I always felt a bit guilty that my hobbies were so involved and not always connected to my work life. I especially felt at times that my laser obsession in the long wait for production units and time on this forum might be a bit much. I had been practicing the clarinet for two years almost every day and about October of '15 I stopped pretty much altogether. That was after my pilgrimage to Seattle just to get a glimpse of their amazing signage. and brought back a cat.
The story continues with @Rita giving me the call and asking if I would be willing to get a pre-release. You betcha! And then the most amazing opportunity of a few of us getting sponsored for a trip to Bay Area MakerFaire.
I was motivated to set up a YouTube channel and do a crash course in live streaming to share my experience with the Glowforge when there were so few in the wild. I did my best. Wisely, Glowforge quickly recruited many more who got a chance to showcase the new machine in the pre-release stage.
BAMF17 meant that I had to purchase some new tech for the trip. Got a tricked out Surface Book and a wireless hotspot for the trip. Too bad wifi was so congested, but we managed.
I am able to shed my guilt over the money and time I spent on this project because of what’s going on now. We have suspended public services at our Church. I, as so many of you, suddenly find myself having to do my job in ways I hadn’t had to before.
Enter Glowforge U: Because I had the technology, because I learned the workflow for streaming, and because I learned how not to let my ego get in the way of putting things out there, even if they weren’t perfect like @evansd2 joints, or @jae’s amazing leather work, I have been able to pivot a little to streaming ministry. It’s raw and unprofessional, but my flock appreciates it and my boss says said it was more important to get something out once we suspended public services and deal with quality as we go along than not have anything.
We have a long way to go, but my Surface book and hotspot, with a little help from OBS Studio and YouTube streaming, we are getting it done. [OBS is so good. Today I needed to do a slideshow for streaming. I don’t have Office on my laptop and jumping to my desktop was getting confusing and haven’t used LibreOffice’s presentation software. One hour to get this figured out how to do a slide show into OBS without having to mess with video editing something. I just thought, surely OBS should have something. And they did. Just had to turn all the pics from TIFFS to PNGs and away we went.]
Thanks Glowforge and thanks to all my fellow forum members for the amazing journey we have shared and all that you have taught me!
I still have to work on the audio connection. I am loud enough with my nasal whine, but other folks aren’t. I do have a USB input device (10 year old Tascam that I at least was able to find a driver for), but getting the audio output from the sound system in church to my laptop in the middle of church is a challenge. I didn’t have the right connectors. Sweetwater to the rescue. But the hearing assist device feed just doesn’t cut it. I know most churches have the sound and video stuff figured out ages ago, but we are a bit slow to catch up.
So thanks again @Dan and all of you!
Me at work: