Colin Harman

If you would have told me back when I was growing up and foreseeing my future in all it’s utopian potential that I would be living in a semi-small town in Central Virginia call Lynchburg, I would have had to laugh in your seemingly lying, time-traveling, future-knowing face. Alas, here I am and have been for going on seven years now (that’s one year in dog years).

I don’t think I would have ever chosen this place, but the people I have met and come to love, the experiences and sights, and the space to explore the person God has created me to be has been invaluable. I got my education here and assumed I’d be leaving post-haste upon graduation, and yet God had other plans and I’ve been working full-time at Blue Ridge Community Church for almost 3 years. It’s been a wild ride, living in many different places with a plethora of roommates, road trips to here or there, a handful of jobs, but somehow in all of it there is purpose. There is a plan for me.

I have spent time on the internet researching other areas like New York City, Austin, Oklahoma City, Dallas, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and so on. In doing so I’ve tried to peer into what God may have ahead for me, trying to look around the proverbial corner. I at time covet the creative communities like NYC and Austin. I read on twitter about the meetups with fellow creatives, cowork spaces, big design firms doing incredible work, the never ending lists of arts shows and galleries to explore, and yet here I am in Lynchburg, Virginia all the way from California. Here I am.

Am I missing out? Am I just treading water when I could be climbing to the diving board? Did I settle? Did I miss my true calling? Am I wasting my life and slowly becoming irrelevant in a non-stimulating town? Questions like this could flood my mind, if I didn’t have this one thing: peace from God. Call it what you want, but I know that for right now I am here for some purpose, and whether or not I know what that is or not doesn’t matter, because here I am. And for what it’s worth, I want to make the most of it while I’m here. This doesn’t mean I’m stuck, it just reminds me that though the grass may seem greener on the other side, there’s more I can do to water, nurture, prune, and better the grass I have between my toes right here where I am.

I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t where I am now, but I hope I can look back on “here” someday and say I am not the person I was then. I want to always be growing, not just getting better at doing the same thing over and over again, but growing. Moving ahead, failing at times, taking risks, putting it all on the line, but being able to look back and say I did my best for a purpose bigger than just me.

I could make the excuses that I’m not stimulated here or that I am not going to reach the potential of being the designer and creative that I hope to be in a place like this, because I don’t have the right people to push me, or I am not always surrounded by creative people that ‘get’ me. That’s crap. All that is just excuses. Anything worth doing takes effort, and nothing is entitled to me. I have to chase down the dream and have passion. I can’t wait, so I won’t. Starting now.

I will make the most of everyday, create, and press forward. I will fight through resistance that will always do everything in it’s power to restrain us all from moving forward in life. Let’s do this.

There are just some things you simply cannot plan for. For example, how do you plan for something that works on a small scale, but is untestable until moment zero for actual reality. A real life demonstration of these inevitable folly reared its ugly head Sunday morning January 4th, 2008. The trouble I ran into was with the seemingly excellent and functional online service known as PollEverwhere.com.

I introduced the using of this service in a “smaller testing market” in the morning High School service at Blue Ridge Community Church. Realizing the potential dangers of using a system like this right off the bat in a huge environment could be a risk difficult to recover from, I felt this was a safe place to get my proverbial feet wet.

For those of you not familiar with Poll Everywhere’s services and capabilities, it is designed with a moron-proof web interface that allows you to build interactive live audience polls using SMS (text messaging) and a short-code paired with a response. Using text messaging the graph/poll on screen is updated live almost instantaneously. The graphs are customizable and can be fitted to your needs. The downside is because they are live updated, they are only functional in Powerpoint on PC and not on mac (for some reason powerpoint for mac blocks the ability for a .swf object to access an outside source for information (lame).

So the concept was simple:

1. Questions on the screen
2. People Text in their answers to the short-code provided
3. Graph updates and works perfectly
4. Much rejoicing and praise for all

However, unanticipated glitch was found in between number 2 & 3 of the above steps. The whole thing choked up. The first 30 or so votes came through no problem, but after that, one at a time squeaked through maybe every 15 seconds or so. My head is spinning trying to figure out where the bottle neck was occurring. As I was voting from my iPhone, I could watch my vote go through immediately, what was the problem?

Well during the second service I figured out what the actual problem was. It turns out that the service polleverywhere.com was not at fault, nor was the internet connectivity of our church, but it was the local SMS service in that area, regardless of who your cell phone carrier is.

I learned that day that every single cell company in the world is enslaved to the demands of a mere handful of companies that hold a seeming monopoly on the text messaging world. These few companies are what’s called SMS Gateway Providers, and they interconnect with every cell carrier to handle text messaging services. These companies have what are called Short Message Service Centers (SMS-C) scattered about to handle the text messages as they come in. Turns out, that in lower density ares of the country (like Blue Ridge’s location), they don’t have the same coverage as they would have in say downtown NYC or San Francisco. So when we sent them a surge of over 500 text messages in under 10 seconds, they were not quite fit to handle it in our given location, at all.

So needless to say, testing it in the high school room was a success with their limited number of users, however using it in the big room where the numbers increase exponentially was a complete and unexpected disaster.

Like I said, things you can only discover in the moment. Has anyone else ever run into any situations like this before where your lesson could only be learned in that very moment? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

So there comes a time in every (static) graphic designers life when he/she realizes that it’s time to move to something unknown and new. For me there were a plethora of things on the table. Street luge, giraffe hunting, baseball card collecting, hot dog eating contests, etc. However when I realized all of those would be complete wastes of time, I decided it was time for this boy to move into motion graphics.

I’ve had After Effects CS3 sitting in my applications folder and have never had a clue what to do with it once it was opened, thus inducing its immediately closing.

All that to say, this was my first dabble into motion graphics, and I have to say it was an adventure, yet I loved every moment of the learning process and the discovery that I was legitimately only scratching the surface of what this software was capable of. Though this was a bit of a daunting task to take on as a first project, 20+ hours of work later, here’s my result.
It’s narrated by Gary Rogers and it moves to the tunes of one of my favorite ambient bands Hammock.

Enjoy.

.ch