Wow, it’s been over 2 months since my last post. I guess you can say that things got a little busy with packing up and moving a few hundred miles. I think I’m finally settled at least enough that things are mostly normal.

The last few months have been nothing short of awesome! Have there been bumps along the way? Sure. There always are, but the awesomeness has been overwhelming. I want to thank each and every person who has prayed for me, encouraged me, helped physically move stuff and listened to me gripe and complain when things don’t go well (yes, I do my share of that even though I don’t like to admit it).

Here’s a quick recap of the last few months:

• I made a visit to Seacoast back in late August, then again in October for CITRT. After lots and lots of prayer and changing my mind a few times, I felt the Lord leading me to take a leap of faith and move to SC to join the team at Seacoast. Yes, I’ll admit - it was scary.
• I returned to the Charleston area to look for houses. Amazingly, I found the perfect house the first day!

• I had to say goodbye to all my awesome friends at JFBC. That was hard. To make it harder, they took me to lunch, got me a cool card, and had a “Going Away Party” for me.

• I packed up to move. This was a LOT of work, but thanks to some great help, got it mostly done in one day.

• Thanks to my Seacoast friends, we got everything unloaded in under 2 hours! 7 weeks later, I’m still trying to figure out what to do with all of it.

• Now I’m here, mostly settled in, and get to serve at an absolutely incredible church! I’m excited about what the coming months and years will bring!

It was way back in 1998, almost ten years ago to this day, but I remember it almost as if it were yesterday. Sitting in a gym at First Baptist Church of Jonesboro without about 500 other teenagers I, for the first time in my life, heard the gospel of Jesus Christ shared with me a way that was crystal clear. I prayed right then and there to ask him to come into my heart and forgive me of my sins. Let’s just say the ten years that followed have been nothing short of AMAZING!

The following week I made my profession of faith public in baptism. I immediately dove in head first and became very active in the church’s media ministry where I served for the next six years, primarily in the areas of audio and lighting and, later, video. Over the next few years was also able to develop and awesome relationship with the media team at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church where I had the opportunity to come in for verious special events as Lighting Director.

In the summer of 2000, just after graduating high school, I began a part time job with an Atlanta area land developer as a web designer. Ths roll quickly transitioned into an IT Director roll where I had the opportunity to design, build and maintain the computer network linking all of the company’s offices and country clubs.

Fast-forward to February of 2006: due to economic factors as well as some changes in the structure of the company, my position was eliminated and outsourced. Around the same time, discussions began with Johnson Ferry about a roll they were looking to fill on their media team. After a few weeks of filling the roll on a temporary basis, lots and lots of prayer and one wrong decision that clearly wasn’t God’s will, God made it clear to me that he had called me to serve him full time.

In May of 2006, I joined the media team at Johnson Ferry. In December of that same year, I had the opportunity to transition to the IT department where I am serving today as Network Administrator. It certainly hasn’t all been smooth sailing - there have been many bumps along the way. But, God has confirmed over and over again that he, without a doubt, has called me to dedicate my life and career to serving him.

This brings us to today. God works in amazing ways, and the bits and pieces don’t always seem to fit together along the way. In the end, though, it is always made clear that his plans are bigger than ours. Now is no exception.

So what’s happening you say?

I am absolutely pumped to announce that in a few weeks I will be making a move to the Charleston, SC area to join the team at Seacoast Church. At Seacoast, I will be filling the roll of “IT and Production Specialist” where I will be involved in planning, design, implementation and maintenance in the both the IT and audio-visual areas.

I’m experiencing every emotion all at once as I type this. It’s incredibly exciting, still a little scary and at the same time very sad to leave all the awesome people I work with at Johnson Ferry. I want to thank everyone who has been praying for me over the last few weeks. It’s going to be awesome!

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.