Anna describes her attempts to obey the Ten Commandments and live a perfect life.
Category Archives: GoodSeed
Ministry Update :: September 9, 2010
GoodSeed recently hosted an open house for the public at our newly completed office. Completed?! Yes! After 10+ months of working on it we have finally moved in. The Open House had over 200 people attend and were given a tour showing GoodSeed’s history and our vision for worldview evangelism. All of us were excited to share our ministry with so many people.
I was one of the tour guides taking people through the building and explaining some of our evangelism tools and resources that were on our many displays.
It took many people to get our office space finished, and it took many more to pull off the successful open house. We thank the Lord God that our office is done and we are ready to get back to work!
Interview with John Cross on Moody Radio
Recently, John Cross was interviewed a few times on Moody Radio’s This is the Day. One of our co-workers, John Krajec, transcribed it and made it available for us.
Tales of a Construction Worker
For a few years now GoodSeed International has been looking for a new home. We are on year 7 of a 5 year lease with a generous friend of the ministry who has been letting us use a building on his property, but we are bursting at the seams for our international office. In Winter 2009, an offer was made by a local businessman to use 3/4 of his building he was finishing in town. We took a look and realized that it would meet our needs for at least a few years. After much thought and prayer, GoodSeed accepted the offer.
In October 2009, we basically shut down many of our operations to begin construction of our future offices. Except for half of the downstairs that is being used by the owner for his water-trucking business, the building was completely empty. Lots of work needed to be done to get it ready for occupation. I traded in my video production hat for a construction hard hat, put on the steel toe boots and tool belt, and got to work.
As a testament to how little most of us know about construction, pretty much all of us bought white hard hats. Apparently only the foreman wears a white hard hat. I had next to no construction experience, so just about everything was new to learn. Framing, insulating, wiring, drywalling, painting… everything needed to be done, and it is a large area to complete. Thankfully, we have had lots of help from others in GoodSeed and the community. Still, it is a big project that has taken many, many hours of work to get it to where we are today.
On the work site, I can usually be found screwing things up. It used to be drywall. I was hanging and screwing up drywall in my sleep after awhile.
Driving the scissors lift to put drywall on the ceiling and walls.
Whose bright idea was it to let me drive something like this?
Lately, I’ve been spending more time screwing other things up, like tin.
The two audio studios and my video studio and editing room take up half of the upstairs! It will be so nice to have a dedicated studio instead of commandeering parts of people’s work stations and warehouse. For the new studios we have used special construction to help soundproof those rooms. The walls all have suspended drywall in the hallways that is not anchored to the frame, and the inside walls of the studios use special (and expensive) QuietRock Soundproof Drywall to further dampen sound.
The exterior of the building as it now stands:
With the drywall now done and the painting underway, the heavy construction is over. The downside of this is that I am running out of excuses for buying tools.. The upside is that we hope to be moving in within a few months with an open house in the summer. This building will give us more than double the current office space we currently use, and with more office space, better warehousing, a real audio recording studio, and new video facilities, we are all looking forward to moving in and the new opportunities it represents in our evangelism ministry at GoodSeed.
Here are some more photos of the process from the start up to now.
training
I have started the training I require to get up to speed on the tools that I will be using in my ministry at GoodSeed. We have a subscription to an online training video site (lynda.com) which covers a wide variety of software programs. Here is a list of the courses I plan to watch:
Hours | |
Photoshop | |
No Pixels Harmed | 1 |
Photoshop CS3 One-on-One: The Essentials | 8.75 |
Photoshop CS3 One-on-One: Beyond the Basics | 10.75 |
Photoshop CS3 One-on-One: Advanced Techniques | 9.5 |
Photoshop CS3 Extended for 3D + Video | 6.25 |
Photoshop CS3 Channels and Masks: The Essentials | 12.5 |
Photoshop CS3 for Photographers | 13.5 |
Photoshop CS3 Creative Photographic Techniques | 11 |
InDesign | |
InDesign CS3 Essential Training | 9 |
Illustrator | |
Illustrator CS3 Essential Training | 13.5 |
Final Cut Pro Video Editing | |
Digital Video Principles | 2.5 |
Final Cut Pro 6 Essential Effects | 9.25 |
Final Cut Pro 6 New Features | 1.5 |
Final Cut Pro 6 Essential Editing | 10.75 |
Final Cut Pro Optimization and Troubleshooting | 2.25 |
Aperture | |
Aperture 1.1 Essential Training | 6.75 |
Aperture 1.5 Beyond the Basics | 3.5 |
Other | |
Blue + Green Screen Production Principles | 0.25 |
Digital Video Principles | 2.5 |
Total Hours | 135 |
A grand total of 135 hours of watching video! There is over 73 hours of Photoshop stuff alone. If we assume three hours a day of this kind of video this will take me to the middle of March to complete, and this does not include other training on video and sound equipment. My mind is already starting to smoke..
These training videos are very good and I have already learned quite a bit. This morning I learned some neat tricks about changing colours. This is a picture I took on Grand Manan island last year and the result of some playing around with the colours. How many colour changes can you spot?
I haven’t even started to scratch the surface of what these programs are capable of, but I look forward to learning more and then using them in my ministry with GoodSeed.