IN THIS WEEK’S POST: Annual Conference 2016 prep, Annual Conference 2016 prep, computer refurbishing, and Annual Conference 2016 prep. Have I mentioned Annual Conference 2016 prep?
This week was actually another short week, as Memorial Day was Monday and I left early on Friday to take part in the Great KHDX Clean-Up. However, I continued to put in as much work as I could to the big behemoth that is Annual Conference. For those of you who aren’t United Methodist and are wondering just what on Earth is this Annual Conference I keep speaking of, it is a big 4-day conference where the business of the Arkansas Conference (the state organization for United Methodist Churches in Arkansas) is conducted. It’s a mandatory event for pastors, and let’s just say that quite a few people are there every year beyond them. It’s not just about business though, as there are several worship services in there too, including the big Ordination Service where new pastors are ordained into the Conference and assigned to churches. It’s a big deal, and so for the majority of my time at my internship so far, I have been working on the presentation aspect of it. That means I take the graphics that Stephen (one of my co-workers, the “Visual Evangelist and Technology Guru”) has made for the conference and add text and more graphics and pull in all sorts of information and put it all together into a slick, cohesive package to be projected. This means that I’ve been making phone calls, writing emails, and generally just buzzing around putting together all sorts of things together.
However, those of you who know me know that I am an intense multi-tasker. And so this isn’t all that I’ve been working on! I’ve also been working on a new initiative that I’ve been developing over the past week that I can now share a little more information about. The REcharge Initiative is a project that I’ve been heading up as a part of the “vocational exploration” portion of the internship. Basically, what this initiative will be doing is refurbishing and distributing computers and other technological components to cash-strapped churches and new church starts for use in worship, administration and general-purpose use by the church and the community.
The thing is, computers and electronics in general, while cheaper than ever before, are still expensive. A computer, monitor and projector combo can easily run $750, not to mention the cost of software and yearly licenses for said software. However, computers can be easily refurbished and made to last for a very long time, if taken care of and properly maintained. Plus, there is a lot of great free software that people just don’t know about because that software doesn’t have the budget to advertise like your big names such as Microsoft and Apple.
Therefore, I’ve created and begun to work on the REcharge Initiative to refurbish old computers and bring them back to life, with recycled parts and some TLC. I’ll also be loading them up with tons of useful free software and software that the Conference has licenses for. Finally, I’ll package them together with keyboards, mice, monitors, and whatever else the church may need, then they’ll be given out to them for them to use! The big dream for this is that enough interest in generated to where we can make this a self-sustaining project, where churches can dig out their old computers and give them to us to refurbish and pass along to others, and we can just continue to do so in the years to come, helping both churches and the environment by making these computers last longer, and keeping them out of the dumpster.
So that’s a lot, more than I realized I would write. So this time, I’ll leave out some of the other parts of my week, like the new backup procedures and the Amazon shipping nightmare. I know, I know, it’s awful. But there’s always be next week! (Except next week will bring more new things, so probably not. Oops.)
Until next time,
Jacob
BONUS: Question: How many hard drives can a person stack on top of one another?
JacobTurner.me 