It’s the ThirdThursday and so it’s time for a Desktop Scrum. Carl will lead the charge as we try out our procedure for updating machines. Our hope is that after a few months we’ll have defined desktop machine classes with defined sets of software and can easily update software on them in a coordinated fashion.
It’s also our last scheduled gathering before the New Year, since I’m giving you each Christmas off this year and the next Thursday will be 1 January 2009 (YIKES!)
Hope to see everyone there!
While there is much to do, there is even more to plan for.
On the agenda for this week is to sit down and look at the construction documents for the Christian Education Wing and ensure that AVIT needs are covered as we envision them. As part of this I’ve invited Rod to come and help us consider how we might configure security cameras and hence the network drops to support them. Although the wiring work won’t be done likely until March it takes time to get things communicated so now a good time to do it.
More operationally, Fearless Leader needs to configure VLC for automagically encoding live video to disk; I’d like to enable PDC control for Samba; and of course there’s always cable to run and junk stuff to clean up.
Next week is ThirdThursday so a Desktop Scrum in the works, as well as celebrating that I’m giving everyone Christmas Day eve off (the 25th is a Thursday). Very considerate of me, don’t you think?
Sorry for the lateness of the post - got back from a family trip to Halifax just last night.
All things video this eve: moving the network camera, working a bit more on the duplicator, checking and running network lines. We’ll start around 8:30. Fearless Leader will join us at 9 and there’s the potential for a surprise visitor to help eat the donuts.
Our ISP for the blog has been experiencing some problems; hence this post coming so late. We have several tasks requiring people power including remaining desktop updates, wire pulling and helping me write a position description for the IT Director.
I haven’t spoken with Fearless Leader but I know that the Contemporary Console could use some cleaning and there are still ausio cables left to be fixed. Come one, come all and we’ll get some work done before Christmas hits.
It’s the ThirdThursday and so that means all hands on deck for Desktop upgrades. I have some organizing documentation ready to go so that assignees can take the list for a specific machine and go to town. The list matches my master list and as we go we’ll discover what we really have for software that’s part of our standard for each of staff and console machines. There’s also a cable or two (or three) to pull from the telephone room to the server room in anticipation of some future projects, including the connection to the new building, the server gigabit network (the Jesus1 network) and the potential to do a kvm-over-cat5 run for the backup server.
But wait - there’s more! We held a small but successful Church Tech Round Table last Saturday, where invited ITFolk from four other churches sat down with Fearless Leader and I to talk tech. Here’s the text from my thanks note that I sent out Saturday evening:
“Wanted to thank each of you for taking time out of your weekend to invest in the Lord’s Kingdom. Personally I feel heartened by what happened. As I prepared for this I hoped that we could talk about issues related to delivery of ministry and services and not necessarily technology. We achieved this without any fights over hardware, OS or applications! I hope that everyone left with a feeling of renewed enthusiasm and a lead or an answer on something that they’ve been working on.
I will get back to you once I work out a more organized way for us to stay in touch.”
I think the outcomes are heartening. Monday night I made a presentation to Board of Management to spend considerable effort this year developing a formal requirements document for a church information system (ERP? CRM?) for Brunswick Street Baptist Church. Although I have no definite answer yet, I was excited by the level of understanding that members displayed (both of what I was talking about and its importance) and so you’ll want to know about that.
But wait - there’s more! The final part to this report is that I asked for Board of Management develop a formal position description for what I do. As is absolutely reasonable they asked that I tell them what I (think I) do now. I’ve asked the Round Table (from last Saturday’s meeting) and discovered that they don’t have such descriptions within their organizations either - but would be interested in what comes out of my request.
What is it that you think I do? What should the position name be? What should the roles and responsibilities be? Who should the position report to? What’s my line?
Well it was bound to happen. When we find bad cables, we let Fearless Leader know and he takes them and puts them in his trunk along with good intentions to fix them. While the good intentions still exist, there’s precious little room left in his trunk, soooooo…
This Thursday plan on bringing your soldering gear. We’ll spend the evening in fellowship, melting metal and donuts restocking our supplies of cables and perhaps some new ones too. While we’re doing all of this I’d appreciate your thoughts on building an ChurchTech community and how I should prepare my presentation to Board of Management on the 17th about church information management and the need for a process to determine a software system to support it.
For all of the lurkers of this blog (and lurking is not a bad thing), I ask the same question: How did/would you present the need for an information management system for your church?
Fearless Leader is away this week, so his share of the donuts are up for grabs!
We’ve had some issues of late that make us wonder if there aren’t some physical wiring issues and so before we do anything silly, like regularly schedule backups between servers, it would be good to know that there’s good connectivity. We also need to complete the anti-virus installs on the remaining machines. Lastly if you check out the web site for the CEWing construction, there’s an elevator shaft that takes up most of the picture - we should think about where else to put it.
See you around 8:30!
So we (at last says Fearless Leader) have a CD/DVD duplicator up and running. However it’s cobbled together on a desktop box and needs some refinement. There’s a whole list of things that need to be done under this heading and I won’t go into it here, but some notables would be giving the duplicator hardware an upgrade to stop it from constantly “twitching” and getting some of the pastoral staff equipped with the client software.
As we work towards backups it’s important that we ensure that our network is indeed working nominally at 100 Mbs, so should a team of 2 appear they can don radios and testing gear and work through the drops, re-bixing when necessary.
Lastly, we need to assemble our independent yet coordinated IT and AV budgets for 2009. Over donuts.
Making DVDs has become a recurring dream - we get so far and then have to go back and restart. Some of this may be due to running XPP on hardware (DL380) intended for Windows Server, so this week we’ll explore putting the DVD system together on a desktop XPP install to see if that resolves our issue. Also on the agenda: desktop maintenance including anti-virus installation, checking physical wiring and securing the backup server to the wall (!).
Ahead of all of this thrill-a-minute evening (and really, what else could you call it?) is a church business meeting. So once that’s done we’ll begin in earnest, beginning with coffee and donuts!
The church’s Alpha programme has it’s retreat weekend starting tomorrow night and I’ve agreed to provide a computer with EasyWorship to provide lyrics and play the DVDs. So we have that to prep tonight as a priority. This is also the 3rd Thusday so we have desktop maintenance to do, including upgrades to the anti-virus software.
Aside from this we have some left-overs from previous weeks and donuts to carefully consider!
Recent Comments