Since I posted some pictures of our new check in stations I have received lots of questions on them, so I thought I would write a quick post on what they are all about.

Recently South Hills Church switched from ACS to Fellowship One for, what I call “an inventory control system for our people”. The reasons for that I will leave for another post.

In that move our Children’s Pastor, Justyn Smith wanted to upgrade our checkin stations for kids and families.

After some concept discussions with him, I came up with this design for our Main Street Campus. Each station is comprised of the following components:

1- Global Truss 12″ square 2.0 meters high
1- Global Truss 16″ end plate
1- 24″ square 3/4″ plywood base, precut from Home Depot
2- MonoPrice Monitor Mounts, Mounted to a 4″x1/4″ custom steel plate
2- ACER T230H Touch Screen Monitors
2- ZOTAC N330 Mini Atom PC’s running Windows 7 Enterprise
2- Honeywell Metrologic MS 9520 Barcode Scanner
1- Godex EZ-DT4 Label Printer mounted on a custom build steel shelf. (These are Print shared between the two PCs on each station).
1- Power Strip.

All the mounting was custom built by me and assembled by my team of staff and volunteers.

Chris Sonksen, Lead Pastor @ South Hills Church posted this on his blog. It is reprinted with his permission.

“Sometimes in leadership we face deep sorrow, and this week at South Hills we lost one of our own. Debbie Sloan passed away on Saturday morning after a long battle with cancer. She was/is loved by all who knew her. She was a tremendous asset to our team, a bright light in the office, and I personally will miss her. Today, rather than attempt to give you some deeply profound insight, I have chosen to simply let other staff members share about our dearly loved Debbie……….”

Read the full post here.

Last week I purchased four $20 fog machines from Walmart. They where on-sale in the Halloween department.

Let me first give you a history of how I got to the place where I would buy these seemingly dubious pieces of hardware.
When I first came to South Hills, I was rummaging through some miscellaneous gear that was pilled in our KidZone and found a Chauvet Hurricane water-based hazer. Finding that it did work but had been filled with oil-based haze fluid, I cleaned it up, ran distilled water through it, purchased a gallon of Froggy’s water-based haze fluid, and put it into service. At first, it worked fairly well. Then I started having issues with it, clogging, sputtering, belching, etc. So I did what any self-respecting TD would do, I purchased another one on Ebay for $150. And that was dumb. The new Chauvet hazer worked really well, for about two days. Now I had 2 cheap piece of junk hazers that I could now use as door stops.

By this point, many of you are probably asking “why don’t you just buy a Radiance Hazer?” and that is a good question. In this time of cut budgets, it is very hard, if not impossible, to spend $1200 on a single item. If I do, I have to justify it and a Hazer is hard to justify, since hazing is, amazingly enough, some what controversial in church. I did try, to no avail, to find a used one for under $1000 (my small equipment purchase limit).

Fast forward to the $20 fog machines. During sound check on a Saturday, I unboxed the first machine, assembled the various small parts, filled it with Froggy’s Haze fluid, and turned it on. Once it warmed up the green light came on and I pushed the control switch. This thing cranked! It was blasting haze into the 10″ fan that was sitting in front of it and filling the stage area in a matter of moments. Wow! I was impressed. I thought “Okay, I can use these, I will just modify the control by attaching a DMX relay switch and rock this thing!” Pleased with myself, I un-boxed the second $20 unit, assembled it, and plugged it in to power. It promptly blew its internal fuse. DONE. Okay, it is a $20 fog machine I bought from Walmart.

I put it back in the box and pulled out another one and let it warm up. I was still back stage and about 50 feet from the unit when it finished warming up. Suddenly, it came on by itself, FULL FORCE! Fogging the cello section of the orchestra, string players running for their lives! I ran over to the unit and tried to shut it off. The power switch had no effect! Unplugging it had no effect! I grabbed the unit and pointed it back stage as it finally sputtered to a stop.
I then proceeded to laugh uncontrollably. ATTACK OF THE $20 FOGGER! It was a masterpiece of 1950′s cinema.

So what is my advice? Buy a real DMX hazer. If you can’t ( and I am still in that camp), go ahead and buy $20 foggers from Walmat, but be warned, you get what you pay for. They are worth every penny, if not in their reliability, in pure entertainment value (insert the Three Stooges theme song here).