As many people know.  I am not just the Microsoft Practice Director at ConsultUSA, but I am an Associate Pastor at Family Fellowship Christian Center.  I've been serving in this position for about 8 years now.  I've been sitting under Pastor Rick Pulido for around 11 years. 

Well, things they are a changin', as they must from time to time.  Family Fellowship was not set up to be a singular entity from the start.  It was intended to be a training ground out of which many congregations would flow.  Well, the first of these church plants is scheduled to take place in 14 months in Miami, FL, with the second scheduled about 1-4 years after that point.  That second one, will be in Sarasot, FL and it will be pastored by none other than... me.

I'm not sure how this is going to effect my remaining time in Pittsburgh, but I know that I'm going to start dedicating myself to preperation for this next step in my life.  

I'm actually kind of torn in this.  I've been prepared for this step for years.  However, I've never wanted to be the senior pastor anywhere.  I've always been comfortable with my position as a #2.  I actually kind of relish that spot.

For those of you who think that being a pastor would be easy, let me inform you, it's not.  Your life becomes a fishbowl and you're not the only fish in the bowl, every member of your family is there with you.  Can you imagine being an 8 year old boy with the whole world watching your every move?  I can tell you, it's hard.  I will say this, if anyone who ever attends one of the churches that I Pastor and they ever say to one of my kids, "...but you're the Pastor's son..." followed by anything, I will read them the riot act and probably show them the door.  My first job is still to protect my family, and I will do it with prejudice.

Other than that, I am in the process of making plans on what type of church I'm looking to create.  What do I want the environment to be like?  What type of music do we want to bring to the people?  What will be the major message to people? At this point, everything is vague, but I have some ideas.  I guess that is what I have to determine in the next few years.

Well, until that time.  I'll see you soon enough Sarasota.

The Family Fellowship Christian Center of Pennsylvania worship team is preparing to record our demo this weekend.  We have been given the opportunity to present our music to a producer in Hollywood that may want to use our music in some movies. 

We've been working on some recordings for a couple of years now, but we never really went all out.  Now we have motivation to get as much stuff into someones hands as we can push out.  This weekend we'll record, next week we'll mix and master and the week after we'll send out the recordings to the producer.  We're just excited to have an opportunity to finally do something with the music that we've written in house.  I think we'll actually be doing one of the songs that I wrote as well.  That is if we can pull together an arrangement other than me on the accoustic guitar, which is the way it was written and has always been performed.

The other exciting this is, I get to pull my bass guitar out of the mothballs and lay down some of the bass tracks.  Since Chuck Behune took over playing bass on the team, I've gotten a little out of practice, but there are a lot of the songs that I wrote the bass lines for and the pastor would like me to reprise them.  Which is cool.  Even if he uses all of Chuck's tracks instead of mine, it's no big deal, my voice will still be the only male voice on the recording, with the exception of one or two songs.  Either way, if our stuff gets used, my voice will be heard by a lot of people.  If it's not used, it'll just be heard by a couple of very influential people in the music industry.  Either way... very cool.

Well, I snagged a couple of pictures that were snapped by Rich Dudley at the code camp on Saturday.  It shows some of our preperation and the presentation. 

Matt, Nate and I preparing in the Speakers Lounge

Nate, making last minute changes... As I start the presentation.

I'm presenting and Matt is looking on.  This is happening at the same time as the last picture.

This one is Nate presenting while Matt and I are looking on.  No picture of Rich, he had the camera.

I'll put up another post up tonight or tomorrow with a link to the presentation.  This won't have any of the code, but it will be my slides.  We want to make the code pristine before we post that.

Well, Rich, Matt, Nate and I just got done with our presentation at the Pittsburgh .Net Code Camp at the University of Pittsburgh.  This was the culmination of a week of Chaos.  Topped with last minute heroics and nervous expectations, we really pulled of a decent talk.

It started with an idea, write an application that would be hosted in Windows Azure using Silverlight 2 and WCF Web Services.  This seemed simple enough to do.  Create the Azure Development Fabric, write some code and deploy to the cloud.  Well, perhaps it would have been that simple if we weren't dealing with CTP (Community Technology Preview) technologies.

The pain started with Azure Table Storage, WCF integration and finally connecting everything to Silverlight.  We spent 20+ extra hours this week in preparation for the talk, including Friday night until 2 AM (I guess that would be Saturday morning.), and getting up and getting to Pitt early to work on it again.

There will be a couple of posts coming outlining the specific difficulties that we encountered and how and if we were able to overcome them.

The funniest part was, I opened the talk with the slide show and going over some of our findings.  In the meantime Nate and Rich were out in the hallway trying to get some last second changes in.  Was it the prettiest presentation ever?  Not by a long shot.  However, it served it's purpose and we got through the whole thing.

Now, we received an invitation to submit an abstract for VS Connections in November, so we'll repackage this presentation and submit it for VS Connections.  It would be cool to be able to do this presentation for a much larger audience.

Now, I'm tired, with 15 minutes until the next presentation.  Then home to my boys.  I haven't seen them in two days, so I miss them tremendously.