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So, in a quick summary of the TPX-holidays:

Jason discovers the inherent danger of buying toys while on vacation.
TPX brings group-buys to a whole new level: group-gifts.
Wii.

Now that the Christmas rush is over.. and the business world is picking up again (since EDge deals mainly with educational institutions, Christmas becomes quite lax) and we’re now completely developer-less.. I have been put into this crappy position where I have to do everything, but I can’t say no because I want the design work to practice and learn. Anyhow.. finally starting to put out some stuff I don’t absolutely abhor.

Here are the two latest.. the humber e-mail, I had to follow their colour/style guide pretty tight so there wasn’t really much too much freedom. Since it’s an email you dont get to pick a typeface for the actual text.. so its ugly Arial. I kind of like the cover though.

Here’s wishing you all a Merry Christmas!

Esp in Japan! Too bad Jason couldn’t be here for tonight’s wii/transfer party.

Lates!

So.. on Tuesday night we sat down (YFA, Eric and I) and watched the Worship Band Workshop DVD (led by Paul Baloche) and it was short.. but had a lot of good ideas.

Baloche starts of course with the main reason for worship and where our hearts ought to be. Nothing completely new, but the DVD has a lot of promise to inspire the NTCAC worship teams to a higher level of musical standard (somewhere above noise.. I kid). The greatest is the two counter-examples that the band plays.. one is of NO dynamics (haha hello NTCAC!) and the second is of inconsistent tempo (hello NTCAC again! except we dont slow down again).

Baloche presents some basic ideas, but hopefully in a way that those who aren’t so dedicated/committed to worship will at least get some kind of clue. He talks about not playing so much, about playing bass/mids/treble and staying out of each other’s way. They’re pretty simple and I think we could implement them in a fairly rudimentary way. The biggest culprit at NTCAC is definitely the piano (bass/guitar/drums tend to stay out of each other’s way naturally) playing all over the place.. and way too much.

Anyhow.. last night I watched the band interviews (only 10 mins :() and they also reinforce some good things, like being spiritually supportive of the leader, being attentive etc. Just things which should be “common sense” but really need to be reinforced.

The only downside of the DVD was the 15-20mins which were just Baloche’s team playing songs.. and taking up valuable talking time :p

It was pretty funny after watching it, Eric saw the “light” and was really gung ho on setting a high standard, a level of musical ability that we should strive for.. and YFA kinda reminded him how he just shot down the whole idea at the EWC meeting a week ago. In about 15 minutes Eric went through exactly the same thought progression that we’ve been going through, except we could quickly explain why it wasn’t possible.. and what middle ground we settled at heh.

It really all comes down to committment and heart. I mean.. talent or no talent, if you don’t even commit to the team, to practicing, to the ministry.. then it’s not going to happen by itself by “God’s grace”.. My countdown of.. 1 and 1/2 year until we can form a TPX worship team is on the wall :p

Saturday, our second foray into the Ontario Road Rally Championship series, the Northern Lights Rally. Chiu/Wong enter again. We’re beginning to become quite the familiar faces on the rally circuit.. seeing as we still haven’t met any other chinese participants.

Anyway.. I woke up fairly leisurely and got some Zelda in, a bit of Wii sports and played some bass. Meanwhile in waterloo, the other half of rallyPX played a badminton tournament with Eric and managed to come in 2nd (gj team). Around 1:30 we both arrived seperately in Campbellville (about halfway between Toronto and Waterloo, near Guelph) and filled out the necessary paperwork.

It was snowing in the morning but by the time 2pm came about the sun was out and the roads were dry. The Northern Lights Rally 2006 was comprised of two legs, the first being ~200km and the second being ~230km. It was pretty much one day/one night leg. As usual, we came out of the “untimed” odometer check too fast.. and ended up being early for the first checkpoint -_-..

For the most part the first leg went pretty well until the end, and we ended up losing some time due to some confusing instructions. We finished the first leg I think it was with a 5.6, putting us in third place for novice.

For the second leg.. we started by missing the first turn.. but it was untimed.. so we we’re ok. However we still came out of the untimed section too fast and ended up early for the first checkpoint again.. ALTHOUGH.. the scorecard shows we zero’d it.. so who knows.

There were was a bad instruction for the novice.. so one checkpoint became a route control. We also drove past a checkpoint completely without stopping.. but they were nice enough and gave us the proper time anyway.. otherwise we would have gotten an extra 20 added to our score (for a missed CP). The rest went fairly smoothly. YFA got sick/dizzy/headachey.. but managed to survive and we managed to get the best score (of the rally) for the second leg.

It pushed us into second place for novice and we got another plaque thing.. woo! 5 weeks until the next rally!

Wii review in a week or so