I've moved

I have abandoned Blogger and can now be found at my new Wordpress blog.

I Feel . . .

This site is amazing. It's capturing people's feelings from blogs and displaying them in amazing ways. Everytime someone writes "I feel" or "I'm feeling" etc. it sees that and adds it to the site.

New website progress

Ever since DREAM3 announced they will no longer exist, I have been in the process of rebuilding our website from scratch with Elexio. Our current website will continue to exist as it is, but we have halted any further development in order to build our new site.

The prospect of building an entirely new site from scratch is incredibly daunting, especially since the website is just one of my responsibilities. As massive of a project as it is, I'm really excited about it because I know this new site will be great. We've designed it to be much more user friendly and it's got a fresh new look. It's still in development, but you can follow the site's progress by following this temp link.

I think Elexio, along with Intellisite, will allow us to have an excellent site without requiring a full-time web person. My role will be to oversee the sites and maintain the big stuff. However, I will rely heavily on other departments and volunteers to maintain their area's pages.

Intellisite, like DREAM3, is a WYSIWYG content management system that allows us to create and maintain the content of the site. In other words, if you know how to use MS Word, you can probably volunteer on the web team.

Unlike DREAM3, though, we get a very professional looking site - because it's designed by a professional. Not having a web person on staff, this is a huge plus and I think you'll agree the new design is coming along very well (although slowly - see below).

So far, Elexio has proven to be miles ahead of DREAM3 in several ways:

• Intellisite's content editor really works. D3 was incredibly frustrating for many reasons. What you saw was usually not what you got. It did some stuff well, but overall it was clumsy and cumbersome. Don't get me wrong - the Intellisite editor has its share of frustrations, but if you worked in D3 you will want to kiss your monitor after working in Intellisite.
• Intellisite is incredibly user friendly. The file manager is similar to Windows Explorer, and supports drag-and-drop (although I often cannot make things drop - I think it's a bug).
• The form creator is excellent
• I can set user permissions on a per page basis. If I don't grant you publisher rights to a specific area, you cannot change or create a page and post it live to the site w/o first having your changes approved by a publisher. With D3, it was all or nothing.
• I can see who changed what page when. Also, I can see past versions of pages and revert back to a previous version at any time.
• I have access to incredibly detailed site stats, i.e. how many hits & visitors, how long do visitors stay, referrers, browser information, search engine stats, etc.

Right now I'm in the process of collecting information from all the departments. I'm also waiting on the design of the main site to be completed so we can move on to our 3 youth sites and the Fairfield site.

To be honest, I'm a little frustrated because this design process has been really slow. It's been almost 2 1/2 months since our initial design meeting and I have yet to be able to revise draft number one. I know this is a really busy time at Elexio, and my designer was recently married and on his honeymoon. On top of that they are moving their offices to a new location. So, I'm being patient, but I'm beginning to get frustrated. If it's taken this long for one site, how long will 4 more take? I've emailed and called several times with no response. I signed up with Elexio long before DREAM3 officially chose them to take over their customer base. I hoped that would keep me from being just 1 of hundreds, but maybe not. I hope this is not an indication of things to come.

I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt, and I'm excited to move forward with everything.

Power Management

About a year and a half ago I installed an APC Smart-UPS 3000 RM XL to replace a much smaller and very old UPS. This thing is a beast, and it's done a great job of protecting the currently 5 servers, tape autoloader and some networking hardware (all that at only 39% load). CLC is notorious for bad power, and we've recently had as many as 4 outages in 3 weeks. I feel very lucky that nothing major has happened to any of our equipment.

My biggest concern lately is that if our power is out for longer than 15-20 minutes, the APC UPS dies and all that connected equipment shuts down hard (ouch!). I've been looking for a solution that, in the event of an extended outage, would:

• page my cell phone to alert me of the problem
• gracefully shut down all the servers before the battery dies, and
• reboot all servers when the power is restored

It's kind of funny because I talked to several high-end IT consulting types and they didn't have a clue how to do all that. After some research, I settled on PowerChute Business Edition (PCBE). As it turns out, a copy came with the UPS and it's been sitting in a filing cabinet for a year and a half - doh!

I've really wanted to solve this for a while now, but trying to find the time . . .
Well, four outages in three weeks is enough to drive something up the priority scale. Today I dove in head first and here's what I learned:

PowerChute Business Edition comes in 2 flavors: Basic and Deluxe.
I have Basic and that's fine. You can see the major differences here.

There's 3 elements to PCBE: the PowerChute Agent, the Server, and the Console.

• The Agent provides UPS status monitoring and, in the event of an extended power outage, system
  shutdown capabilities for UPS-protected computers. This software must be installed on each computer that is directly attached (via a serial cable) to one of the UPS systems.
• The Server is used to configure and monitor the PCBE Agents. The PowerChute Server gathers information from the Agents and provides centralized event tracking, event notification and a single point of contact for the PowerChute Console. This software must be installed on a networked computer, and preferably one with an Agent installed as well.
• The Console connects to the PowerChute Business Edition Server to provide the user interface for
  managing and configuring UPS-protected systems. Install the Console on any workstation, desktop, or laptop (running a supported operating system). I've got it installed on my laptop.

The installation was really straight forward. The only issues were because of my ignorance. I assumed I needed one server directly connected to the UPS via a serial cable and it would be responsible for alerting the other servers to shut down in an outage. Wrong!

Shutting down multiple servers from a single Smart-UPS requires some additional hardware.
Oh well - I'm headed in the right direction. For a couple hundred more bucks I can complete the setup and gracefully shut down all the servers when we lose power. For now I can control one server, as well as monitor the health of the UPS.

Most importantly, though, I now have a notification system in place when we lose power. After some research and testing, I was able to configure PCBE to email my cell phone when there's a problem. That's miles ahead of the "I hope our Maintenance guy remembers to call me" solution I was using before.

I think I'm on the right track. What's everybody else doing?

Google Notebook

How many times have you read something online that you wanted to remember, but bookmarking it doesn't cut it? I've been using Google Notebook for a few weeks now, and I really like it. After you install the tiny app, you can add pages & content to your notebook either by selecting and right-clicking, or clicking the notebook icon added to your browser. Then you can organize your content under headings and/or separate notebooks. And, of course the notebook is accessible from your Google account so you can access it from anywhere. You can also make your notebook public, so others can search and view your notes.
This is great for me because I do so much reading and research all over the net. Now I can have a central repository of the really cool stuff I run across.

Dell PowerEdge Updates

Dell is now announcing their latest PowerEdge Server updates. They include Xeon 5000 series dual-core processors, PCI-Express I/O, Serial-Attached-SCSI (SAS) Hard Drives, and TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) NICs.

I was looking at a 2850 for our file & print services next year, so I'll definitely be taking a look at the 2950.

We had company

You know when you were a kid and your parents were having company over, everyone spent hours making the house clean and shiny and you had to be on your best behavior? That's the way it felt at CLC over the last couple days. In fact, if I had seen the secret service I'd have sworn the president was visiting.

Well, I didn't see the men in black, but he did have an entourage. Bill Hybels of Willowcreek Community Church flew in to CLC for a brief gathering with local pastors. CLC is a host site for the 2006 Leadership Summit, which will feature Hybels, Andy Stanley, Bono (yes, the Bono) and others.

Hybels visit was to promote the summit and encourage other churches to attend. Of course I wasn't privy to be in the little gathering, but I heard it was pretty good.

T-Mobile rebate rip off

I received my notification in the mail today about my $50 mail in rebate from my T-Mobile phone. I was expecting a $50 check, but instead I just got a letter saying they couldn't process my request because I didn't include the original UPC from the phone box. Of course that's crap and I'm 100% sure I submitted everything correctly.

Google "T-mobile rebate ripoff" and you'll find plenty of others with the same experience. They know I have no way of proving anything, so they've got the upper hand and they're using it. I called their rebate "customer service" number, and the operator said that unless I have a copy of the UPC, he couldn't do a thing. I should have known better, but of course I didn't make a copy of that. I have the original box with a big hole in it, but that's it.

I submitted a complaint on ripoffreport.com, but I'm not sure it will do any good. What else can I do?

It could only mean one thing . . .

Around this time every year at CLC, it's not uncommon for staff to disappear for days at a time to work off site. Others barricade themselves in their office and post signs warning others to enter at their own risk. Still others deny there's anything wrong and secretly hope it will go away. And of course, some blog.

That's right - it's budget time at Christian Life Center!

I personally chose to shut the office door, put on the headphones and crank the iPod. And if that doesn't work, I head out to Panera.

After 2 solid days of internet research, crunching numbers, following up on quotes, and lots of coffee and bagels, my budget is done.

Almost.

A little more rationale and I'll be ready to turn in everything by the Monday 9am deadline.

It's always a bit of a challenge for me because I have to project everything the whole church may need for an entire year. This includes everything related to computers, software, servers, printers, internet service, email, networking, the website, the phone system, campus security, and a lot of other things.

In the IT world, this is quite a challenge because everything's constantly changing and upgrading and breaking. I've done well over the past few years, but I always worry about forgetting something really important.

I don't take this lightly at all - it's a huge responsibility. I'm personally responsible for spending tens of thousands of tithe dollars, so I need to be sure I'm planning for the future and making wise decisions. Every line in my budget includes rationale. It's a time consuming process, but a necessary one.

I wonder what the process is like at other churches.