relieved,
And seconds become years
No pain, that life has
disappeared

Chorus:
Not someday, nor yesterday,
Not waiting, not waiting,
No wishing, or wanting,
Hope has taken me
I’m here now, we’re together,
You’ve brought me to this moment
Most satisfied; hope has taken me.

You’ve laid the brush aside,
The canvas needs no more,
This world is a masterpiece,
Of pain, of joy, or peace and war,

Now you take my hand,
You help me see it through,
I worship the ground you walk on,
I love you!
[chorus]

I said we’d go GeoCaching together— which would normally be fine, even at 6. But when Seth started wimpering in his sleep at 3, came into bed with us, and then starting talking at 5, I knew I was in trouble. Then at six I realised the sun doesn’t come up until 7. The boys played computer games while I tried to catch a few more z’s.

Eventually the three of us piled into my car to head for the Bock-Bock cache, which we hadn’t found a few days ago. On our way up Mount Albion road, a police road-block signalled to us that we weren’t going to find that cache that day. We finally got a signal lock with the GPS and turned around, heading for Stoney Creek Battlefield Park.

But we couldn’t seem to keep a lock. My i.Trek CF GPS is garbage. The last one was wonderful, but this one can never aquire a signal from the satelites. I’m so frustrated.

We drove around for a while, then gave up. An hour in the car, with nothing to show for it but two disappointed little boys, and a severely annoyed grown-up.

~Jason

You can optionally have a tips window pop up every time you start ServiceBuilder, and this window explains to the user how to take advantage of various functions. Each tip can also have a ‘show me’ button, which takes the user to the part of the program in question.

ServiceBuilder is finally starting to become easy to use. I never really thought about the user-friendly aspect of SB before, but now that it’s underway, I’m really excited.

~Jason

No, we’re not crazy — a 5 month old baby, a screaming 2 year old and a would-be teenager (9 year old) are enough work for us. This is my sister’s new dog. She and her family are coming to pick it up tomorrow. It will be great to see them again.

Before heading off the Welland to get this dog, I loaded some maps in my GPS and nailed down coordinates. Imagine my disappointment when it just wouldn’t grab a signal. I’m not sure what’s wrong. Whether it’s cloud cover, or cold air… I don’t know. But it did finally kick in for the drive home, so I got to play a little bit.

I’ve gotta figure out what’s going on with this thing.

~Jason

~Jason

I am demo-ing it with a local church this Wednesday afternoon. I’m excited to see what their response will be. Excited, and scared at the same time. Pray everything goes smoothly.

 ~Jason

God has made me a musician, I believe he has given me a gift to touch people with music, and to be a church music director.

For this reason, I’ve decided to really focus a lot more time on blessing other churches out there with ServiceBuilder. I’ve started contacting some people about it, trying to get referrals, etc.

Austin Fusilier has agreed to help me with spreading the word too.

Today I’ve spent some time enhancing the program— adding the ability for it to use the Windows Registry to save settings, including church name and registration number, as well as smoothing over a few little bugs that were hanging on.

It’s good to be re-energized with new focus. I trust this will honour God, and be meaningful for music directors and worship leaders everywhere.

~Jason

 It’s amazing how easy it is for me to fly off at the mouth and not think before I speak/write.

I’m sorry. I didn’t intended to hurt you, and I want to make it right. If you’re reading this, please forgive me. I was wrong.

~Jason

But seriously, I’d love to have a machine set up as a server, where I could host a few sites, maybe some of mine, maybe some friend’s sites, and a machine or two to run a SpamBayes mail filter server, an intranet server for hosting all of our multimedia files: music, movies, photos— that kind of thing.

Imagine how cool that would be? From any computer in the house a person could connect to the server, watch a movie, listen to a song, scroll through some photo albums. I love the idea!

Anyone wanna help?

~Jason

As always, comments from all you lurkers out there would be nice. 1909 page views this week means lots of people are coming and reading my blogs… but hardly ever any comments!! (Come on people! )

~Jason

The guys at FonicFactory are so talented and generous. They were forced to do a two week project in twenty hours, without much sleep! And for very little money. Thanks guys! The album sounds way better because of their efforts.

So Tom and I grabbed a bite to eat at a little Greek hamburger joint downtown, then high-tailed it to Brantford where we dropped off the CDs for duplication. Lots of paperwork, but it was fun. Met some people who knew me through other people, and I guess Philpott is getting a reputation. Cool.

Can’t wait for this to be all finished, and to stop worrying about it. Like Lane said a few weeks ago, “If anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing with mediocrity.”

~Jason

One of the things I’ve noticed lately is how embarrassed our country seems to be by the great wars. I’ve heard it on the radio quite a bit lately— people who aren’t observing Remembrance Day, or who are downplaying it for some reason. One school in Hamilton moved the date so they could go on a field trip. Brutal. Or is it?

I understand all the reasons we abhor war. War is, well, war. It’s terrible. It’s horrific. But sometimes it’s necessary. People gave their lives sacrificially so we can have peace, so we can do what we want; say what we want. We cannot forget, or disregard, or disdain it. We need to focus our minds on remembering.

Though this is what I really believe, as I was observing two minutes of silence at the anniversary of Armistice,  I couldn’t help but feel like I was walking a fine line. What should I think about? Should I think about the horrors of war? Should I say thanks quietly to myself, or to God?

I mean, is it praying? I’m remembering, right? You know, “Lest we forget.”

So I tried to remember what happened before I was born. I tried to say thanks to God for our freedom, but a voice came back to me that Jesus won our freedom, the war didn’t. Even if Hitler’s Nazi Germany won, faith would be seeding around us everywhere. Nothing can overcome God’s church. It was weird.

Not sure what to do with the two minutes of silence next year, but I do appreciate the physical freedoms I enjoy, limited as they are. 

I now realise I need to consciously observe a time of silence everyday, lest I forget the spiritual battle Jesus fought and won for me to give me new life. If there was a war to end all wars, it happened on a cross 2004 years ago.

~Jason

Finally finished recording and mixing our new CD. I had people over all the time laying down violin, mandolin, vocal, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, drum tracks… it was really a lot of fun. Actually mixing it wasn’t so great. We had eighteen songs for the CD, dropped it down to 16. You can hear the ones that I sing at JasonSilver.com. Lots of fun.

Mixing is extremely difficult. I didn’t realise how much really needs to go into it. Vocal parts that seem to disappear as the song progresses; EQ-ing that sounds great on one system and really bad on another; compressing things too much, or not enough; a snare that’s too loud, or an effect that washes the vocal part to left and right too much… there are so many little variables. It took me about four or five tries (imagine mixing 16 songs four or five times!)

So I sent it to be mastered, and FonicFactory is taking over from here. I talked to the ‘masterer’ this morning (Tom Bigas), and he said some of the mixing was really bad. I said, “Oh well, just finish the project.” At this point, I’ve done everything I can and the deadline is only two weeks away. I can’t believe that.

I was regularly up to past 2:00 a.m. EVERY night to get this job done. One night I was up until 4:00 a.m. (This after a full day’s work too!) Needless to say, I slept really well this afternoon, after church!

So the only project on my horizon now, (that I can think of anyway,) is Hamilton’s Best Valentine’s Party. I’ve arranged 10 of the 20 songs already, and need to be done by the middle of December. I’ve been trying to get the easy ones out of the way first, but upon reflection I’m thinking that wasn’t the brightest idea.

Anyway, it’s good to be blogging. Now I’m going to go read three week’s worth of missed friend’s blogs.

~Jason

I want to remember how to do this, should I ever have need to, so I’m pasting the information in here.

I have just gone through the process of trying to upgrade my home PC to use a larger disk drive.  It appears that the Windows XP operating system detects when you have changed your hard disk and will not allow you load windows.  After several hours of research and attempts I have discovered a path that works:

1. Connect your new drive (in my case 80GBbyte) as a slave drive and format the disk using a basic partition.  Do not use a logical or dynamic partition.
2. Run a program called sysprep with the “reseal” option.  This tells windows xp to reathenticate your software when you reload windows.
3. Run Norton Ghost (or another disk image program) to image your existing drive to the larger drive.  Don’t forget to set the “make drive active” option.  Otherwise, you cannot boot from your new disk drive.
4. Shutdown your computer and disconnect your old drive and connect your larger drive to the primary cable.
5. Restart your computer
6. You should then be presented with the windows initial authentication screen and you will have to reenter your authentication code. 
7. You should then be able to logon to windows. 
8. You will also need to reactivate your Microsoft Office software. 

The sysprep program is found in the deploy.cab file on the source windows xp cd in the tools directory.  This program is what prepares the disk image for deployment to other machines.  Without using this Windows XP will detect that you have changed your hardware and will not let you load windows from your new drive.

Thanks Ray!
~Jason

I’m sorry. I’m recording an album, and am SO busy. Soon.

~Jason

It felt a little bit like a young boy’s story, especially at the beginning. But it was entrancing. I couldn’t put it down.

Good read.

~Jason

~Jason

Comparing U.S. President George Bush with Winston Churchill may seem a stretch. Yet there’s a parallel — not with Churchill of the war years, when he was the “free” world’s most admired leader, but with Churchill of the 1930s when he stood alone, warning about the rise of Nazism.

Then, pacifism was rampant in Britain and Europe. Hitler’s aggression was rationalized by wishful thinking. Peace at any price.

Except for Churchill. He began warning that the Nazis must be stopped when they occupied the Rhineland in 1936. He urged an alliance of Britain, France and the Soviet Union to stop Hitler’s expansion. He was called a warmonger, an enemy of peace, reviled in print and in speeches. Few stood with him.

History has proven Churchill right.

With the U.S. election entering the home stretch, Bush is under the same sort of attacks for his war on terrorism and Iraq that Churchill endured before WWII.

Good comments on this page too.

~Jason

I just finished this second book in the Bourne series, and really enjoyed it— though I can’t say it was as good as the first. The first was such a mystery— no one really knew who Bourne was— The reader discovered evidence along with the main characters, making for a real page turner. In this story, there was no real mystery. It was just adventure, and that’s not as compelling for me.

So it got just a bit monotonous especially the later chapters. The epilogue was horrible… I hardly read it. It was one of those, “All the characters lived happily ever after” bits.

So now I’ve started Call of the Wild, and I’m actually a third done already. Quick little book. After that, some Sci-Fi that Austin lended  me.

~Jason

The IP address range where this Cobalt was situated on: 66.164. was rented for about 3 years from Peter Schroebel US Company SMSOnline, we notified this Company allready in may and june 2004 we don’t want to use this 66.164 range anymore because it is listed into many anti spam organisations, because Mr. Peter Schroebel is a wel known first clas spammer!!

This is the reason why our company stop with the ip range 66.164.xx from SMS online take a close look at this:

http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/sbl.lasso?query=SBL11339 and you wil see what the problem is with Mr. Schroebel and SMS Online, this is the main reason we stop with this Company.

This have nothing todo that the server where you was hosted on is down, this is a totaly different thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE:
The server that had been lost was located by the web host, and they were able to retrieve everything and give me access to the files via FTP! So Thank God! I’m downloading and uploading right now! Yippee!

~Jason

~Jason

http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aig/aig-c039.html

~Jason

You may have read below what happened with the FortyDays.info site. I stayed up until 2:00 a.m. yesterday (this morning) moving that site to the getChurch.org server.

Intelliscript.net “up and died” a couple of days ago. Apparently the company on which Intelliscript was hosted failed to pay for their IP address range (they owed $5000). They were cut off (and so me with them). I lost all my database of users, some images and a few minor script modifications, as well as the time & money I’ve spent on the phone with the Netherlands and the US. These headaches just never end.

So I’m moving Intelliscript.net to InternetBusinessFollowUp.com, a server which has got a lot less hits lately, and doesn’t serve the purpose it once served (please, that wasn’t a pun).

I’m tired of all this work.

And then there’s home. My double garage door broke— a cable came off the pulley. We still have giant holes in our downstairs bathroom wall, and the toilet is running incessantly. (I think I’ve fixed the toilet though). I’m not even going to mention my car.

On a postitive note, I decided to spend time ‘jamming’ with my kids every night I can, and we had a great time tonight. Luke took a few piano lessons, a drum lesson, and an egg-shaker lesson. I think he could really learn to be rhythmic. His tuning isn’t the greatest, so drumming might be right up his alley.

Seth just pouted for the first half of our jam. I had a penny whistle out for him, and Lucas brought up his mini keyboard, but he didn’t really get into it until we started playing his favourite song, Oh Susanna.

Even Joanne helped out on keyboard for a while, then to piano. What a lot of fun.

I know I scored a run with Lucas, because he said I was cool. He said, with my long hair and the way I tossed my head back, and told everyone what to play, that I was like Jack Black.

Really though, I was pumped. He said I was so funny!

So, things are tricky, and things are good too.

Thanks God,

~Jason

UPDATE:
I was able to contact the fellow who set me up with the server in the first place. Apparently, the above is not true. The IP range was used by spammers, and they were no longer interested in paying for that range. The cobalt server where my site was hosted was old and ready to go, and they had tried to communicate with the users on that server of its imminent death. I just didn’t get the message in time, and so lost everything. Good news is that I’m getting another free server out of it, and it’s been a great lesson for me.

The ip range where this Cobalt was situated on: 66.164. was rented for about 3 years from Peter Schroebel US Company SMSOnline, we notified this Company allready in may and june 2004 we don’t want to use this 66.164 range anymore because it is listed into many anti spam organisations, because Mr. Peter Schroebel is a wel known first clas spammer!!

This is the reason why our Company stop with the ip range 66.164.xx from SMS online take a close look at this:

http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/sbl.lasso?query=SBL11339 and you wil see what the problem is with Mr. Schroebel and SMS Online, this is the main reason we stop with this Company.

This have nothing todo that the server where you was hosted on is down, this is a totaly different thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE:
The server that had been lost was located by the web host, and they were able to retrieve everything and give me access to the files via FTP! So Thank God! I’m downloading and uploading right now! Yippee!

~Jason

So I’ve lost thousands of records in my database: customers, their purchases, the scripts they’re interested in, their EMAIL ADDRESSES! Ugh. It’s like starting over. I’ve lost everyone interested in ServiceBuilder too.

So I moved Intelliscript.net to InternetBusinessFollowup.com’s server. It’s finished, except for the big job of troubleshooting and reinstalling all the scripts on my site. That’s one big headache of having a server-side-intensive site. Includes need to be changed, rules for the servers differ, so I had to rename all .pl files to .cgi if they were located outside of the CGI bin (Which is a good idea anyway, and I should always do this!).

So it’s another example of me wondering, “WHY AM I DOING THIS AGAIN?” Money just doesn’t seem like a good enough reason. It’s 12:30 here and I haven’t even got to my real job yet! UGH.

~Jason

“This election represents an important milestone in the country’s democratic transition and an impressive achievement of the Afghan people. Canadians are proud to have contributed to this process from the ou