Through 9/25/22

Video

Summary

Well, it’s now been a full month since initial launch. I might wish I had gotten more done thus far, but slow and steady wins the race. I’m still sort of in the set up phase – in more ways than one. This cycle, I did all the things for the first video of the focused BB6A playlist on the channel, so that I could set up the BB6A study page on the website. I also made 7 meta-related videos for the YouTube channel. 4 of those videos dealt with explaining playlist structure for existing conternt playlists, 2 were content introductions for both BB6A playlists (the more focused version, and the full version), and the last video was a new banner video for the channel that condensed all of the content from the initial intro video I had made… the one that ended up around ~45 minutes long. That was too long for the general banner video (in my opinion), hence the new shorter version too.

The desktop computer I’d ordered also came this cycle, so I spent a good bit of time setting it up. This entire ministry progress summary was produced on the new computer. It is many times more powerful than the old tablet it is replacing.

Timestamps

00:0000:00 - Introduction
02:1302:13 - Added transcripts
02:4002:40 - Considered upcoming future work, somewhat gloomily
06:2806:28 - But then came up with a detailed plan of attack
   08:4308:43 - Phase I: Polishing the basic content related to initial launch
   11:4411:44 - Phase II: Supporting discussion pages/videos fully, organizing all the already-existing SR4 content
   18:5018:50 - Phase III: Organizing all the already-existing BB6A content, setting up the fully-optimized video creation workflow, and catching up in other areas so that I can more fully focus on ministry without feeling like I’m behind elsewhere
23:1923:19 - Finished all the Phase I tasks this cycle
   23:3623:36 - Did all the things for the first focused BB6A video, so that I could get the BB6A study page up and started on the website
   25:0125:01 - Created additional meta-related videos on the YouTube channel
30:4530:45 - Did some miscellaneous styling bug-fixes and improvements
31:3431:34 - Set up new computer (for the most part)
33:5533:55 - Upcoming work
35:3435:34 - Outro

Content

Added transcripts

I added transcripts to the webpages for several of the recent videos I’d worked on organizing.

Considered upcoming future work, somewhat gloomily

  • There is still a depressingly large backlog of rather unpleasant tasks that must be done.
    • Some are boring, tedious, busywork (e.g, formatting all the already-existing content appropriately, writing more documentation).
    • Others are difficult, time-consuming, and unpleasant – largely due to a bunch of unknowns and the great complexity of the overall system (modifying the codebase for the preprocessor application to support discussion pages)
    • Then there’s a lot of set up I still need to do to be able to do all the video-related things I’d like to in the future. Using a teleprompter with full scripts for every video (made with voice recognition to make it sustainable time-wise), a whiteboard in the background (or drawing on-screen with my tablet?), etc.
  • I had a walk with my roommate to vent a bit, and also to talk through my plans and goals. I’m launched now, to be sure, but there’s still so much to be done before I’ll feel like I’m truly where I want to be, and that’s a bit discouraging. Talking through it with someone who truly understands helps a lot.

But then came up with a detailed plan of attack

Deciding that the best way to tackle the large pile of work was with a detailed plan, I set out to make exactly that.

I settled on a plan that has three phases. After each phase (at which point some sort of milestone will be reached), a certain set of things will be able to be done that could not be done before. We’ll get to the three phases in a sec, but first, some other general notes on what I decided:

I made the call to put off fully scripted videos, the teleprompter, and whiteboard-type-things (that is, the completely ideal video-generation setup, as things seem to me) as long as I need to, until these things are truly ready. But the change is, I’m going to keep going with the SR4 series in the meantime (making “less-optimal” videos without the scripts/teleprompter and whiteboard demonstrations), even though I hadn’t intended to make any videos at all until I got the new setup completely operational. That had been the plan even as recently as a week ago.

Basically, I just don’t want to let the perfect get in the way of the good, and I very much wish to do some actual ministry production alongside all the tedious busywork tasks I still need to finish here at the beginning of things. If I just do the latter (as I have been for the last little bit), everything is too painful, and burnout sets in. Which is no good.

Now, as to the actual phases:

The Phase I tasks are as follows:

  • Doing all the things for the first focused BB6A video, so that I can get the BB6A study page up and started on the website
  • Making some additional meta-related videos on the YouTube channel, to get the content in a more polished state. Videos discussing playlist structure, videos discussing playlist content (introduction videos), and a shorter version of the ministry intro video that ended up over 45 minutes long, to be used as the channel banner video.

The things that can be accomplished after Phase I is completed:

  • I can be a bit more vocal about sharing the ministry, even more than I have been. My mentor can link to it in the weekly email posting on his ministry site, to hopefully get a bit more exposure. After I had identified these improvements to make, I wanted to get them done before further trying to increase exposure.

I actually finished all the Phase I tasks this cycle. We’ll go over them shortly.

Phase II: Supporting discussion pages/videos fully, organizing all the already-existing SR4 content

The Phase II tasks are as follows:

  • Fully coding support for discussion pages in the preprocessor application
  • Writing documentation for discussion pages on the content organization page
  • Catching up on completely polishing all the content from all the already-existing SR4 videos, reviewing the material at the same time (so that I will be able to pick back up more seamlessly when resuming new content generation for the series).

The things that can be accomplished after Phase II is completed:

  • I can start making new ministry content: more SR4 videos.
  • Given that I’ll finally be adding new content on a consistent schedule, I’ll feel even more comfortable with additional ministry exposure – to the degree that I’ll be ready to start getting more involved in local church groups again, something that I have thus far been holding off on in large part. I wanted to completely have the ministry live first.
  • If there is sufficient interest after meeting some local folks, the in-person Bible studies at the house might be started at any point after Phase II is completed (after I am regularly making new content again). It may take some time for this to happen, however, and it ought to be something organic, not forced.

I’m really looking forward to having a social life again (I’ve been pretty head-down with nose-to-the-grindstone since I graduated from college several years ago – in order to get the ministry website/YouTube channel launched), so I’d like to get through Phase II ASAP, so I can start getting involved once more in local church groups. I’m also looking forward to the opportunity to serve in these communities too, as I am able.

Phase III: Organizing all the already-existing BB6A content, setting up the fully-optimized video creation workflow, and catching up in other areas so that I can more fully focus on ministry without feeling like I’m behind elsewhere

The Phase III tasks are as follows:

  • Catching up on all the already-existing focused BB6A content = ~38 videos or so, which do not follow as strict a structure as the SR4 videos (that is, as completely follow a set of slides), and will therefore be much more painful and time-consuming to timestamp and organize effectively.
  • Getting the voice recognition (to quickly dictate full scripts), teleprompter, and whiteboard parts of my video creation workflow set up, so that the workflow will then be configured exactly as I wish for it to be, with no further outstanding TODOs. Also make several changes to the slides part of the preprocessor to further improve the slides the videos are based on. (For example, not using embedded Bible app windows in order to save space, supporting header nesting in the construction of the auto-generated slides outlines, etc.).
  • Catching up on the huge backlogs of daily progress summaries and random ramblings videos on my other YouTube channels that I need to make/process/post.

The things that can be accomplished after Phase III is completed:

  • I’ll be able to focus much closer to 100% of my attention on content production, rather than having these other matters steal away my attention. I’m hoping to be able to really crank up the production pace once I’m no longer pulled as many different directions all the time.

Phase III is the last phase. After Phase III I’ll be done with everything on my list, and making all new video content with the workflow I’ve thought out and wish to use in the long-term. Things will then mostly just be a matter of which content I make first.

Finished all the Phase I tasks this cycle

Both main categories of tasks.

Did all the things for the first focused BB6A video, so that I could get the BB6A study page up and started on the website

As part of Phase I. In getting this first focused BB6A video organized and formatted, I:

  • Built content for it (copy-pasted from Ichthys study, formatted with special content sections as appropriate)
  • Added timestamps (trickier/more time-consuming since this one wasn’t directly based off of slides)
  • Subject-tagged all the sections (this took a while)
  • Built video description
  • Pushed everything live on YouTube and on the site
  • Etc.

As part of Phase I. There were 7 videos that I made:

Prior to making all these recordings, I had to draft content and make slides (at least for most of them). I made a new “not-displayed” content type to generate .gitignore’d slides for all these videos that won’t have actual deployed pages of their own. I had to ensure that the appropriate structure was still followed so that the preprocessor application would still work properly to generate slides for things in this new content type. Needed all the right folder nesting with _index.md files, etc.

After recording the 7 videos, I had to do all the post-processing on the videos, upload them to YouTube with appropriate thumbnails, and then organize them appropriately in the relevant playlists. And so on.

Because I was concatenating several different takes this time to be able to share identical content across the two videos in each of the structure intro video types (discussion vs. no discussion, full BB6A vs. focused BB6A), I bumped into issues I hadn’t had before (dealing with variable vs. constant frame rate recordings not concatenating properly, and differing audio channels not concatenating properly). I’ll spare you the boring details, but it took a lot of research to fix things, and I had to delete and then completely re-do some processing steps partway through. At least now I think I understand everything better, so hopefully things will only go smoother in the future.

Did some miscellaneous styling bug-fixes and improvements

  • Made a CSS tweak to the slides template to make the highlight background color yellow rather than blue. Looks better in presentations, I think.
  • Fixed CSS bug: Centered icons better (more towards middle of lines) in subject index link shortcode.
  • Fixed CSS bug: Resolved positioning issue with TOC container being offset somewhat from the top of the page.

Set up new computer (for the most part)

  • The desktop computer I’d ordered finally came. I spent a good bit of time compiling a list of applications I use to make sure I installed everything I wanted to. I’m shifting into using a package manager (called Chocolatey) for as much as possible too, which should help maintainability in the future.
  • This is the first time I’ve set up a new computer in like 6 years or something.
  • It went relatively well, but there’s just a lot to set up, is all. I still have a few more things to do, which will carry into the next work cycle. I’m hoping to start using the new computer (which is much faster and more powerful) for absolutely everything within the next few days. It should speed up the content generation process, as it has approximately 4x the CPU power and 8x the RAM of the computer it is replacing, with much faster generation 4 NVMe SSD read/write speeds too.

Upcoming work

  • As mentioned, I actually finished Phase I this cycle, making all the new meta-related videos, as well as finishing things for the first focused BB6A video.
  • So my main focus in the coming days will be the tasks from Phase II. I’m going to focus on coding support for discussion pages first (and then writing documentation for how they work). This means that I will do the review of the SR4 content I’ve made thus far at the very end of Phase II, right before I start back up content creation in that series. That way things will be maximally fresh in my head, and I can resume more seamlessly.

Video/audio transcript

0:00 - hey guys so right now I’m going to be making the second Ministry progress summary update here and so it’s been
0:07 - about a month here since the ministry launched and uh I’m going to be going over some of the things that I’ve got
0:12 - done in this last two week cycle here now first off I’m really hoping that the
0:18 - webcam quality here is going to be better than the last couple videos that I’ve recorded um I spent some time
0:23 - fiddling around with GoPro settings I am recording inside right now it’s pretty late at night uh you know like past 10
0:29 - o’clock so it’s pitch black and I do have blackout curtains up in the room that I’m recording in now but I fiddled
0:34 - around with the color profiles and the iso settings and things on the GoPro so I’m hoping that this comes out clearer
0:41 - now the other thing that I did was I increased the recording resolution for the screen capture software so I am
0:47 - recording at 4K now which means that hopefully the picture will be a lot clearer than it has been so I just
0:53 - noticed some issues with the videos that I had made uh pretty recently here you
0:59 - know like the second a shorter introduction video that I’ll go over here in just in just a little bit um you
1:05 - know so like the the shorter version of the ministry intro and you know a couple others I just noticed that the footage
1:11 - wasn’t that great and I mean there were several reasons for that and I’m going to be trying to hopefully fix that here so uh you know I’ll stop rambling about
1:17 - that um I’ll get right into the um the slides to go over here for all
1:23 - the things I went over and so uh we’ll pick up with that in just a sec all right so here we are with the slides
1:30 - and this is going to be the ministry progress summary here through September 25th 2022 and so as you can see with the
1:37 - title here uh big categories that we did I made the Bible basic 6A study page on
1:43 - the website so I got the first video for that organized so that that web page could be created as the landing page for
1:50 - that study and I’ll be filling out the other studies over time here I made a bunch of meta videos on the channel so
1:56 - things describing content and structure for the playlist and then the shorter introduction video
2:02 - that I mentioned just a second ago and then I also planned out a bunch of the future work so
2:08 - um here’s the summary uh you know that’s going to be up on the web page as well and I’m not really going to go through the outline I’m just going to go jump
2:14 - right in here um so uh one of the first things I did this last cycle was I added transcripts
2:21 - to the web pages for several of the recent videos that I’d worked on and so
2:26 - transcripts for me are pretty easy I have a spreadsheet program that I copy
2:31 - paste the automatically generated YouTube transcripts into and it spits out everything with the hyperlinks made but I just had to do this and this is
2:38 - something that I’ll have to kind of perpetually keep up with over time now after that I was trying to decide
2:43 - what I was going to do next and so I started thinking about all of the things that I still had on my to-do list here
2:49 - and uh in so doing started getting a little bit depressed because there’s still rather a lot of things that I want
2:55 - to get done before I’ll consider myself truly ready so it’s not so much that I have you know
3:01 - things that I must do as there’s just quite a few things in my backlog of
3:07 - tasks that just aren’t entirely fun so if it were just a lot that’d be one thing but it’s kind of a lot of things
3:13 - and the things that I have to do aren’t terribly Pleasant so some things are kind of boring
3:18 - tedious busy work so for example formatting all the already existing content appropriately writing more
3:24 - documentation for features I add things like that others are more difficult time consuming
3:30 - and just unpleasant generally and this is largely due to a bunch of unknowns and how I’m going to implement things
3:36 - and the great complexity of the overall system so I’m thinking here mostly specifically of modifying the code base
3:42 - for the preposter application I’ve written in Python to support the new page type that I want to do and it’s
3:48 - going to involve a good bit of refactoring to like the main program Loop and I’m going to have to write some
3:53 - other regular Expressions to do the parsing that I want and age just can I I’ve done this sort of thing a couple
3:59 - times before and making this application I just know it’s going to be bad and so it’s been a bit of procrastination there
4:05 - but you know this is something else that isn’t terribly fun it’s just another necessary task that I have to get through
4:11 - and then of course there’s still a lot of setup that I need to do to be able to do all of the video related things I’d
4:17 - like to do in the future so this is kind of setting up the videos for how I wish to do them in the long term and so some
4:23 - of those things are like using a teleprompter with full scripts for every video and so I am planning on making the
4:29 - scripts with voice recognition software hoping to get uh you know input speeds kind of above 200 225 words per minute
4:36 - so that this will be actually possible time wise for me to actually fully script all the videos and then either
4:42 - use a whiteboard in the background or drawing on my screen with my tablet I haven’t quite decided although I think I’m leaning towards like the tablet
4:48 - approach just kind of for a little bit more interactivity when I’m going through things and you know other things like this so
4:54 - there’s uh several to Do’s on the list relating to improving some of the way that I
5:00 - generate video content and so there’s some research and setup that’ll have to do with all of those things as well and
5:06 - again it’s not that any of these things are inherently so terrible as they’re just not very fun tasks they’re
5:13 - not like intellectually stimulating or things that I can kind of spend time researching and
5:20 - talking to others about doctrinally and things like that so they’re just kind of a lot of busy work
5:25 - tasks here and unpleasant busy work at that so in this process here I went on a
5:31 - walk with my roommate we kind of talked about some of these things that I need to get done now that I’ve launched my
5:36 - Ministry and stuff but there’s just a lot that I need to do before I’ll feel like
5:42 - I’ve reached the place where I truly want to be and that’s just a bit discouraging you know it has been a long process here many years I’ve been
5:48 - working on things but uh you know to kind of launch and then still have all of this stuff on my plate
5:53 - I mean that’s just a little bit rough so talking through it with someone else who’s kind of in the process of setting
5:59 - up ministry stuff someone who really understands you know it helps a lot just be able to I don’t know just talk about
6:04 - all of the things that I’m facing and you know talking it out kind of helps you figure out what things you need to
6:10 - prioritize as well so you know good conversation it’s always good to have close friends to bounce things off of so
6:16 - they can give you some perspective and so this was kind of the first step here considering all of the work that I have
6:22 - to do uh kind of trying to make a list in my head of uh here’s all the tasks here’s what is critical for me to be
6:29 - focusing on next and then so after considering all the work the next thing was coming up with a
6:35 - detailed plan of attack to work on all of these things so given that I decided that the best
6:41 - way to tackle the large pile of work was with the detailed plan I set out to make exactly that
6:46 - I ended up settling on a plan that has three phases after each phase at which point some sort of Milestone will be
6:52 - reached a certain set of things will be able to be done that could not be done before we’ll get to the three phases in
6:58 - a sec but first some other General notes on things I decided I made the call to put off fully
7:03 - scripted videos the teleprompter and the Whiteboard type things that is the completely ideal video generation setup
7:09 - at least as things seem to me as long as I need to kind of until these things are truly ready but the change is I’m going
7:16 - to keep going with the sr4 series in the meantime and so that kind of means making the quote-unquote less optimal
7:22 - videos without the scripts and the teleprompter and the Whiteboard demonstrations kind of even though I
7:27 - hadn’t intended to make any videos at all until I got the new setup completely operational and
7:33 - so this is kind of a change I am kind of changing my mind here because even as recently as a week ago I was kind of
7:38 - thinking that I wouldn’t make any videos until I had kind of completely smoothed out that process and had everything set up how I wanted
7:44 - but as I said kind of changed my mind and the basic idea is just that I don’t want to let the perfect get in the way
7:50 - of the good and I very much wish to do some actual Ministry production alongside all the tedious busy work
7:56 - tasks I still need to finish here because if I just do the latter like just the busy work stuff everything is
8:02 - kind of too painful and I’ll start burning out just because I’m not excited and enthusiastic about
8:08 - any of the work it’s just kind of something I have to grip my teeth and get through and so I feel like mixing in
8:13 - some actual Ministry content which is much more enjoyable for me because I get to feel like
8:19 - I’m creating things and I’m I’m providing useful content and things like that it’s just much easier for me to get
8:25 - myself to do that so I’m going to try to kind of mix in the the tedious boring busy work over time rather than front
8:31 - loading all of it and I hope that will actually help kind of make things easier to get through so that I don’t keep
8:36 - procrastinating on things or just burn out from trying to do too much all at once so now as to the actual phases in
8:43 - this plan we’ll go through each one of the phases in turn here so phase one is basically polishing the
8:48 - basic content related to the initial launch the tasks for completing phase one uh
8:54 - there’s only two of them here so the first one is kind of doing all the things for the first focused Bible
8:59 - basic 6A video so that I could get the Bible basic 6A study page kind of up on the website and started on uh you know
9:06 - like having each of the lessons displayed and so over time I’ll be filling in the rest
9:12 - of these lessons but I wanted to get at least one up because that way I could have the study visible on the website
9:17 - whereas it wasn’t before and then the other task here was kind of making some additional meta related
9:23 - videos on the YouTube channel and this is kind of just to get the content in a more polished State overall so I had
9:30 - videos discussing playlist structure and there’s four playlists for this so there’s the more focused Bible basic 6A
9:36 - the full Bible basic 6A that has like all 90 videos the
9:42 - sr4 Series without discussion videos and the sr4 series with discussion videos so I made a very short intro video for each
9:49 - one of those playlists describing the playlist structure then I also made content introductions for the two Bible
9:56 - basic 6A Series so uh videos going over what content is contained in those
10:01 - playlists and then finally I made a shorter version of the ministry intro video like I mentioned at the beginning
10:07 - of this video here because the initial intro video ended up more than 45 minutes long and that’s just a little
10:13 - bit too long I think for it to be the banner video on the channel so I made a much shorter one that goes over much the
10:18 - same information but I tried to be really really concise and only talk about the very pertinent things in a
10:25 - brief Manner and that got the length down to closer to 18 minutes which is a lot better now as to what I can kind of do after
10:32 - I’ve finished phase one I can be a bit more vocal about sharing the ministry even more than I have been
10:37 - of course I’ve shared it with friends and family and people I thought might be interested on the mailing list but uh my
10:43 - mentor you know who runs a Ministry website of his own he can kind of link it in the weekly email posting on his
10:48 - site he’d offered to do that but I kind of had to identify these things you know several days after I launched I’m more
10:55 - like a week and a half or something you know I was just thinking about how could I make things better and I kind of wanted to get these things done before
11:00 - further trying to increase the exposure of the ministry you know if more people are going to see it anyway I might as
11:06 - well make it better before more people see it if that makes any sense and so I kind of wanted to do this this extra bit of polishing get
11:13 - some more of the explanatory videos up there on the YouTube channel to kind of explain how the playlists are laid out
11:19 - and what content they contain just because that’s useful um and so having those things done first I think will make it
11:25 - kind of easier to understand uh when it’s shared with people in a wider sense and so I did actually finish all of the
11:32 - phase one tasks this cycle and so we’ll go over them once I finish going over the phases in the plan here but this was
11:38 - the first phase of my three-phase plan for tackling all the work I have kind of staring me down here so this was
11:45 - phase one now as to phase two phase two is kind of supporting discussion pages so that’s
11:51 - the pages and then the corresponding videos in the YouTube playlist and then organizing all of the already existing
11:57 - sr4 content from the uh sr4 series I have already up on the YouTube channel
12:03 - that has about 20 I think it’s 21 videos in that series already so we’ll go over exactly what those
12:09 - tasks are in a little bit more detail here so the hardest thing probably by far is
12:15 - going to be fully coding the support for the discussion pages in the preprocessor application so uh you know the
12:21 - application itself is probably a couple thousand lines of code at this point and may sound like a lot it’s not that bad
12:27 - but it’s just I have to go modify some logic here and keep track of additional
12:32 - States so that I can pass things up from different page types and it just gets kind of complicated pretty quick and I
12:37 - just know from like I said past experience having made some modifications to this application a couple times in the past that this is
12:43 - just going to take me a while it’s going to be kind of tricky and I’m gonna have to sit there and debug it for a while to make it work properly and so I am just
12:51 - not really looking forward to this because I know it’s going to be kind of a long arduous process to get it to work how I want it to
12:56 - and then after I’ve set up the code base to do what I wanted I have to explain exactly what it’s doing and what these
13:03 - pages are and how people can make use of them and so that means I need to write some documentation on the content organization page which is one of the
13:09 - main documentation pages on the website and writing documentation I mean it’s very useful it’s necessary for people to
13:15 - be able to understand what things are supposed to do on the site it’s just again not very interesting and so it’s something that I have to kind of grip my
13:21 - teeth and make myself do because I don’t inherently want to do it very much and then also on the busy workfront here
13:28 - I have to catch up on completely polishing all the content from the already existing sr4 videos kind of
13:33 - before I make new ones and so at the same time that I’m going through and adding the time stamps and subject
13:39 - tagging everything so that the sections will show up in the subject index and things like that I’m actually going to
13:44 - go through and review the material at the same time because it’s been a few months since I’ve last posted videos in
13:49 - this series and if I go and review it at this point in time I’ll kind of be able to pick back up more seamlessly when I’m
13:55 - resuming the new content generation for this series so again um you know after I have reviewed all of
14:01 - this I’ll be able to kind of pick back up in the series way more seamlessly than I would if it
14:07 - has just been months since I’d last seen this stuff all right so after I do those tasks uh
14:12 - the things that I can kind of do after phase two is completed uh there’s three of them so most obviously I can start making new
14:19 - ministry content and that will be more videos in this sr4 series that I’ve already started and so once I’ve gone
14:25 - back and gotten all the things done for the previous videos that are already there I’ll be able to
14:31 - start adding new content myself and that way uh you know I’ll be able to balance all of the kind of tedious busy work I
14:38 - have to do with generating new ministry content which is something I find a much more engaging something that is not as
14:44 - hard for me to motivate myself to do and so that way getting that mix I think it will be much more sustainable in the
14:49 - long term now this is another big important thing at least in my mind here given that I’ll
14:54 - finally be adding new content on a consistent schedule I’ll feel even more comfortable with additional Ministry
14:59 - exposure to the degree that I’ll be ready to go start getting more involved in local church groups again and this is
15:05 - something that I have thus far kind of been holding off on in large part because I wanted to completely have the ministry of Life first I kind of wanted
15:12 - to get my priorities straight and make sure that I watch the ministry kind of have all my ducks in a row there
15:18 - before I go sinking a lot of my time into other things just to make sure that I’m prioritizing it
15:24 - and also just so that I kind of have a sense of how much time it will take before I go commit myself to other
15:29 - things but once I start making content again I’ll kind of be ready to go get more involved in local groups and stuff
15:36 - and so that’s another thing that can kind of be accomplished after I finish the phase two tasks here
15:41 - and then finally if there’s sufficient interest after meeting some local folks like people from the Bible studies I attend and stuff but they’re interested
15:47 - and maybe meeting in my house another day of the week to go over some of the things that we talk about in more depth
15:53 - you know just in addition to whatever other meetings the church groups we have already have well then the in-person Bible studies at
16:00 - the house might be started at any point after phase two is completed so that is after I’m kind of regularly making new
16:06 - content again now I’m not going to try to force this um it might take some time for it to happen but I want it to be
16:12 - organic rather than something I kind of push super hard so you know I’m not going to try to drag people to my house
16:18 - to do these Bible studies but just that people are interested and we can go that extra level you know I never in the past
16:24 - when I was leading Bible studies at University never had too much trouble uh finding people who I wanted you know
16:31 - this extra Bible study sort of thing that we do and so I’m probably interested in having things developed that way in a more organic sense here
16:38 - but point being here this is something that can kind of happen after I’m regularly making new content again
16:44 - and I’m getting myself more involved in the local church groups around me so even aside from Ministry
16:50 - considerations here I’m kind of really looking forward to having a social life again just because I’ve been pretty head down kind of with nose to the grindstone
16:57 - since I graduated college which was coming on three years ago now I mean that’s just because I had so much work
17:03 - so many tasks that I had to get done to get the ministry website and the YouTube channel launched and you know things
17:08 - have kind of changed over the years as I’ve been planning out what content format organization everything from my
17:14 - Ministry is going to happen so there’s just like a lot of things I needed to get done here and just so that I could
17:20 - focus on all of that and give that my full attention and my time so that I wouldn’t let it slip on the back burner
17:26 - and never get done I really prioritized getting all of this stuff done first and so that meant that I kind of sacrificed
17:33 - a lot of social interaction you know I wasn’t as involved in local stuff as I was in college because I wanted to get
17:38 - all of this stuff done and make it my highest priority um so I’ve just kind of been a little
17:44 - bit isolated as I’ve gone through and uh kind of as I said kept my nose to the
17:49 - grindstone here to get all of these tasks done the last couple years and so I really like to kind of get through
17:55 - phase two as soon as possible so that I can start getting involved once more in local groups because it’s something that I’ve done previously I mean of course
18:01 - even aside from kind of helping serve in those communities you know you get something out of being together with
18:08 - other believers so it’s something I’m really looking forward to I hope I can find communities that you know share enough beliefs with me
18:14 - that I’ll be able to speak my mind freely and find people who are similarly excited about the things that I am but
18:21 - just that social component of it is something that I’m also looking forward to and this is one of the reasons why I’d really like to get through phase two
18:27 - as soon as possible so get through these tasks that we’ve talked about up here these three things even though I think
18:33 - this is going to be some of the worst of it this is going to be kind of busy work unpleasant sort of things you know
18:39 - there’s not a lot here that I really want to do terribly but I’m going to try to grip my teeth
18:44 - and get down to it and finish all of this because I really want to get to the other side
18:50 - so that I can start getting more involved again with local believers all right finally there’s phase three stuff so that’s kind of organizing all
18:56 - the already existing Bible basic 6A content setting up the fully optimized video creation workflow and then
19:02 - catching up in some other areas so that I can more fully focus on Ministry stuff without feeling like I’m falling behind
19:08 - everywhere else so that’s basically what these tasks are the things that we just said
19:13 - so the Bible basic 6A content there’s even more videos in that series than the sr4 series but the thing that makes this
19:19 - even trickier is that the videos in the bb6a content series don’t really follow
19:25 - a strictest structure so that is they don’t completely follow a set of slides as much as the videos that I made myself
19:31 - do because there’s more discussion involved in the Bible study group that we had and therefore they’re going to be
19:36 - much more painful and time consuming to timestamp and organize effectively just because they don’t nearly so
19:42 - rigidly follow a format of an outline which is what makes it really easy to time stamp stuff so I know this is going
19:48 - to be even more unpleasant on that account and then there’s just like a bunch of stuff that I need to do to kind of get
19:54 - the video workflow set back up how I want it to be so to kind of be able to quickly dictate the full scripts I have
20:01 - to set up the voice recognition software completely and then I need to experiment with the teleprompter make sure I can
20:08 - generate good quality video content with that and then figure out how I want to do demonstrations on the Whiteboard or
20:14 - drawing on my tablet and then so I have to get all of these things set up so that the workflow will kind of be
20:19 - configured how I want it to be in the long term and then I also need to make some changes I’m not going to go through this too much but some changes to the
20:26 - preprocessor application to further improve the slides the videos are based on so for example not using the embedded
20:32 - Bible app Windows uh in the slides just because they take up a lot of space but just using the plain text instead
20:38 - supporting like nested headers so like H4 versus H3 in the outlines so right
20:44 - now the outlines are all kind of like one level but would like to support nesting there’s no reason why I can’t I just haven’t implemented it yet so some
20:50 - things there to basically get all of these slide this generation and the video content generation workflow
20:57 - kind of exactly how I want it in the long term and then I also have a bunch of stuff
21:02 - that I need to catch up on on the other YouTube channels that I run so I have almost a Year’s worth of kind of daily
21:08 - Vlogs that I’ve recorded going over all of the the tasks that I do every day to kind of motivate myself to be organized
21:15 - and formal about things and you know kind of keep that spiritual fire lit beneath me for all of the
21:21 - duties and the obligations that I’m trying to to Bear up under and then I also just have a bunch of uh videos that
21:27 - I’d like to make about topics that I’ve researched and kind of written up my thoughts on and so those
21:33 - will go on my personal YouTube channel but I have like 25 or 30 of those videos that I’ve just been putting on the back
21:39 - burner because I wanted to prioritize Ministry stuff first but I don’t want to let these things go forever because I
21:45 - would like to kind of dig myself out of the hole a bit so that moving forward I can much more easily just kind of make
21:50 - these whenever my fancy kind of gets taken by something rather
21:56 - than having you know like this big huge backlog of things that I need to catch up on so there’s kind of not as much exciting
22:02 - that I can do after I complete phase three but the big gist is that I’ll just be
22:07 - able to focus much closer to 100 of my attention on uh the production of new content rather than having like other
22:13 - matters steal away my attention so rather than being distracted by all these you know 50 other things I have to do I’m hoping to really be able to crank
22:20 - up the production Pace uh once I’m not pulled so many directions all at once so once I can focus more 100 of my
22:27 - attention on Ministry stuff and producing new content I’m really hoping that I’ll be able to
22:33 - kind of flip that switch and go into production mode quite a bit more than I have been at present
22:38 - all right and so phase three is the last phase of my plan here after phase three I’ll be done with everything on my list
22:44 - and making all new video content with the workflow I’ve thought out and wish to use in the long term and so after
22:50 - this I hope at least things will mostly just be a matter of which content I make first so if I have a bunch of things
22:56 - that I want to record videos about I’ll just need to decide which thing I do first but I’ll always be making content which again is not something I find
23:02 - nearly as burdensome and tedious as all of this other work that I’m having to do up front here to kind of get things
23:07 - launched the first time and so I’m really hoping that will make it a lot easier for me to motivate myself
23:12 - and stay focused uh because you know it’s just easier if all I’m doing is the content
23:18 - production because it’s actually something I relatively enjoy all right so that was the three-phase plan I came up with after being a little
23:24 - bit gloomy about all of the tasks that are still staring me down here and I actually did finish everything in phase
23:29 - one in this two week cycle here so both of the main categories of tasks in Phase One actually got done so we’ll go over
23:35 - those a little bit more in a sec here so first off I did all the things for the first Focus Bible basic 6A video so
23:42 - that I could get the study web page up on the website and so that means that now the page is there I’ll add more
23:48 - lessons to it as we go in the future here well kind of in the process of getting this first Bible basic 6A video
23:55 - organized and formatted I did a bunch of things so first I kind of built content for it
24:00 - I copy pasted the stuff while fake this turned it into markdown formatted some of the quotes and stuff with special
24:05 - content sections and all the things like that to build slides because for this video specifically I’d actually just
24:11 - been teaching straight off the study and I didn’t have the slides for it so I built slides for it here
24:16 - I added timestamps for the study and again this was trickier and more time consuming since this one wasn’t actually
24:21 - directly based off of slides I subject tagged all the sections this actually took a good bit because you
24:27 - know there are a fair number of sections in the study and I wanted to make good subject tags for everything
24:32 - then I built out the video description and pushed everything Live on YouTube and the site so this is kind of publishing it all making it go live on
24:39 - the internet and so you know there were some other things that went into this too but this was kind of the basic gist so getting all the things done for the
24:45 - first bb6a video so that that web page on the website is now kind of set up and ready for when I go ahead and start
24:52 - organizing more of the later lesson content I think there’s like 38 more videos after this one that I’ll need to
24:58 - do the same thing for but this was just getting the first one up so that at least the study shows up on the website
25:03 - and then the other task that I did here and this was what took a good long time this cycle here was creating the
25:09 - additional meta related videos on the YouTube channel so there were actually seven separate videos that I made here
25:15 - I made two videos for the Bible basic 6A playlist on the channel going over the structure and what’s different in the
25:22 - structure between the focus playlist and the full playlist for videos so basically the focus playlist only
25:27 - contains videos from later on in the study once I was a bit more organized about things and making
25:32 - slides for the content that we went over and stuff and so those videos tend to be just more focused a bit shorter
25:39 - probably more useful for most people on balance just because we don’t kind of go off in as many rabbit trails and get
25:45 - sidetracked in discussion as much so they’re just a little bit more focused on the study itself
25:50 - whereas the full series has like all 90 videos in the playlist and you know like the first 50 or so where we were
25:57 - just recording the study as we had it you know it might be good if you’re interested in lots of discussion on all
26:02 - the material but some of those videos are more than two hours long which is kind of a it’s a pretty heavy lift right
26:08 - and then I also made videos explaining the structure of uh playlists on the channel That do and do not have
26:15 - discussion videos so these videos I actually made for the sr4 playlist here specifically but I’m probably just going
26:21 - to reuse these same videos across all the playlists that I do make discussion videos for just because the concept will
26:27 - be the same across all of them so I think I’ll be reusing these quite a lot over the history of the channel here but
26:33 - I made those explaining what the differences between playlists that do and don’t have discussion videos are so things that do have discussion videos
26:40 - give more depth but they’re just a little bit longer and less focused than the playlists that have just the lesson
26:46 - videos there because with just the lesson videos you don’t have as much
26:52 - perspective you don’t have as many backgrounds given to kind of help flesh out the content but
26:57 - you do stay very focused and on topic with just the videos from the study itself so that’s kind of the difference
27:02 - there so explaining the difference between those playlists as well then I made content introduction videos
27:08 - for both of the playlists for the Bible basic 6A series as well so both the focused one which I just went over the
27:15 - videos that we had up in the playlist for like the last 30 some odd lessons that we had recorded that were part of
27:21 - the focus series and then for the full one I actually went through the entire outline of the peripathology study on
27:28 - ikthis kind of going uh section by section just giving a brief summary of what the study is about and so that’s so
27:34 - people who come across that video they’re kind of wondering what is contained in the playlist that has these 90 videos on
27:41 - this study well what’s it about well that’s kind of what that video is for and then finally I made a shorter more
27:46 - focused version of the general Ministry introduction video so this one was about 18 minutes long as opposed to the 45
27:52 - minutes of the initial one and so that is to be the new Banner video on the channel
27:57 - now of course prior to making all these recordings I had to draft content and make slides at least for most of them uh
28:02 - you know a couple of them like the content introductions I didn’t really go off slide so much I just did
28:08 - a little bit of organization of an outline and then just did it spur of the moment but most of these have had slides
28:14 - I actually made a new content type called not displayed which kind of as you would assume doesn’t get displayed I
28:19 - actually ignore it in Version Control so none of this will end up on the website but this is just so that I can make
28:25 - these slides uh for me to have them you know the same format as other things I do even if I’m
28:30 - not pushing them up on the website so I kind of had to organize the folders and stuff to make that work properly
28:35 - and of course after recording all the videos I had to do all the post processing for them upload them to YouTube with appropriate thumbnails put
28:41 - them in the appropriate order in the appropriate playlist you get the idea yada yada right all of the organization stuff relating to the videos on YouTube
28:49 - and then I’m gonna ignore this paragraph mostly but I basically actually had a lot of technical problems here because I
28:55 - was actually combining some videos here I did several different takes and then I was kind of sharing a section in the
29:01 - structure videos kind of the section that explains the differences for example between the full Bible basic 6A
29:07 - playlist and the focused one and between the no discussion videos and discussion video playlists I was kind of sharing
29:13 - these main section that describes what the differences are and then adding an intro and an outro for each well when I
29:19 - started trying to concatenate videos I was getting really weird behavior and that’s because the frame rates weren’t matching and so if you’re interested uh
29:26 - you know when you edit videos and stuff usually best to have constant frame rate for your video but the screen recording
29:32 - software I have has variable frame rate so I had to figure out how to convert between the two and uh also the audio
29:37 - channels weren’t working because I recorded one part of a video with a specific byte configuration and a
29:43 - different part of the video with a different mic configuration and it wasn’t letting me just smush them together and so I had to do some conversion there and blah blah blah
29:50 - right so technical stuff I think I figured it all out I understand everything better so I don’t think I’ll get confused again and have to spend as
29:56 - much time researching all this to fix it but uh that did eat up uh you know a good few hours there figuring out how to
30:02 - get all the videos made even though in the past I’ve had no issues uh well now because I was kind of smooshing things
30:07 - together some complexity came up in doing that all right so that was the second uh part
30:13 - of phase one and so that those were both tasks in phase one I got all these videos made I got the bb6a study made so
30:19 - that’s phase one completed now and so I did send an email off to my mentor he’s going to share the ministry on his website so I appreciate that you know
30:26 - gives me some extra exposure but that’s kind of like the initial polishing now that the things that really jumped out
30:32 - at me uh when I was reviewing the initial launch content here kind of a month out seeing if there’s anything I
30:38 - could make better for the initial stuff and I think this is uh the polishing that I wanted to do up front and so I’m
30:43 - happy with how things turned out here and now I’m moving on to phase two stuff so things that we still have left to go
30:49 - over here um this one I’m gonna go over real quick I did some kind of miscellaneous styling
30:54 - bug fixes and improvements I made a CSS tweak to the slides template to make the Highlight
30:59 - background color yellow rather than blue so um you can actually see I’ve been using that in this presentation uh to
31:05 - kind of highlight what text I’m going over at any given point in time I think it looks a lot better I fixed some alignment in the icons that
31:12 - are part of the subject index links and the subject index so just made things more centered on the line it was kind of
31:17 - just didn’t look as good because they were a little bit off center and then I kind of resolved a positioning issue with the table of
31:23 - contents it wasn’t uh kind of properly stuck to the top of the web page but there was a gap of like 10 pixels or
31:29 - something and it looked kind of weird and so I just figured out how to make it stick to the top as well as the bottom
31:34 - so that it is the full height of the screen now close to the end here I also got the
31:40 - new computer this week so the desktop computer that I ordered from kind of a custom builder they put
31:46 - all of the CPU and the RAM and everything in and I just had to boot it up and install Windows on it um well
31:52 - that desktop finally came here and so I spent a good bit of time compiling a big list of applications I used to make sure
31:58 - I installed everything I wanted to on the new computer I’m shifting into using a package manager called chocolatey for
32:03 - anyone who’s interested kind of for as much as possible and this should help maintainability in the future because in the future I can just kind of export a
32:09 - script and then import all of the uh the applications and it will automatically download them for me rather than me
32:16 - having to go download things one by one that’s pretty cool pretty efficient uh happy with how that turned out but it took me a while to research all that
32:23 - so this is like the first time I’ve set up a new computer in like six years or something since I got my tablet middle
32:28 - of college so it’s been a long time now of course this computer is way more powerful than that one is too um but I mean still running Windows so
32:34 - most of the same applications I use I’m going to be using on both and so this entire process I mean I’ve gotten stuck on a few things so there’s
32:41 - some some quirks the differences between Windows 10 and windows 11 that have thrown me a little um you know actually mostly for the
32:47 - worst which is kind of frustrating um there’s some stuff that I haven’t been able to figure out or at least I had to do a bunch of researching to figure out
32:52 - how to do which was kind of annoying um but uh you know I have a few things to do still here so some setup will still
32:58 - carry into the next cycle here but I mostly got things set up and in fact I am making this video as we speak on the
33:04 - new computer so things are mostly working got all the software processing for video editing and stuff and for uh
33:10 - generating stuff with markdown I got python installed so I can run the preprocessor and all of that set up on the new computer now it’s a lot lot more
33:17 - powerful to the tuna it’s probably more than four times it’s probably like six times as much CPU throughput and eight
33:24 - times the ram so I have 64 gigs of RAM on this computer um just I was running into some memory problems and when I’m uh running
33:31 - virtualization and probably the voice recognition as well eventually and everything all at the same time I want
33:36 - to make sure that I don’t get memory locked because as it does slow things down a lot so a very very powerful
33:41 - computer here I’m hoping it will help speed up all the content Generation Um just because you know there’s a lot
33:47 - that goes into some of this and so having a powerful computer should help a lot and I’m pretty psyched about it you know I’m happy with how it turned out
33:52 - for the most part but this was something else that ate up a good bit of my time uh this two-week cycle here
33:58 - all right so finally I’m going to talk about the upcoming work I have kind of as just mentioned I finished all
34:04 - the phase one stuff already we’ve talked about that sufficiently not going to go over that too much more here but that’s good because it means that it’s at least
34:10 - one step out of the three-phase plan that I’ve knocked out here so my main focus in the next coming days
34:16 - here will be the task for phase two now I actually did order this more specifically um so the three tasks there were coding
34:23 - the support for the documentation Pages documenting uh what how the sorry not documentation Pages for the discussion
34:29 - pages documenting the discussion pages and then organizing all of the already existing
34:35 - content for sr4 and I’m actually going to do things in the order I just said there rather than doing like the sr4 stuff first
34:40 - um that’s because if I do the review of the sr4 content I’ve made at the very
34:46 - end of phase two right before I start back up content Creation in that series uh things will be maximally fresh in my
34:52 - head and I can resume much more seamlessly than if I kind of like do it and then spend two or three weeks
34:58 - fiddling around with the coding stuff and then have to come back to it and try to remember where I am so I’m going to
35:03 - kind of do the review of the sr4 material right before I start up production there again that way it’ll be
35:10 - way more seamless for me to kind of pick up and keep going where I left off because I left off probably more than a
35:15 - year ago now and so I just want to make sure I know where I am in the study what the next step I want to talk about is and organize all that effectively so
35:21 - that there’s for people who come back and watch us in the future there won’t be like this big glaring gap between like week or less than 10 and the 11th
35:28 - lesson which is the one I’ll pick up with uh because I hadn’t seen things in a while but I’m going to try to make it as seamless as possible
35:34 - so that’s the plan for the work that I’m going to be doing in the future here all right well this one got a bit long
35:39 - here too but I hope this has been a useful explanation of all the things that I’ve gotten done here through
35:44 - September 25th then I’ll pick up in next couple weeks hopefully having made more
35:50 - progress on the coding side of things here with discussion Pages as well as organizing some of that sr4 content so
35:56 - that I can actually start generating new ministry content again again that’s something that I’m really hoping that I
36:02 - can get done partially so that I can go get involved with local church stuff but also so that I can balance the creation
36:07 - of new content which is again something I have a much easier time kind of getting myself to do
36:13 - with all of the busy work uh tedious tasks that I still have to do here in the initial setup phase and so
36:20 - um with that I will talk to everyone again next time