The two videos that Tony Dye posted about the Juggling FMer are quite possibly my two favorite videos of all time (although my wife would prefer I put our wedding video at the top I think :-) Although related to Facilities Management, they apply equally well in most cases to Information Technology, and are thus quite hilarious to anyone in either field! Must-watch! We were treated to these videos by Clif Guy at last Fall’s Church IT Roundtable, and I’ve been anxiously awaiting their further availability as I have several people, including Lakeview’s own Facilities Manager (”FMer”), who I want to show them to! Thanks to Dick Cooper, the juggler himself, as well as to Clif Guy and Tony Dye for sharing and putting these things online!

What is Facilities Management?

(View Video 1 directly on YouTube - makes full-screen option available)

Metaphors using sharp objects, plus “The Howling FMer”

(View Video 2 directly on YouTube - makes full-screen option available)

Well, it’s Mothers Day again. It didn’t used to be quite as big a deal as it is now. There are two reasons for that. One is that growing up, my Dad always made sure my brother and I had something nice for our Mom for Mother’s Day, and did something nice for her. Go Dad! That was a cool way for him to help support his wife, by making sure their kids remembered and observed Mothers Day!

The second reason the day is a bigger deal for me is that in the past few years, I’ve made a dramatic jump in Mothers from one to three! First, I got married back in 2005, obtaining in the process stepmother Viv, bringing my Mom Total suddenly to two, which was twice as many as I’d ever had before! Then, fourteen really, really short, very short months later (did I mention they were short?), this awesome woman I married (some people call her Ruth, I usually call her Sweetie) added Mom to her title! (It’s arguable she became a mom about 0.75 months prior depending on how you count. Let’s just say I’ve been told I share some of the blame for her new title :-) Just because she’s not my Mom doesn’t mean she’s any less important than the others!

For now, she’s actually the most important on Mothers Day, because our son pretty much thinks every day is Mothers Day. As in, he should have the full attention of his mother every day, all day, whenever he wants it. Not as in, making or buying cool stuff and doing cool things for “Ma Ma” on a particular Sunday in May! Fortunately, he’s started to have fun coloring in the last couple of weeks and when my mom was watching him last Thursday she had him color a nice Mother’s Day card! I guess my mom’s still helping me out by getting something together for my son to give his mom :-) I’ll have to do a bit more work next year to fill my dad’s shoes and help my son figure out something as cool!

I say all this to say three things:

1. That moms are cool, the natural ones, the in-laws, and the one you get to personally select for your kids.
2. The older you get, the more moms you have, as a general rule.
3. Moms deserve more than we kids and dads give them.

Thanks for reading my random thoughts about awesome Moms, on the appropriate day of the year. Of course, that day really comes every day. But at least express it well on the one everyone talks about! I’ve got all three of the moms I’m talking about here with me all this afternoon…it’s great to hang out with them all. Even if we’re alternating between hanging out, games, and taking naps!

Given that I’ve never been interviewed before, I’m probably taking the risk of sounding incredibly dumb in public (well, I took that risk already but now I’m doing more damage by telling you about it!) by mentioning that I was interviewed for the JesusGeek Podcast. John Wilkerson, aka Jesus Geek, was interested in how we have used WordPress as Lakeview Church’s web content mangement system so he asked me to fill him and his listeners in on the details. I’ll be listening to the podcast episode tomorrow (I’ve been catching up on some of his past episodes recently and have picked up some good tips!), so you can listen right along with me on your own commute :-)

If you don’t use a podcatcher such as iTunes to subscribe to podcasts, you can subscribe in Google Reader and stream episodes from your web browser, in addition to just downloading the MP3 file from the JesusGeek post directly.

The interview was complicated by a few connection losses while recording, so if the audio sounds awesome John gets the credit for making it work anyway, and if it has any issues, blame me! I also lost my notes about which WordPress plugins I was going to talk about in my XP-to-Vista conversion on my laptop and didn’t realize it until we were recording, so that was a bit more off-the-cuff than I had intended. Live and learn!

This past Friday I attended my first Indy Christian Geeks lunch, where I was invited a couple of weeks ago by Dr. Thomas Ho from IUPUI’s Computer Information Department (where I’m currently a half-time student). I hear the group is bigger, but there were six plus me last week, and we ate at the food court of an ethnic grocery store where food was available from three countries (we all ate Korean), and I had the Fried Rice with Chicken, which was very good. The Geeks lunch is always on the last Friday of the month, so it’s easy to remember.

The basic idea I gather is that the group is a way for Christian geeks to fellowship and share, similar to the Church IT Roundtable concept only smaller and not focused specifically on “church IT” and more on a shared love of Christ and electronic gadgets. I didn’t take my laptop, but without it I felt in the minority, although I think it might have been split 50/50! My Nokia N800 was charging or I would have taken that at least!

I’m sure I’m leaving someone or something out, and it was great meeting everyone, but I met a few people at lunch that were particularly relevant to my present activities. One was Neil Cox, aka IndyChristian. Neil is a local Indianapolis blogger who has been using social media extensively to help his life and with Christian outreach. I have been accumulating del.icio.us bookmarks for a while and have over 1,700 links saved, but Neil has several times that! I like Web 2.0 technology and social networking and it’s nice to meet someone else in town who shares a similar interest! Of course, Dr. Ho is also quite into social media, but is currently using Twitter the most (granted, I have been too!).

Eldon Kibbey was the first person I saw when I showed up for lunch. He was at a table by himself, but as he had a laptop open I figured it was a safe bet to head over and introduce myself. The bet was as safe as I thought! Eldon’s the Director of the Christian BusinessMen’s Connection (CBMC) Indiana and is also the Transform Indiana Moderator.

I also met Tom Buckley, who works for Exacq, a company I was only vaguely familiar with before that I’m taking a much stronger interest in now! They make security camera software that I can’t wait to get my hands on and try, both because it’s cool and because we’ve been having some security camera issues that I may get around to blogging about. (Exacq is pronounced just like the word “exact” without the “t” at the end, by the way.) Because they run a demo system in their offices that records 24/7, Exacq managed to get some footage from their office cameras of the recent earthquake in Illinois that they put on their blog and it was picked up by several news stations. Ironically, the company that installed our current security system was Vigilcorp, whose offices are in the same building as Exacq and who now sells primarily Exacq systems, which was not the case when they put ours in. We really like the guys at Vigilcorp and I really like Tom at Exacq, which is a good combination!

Alex Connor, an IUPUI student and programmer/web developer who also maintains the IndyChristianGeeks.com website, was also at the meeting banging away on some code, along with a woman who stopped in a little bit later whose name I have unfortunately temporarily forgotten.

This seems to be a great group to get to know, and an excellent way to get into the local Christian IT community and not just the online one, not that there’s anything wrong with either. But I think this may help (even though most of the Geeks aren’t necessarily “church IT” geeks in the same sense that I am, or many of the CITRT folks are) with my eventual goal of bringing together a Central Indiana Church IT Roundtable as a regional extension of the national CITRT. I’m already making contacts in that direction, but I don’t have any firm plans. If you do IT at a local church here in or around Indy, in a paid or volunteer capacity, why not get in touch with me and start a relationship? We can work towards a Roundtable, which I think would be beneficial to everyone. I’m not the most outgoing person I’ll be the first to admit (which makes meeting new people and sometimes even working with people I don’t know very well a challenge outside of my comfort zone), but if you get me started talking tech you’ll have a friend you may not be able to shut up once in a while! I’m definitely planning to be at next month’s Indy Christian Geeks lunch barring last-minute schedule conflicts!

When I moved from Office 2003 to Office 2007, personally, I had a learning curve like everyone else when I had to figure out where all the commands I knew had gone! I adjusted rather quickly and I think the new “Ribbon” in Office 2007 organizes commands in a much more logical fashion than previous versions. I’ve adjusted, but even now sometimes there’s a command I’m just not sure where to find, or what it’s called. That’s where this great little add-in, still in pre-release, comes in. It’s called Search Commands from Microsoft Labs, and it just adds another item to the Ribbon in Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 that resembles the live search box in Vista or Windows Desktop Search in XP but instead helps you locate the menu option you’re looking for! I’ve tried it briefly in Word and it seems very helpful. I’m probably going to give it a better workout soon, but I really, really like the Start Menu search-to-launch system in Vista, which does bias me towards this other “search to help” tool…it’s well done!

Don’t forget, it’s pre-release code right now and it requires Vista or XP 32-bit editions only right now, and of course Office 2007 (works with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint only). That said, check it out if you can!

The most popular post, nay, page on this site is my post on the Outlook 2007 PDF Previewer add-on that has since been pulled from circulation due to Adobe Reader building the feature into version 8.1. Additionally, Tim Heuer wrote a similar PDF preview utility utilizing the Foxit PDF engine, which is much faster than Adobe Reader in my experience. I just finished updating my post again to link to the Foxit versions of the utility as well, since that post overshadows even hits to my homepage by a wide margin it’s still so popular! Apparently searching Google for how to preview PDFs in Outlook 2007 is quite a popular pastime. If you want links to all that stuff, this is a reminder you can head over to my original post to find them all! This is just a reminder and a note that I’ve updated the post yet again to keep it useful for everyone.

OK so this is a little nitpicky, but it’s got me slightly annoyed with Scholarpedia because they don’t appear to publish any contact information. Here’s how I got there in the first place (why do I tell you? To confuse you, of course!): Through a chain I won’t make you follow (and probably couldn’t recall), I ended up at Mark Jaquith’s Twitter page (he’s a core developer for WordPress if you were unaware). I ended up clicking on the link in his then-newest update to his own blog’s contact info (he was linking there for a guy named Jeffro (Jeff Eaton) (I made a mistake in my original post and thought this was Jeffro2pt0, but I was incorrect; apologies!). “Hey, why not check out Mark’s blog while I’m 95% of the way there?” methinks. Latest post is titled How I visualize the months of the year and I click through to see the comment by Austin Matzko (aka filosofo) (Most of these are guys who develop WordPress or Plugins for WordPress).

Austin, in his comment, links to an article in Scholoarpedia on Synesthesia which I begin to read and find rather interesting. However, as I get down to the “Top down and contextual effects” portion of the article, I notice that there’s a sentence with a typo in it, specifically “The second experiment (6) used an ambiguous grapheme (’A’ or ‘H’) embedded either in between ‘T’ and ‘E’ (as in ‘THE’) or between ‘C’ and ‘A’ (’CAT’).” If you notice, at the end there, the ambiguous grapheme as an ‘A’ really is between ‘C’ and ‘T’, not between ‘C’ and ‘A’ as the sentence states (this makes more sense looking at the image provided in the article to illustrate).

Now, I was feeling generous and figured, hey, why not mention this to someone at the site so they can fix it? Actually, my first thought, being linked into the middle of the article, was “I already have a Wikipedia account, I’ll just fix this for them real quick.” Of course, they use the same MediaWiki software and default theme (hence the confusion, especially when linked to an anchor within an article), but Scholarpedia is not actually Wikipedia, as I quickly infer (and I haven’t had a scientific paper with a model named after me published with over 250 hits in Google–yet, if ever–so I can’t create an account). No problem, I’m sure there’s a contact form around. Nope. I can’t find one, anywhere on the site. Well, I just noticed the only email address I’ve run across on the site, suggestions @ scholarpedia.org, hidden away on the detailed requirements for authors page. No useful information on the About page, or the Help page. Oh wait, on the Instructions for authors page, it does have a random other email address, for a specific person. But they seem pretty much of the opinion that if you aren’t a famous scientist, you have no need to contact them about anything. Ironically, their Copyright page even says to “Contact Scholarpedia for copyright details.” Without mentioning a way to do so.

Oh well, maybe I’ll grab those two random email addresses I found and send them a quick note. If I get around to it; they can certainly find it here if they bother to look. I guess sometimes it takes is someone who graduated high school after being homeschooled to find the errors the super-genius scientists miss… ;-)

Thus ends this rant. Thanks, I feel better now. School 100% complete for the semester as of a very short time ago, so I’m quite happy to work the hot-air typing muscles for a few before getting to bed later than I should, again (but the exam got completed and submitted!).

A server was stolen from a debt-collection agency in Indianapolis last month, which meant 700,000 names, addresses, phone numbers, and of course, social security numbers are out there. It’s supposedly the largest computer security breach in Indiana history. Given the fact that it’s a debt-collection agency that lost the records (which were supposedly “protected by two passwords, but was not encrypted…[and] had been stored behind three locked doors.”), if you live in Indiana but never had late bills go to collections, you shouldn’t be directly affected, although there’s a hotline you can call to verify. Original details and report are available at the Indy Star, at least for the time being (they tend to lock up articles after a certain amount of time and make you pay for them).

This is just one more step in the growth of identify theft, which is becoming more and more of a problem (I won’t bore you with the details of other theft cases, if you’re in the IT field I you probably know about them already!). I hope they figure out a better way to protect this stuff before it gets as common as spam as gotten. But I know the technical sophistication required by every single business to make that a reality, and I don’t think the problem is going away any time soon.

On the personal front, I’m in Ohio this weekend for my brother-in-law’s wedding, and I only have one week of schoolwork left for this semester before being freed to spend some more time blogging; I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of things! I have managed to stick around the #citrt Freenode IRC channel on a consistent basis, and I’ve stayed reasonably active on Twitter since MinistryTECH and the Roundtable, which I’m still catching up from at work (but getting close to the normal level of “behind” :-)

MinistryTECH and the Church IT Roundtable gave me a lot of great opportunities to gain interest in and discuss SonicWALL solutions with Mark Moreno, consultant and reseller, and SonicWALL poster children Jason Lee and Jeremie Kilgore. I must admit to being more than a little impressed with the combination of flexibility, power, and price that the SonicWALL products provide. Those are three pretty important areas. In specific my first interest is in the SonicWALL firewall (NSA Series) products that also do UTM including antivirus, antispyware, intrusion prevention and content filtering, my second interest is in their Continuous Data Protection (CDP) products as both on-site and off-site backup solutions, and thirdly I’m interested in the ability of the SonicWALL firewall appliance to also serve as a centralized control point for relatively inexpensive SonicPoints (wireless access points).

Before making a decision there are certainly things to evaluate, and I definitely want to get my hands on an NSA box for a while to test first. I like the ISA 2004 firewall interface that we’re currently running and I want to make sure I’m comfortable managing SonicWALL if we go that route.

Both MinistryTECH and the Roundtable were, again (for the Roundtable), well worth the trip in more ways than I can express, but since this is a blog I’m sure you expect me to try anyway (I won’t disappoint). There’s always something new and different going on (this time it was some video experimentation and the heavy use of Twitter throughout). This is only the second Church IT Roundtable I’ve been to (the first was last October), and this was only the fourth National Roundtable since Jason Powell kicked it off shortly before I discovered his blog and shortly thereafter started blogging (but missed the second Roundtable in Houston last Spring).

The Roundtable, Now and Again

Each Roundtable ends with a discussion regarding the future direction of the Roundtable. Do we want to continue as-is, or do we want to become more of an official group? Do we want to stay the same size, or try and grow? Do we have a problem at all, and if so, what is it? The general consensus I think, was that we will continue as-is until we discover a problem to solve. We’ll keep inviting people, but it doesn’t matter if they come or not. That’s their problem. I think almost everyone who has been to a Roundtable has had an amazing enough time that they are excited about it and want to share such an amazing experience with others in a similar position who haven’t heard of it, and that’s where the desire to grow comes from. At the same time, the group works well with approximately the number we have (25-75), so why change it?

I agree with both perspectives, how’s that for being on the fence? Until we have a problem, we keep it small but work to make it bigger. We have local Roundtables in our area if we can drum up enough interest among the locals Church IT folks. We work on centralizing and updating the main CITRT website more often to provide some cohesiveness and a single-source-of-information without becoming too structured. We keep hanging out in the #citrt chat room on IRC (connecting online with people we’ve met in person is a tremendous boon, at least to me, and the two complement each other very well), and we keep blogging. It’s worked pretty well so far. A couple of vendors suggested creating more structure, and I think they could end up being very helpful in this area when we get to the point that we want or need to do that! Until then, we’ll stay on what looks like auto-pilot (can you tell I’m writing this in an airport?) but with the usual careful planning and assistance that the “founding partners” have provided behind the scenes with everyone else helping out where willing and able. I think that was the consensus as I heard it, feel free to correct me or provide an alternate view.

One issue that was raised in the final discussion was, “Why keep having a discussion about the group at the end of each Roundtable, does that mean we need to change or people want change?” I think that group introspection and evaluation is a good idea to see what did and didn’t work each time, since each Roundtable is different. We are very “un-group” still, and rather than a core group getting together to review and plan after the event, I think it’s beneficial to have everyone contribute to the process as a part of the meeting. I would call the discussion useful and beneficial, which is why I feel posting the details for anyone to see here is just continuing the same transparency and discussion already started in person. Of course, this is all my understanding mixed with my opinion, so feel free to disagree (comments are welcome although if you care that much, it’s likely you have a blog of your own!).

All in all, I had at least as good a time at this Roundtable as the last, if not better. I love the people and the friendships and the discussions and the shared enjoyment of technology with fellow Christians. Sure, I can read Wired or Network World magazines and see a lot of cool gadgets, but there’s no shared worldview or mission to really connect with, it’s just technology (and often, in the case of Wired, a very atheistic worldview comes through very strongly). With the Roundtable, it’s not just a meeting and it’s not just about technology. It’s an excuse for friendships and relationships (shhh, don’t tell my boss–oh wait, developing relationships is higher on Lakeview’s radar than technology, and getting both at once is quite a nice combination :-)

MinistryTECH

So what about the new MinistryTECH conference? Overall, I think it was a success. In addition to the CITRT group, many of whom were present, MinistryTECH managed to reach a wider audience due to their existing MinistryCOM foot-in-the-door history and an actual marketing budget (apparently there are some benefits to charging $325 instead of $15 to attend, and hosting a vendor exposition hall!). They also were able to attract some well-known people in the Church IT world (such as Terry Storch and Tony Morgan and others) that provided some great information and ideas to re-energize us and provide food for introspection, in addition to the great church tours we were able to take (even though I missed about half while traveling). A side benefit to the conference and the many attendees was the opportunity to mention the Roundtable to people that hadn’t heard of it. We are at least getting seeds planted and the more we can get people involved in the national (and global) Church IT community rather than hanging out by themselves, I think there will be more of a reach for both MinistryTECH and the CITRT in the future.

In Which The Babbling Stops

That just about does it for my thoughts right now. I have a lot of pictures to sort through and upload (in the range of 600-700 raw), and I’ll post them or links to them when I do that. I left my laptop off and did more Twittering than blogging or note-taking this time, but Jason Lee and several others have done an excellent job of posting outlines and summaries of many of the talks and topics, and in many cases speakers have posted their slides for download as well. In addition, a couple of talks were streamed and recorded using the uStream.tv video service thanks to Ian Beyer.

Also, this post was written primary on Sunday, April 6th (the day after the Roundtable) while I was in the Cincinnati airport on my way home, with links added later. So it’s a fresher perspective than I have now, not that I’ve had time to think about it since! Being gone for a while from work means a bit extra waiting when I return :-) Since it’s taken me a while to get this posted, Tony Dye (at least) has already managed to beat me to a lot of this. Check out his posts, and as usual they are very logical and well-considered (he also re-caps each session he attended and all of the Roundtable in posts just prior, check them out too!):

• Spring 2008 CITRT: What’s Next?
• MinistryTECH, CITRT After-Thoughts
• Roundtable Reflections, part 1
• And, for an funny hotel story: My Interesting OKC Hotel Room

I know others have posted as well, I just haven’t had time to find them all yet!