Wow.  Things got really busy and it’s been a couple of weeks since my last blog post.  I was helping with VBS last week, out of town for the weekend, then had a pretty crazy week this week.  It’s been great finally having a nice, slow Saturday to relax.  Hopefully I’ll have more time to sit down and write next week - got lots of cool things going on:

• Continuing to work on better support and management for the growing number of Macs on our network.  Open directory is up and running and integrated with Active Directory!  I’m in the process of upgrading all of our Macs to Leopard and migrating them to the Open Directory system.
• Doing some research and testing to determine whether it’s feasible to use iSCSI as the backend storage for a Final Cut Server implementation - things are looking pretty good so far, even for HD video.
• Still checking out different firewall technologies to see what makes the best sense for our environment.
• Working on building an intranet site in Sharepoint.  Still not convinced Sharepoint is the best solution, but seems to be working OK so far.
• Helping our media team install projectors and sound systems in several classrooms.
• Trying to find time to get some local church IT guys together for a WiFi discussion.
• Trying to find a good time for a vacation.  I think I’m about due to take a little break.

Stay tuned for more updates!

White I was out yesterday, I stopped by the outlet mall for a little while. I didn’t buy anything due to my commitment to the House Pay-Off Spectacular, but I went in a lot of stores and looked around.

Everyone has a “Things That Irk Me” list - things that just irritate you to no end. Well, this is definitely on mine:

In nearly every store I walked into, someone was near the door and greeted me with “Welcome to <store name>, how are you doing today.” I ALWAYS respond, usually with something like “I’m doing great, how are you.” They ALMOST NEVER answer back. I stopped by Sam’s Club today to have my tires balanced. There was a 2 hour wait, so I walked around to several other nearby stores. Same thing today.

Is it asking too much to expect a response back? Have all of these businesses just programmed “Zombies” to repetitively say the same thing and never provide any intelligent response? Is there that little interest in what they are doing? What if the church was the same way? (Unfortunately, some churches are, but I won’t go there).

Anyone else experience the same thing? Does it bother anyone else?

How do we hear the voice of one who is invisible and very rarely uses sound waves to communicate with us? Throughout the Bible, it is made apparent that is is God’s desire to dwell among the people. Adam and Eve heard the voice of God in Genesis 3:8. In John 10:16, Jesus says his sheep hear his voice. Isaiah 30:21 says wherever we go, there will be a voice telling us which way to turn. I could go on and on.

But how do I hear gods voice? In our increasingly “noisy” world, distractions abound. As I sit here and type this, my email and IM clients “Ding” every few minutes, the fan in my laptop constantly slows down and speeds up, another computer is humming over in the corner, the ice maker dumps a batch of ice, cars are passing down the road outside, and every few minutes, I hear the AC unit cycle on and off. And, if that’s bad, then just wait until I set foot in the office on Monday. In our world today, it’s just way too easy get distracted, drift off into another world, and totally tune out God.

So what’s the solution? It depends. There’s no universal answer. For me, I’ve found that getting our for a few hours, or sometimes a weekend, and enjoying nature does wonders. I love to go back in the woods away from all the noise of the cars passing by, where cell phones don’t work - distant from all of the technical toys so prevalent in our “Wired” world - sit down on a rock next to the river, and spend some quality time with God. I’ve had a lot on my mind lately. Lots of unanswered questions and confusion as I walk with the Lord.

It’s absolutely amazing what getting away for just a few hours can do. I spent most of the day yesterday hiking and relaxing away from all of the distractions that are all around me much of the time. Here’s a couple of pictures of my little “outing” with God:

Our recreation department requested that we set them up a few kiosks so that they can handle registering people for events. The idea is to eliminate the paper and extra time involved with on site registrations and have 100% online registration. The requirements are:

• Very portable - easy to roll around to various parts of the building. Our current Children’s checkin kiosks would probably be a be cumbersome for this.
• Wireless - there might not be a network drop everywhere we need to do registration.
• Ability to for user to use it standing up.
• Secure - might not always been 100% supervised, so we need to keep people from doing bad things to the computer, surfing websites other than ours, etc.
• Ability to print confirmation pages to a network printer.

Below is I ended up putting together. Just got the “prototype” assembled last night. I still need to clean up the cabling a bit, but I think it’s going to work.

I’m running Provisio’s SiteKiosk software, which is really cool. It basically locks the user into a full screen browser with limited buttons, no address bar, and access only to specific URL’s. Once the machine is idle for 5 minutes, it will automatically revert back to the home page. A speciall keyboard driver filters out all of the windows special key and combinations. For example, you can’t use the windows key, ctrl-alt-del, alt-tab, and various other combinations. All in all, it’s a really cool setup.

Last week, I got together with a few people from Simple Machines (Open Source project I help manage).  We met up several times to discuss the future of the project, and did a few fun things as well.  On top of that, I had my ESX 3.5 upgrade, the Information Lifecycle meeting with Veristor and other Church IT guys, the SonicWall roadshow, and several other meetings.  Needless to say, I’m behind on my blogging.  I’ll be posting a lot of updates on these various meetings and projects over the next couple of days!

I was trying to log into Wells Fargo to check the progress on my House Pay-Off Spectacular and was greeted with this:

Now seriously, what kind of customer service is that?  Who still uses Netscape?  To make matters worse, all of their download links just redirect you back to the same page.

Looks like I have yet another reason to put my Pay-Off Spectacular into high gear so I can fire Wells Fargo.

I just found this on the net and thought it was an interesting concept.  I don’t drink coffee, but know a lot of people who live on it, so I can definitely see the need

After a crazy week with almost no free time, I finally got to sit down and continue reading Louie Giglio’s book “i am not but i know I AM.”  Here are a few thoughts that stood out to me:

• Life is not about us trying to be bigger, but about embracing our smallness
• Running our world, no matter how hard we try, is way too much for us. We might succeed in making a name for ourselves here on Earth, but it will fade to nothing when our story comes to an end.  We must remember that God is in control.
• He must become greater, and I must become less (John 3:30).
• Sabbath rest (Exodus 8:9-11) is essential.
• We should wake up each day looking for the story of God.  What is he up to today?
• If we’re not careful, on the way to attempting something great for his name, we can forget that He is in control.

I had a couple of gift cards I got with credit card reward points I need to use, and was running out of places to put stuff in the garage. So, I decided to use the gift cards to get a new toolbox. Did the “order online, pickup in store thing”, which worked amazingly well - first time I’ve tried that.

I think I might have went a little overboard - didn’t realize how big (and heavy) this thing was until I got it home. Thankfully, Matt came over and helped me unload it. Now I just need to get more tools. I think it’s going to be mostly empty even once I cleanup the garage.

I was just in the Children’s Ministry office installing a thin client and they had a cool sign on the wall. “Stressed spelled backwards is DESSERTS.” Now why didn’t I think of that? That is awesome!