Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Christmas Eve

This is my attempt to debunk the rumors:

WE launched 208 super balls into the air during the 6 pm Christmas eve service. Way more than the rumored 100.

Just kidding, of course. but you can listen to my teaching on the giving joy this past Christmas by going to the South Albany Community Church website and listening in.

It will only be up for a few weeks, after that it is shuffled off - so check now!!

Listen here

6 comments:

Mike said...

That would have been quite the sight to see! I liked the message.

Just a question though, why on earth does your church put the messages up as WMA (Windows Media) sound files? Amazingly enough, my non-Windows computer was able to play it, but why not use a more universal format like MP3?

James said...

Hey Mike -

I don't know why we use the formats we do - I'll ask our computer guru though...he knows -

Anonymous said...

The thought was this -
(1) The vast majority of the visitors to our site are Windows users. (2) Many of our visitors are still using dial-up Internet services. (3) We do not currently have audio streaming capability on our site - hosted by Interland - because we have not yet invested in the hosting packages that allow us to offer streaming. Using WMA allows Windows users (using Media Player) to buffer a portion of the audio and start listening while the rest downloads. Admittedly this isn't streaming - but is more desireable to dial-up users than having to wait for the entire file to download before playback begins. The last time I tried this with MP3 - the file had to download entirely before playback could begin - and that can take a long while over dial-up.

James said...

This is what I mean when I talk about having no idea...

Anonymous said...

So that's why I only got about 8-10 mins of it....

I thought when the files had loaded it was done.(it still took like 40mins to download those ten minutes....*the evils of dial up*oddly enough though the sermon in mp3 format from the way of the master site took slightly longer but I got the whole thing. hmmm....)

Mike said...

Well, at least the sound file works on my computer as I've somehow got windows codecs installed on Linux (granted, it may not entirely be legal in some jurisdictions to so thanks to the evils of software patents... I digress) I do accept the fact that I am a minority when it comes to desktop environments (I quite like it that way), it's just nice to see open standards embraced sometimes.
Being on high-speed ever since becoming a student, downloading has never been an issue for me - I now can see why it would be important to have a format that could be read a little at a time.