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