Not many of my readers may no know this, but my first online passion wasn’t obsessing about now Congresswoman Jean Schmidt, but Church hymns. For over 15 years I’ve had this dream of creating a hymn database that was able to dynamically generate sheet music. This came about back in my days as a choir director and dealing with all the frustration of finding good simple music each day.

So I had this great idea, but my problem was that I hadn’t touched a computer in six years. After purchasing a computer and dozens of public domain hymnals I went about trying to teach myself how to turn printed sheet music into a flexible thing on a computer. (Something I’m still learning.) After several years I decided to put up a demo website of what a hymn database might be able to do. Since I didn’t want to do the whole Church year, I picked Christmas as the focus, since that was the most popular period for Church music.

Within weeks of my Online Christmas Songbook going online it got recommended in Yahoo! magazine. That one link on their site directed hundreds of thousands of people from around the world to my site. So many that my ISP sent me a substantial bill for excess bandwidth. The site was recommended by newspapers all over the country, including the New York Times.

While the idea seemed to be a success, I still had no idea how to progress further, or how to make it so that I could actually make enough money doing it to actually create a working hymn database. Not sure where next to turn I used the site to promote working as a web developer. That got me a job at a major web portal. That job allowed me to meet my wife. Meeting my wife brought me to prosperity in Ohio. Being in Ohio lead me to this site.

As I worked fanatically on the project as I like to call it, I completely ignored politics. My rational was that bringing people together to sing church hymns was a much more fruitful endeavor than worrying about global warming, or nuclear weapons, or the Bush clan. I’m still not convinced that that isn’t true.

Anyway, the site shows its considerable age. At the time I avoided PDFs because when I tried them hundreds of people would send me emails complaining about how they didn’t understand how to install Adobe Acrobat. Now Acrobat is commonplace. Someday I hope to get to working on it. Many of the questions that I had have been answered by the web revolution itself: Lilypond for opensource music calligraphy, Java for a superior online sound engine, SVG for easy online graphic rendering. All it takes is the time to bring this learning together into something that everyone can use. Even though it is a task unfinished, every day I profit from it more than the value of life itself.

It has been a tremendous pleasure meeting so many wonderful people because of this site. Despite all our political differences each encounter gives my hope for a better tomorrow. And with that, my gentle readers, I wish you all the merriest of Christmases.