ChMS - All church check-in - SUCCESS!

It is a glorious day. The birds are singing, the sun is shining, and the wind is blowing at about 500 miles per hour. Ah, the desert... But check-in is over for the three big services, and it was a resounding success.

All told we checked in 1,174 kids over three services so far this weekend. The largest service was 527 kids. We used sixteen check-in stations, which is overkill, but made the whole process go very smoothly and quickly. By our testing calculations on Friday we can checkin roughly 100 kids per kiosk per service, not counting the task of entering families. Using the planned twelve stations (the extra four are for other classes and other parts of the campus, but we are using them for the first month or so) we should be able to checkin up to about 1000 kids per service, roughly twice what we have at our biggest service.



This photo was taken at 10:59. Last week at this time there were six lines out the door of people waiting to get to the check-in tables. This week there were a lot of people, but the lines moved quickly and most were able to checkin in under a minute. The longest amount of time was spent explaining to parents what the three labels were for. Next week, those explanations won't be necessary, making this even faster still.

We found one bug in a beta arena dll (created for us to code around a microsoft problem) that we will get resolved this week. We also found that parents don't believe that their kids are ever "new walkers" they are only "confident walkers" so we will remove the new walker designation... Still, the weekend was a resounding success.

Thanks again to Jason and Nick at CCCEV for writing the checkin module we are using, and to the guys at Arena for creating a database powerful enough for us to pull this off. Also props to the volunteers around HDC that helped us pull this off. From the kids team to the IT volunteers to the guys that helped us fit out the kiosks, build the back panels for power and ethernet, fill the bottoms with sand etc. it was a true team effort.

Time to celebrate!

Joel

ChMS - Tick..tick...tick...

The kiosks are built and tested.

The check-in software has been revised to fit our needs perfectly and tested.

The family registration module has been built and tested.

The system has been setup to put kids in the proper rooms and balance rooms with overlapping age ranges.

The congregation has been informed.

People have been given opportunities to update their data.

We have demoed the check-in system from the stage during services.

We have tested for six weeks in a smaller venue.

There can be no more delays...

Check-in goes live to our entire church Saturday night at 6PM.

That ticking. Is it a bomb, or is it counting down to a celebration?

Joel

Vin Scully can read my wife's mind!

During tonight's dodger game Hiroki Kuroda, the dodger pitcher was hit in the head by a line drive and seriously injured. My whole family was watching the game, and we were all deeply concerned. After a few minutes of chatter and watching him be attended to by the trainer and other personnel, Patty says "I wonder if he is married"

Vin Scully replies: If you are wondering, Kuroda is married and has two daughters.

A few minutes pass and the game is about to resume.

Patty: What do they do about the batter?

Vin Scully: That is ruled as a ground rule double in case you wonder about such things right now.

We start to laugh, and remark about how good Vin Scully really is. He has been doing this so long he can anticipate what his audience wants to know...

Patty: Where are they going to take him? I hope they tell us before the end of the game.

Vin Scully: They have taken Kuroda to St. Josephs hospital nearby.

Spooky.

Joel

PS - I would assume updates on kuroda will be posted here.

Scriptural or Cultural

Recently I did a pre-marital appointment for a couple who wanted to attend our marriage class. They indicated in their application that they were living together. Part of our requirement for being part of the class is that couples not be living together, and if they are we meet with them to encourage them to separate until their wedding. Not knowing how the appointment would go, I wanted to prepare and be sure that I had solid scriptural footing for any conversations that might arise.

I figured there had to be a verse somewhere that said "Thou shalt not knock boots until thy wedding day, thus saith the Lord" but it is nowhere to be found. So I asked another pastor. He looked at me funny. "Hmm, I don't know. Let's look" and he pulled out a little counseling guide that pointed to 1 Corinthians 6:

1Cor. 6:9 Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality,
1Cor. 6:10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

Ok, but what, exactly, does sexually immoral mean? Because they are not adulterers, they aren't married. Well, in Greek it's pornos. Looking at the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, pornos seems to be related to prostitution. Well, they aren't going to prostitutes so that doesn't exactly apply... Other greek lexicons were of no help either. They mostly talk of immoral behavior or relationship to prostitution. Hmmm. Ok, so what if they claim "we aren't immoral, we are in a monogamous relationship with one another!"

So I asked another pastor. He pointed me to Hebrews 13:4

Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.

Ok, but they aren't married, and they aren't guilty of adultery, and the sexually immoral had that pesky pornos root again. I began to wonder if this was more of a cultural thing than a scriptural thing. After all, in 1 Corinthians 6:16 it seems to indicate that it is the sexual act that creates the union in God's eyes, not the marriage ceremony:

1Cor. 6:15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never!
1Cor. 6:16 Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.”

It was at this point that my wife joked "we shouldn't have waited!" to which we all laughed. So I asked another pastor. He went first to corinthians, and then to another passage that had that pesky greek word pornos in it. He replied confidently "but pornos means immorality!" and then we discussed that a bit. Pornos is often claimed to mean a lot of things, but when you come right down to it, it seems to tie mostly to prostitition. It was amazing to me how confident we all were without ever really digging into the scriptures involved.

So I went to yet another pastor and asked him. He immediately went to Ephesians 5:3 -

Eph. 5:3 ¶ But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people.

We have a winner! Regardless of how you exegete porneia or pornos, this verse is clear about sexual purity in english or in Greek. I didn't exactly expect them to begin arguing greek roots with me, and I wasn't about to tell them to continue on in sexual sin, but I found it very interesting how difficult it was for guys who know their bible to answer this question when challenged on those very points.

It did get me thinking about how easy it is to apply culture to the scripture, and to assume that cultural values are biblical values. It is always good to search the word of God to be sure that our assumptions are backed up by the text. In this case I believe they are, but I was definitely surprised at how not black and white this whole discussion really was when we dug in.

Joel

16 Years

July 31 was our 16th anniversary. 16 years ago Patty said "I do" and life changed forever. These 16 years have been the best years of my life. I am grateful to God for the family he gave me, and grateful to Patty for what a wonderful wife she has been all these years.

Over these years we've:
- lived in one apartment and three houses in four different cities.
- had two wonderful children.
- had the privilege of serving at two great churches
- developed many great friendships
- driven across the country from california to virginia
- gone to hawaii, guam and yap as a family
- developed our own holiday traditions
- experienced joy and heartbreak innumerable times
- buried a parent
- loved
- been loved
- and the list goes on.

When we first got married people would say "how to you like being married?" to which I would reply "I highly recommend it!"

I still do. My wife rocks.

Joel

ChMS - Lessons from week 1 of check-in

Sunday night we launched check-in for our 7 community. We launched it at 7 for several reasons:

(1) There are only about 600-1000 adults that attend 7, and most of those are younger resulting in fewer kids going into our program.

(2) The fact that most are younger means they are less likely to be antagonistic towards technology.

(3) It is isolated from the rest of the communities, being the only one meeting on Sunday night. As such, it is a perfect place to deploy first.

Here's what we did wrong:

(1) We ran out of time. This is probably true of almost any deployment, but we got bit by it. Not hugely, but we did get bit. We were so focused on the mobile kiosks that when we went to setup the desktop kiosks for nursery and pre-school, we realized we didn't have enough wiring in place to support two kiosks, so we had to settle for one for the first weekend. Unfortunately, the fact that 7 is a younger crowd meant that the load on these areas was pretty high, and having only one kiosk was a huge problem. When someone wasn't in our system properly, a big line would build while we were entering them in. Although we had never planned for there to be only one, it definitely reinforced this principle: Always have at least two kiosks in every location where people are checking in.

(2) We tested the family registration app, but not with lots of different addresses (or invalid ones). This doesn't seem like a big deal, but by request we had included geocoding on the spot for new addresses. Unfortunately, when an address wouldn't geocode, the record wouldn't save, creating a bit of a panic when you have a huge line of people (see point 1) and the record won't save allowing you to check-in the family. This was a small mistake, but it bit us big time. The reason the record wouldn't save is that the geocoding was timing out on the request, which took a long time. I honestly don't know how we could have known to do this differently.

(3) We didn't educate the kids team enough on how check-in should work. For example, they gave us very precise ranges for kids rooms (0-6 months, 7-12 months, 13-18 months etc.) which seems like a great idea, but doesn't allow the system to "load balance" rooms resulting in a few very full classrooms offset by some rather empty ones. Always provide age overlap so that the system can balance rooms for you.

(4) We didn't hound the parents for good data ahead of launch. We had LOTS of kids with no birth dates in our system. This resulted in a lot of time wasted while we added birth dates with kids in line. Take time on the front end to fill in holes in your data.

The elementary team was extremely happy with the new check-in system. Even though we were dealing with a lot of missing information, check-in went very fast because this system is so much faster than our old processes.

The pre-K team wasn't as happy because of the issues we listed above. But we are fixing those for week two. We will go live in all of our communities once we feel that 7 is working as it should. On Monday we had a debrief meeting in which we laid out a schedule to go live in August for everyone. Prior to that, we are going to ask parents to fill out cards that have information like all of their kids names and birthdays etc. If even half of them do that for us, it should help us immensely.

On the whole we are very pleased with the system so far. Many, many kudos to Nick and Jason at CCCEV for their work on a check-in system that allowed us to go live with an all mac check-in system. To our knowledge we may be the only church in America doing automated check-in without windows client software. Arena let us do that, and that is very cool.

Joel

ChMS - Check-In Progress

I'm sorry about the gap in blog posts. There has been a tremendous amount of stuff going on, and I've been too busy to read my email, let alone blog...

We made the decision a couple of months ago to pull the trigger on children's check-in. This is something we have wanted for at least nine years, so it is quite exciting to finally be making it happen.

The first step was software, and we found a solution that would work for us in the check-in module written by CCCEV. I blogged about this here. Next up, we had to create a replacement for the family registration windows app since we were planning to do this as an all mac solution. Daniel wrote a replacement for this as an Arena module, and we involved the Arena community in its development to insure that we benefited more than just HDC with it.

The biggest thing for us is being able to do this as an "all mac" check in solution, allowing us to work with equipment and software that we know well. Once we made the decision to move forward we had to write the family registration module, find a kiosk and get it ordered, and get the equipment in place. That's when we hit our first snag: We saw lots and lots of kiosks online, but we could not find what we needed, so we ended up building our own. The kiosks we looked at failed to meet our needs in several ways: (1) Most were not mobile. We had to have them on wheels. (2) Most did not have space for the printer. We wanted to print the labels at the kiosks. (3) None of them came equipped with macs, although many came pre-loaded with pc hardware we could not use. (4) Most of them were much larger than we wanted. We have to store these things, they need to be small. (5) None of them had a provision for a keyboard to be used only some of the time. It was either no keyboard, or a keyboard out all the time.



This is the final product of our design. The monitor is an ELO Accutouch 15" LCD. We tested two other types of touchscreen (Intellitouch and Caroltouch) from ELO and this was the favorite of our staff. Below the monitor you can see the tray that holds the keyboard. It recesses into the kiosk. The idea here is that people come up and primarily interact with the screen as a touch screen. The keyboard is utilized by volunteers when these need to be used to register new families or make changes to the data in our database. For the most part the keyboards remain hidden. Then the printer, a Zebra GK420d.



The back of the kiosks show the way we have assembled everything. There is a mac mini mounted on the side, a linksys 5 port ethernet switch (powered by Power over Ethernet) and then a power strip. What this photo doesn't show (it wasn't installed yet) is a panel on the back along the bottom that provides external plugs for power and ethernet. So the volunteers only have to take the 12' cables and plug them in on the outside. There is no stretching of the power strip cable, no stress on the switch inside etc. Everything is self contained. We also found USB powered fans to keep everything cool. The best part about them is they only create 19db of noise: they are virtually silent.



Then we had to start setting everything up. This means a serious assembly line of stuff. Here you see 16 mac minis being installed and tested. Below, power strips, mini shelves and ethernet switches await installation.



The kiosks are not quite finished. They are due to be wrapped with a vinyl wrap that includes kids graphics and such to make them blend into our environment better, but we stained them ebony to minimize the showing of dirt on exposed areas, as well as to make the kiosk disappear behind the printer.



This is the first batch of kiosks, eight of them, ready to go for this weekend. We are implementing check-in at our 7 community, which has a much smaller group of kids than our Harbor community. We figured that 7 is the perfect place to test and work out the bugs. We go live tonight, I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow!

Joel