YouVersion

My brother-in-law (a children's pastor in Owasso, OK) was asking me the other day about any great places that I use on the web. It is funny that even though I feel like I spend my life on the internet I didn't have any great nuggets to share with him. He then asked me if I used YouVersion. I couldn't be too cool and act like I already knew about it because I was very intrigued. When I got home to check it out I immediately fell in love with it. Basically it is a web-application that allows you to read the scriptures and make notes and comments on specific what you are reading. I was trying to do this with my personal bible study and a blogger account. It was a little difficult. YouVersion gives you the ability to do what I was looking for and quite a bit more. It also allows you to share your thoughts and ideas with others and they can in turn share theirs with you. This would be great for small groups who want to connect with each other int their reading of the scripture.

As I was browsing around on the site I noticed that the copyright was LifeChurch.tv. The have been doing some really interesting stuff recently. I've been really impressed with their effort and drive to share their resources. This app could have been built only for their church members and they could have packaged it and sold it to others that were interested. Instead, they made it functional and available to all believers. This could be a huge blessing to many people and get more people digging into God's Word. Many people and their churches are receiving blessings from the openness of LC and their willingness to share and equip.

Their leadership and example encourages me to share our resources and knowledge for the Church not just our church.

Computer Clutter

If you ever walked by my office you would notice the piles of stuff that I have to step over and work around to get the job done. Anywhere I have worked I can honestly say that I've never been able to keep a tidy office. I'll admit that about half of the blame lives in my hat but the other half is attributed to the amount of stuff that passes through my office. I have papers, boxes, cables, computers, ram, etc... well you get the point.

My computer isn't much different. It gets loaded with trial programs, web servers, SQL servers, OS files, CD images, drivers, diagnostics, etc... Again I'm sure that you get the point and if you work in Information Technology I'm sure that you share similar battles. I have a good policy for myself and that it is to wipe my computer every year and start over. As in the case of may other policies, I don't adhere to this one like glue. It takes a while to get a computer loaded back up the way I like them. This configuration also mutates month by month so an image of my ideal OS isn't very practical. So instead of the theoretical "every year" I usually depend on my pain threshold. Yesterday I hit the pain threshold yesterday when my desktop crashed 3 times rendering me useless for about 20 minutes each time.

This time I'm going to try and be a little smarter. I've loaded VMware on my computer and anytime I would like to test drive some software I'm going to try it on a VM before I load it to my wonderful desktop. In the process of reloading my computer I went ahead and snagged one of computers that we purchased for our desktop replacement program (don't judge me, they are awesome).

What are some good policies or tips/tricks to avoid your computers getting cluttered and sluggish?

Disaster Recovery Development - Simplified

Tony Dye posted some great information defining some really important disaster recovery terms.

RTO & RPO - Recovery Time Objective & Recovery Point Objective

These two definitions should be the building blocks for developing your DR plan and its strategies. If you know how much time that you can live without your data and how much you are willing to lose then you are well on your DR way.

The other major factor in development of a DR strategy is obviously cost. The bigger the number for your RTO and RPO the less you are going to have to spend. As your RTP and RPO approach zero you costs increase dramatically. It is like adding 9's in your uptime or reaching absolute zero. The trickiest part is meeting your expectations to your budget.

Welcome to the PARADOX.

Hello, I'd like to introduce myself...

I can't tell you how many times a week I receive an email or a phone call from sales people. I completely understand what they are trying to do and I believe they are really trying to save us money or give us better service. The people who we usually work with provide us a great service at a very high value to our organization. What I am struggling to deal with is the balance between being open for new opportunities and not spending too much of my time meeting with vendors.

Aside from my time management, I'm always reminded that the people that are cold calling me are God's children and every interaction is an opportunity to make an eternal impact on someone's soul. That single fact keeps me from hanging up on pesky vendors vying for our business. When I'm ready to be uber-assertive (read: rude) I'm gently reminded to Love.

What are some things to help you find the balance in your work ministry? I think that this applies to everyone regardless if whether you work at a church or not.

Windows Live Writer

Jason Lee mentioned that he was using the Windows Live Writer (free download with different configurable services) to compose his blogs. I downloaded it a while back but I'm just now starting to use it. It is actually really nice. We have started to get some of our staff here blogging for their ministry and this might be a good tool for them to compose their posts since many of them aren't super savvy on technical things. I mean many of them just found out what blogs actually are.

Blog Applications

We are using blogger.com for the time being because it is what I know. In the future our ministry blogs will be run by our website once the overhaul is finished. Are there any other good blogger applications you blog-a-riffic people use and love. I notice that many of the CITRTers use typepad and wordpress. What made you choose one over another?

A Nice Welcome Back

Back in the middle of April my wife and I took a trip for our 4th anniversary. We saved up over the past couple of anniversaries to go somewhere big. We went to the Dominican Republic. It was wonderful.

The night before we left to come home I got a call from work to let me know that our exchange server had crashed and burned. My stomach immediately turned and my mind started to race. I was out of the country where my mobile phone didn't work, I had no computer access, so there was absolutely nothing I could do. I kept asking myself if I did have some kind of connectivity could I actually be doing something to fix the problem.

I was able to contact the church from our hotel phone and got some more details. None of them were good. After a $75 phone call I found out...

1. We lost a disk in our array for Exchange
2. The were able to call in a friend to come and help
3. A new disk was ordered and installed in the array
4. As it turns out when installing a replacement disk into an array on Dell PowerEdge servers there is a possibility that the array will become corrupted
5. Our array became corrupted when the replacement disk was installed
6. The most recent complete exchange backup was a month old (a whole other story)
7. The friend we had help us was able to purchase a program to restore the data from the corrupted array (Arax Disk Doctor - totally saved my bacon)
8. After the restoring the exchange database files we found out the they were corrupt

Needless to say I didn't sleep very much the next couple of days.

As I find out more information I learn that the server crashed the night that I left for vacation and had essentially been down the entire week I was gone. At the Sunday service they announced that the we weren't mad at the congregation and we weren't dodging their emails but our server had crashed. I my heart sank as did my body in the pew.

Over the next few days I worked nonstop to do a hard repair and a defrag of our database (which wasn't easy since the db was 40GB and we had almost no servers with enough room/power to deal with files that large). We were able to restore Exchange by Wednesday morning at 3:30 am with no noticeable data loss. The outage was about a week which is far beyond unacceptable. The only good thing is that it brings DR to forefront of management's mind which is something I've been trying to do this entire year.

Needless to say I needed another vacation to recover from the welcome back I received from my last one. The unfortunate part is that I may never be able to take a vacation again given what happened this past one.

I don't know what it is about servers but somehow they know when you leave and the worst possible things happen when you are gone. I think that it has something to do with separation anxiety.