<font size="2">I recently attended a conference for Qld Youth Leaders which was run by YACMU. This was a very interesting weekend as they addressed many shortfalls which are present in the way which Youth Ministry is done in the western world.
The speaker there was Ken Moser. He has a significant background in Youth Ministry (infact he has been doing it about as long as have been alive) and during this time has had plenty of time to observe what doesn't work.
Basically his message is that we have moved away from Youth Ministry and more towards providing entertainment. You just have to look at the way that the majority of Youth programs are run to see this. His position is that the games based groups simply don't retain people past high school age. Furthermore he think that Kids will generally come along to learn about faith. I cannot say that I disagree with any of this.
<font size="2">The general aim of a Youth Group should not simply be numbers, but to help young people to grow in faith.
Funilly enough while he spoke, I had the distinct impression that I had heard it before. Upon returning home from course I found that the book which I had gone through before starting as a Youth Leader was actually written by him…
In addition to the speech, YACMU have also produced a resource called "The Fridge" which is based around the theory that we need a well rounded spiritual diet for strong faith.
The 7 "Soul Food" Groups are
<li><font size="2">God and I: Enjoying an intimate relationship with God
<li><font size="2">Hanging Out: Cultivating healthy and authentic relationships
<li><font size="2">Serving Others: Using gifts and abilities in a life of sacrificial service
<li><font size="2">Doing Church: Belonging to and participating in a community of faith
<li><font size="2">Living Life: Being sustained, recharged and empowered by the Holy Spirit
<li><font size="2">On a Mission: Actively engaging in Mission
<li><font size="2">Who I Am: Developing a Christ-Like character
<font size="2"> Overall I think it was a great weekend and I think that the resources will be very useful. We will be taking what we learned and implementing some of the suggestions into our 2007 program.
It was March 2003, I had just started uni and was down at a local computer store. There I spied a 128mb USB memory stick. Given that floppy disks are the bane of my existance, and that I couldn't always be sure of having a CD-burner avaliable for files over 2mb I decided to grab it. From memory it costed about $120.
Anyway its now August 2006 and 128mb is really not a particularly large amount of storage anymore. $90 later this problem was sorted and I had a shiny new little 2gig usb memory stick. After testing it to verify its capacity I am quite happy. While this is not particularly useful think its great that, just a few years ago, 128meg was the limit. There today there were 4gig drives…Best invention ever..
<img width="300" height="240" align="middle" src="/Portals/0/Img/memsticks.jpg" alt="" />
My old 128mb one is on the right and the new 2gig one on the left.
My little DNN site is finally to a stage where I am fairly happy with its ongoing operation. As such I have decided to list the things which were a pain for a n00b to deal with. It covers things which I found while running it as a VM on my PC and also after I got it hosted.
They can be found <a href="http://www.burningsilicon.net/ITProjects/DotNetNukeExperience/tabid/180/Default.aspx"><strong>here </a>
I recently decided that I would have another crack (or actually try to make some progress after a while on the backburner) with my efforts for the Brisbane Mesh.
One thing which I also realised is that the AP which I was using didn't really have the features I would require to align my antenna properly.
Time for Ebay to get some <strong><font color="#ff0000">REAL kit..
<img width="400" height="300" align="right" alt="" src="/Portals/0/Img/linksys.JPG" />
Good for mee that there just happened to be a V2.0 WRT54GS going, not bad given that the newer versions require a bit more effort to get going with 3rd party firmware.
First things first, the firmware had to go. After doing a bit of research I decided to go with <a href="http://www.dd-wrt.com/">dd-wrt,</a> its free and can do alot more than some of the other firmwares out there (*cough*- sveasoft) but is also user friendly.
The great thing about these linux based routers is that they will quite happily run custom builds of <a href="http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Kismet_Server/Drone">Kismet</a>. The effort here was actually trying to run a Kismet client under windows, this had mixed results. Given that cygwin is sort of unholy (Linux doesn't belong in windows 
), I eventually ended up running it in a VM using my free copy of <a href="http://www.vmware.com/products/server/">Vmware Server.</a>
Well since that was happily working I decided to let this run the link between my place and a mates for a while and see how it goes. The results were quite impressive with the downloadstream speed now consistantly pulling 15mB/s (about 20% faster) but the upstream is what will benefit the most, given the significantly higher output power of this unit (to be save I'm running it at 100mW, as opposed to the 26mW of the other unit).
Furthermore this router is capable of being a VPN server may make life easier on when I finally get onto the mesh.
The only downside that I see to this device so far is that it doesn't use RP-sma connectors and I will therefore need to purchase another pigtail to enable the connection of my 16dbi grid antenna.
Anyway In closing I am going to continue to test this device over the coming week(s). But this should allow me (through the use of kismet) to do some decent testing. Very impressed with this device.
Blog | Iteration 30/08/2006 | 
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