EVDO rocks

Many of you know that my wife is a church planter. I've been struggling with finding a good way to get high-speed Internet service at the church since we moved into the building more than two years ago. DSL service is not available in that semi-rural location and cable is too expensive.

In late January Sprint completed their roll out of EVDO Rev. A service in the Kansas City area. The first day it was available I got a Pantech card and started testing/using the service everywhere I went, including the church. Bottom line: it rocks. It gives a user experience very similar to DSL or even cable for everything except large file downloads. I'm seeing speeds in the neighborhood of 750+ Kb/s down and 250+ Kb/s up (though it does vary somewhat by location and time).

So having passed the performance and reliability test, I decided it would work well for the church until a faster, affordable land-line service becomes available. Yesterday I got a Linksys WRT54G3G-ST router that accepts an EVDO card and/or a wired broadband connection, routes, has a 4-port switch, and does WiFi. In other words, it's a WiFi router that can use EVDO to get to the Internet. This thing is very cool and it works quite well, but it was a pain to set up. Turns out you need to upgrade the router firmware before it can see/use the Pantech card, but finding the upgraded firmware on the Linksys site is nearly impossible. (By the way, it's here.)

Now ... think about how this could fit in to your disaster recovery planning. This little guy is a completely mobile WiFi hotspot. All you need is electrical power and EVDO coverage. (If it can't find a Rev A tower it will drop back to the the older EVDO Rev 0 or 1xRtt.) Admittedly, the bandwidth is pretty minimal for a subtantial number of users trying to share an Internet connection, but it could be set up instantly almost anywhere. One of these and some computers could provide an instant office with zero lead time to order DSL or T1 service to a location.

In the event of disaster, you could go to your local Sprint or Verizon store, sign up for service, and walk out within an hour with an activated card. Getting an EVDO router could be a bit tougher to find on zero notice. Stores like CompUSA are carrying some of these, but not all are compatible with all EVDO cards and services. You need to verify compatibility prior to purchase. We tried a D-Link router we bought at retail with no success and had to take it back.

Also ... think about how this could be used to provide backup for a critical Internet link in a remote location such as a second campus. I configured the Linksys to give priority to the wired WAN link and connected that link to my cable modem at home. Then I connected my laptop to the router via WiFi and I was on the Internet through the cable. To test the failover, I pulled the plug on the cable. Instantly the Linksys connected to EVDO and continued my sessions without interruption. Neither my Skype nor my MSN IM connection dropped. Sweet!

Adam Hamilton at the RoundTable!

I'm very excited to announce that our senior pastor, Adam Hamilton, will be coming to the Fall RoundTable for a 30-minute Q&A session. Adam is an amazing man who started this church in 1990 and has seen it grow to more than 12,000 adult members and average worship attendance in the 7,000 range. I am grateful he has accepted my invitation to spend some time with us during one of the busiest weeks of his year. It will be very interesting to get Adam's insight into the value of IT in the church and how we IT people can better serve the mission, minisry, and senior leadership of our churches.

KC-area church IT lunch

The next KC-area church IT lunch will be at Chili's in the Merriam Town Center mall at Antioch and Johnson Drive in Merriam, Kansas on Thursday, May 31, at 12:30 pm. See you there!

Include more people and keep it small

Tony Dye hit the nail on the head when he said that the consistent sentiment of Church IT RoundTable participants is that we should "include more people and keep it small." That paradox still makes me chuckle every time I think about it, but it does set out a vision that I believe (all humor aside) we should pursue. How could we do it?

In my original invitation to come to Church of the Resurrection for the Fall RoundTable, I explained a half-baked idea about how the RoundTable can grow while retaining the best aspects of being small. The essence of the idea is to have roundtables in cities across the country and then link them technologically a couple of times each year for a national roundtable of roundtables. Now I'd like to update you on how that half-baked idea is maturing into something that could be truly workable.

Our plan for the Fall RoundTable is to try this once with everyone located in our building. We think that is a good idea because it will allow us to test our facilitation technique and technology with all of us physically together. (Prototype? Cool!) If something goes horribly wrong, we can scramble and put everyone together in one large room and salvage the event. (Contingency plan? Cool!)

We are going to break up the large group into four separate classrooms, each of which will accommodate 20 participants and a few observers. With this idea we will be able to handle as many as 80 participants and 20 vendors/observers before we have to close registration. (I've been told this is similar to the approach taken by Leadership Network, but I've never been to their events so I have to take the word of others on that.)

Each classroom will have two projectors: one showing content from the conversation in that room, and the other showing content from all of the other rooms. Each participant will use their own laptop to join an Adobe Connect meeting with everyone else in their room. Through Connect, anyone in the room will be able to show content (web sites, pictures, diagrams, PowerPoints, etc.) on the primary projector. United Methodist Communications (UMCOM) has agreed to let us use their Adobe Connect system at no charge, and Sean McAtee from UMCOM Tech Shop will be here to assist us with his deep expertise in Connect.

So that we are not limited to interacting only with the participants in our own room, the secondary projector will show content from the conversations happening in the other rooms. We're still in the process of figuring out exactly how this will work. We will run some tests within the next couple of weeks to evaluate various ideas. I'll post once we have a clear picture of this in order to solicit your feedback.

When I suggested this idea to Tony, he said, "Sounds exciting, crazy, and even a bit prone to potential failure. Perfect! :-)" Tony's right. This is both exciting and risky. But I figure, if a bunch of techno-geeks can't make something like this work, who can?

Fall Roundtable schedule overview

I'm very excited that so many of you have commented on my invitation post indicating your interest in coming to the Fall Roundtable, October 3-4, 2007. We're actively working on detailed plans so we can open registration.

We will start on Wednesday around 9:00 am and end Thursday at 5:00 pm. We're also planning a get-together for Tuesday (October 2) afternoon around 3:00 pm for those who are flying in on Tuesday and would like to get a facilities/IT tour of Church of the Resurrection. After the roundtable is Resurrection's annual Leadership Institute, October 5-6. Leadership Institute is our biggest conference of the year. If you are able to stay, I know it will be a blessing to you as well.

For any vendors that would like to attend, sponsorship opportunities are available. Please e-mail me for info (clif.guy at cor dot org).

Watch this blog for more deets to follow soon. It's going to be an AWESOME event!

ESX, here we come

We're currently running the free VMware server using Windows 2003 Server as the host operating system on our original Dell 2950 server. We have 8-10 virtual servers running on that box now, none of which are demanding resource-wise (gratefully).

Three weeks ago we bought a second 2950 like the one we bought last year, a Dell/EMC AX150i iSCSI SAN, and a bunch of expensive ESX 3 software from VMware. We're going to hook the two 2950s to the SAN, load ESX on them, and convert all of our existing virtual servers as well as 3 older physical servers to the new virtual environment. We have hired some consultants to help us and hope to have it in production by June 4. We'll keep you posted ...

Sitting in church

Miles McPherson from The Rock Church in San Diego presented this week at the Beeson Institute. My favorite line from his talk: "There is no spiritual gift called 'sitting in church.'"

The Roundtable is an "Unconference"

BusinessWeek has a nice overview of the unconference idea that we've stumbled into for the church IT community. "Roundtable" is a much better word, in my opinion, than "unconference" or "camp" (as in BarCamp or PodCamp). I'm glad we're doing an unconference and calling it a roundtable - that's the best of both!

Mike Breaux at Resurrection

The Beeson Institute for Advanced Congregational Leadership is having one of its sessions at Church of the Resurrection this week in our Student Center. Mike Breaux, teaching pastor at Willow Creek, presented today.

Mike says our churches should have signs like:
"Come As You Are"
"Grace Happens"
"You Matter to God"

Goodbye Annex

Demolition Day has arrived for the humble annex. Turns out you can use a backhoe to bring down a building.

In the upper left corner you can see our camera crew recording the whole thing from the roof of our West Building. I'm sure they'll find some creative use for the video!

Vista when?

The IT organizations of Intel and Dell are waiting for SP1 to upgrade to Vista. I know we'll run Vista eventually, but I also know it won't be in 2007. We'll look closely at it in November when we need to decide whether to budget for it in 2008. If it doesn't seem like a good move, we'll wait and look at it again in November 2008.

What are your Vista roll-out plans?

KC lunch meeting?

I'd like to get together for lunch with my KC-area church IT homies sometime in the next couple of weeks. How about the 10th, 17th, or 31st? Leave a comment ...

Silverlight?

Who out there is paying attention to Microsoft's Silverlight technology announcements? Is it as big a deal as Scoble suggests?

Spring Church IT Round Table - Round Table Day

I've been quite the slacker in blogging this, but better late than never eh?

The round table was a great experience. In short it was about 30 guys seated around folding tables, and discuss we did. The dynamic of the round table went like this. A topic was thrown out and an expert board was formed on the fly. Expert board = the guys and gals that had worked around that topic a great deal. People would ask the board questions, the board would question or concur with each other, and great value was gained by everyone in the room. I thought it was a well-balanced event between free-flow conversation and a structured discussion.

The best analysis I've seen, gathered from feedback of the event, was Tony's summary of what everyone wants. As Resurrection is hosting the Fall event this year, I had walked around the crowd during breaks and sampled feedback on what we should do next - I came to the exact same conclusion as Tony. "Keep it small, but include more people." Sorry boys and girls - some of you are gonna have to take one for the team. :) In all seriousness, "taking one for the team" is exactly what we want to avoid.

Not to beat a dead horse, but if you haven't given feedback on our idea of how to truly tackle "small but more people," take a look at the invite Clif posted and let us know.

Overall, the spring round table was an unparalleled experience. Every individual was great, and they inspired me. The conversations in the hall, and the more structured times blended well. I would hope that if you are in the ministry of church I.T., yes it is a ministry, you have the opportunity to make one of the future round tables and be fed, have your tank filled, or other appropriate metaphor. ;)

Props to all my church I.T. brethren, it was a pleasure and will be again.

Church IT Blogroll

Today I realized I had never posted a roll of the church IT blogs I read. So I went through and cleaned up the subscription list in my feed reader (IE 7), exported the list as OPML, and then imported it into blogrolling.com in order to quickly create the new blogroll you see on the right.

Then I realized, this could be a really cool way to link church IT blogs, using the same approach as the Methodist Blogroll. So, here goes ...

Church IT Blogroll Instructions
Benefits:

• We will maintain the blogroll and update it regularly
• As links are added, updated, and deleted, it will update on your blog automatically
• A great way to keep track of the church IT blogging world and build the fledgling Church IT Roundtable/Church IT Association

Requirements:

• Your blog is focused on church IT and/or church web sites
• You update it regularly (if we see no posts for a few months, we'll take you off)
• You provide an RSS feed of your posts (because the feed is what we'll actually put on the blogroll)

To get on the blogroll:

• E-mail me (clif.guy at cor.org)
• We'll check out your blog and add you if you meet the requirements

To add the blogroll to your own site, paste the following code in your blog template:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://rpc.blogrolling.com/display.php
?r=9407d5ed585629e658efc2318e1add48"></script>

FBI update

In my wee-hours haze last night I linked something totally unrelated to Andrew's video. It's here.

The FBI pays us a visit

The Annex is going away. It's worth less than it would cost to move, so what to do? I know! Blow it up, real good! Our Facilities folks invited the local FBI SWAT team to use it for practicing a hostage situation. Andrew took a bit of video showing the guys in full battle gear assaulting the Annex. And here are some pictures of the damage they left in their wake.

Annex main entrance with shattered glass everywhere:

Glass from the back door lays shattered on the floor:

A spent shotgun shell (they used shotguns to shoot open locked doors):

Smashed door hinge:

This door latch was blown off by a shotgun blast. It threw the door knob into the sheetrock wall, making a nice hole:

The black spot on the floor is from a "flashbang" - a non-lethal grenade that makes a big flash and a loud bang to stun anyone in the vicinity. You can see damage on the adjacent partition. The white powder on the floor is fire extinguisher residue:

Somehow they knocked a hole in the outside wall. Yes, that's daylight you can see through there!

Lesson: don't be in the way when your friendly, local FBI SWAT team storms the building!

The Leawood Police are coming in tomorrow for more training exercises. There's nothing left to smash. ;-)

Seth's "Memo to the very small"

Those of you who subscribe to Seth Godin's blog have already seen his post a week ago titled "Memo to the very small." Interesting that he mentioned churches in the opening paragraph as possible users of his method for small organizations to use the web.

People from small or technically-unsophisticated churches frequently ask us for advice about how to build or rebuild their church web site. Seth describes these people perfectly when he says:

These are businesses that have trouble dealing with the Yellow Pages. Too much trouble, too much time, way too expensive. So, should local micro-businesses just ignore the web? Or should they become experts in the art of building and maintaining a website?

His suggestion is to use Typepad with a standard template, a Squidoo lens, and a set of pictures on Flickr. Those of you who work with small churches as a volunteer or consultant, does this sound like a good recommendation?

Neat Patch?

We don't need no stinking Neat Patch. (Sorry, Jason, couldn't resist.)

This is one of the racks for our new office at Southcreek. It has two 48-port HP switches and fewer than 10 ports are free since we completed our moves yesterday.

On the shelf below the patch panel is our SonicWall firewall and DSL modem. These provide a backup (a VERY slow backup) for our wireless LAN bridge.

Moving Day 2

Yesterday was the last big moving day in a sequence of moves we've been doing for more than a week.

Below is the humble Annex, a temporary building obtained for our rapidly-expanding Children's Ministry back in the mid 1990s. For the last several years it has been the central church office, housing our receptionists, mail room, main copy/work room, most of our executive management, and numerous other staff. It's hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and frequently smells of animals that have crawled underneath to die! Next week it will be used by local law enforcement for training exercises before it is finally dismantled and hauled off.

Front door to the Annex with the East Bldg reflected in the glass. The sign directs visitors to the new reception desk in the East Bldg.

"We are moving! Please pardon our mess while we pack"

Load 'em up!

And move 'em out!

Spring Church IT Roundtable

I neglected to mention in my first post that today we are being hosted by Sugar Creek Baptist Church, http://www.sugarcreek.net/, at the LYF youth center. Our hosts were very gracious, and I want to thank them for opening up their facility and catering to us. (Image to right is an X-Box array for youth.)

Today we heard from many Vendors and consultants ranging from VMWare, ScriptLogic, DataCore, Service-U and Web Empowered Church.

I was familiar with VMWare and Service-U, and obviously Web Empowered Church, but the other two I'd never heard of before. DataCore is a mind expanding virtualization software that virtualizes your SAN or slack disk space across multiple servers, and synchronizing between virtual storage. I'd have to think about that more, but one thing that is potentially big for churches is synchronizing virtual storage between geographically distributed locations. What we were told was that you can synchronize between 8 different locations. So if multiple churches are using DataCore and have unused disk space, they can use each other as back up locations. Potentially pretty cool.

ScriptLogic produces a toolset of automation and management applications that makes nearly everything in Windows system administration easier. Active Directory users, GPOs auditing and alerting, patching, spyware, file permissions and ACLs, USB port security, MSI packaging, system imaging and software distribution, and file system level auditing. I'm excited about the potential of using ScriptLogic apps in our environment because it is easily powerful enough to make up for a half time network admin guy or more, and our network guy would salivate all over his shirt to have these tools at his disposal. The tools are not only cool, but can replace other tools like Symantec Ghost and MS SMS, saving you some money nad giving you one software manufacturer to yell at when things go wrong. :)

All in all, a very cool pre-roundtable day and I enjoyed meeting the vendors, including Tim Whitehorn, CEO and original creator of Service-U. Resurrection is a long time user of Service-U, and I have always suggested it to churches looking for a resource management and calendaring solution.

Looking forward to tomorrow, but first - a good nights sleep. Aaaaah.

And Here We Go!

I'm here at the church IT event organized by Tony Dye and friends. Our first day is vendor presentations - but first we started off with a short worship service. It was amazingly high energy for a ~30 minute service. In short, they rocked, we worshiped, and when they finished everyone simply stood in awe and silence for many seconds until someone started that quiet "is it ok yet?" clapping.

Thus far I've been thrilled to meet some of the guys I know only by blogs and e-mail addresses. I expect shock and awe over the next few days. Geekfest. :)

Moving Day 1

We're working closely with our Facilities Department to move 50 staff people, starting yesterday through the end of next week. Yesterday was Move Day 1 when we moved 21 people from Central Campus to the leased office at Southcreek. Next Wednesday and Thursday we'll be moving 11 people from one place to another within campus (including Andrew). And then Friday we'll move another 18 people from campus to Southcreek. Whew!

Philip (foreground), Jeremy, and Brian working among the cubicles:

Movers from Fry-Wagner:

Dick Cooper, our Director of Facilities, holding forth:

Jeremy prepping phone cords:

Ian, concentrating on settting up phone extensions, amid the chaos:

Kelly Williams (center) and some of her staff from the Finance Department surprised us with lunch (what a blessing!). Uber voluteer Doug Blackwood, retired from management of the help desk at HP, is on the far right.

Outfitting the new office space

Here's some of the work we've been doing over the last three weeks to prepare for 40 staff moving into the 9000 sq. ft. of office space we leased to replace our 13 year-old temporary building.

In the process of installing data and phone cables:
Ian and Jeremy begin installing equipment in the phone/network room:


Jerry and Kevin from WKT (our phone vendor) installing the phone system:

Ian installing a repurposed Dell 2650 for use as a file/print server (it does DFS replication with a server in our data center on Central Campus):

Should we say "no"?

Another answer to Tony's question comes from Joel Dehlin:

I.T. should not be saying no. You should give the customer(s) information about what resources you have available, and they should (collectively) make decisions about what to do with the resource. You can cajole, influence, or merely suggest, but the customers should be making these calls.

Rain fade update

I posted previously about the wireless LAN bridge we installed from our Central Campus to our new leased office space, and I mentioned the problems we've had with rain fade.

Since my last post I learned that the radios nominally use the 80 GHz band, but since it's a full-duplex link, there are two diffferent frequencies in use: around 80 GHz in one direction and around 72 GHz in the other direction. Consequently, the signal strength in one direction isn't the same as the signal strength in the other direction. The graph I posted previously was for the stronger of the two.

Since my last post our vendor has repositioned the radios again and wrung out another 3 dB, which is great. Unfortunately, the link is dropping at -66 dBm, whereas the spec says it won't drop until somewhere in the -69 to -72 range. And according to Bridgewave, our radios tested to -69 in the factory before they were shipped. So we still have a problem.

Here is the signal strength graph from yesterday when in rained starting around noon and continued at varying intensities for the next 24 hours:

In all of that we had only one drop lasting around 30 seconds at 3:39 pm. You can't see the excursion below -65 because the monitoring system is on the other end of the link. (The monitor needs the link to be up to grab the signal strength from the other end.)

Now, one 30 second drop doesn't sound to bad considering it's been raining for 24 hours. But the problem is, if we had staff working here yesterday, every phone call in progress at 3:39 pm would have been dropped. Most likely every Shelby session would also have been dropped. That doesn't seem good enough to me. What do you think?

Three values

In reponse to Tony's post about how much to serve users ...

This is good stuff, Tony, but twelve values is probably too many. I try to simplify things down to three if at all possible.

1. Our default answer is "yes". We always hope to find a way to meet the user's need, even if it isn't in quite the way the user expressed the need or quite the solution the user proposed. See: http://appianway.blogspot.com/2006/01/our-default-answer-is-yes.html

2. Our mission is our user's mission. That is, when we're working with Children's Ministry, our mission is to teach kids about Jesus; when we're working with Congregational Care, our mission is to visit people in the hospital; etc. Rather than focusing on our own mission, we're focused on the mission of those we serve.

3. The one mission that is uniquely our own is information security. If we don't look after information security, no one will. We define information security as providing or denying information access as appropriate and ensuring that critical information can't be lost. If #1 or #2 above conflict with security, then we make a tradeoff.

We don't always achieve our internal IT Department goals (roll out the software update by Feb. 1, upgrade environmental monitoring in the data center by the end of the month, etc.), but we always get high marks from our user community. As far as I'm concerned that's the correct priority. And of course, we have to work very hard behind the scenes to make sure we don't work exclusively on short-term or user-visible things. Sometimes the best thing we can do for our user community is to work on something that takes a lot of resources and users never know about. But that's nothing fancy, it's just good, disciplined execution.

Fall Roundtable update

From the number of comments on my Fall IT Roundtable Invitation, it seems like we'll have a great group here in Kansas City for the Fall Roundtable. For now I just wanted to acknowledge all the responses. There will be a lot more information and discussion about the Fall event during the Spring Roundtable in Houston. We want to get feedback from the Spring Roundtable before we start posting more specifics.

Have a blessed Good Friday and Easter.

Rain fade

I posted earlier about the wireless LAN bridge we installed from our campus to our new leased office a couple of miles away.

These radios operate at such a high frequency (80 GHz) that nearly everything -- a tree, a dense flock of birds, an errant golf ball (okay, I just made that one up) -- is opaque to the signal. Consequently, they suffer from signal attenuation due to rain. This is a well-known phenomenon called "rain fade" that the RF engineers have to take into account in their designs.

We're having some trouble getting sufficient path clearance (getting the base signal high enough) to avoid a link drop during periods of intense rain. Right now the base level is approx. -44 dBm. We were expecting rain fade of approx. 16 dBm, which should make it bottom out around -63 dBm. According to Bridgewave, these radios are supposed to be able to maintain the 100 Mb/s link down to -72 dBm. Therefore, we should have approximately 9 dBm of safety margin.

But we have two problems. First, we're seeing rain fade of 22 dBm. Second, we're seeing the link drop when the signal goes below -65 dBm. With 6 dBm more rain fade than expected and the link dropping 7 dBm before it should, our 9 dBm of safety margin is shattered.

Here is a graph showing two times when we had brief periods of intense rain. Each time the link dropped for a few minutes and then came back up after the intense rain passed:

After the the second drop you can see other periods of rain fade that weren't intense enough to cause a drop. (The graph shows signal level in 100ths of a dBm. i.e. -4400 is -44 dBm.)

I gave a requirement of four 9s of availability (99.99% up time). Clearly, with the current base signal level, the amount of fade we're experiencing, and the link drop level, we're not going to be close to four 9s. Thankfully, we're installing this well ahead of staff moving into the office so we have time to improve the situation. Also, I'm grateful that we're installing in the Spring when we have rain every couple of days. Each time we make a change, we don't have to wait too long before a real-world test presents itself.

We're out there on the bleeding edge with this one! Please pray with us that this wireless LAN bridge story has a happy ending.

GodTube mocked in Wired

Did anyone else notice this Wired blog post mocking GodTube?

There are many things swirling in my mind about this:

1. Does it make sense to have "Christian" versions of popular, secular web sites, or does it make more sense to proclaim the good news on the secular sites themselves? John Brownlee, the writer of the post, gets at question when he says, "What is disturbing about GodTube is that it is an observable microcosm of the way that fundamentalist Christians have shut themselves off from any outside perspective." Where is the line between being "in" the world but not "of" it?

2. John does us a favor by saying what many others also must be thinking. Doesn't this help us gain insight into the mindset of secular humanists and atheists? We can't possibly present the good news persuasively without knowing the views of our hearers.

3. Also facinating are the comments at the end of the post. Clearly John struck a nerve because many people wanted to react to what he said -- both echoes of John's ideas as well as thoughtful Christian responses.

Network and server monitoring

We are in the process of taking our network management up to the next level. Our server and network infrastructure has gotten sufficiently large and complex that we need to keep a much closer eye on what is happening. We need to be able to monitor resources, applications, and errors. We need a way to alarm, for example, when a server, switch, or application is down or when a resource gets to a critical range.

We're currently evaluating What's Up Gold. I also recently heard about Splunk. Do any of you have any thoughts on either of these or something else we should evalutate?

Wireless LAN bridge

We are preparing to move 40 staff to an office building a couple of miles from the church. For the last several years those staff have worked out of a temporary building for which the temporary use permit is now expiring. So how do you connect 40 remote staff to your LAN? If you have a clear line-of-sight, a great option is to use a wireless LAN bridge.

Here are pictures taken yesterday as our vendor performed alignment of the integrated radio/antenna units. These are 80 GHz (millimeter wave) radios that are capable of 1 Gb/s full-duplex, but we got the version that is rate-limted to 100 Mb/s.

Radio on roof of office building, pointed towards the church. The steel wall in front is a "penthouse" that hides roof-top air handlers an other equipment. The mast is mounted to steel girders supporting the penthouse.

Close up of back of radio with volt meter showing signal strength.

Looking over the top of the radio toward the church building, 1.7 miles away.

Close up taken from the office building with black arrow showing the location of the radio on the roof of the church building.

Radio on roof of church building. The mast is held by a 4-point mount and weighed down by concrete blocks so roof penetration isn't required. This location was chosen for maximum wind protection (air handling unit to the right; roof parapet to the left). It also happens to be right next to a roof access hatch.

Ian (our network admin) with his shiny new radio!

Jay, the lead installer for our vendor, tweaks the alignment by turning nuts on the mount while looking at his volt meter.

Jay relays meter readings to his co-worker on the roof of the other building.

On this end the radio is connected by fiber.

Close up taken from the church building with white arrow showing the location of the radio on the roof of the office building.

Is redundant more reliable?

Pete Whiting, in a guest post on Joel Dehlin's blog, has some insights into the perils of complexity. This is good food for thought as we plan our server virtualization project at Resurrection, which we have scheduled for implementation in May. I particularly agree with Pete's point about isolating/avoiding tight coupling between services. For example, it's much better if an application is dependent only on one server, than if it requires two (or more) servers to be able to operate. With virtualization, we are making it a priority to gather everything a particular application needs onto a single virtual server, which will be able to run on either of two redundant physical servers. This architecture provides the benefits of redundancy without introducing unnecessary interdependence.

A Long Overdue Thank-You

Thanks Tony for your outstanding hospitality during my visit to Perimeter Church back in December with Mark Stephenson. Please offer my long overdue thanks to the rest of your team as well. Our tour of Perimeter Church's facilities was amazing. God has blessed the church with an innovative spirit that is never satisfied with past accomplishments. The oldest part of the building is only 15 years old, but already many parts have been purposed and repurposed, designed and redesigned, modeled and remodeled numerous times as the church’s needs have grown and changed. That kind of passionate pursuit of ministry warms my heart and re-energizes me.

Speaking of open source

Scoble posted today about the Viacom-Google lawsuit. He says Viacom loses by winning. YouTube, which is owned by Google, wins by losing. It will be a few years before we know, but I hope he's right.

Open Source Kingdom

Mark Batterson posted recently about the kingdom impact of freely sharing creative ideas. Here's hoping Mark's vision spreads to decision-makers in other congregations. The Church should be the greatest open source community in the world.

The DST Saga Continues (with a happy ending, we think?)

Tony has been blogging about various Daylight Savings Time issues at Perimeter Church here, here, and here. We, too, have had some serious headaches with this. I commented on one of Tony's posts saying that we couldn't get the Exchange Calendar Update tool to work. Tony generously put the question out to IT Discuss and we got a response from Jason Hand of Walk Through the Bible. Thanks Jason, but unfortunately it didn't help.

So ... Yesterday, when everything was going horribly wrong ;-) Ian, our network administrator, found someone at Microsoft who could help us. He posted a full explanation of what happend here. Turns out even the developer at Microsoft who wrote the tool couldn't get it to work in our case. In the end he threw up his hands and had Ian do a manual workaround to the front-end of the process that allowed the rest of it to run successfully.

Things have finally settled down here. We have only a few, minor issues being reported today. DST - was it fun for you?

Fall IT Roundtable Invitation

I was part of a group of IT leaders from very large churches that met a couple of times a year for three years or so. The group (which never had a name other than “megachurch IT group”) included Mike Gold of Willow Creek, Terry Chapman of Fellowship Church, Vic Mollett of Southland Christian Church, Eric Busby of Saddleback Church, and others. When last we met in May of 2005 I told the group I would host the next meeting here at Church of the Resurrection in the Kansas City area in 2006. Unfortunately, I got slammed last year with workload and staff turnover issues so I wasn't able to make it happen. I recently exchanged e-mail with Mike Gold about renewing my invitation to host the group here and suggested merging the group with the Church IT Roundtable. He was very supportive and hoped to be able to attend and invite the old gang to join the Roundtable.

Accordingly, we would like to invite you to come to Kansas City for the Fall Roundtable October 3-4, which is right before Leadership Institute, our biggest conference of the year. After the Roundtable you could stay for Leadership Institute if you’re so inclined. I spoke with Tony Dye about getting this on the agenda for discussion at the Spring Roundtable to determine the level of interest. To get the conversation started, please leave a comment here and let me know if this sounds good.

National Church IT Association?

If you read Jason Powell’s blog, you already know about his hope to create some sort of national church IT association. (Tony has arranged for Phill Martin of NACBA to come to the Spring Roundtable to speak about this.) Now as for me, I strongly prefer the roundtable format for meeting with and learning from other church IT leaders. I worry that formalizing and scaling up what we’re doing into a national association would result in losing the powerful, peer-to-peer sharing of the roundtable format. I also worry that we’ll discover even the 25-30 people expected to attend the Spring Roundtable will be too many for everyone to fully participate. So what to do?

Fall Roundtable Format

Now here’s where it gets really exciting (we think?!) or maybe even crazy. For the last couple of years I have been meeting informally with church IT leaders here in the Kansas City area such as Mike Mayfield of Pleasant Valley Baptist Church. I suspect many of you have had similar meetings with other church IT leaders in your own cities. Perhaps some of you have already held roundtables in your cities. This makes me wonder if the best way for us to scale up would be to have roundtables in cities across the country and then link them technologically.

What if we made a first effort at this idea for the Fall Roundtable? What if we limit attendance here in Kansas City to 15-20 people and find some great way to link in roundtable groups from other cities? This idea is partially inspired by the Willow Creek Leadership Summit that brings together church leaders from around the world. We’re imagining some kind of “un-conference” that retains the strengths of peer-to-peer sharing but is scalable to involve many more people than you can fit around one table. We would like for everyone to be able to see/hear each other and use their own laptops to annotate/live blog the discussion and have side conversations. We’re not even close to figuring out how to do this from either a facilitation or technical standpoint, but one idea is to use Adobe Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze). Whatever the mechanism is, we would need to fully test both the technology and the method of facilitation prior to the meeting. And, no doubt, we’d learn a great deal from doing this once. At that point we would know either a) this works; b) this works but needs to be tweaked/improved; or c) it doesn’t/can’t work.

Please comment and let me know your thoughts or post on your own blog and link back to this post.

Don't you be doing that church hop

Perry Noble points us to Steven Furtick blasting church hoppers/church shoppers like I've never seen it done before. I was fired up by his comments. On the other hand, I have good friends who have struggled with finding the right place where God is calling them to worship, grow, and serve. There's a line between a genuine spiritual struggle and a crassly consumerist attitude toward church.

The best approach for churches is to reach out and welcome everyone with all of their experiences, sins, mistakes, bad hair, doubts, fears, body odor, struggles, biases, broken relationships, addictions, questions, emotions, mental illness, inappropriate behavior ... and yes, even warped attitudes towards church. We start with people wherever they are. And then, pay close attention here, we must rely on the power of the Holy Spirit to work through our teaching, worship, service, and deep Christian community to transform them. No doubt some of those people have been church goers for years, yet they haven't learned even the basics of Christian discipleship. Instead of giving up and calling them out, let's call them up to a richer, fuller, deeper understanding of what Jesus asks of them. To be clear, I'm talking about starting with people where they are, but not being complacent about letting them stay there.

Web Software Developer position open

We're seeking a highly-skilled web software developer for a challenging and fulfilling position at The Church of the Resurrection (Kansas City area). Work in a high-energy, innovative environment with other talented technologists. BS in computer science or related field or equivalent experience required. Minimum of 2 years professional experience with the LAMP platform and 2 years professional experience with the .NET platform. Reports to the Director of Information Technology. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to serve Christ with your software development skills. To apply, please e-mail Cork Kurlbaum (our uber-volunteer/professional IT recruiter) for immediate consideration.

Five hot technologies for 2007

Yesterday Computerworld published an interesting article predicting five technologies will be hot over the next 12 months:

1. Ruby on Rails - web application development framework

2. NAND Flash drives - solid state mass storage with big enough capacity to substitute for small hard drives and 100x the performance

3. Ultra-Wideband (UWB) - short range wireless at 200x the speed of Bluetooth

4. Grid Computing - rent a data center by the gigabyte such as Amazon's S3 service

5. Advanced CPU architectures on higher-density chips

Y2K7

I just spent all day yesterday, along with a co-worker, tracking down one of the more heinous time calculation bugs I've ever seen. If you're a programmer, you probably already know about the Daylight Savings Time change that is occurring in this year of 2007. This is sending a shock wave of problems through the IT industry on a scale of which we probably haven't seen since Y2k. Everyone is having to update code that calculates when DST begins and ends.

In short, Microsoft is either in a very tight spot, or they screwed up big time. With the new calculation of DST, any year previous to 2007 now has the potential to show the wrong time! Here is a quick example.

This page is using JavaScript within the viewers browser to calculate dates. You will notice that if you are viewing this page from Vista, or a Linux based OS, that all the dates are displayed as expected. If you're on a Windows XP or earlier OS, the middle two dates will show as being in DST when they should not be:

Wed Mar 15 00:00:00 CDT 2006 <- Um, not quite yet actually. CDT doesn't start until April 02, 2006 02:00.

This is because MS OS' previous to Vista can only store one set of DST rules. So when you installed that cool new patch that fixes 2007 and future dates, you break every year previous to it. Nice. Granted this only crops up in past dates between the previous DST starting time, and the new one. I.e. between 2007 and 2006, this is between March 11 and April 2. See another conversation on this.

This is going to cause problems until it is fixed. Hopefully MS can get us something quickly, but depending on how deeply the OS is affected by this - they could have a serious issue on their hands.

Kathy Sierra on user happiness

Kathy has an excellent post today on what happens when the "policies and procedures tail" wags the "user happiness dog." I continually remind my IT team here at Resurrection that our job is to serve users, not the other way around. My team has a lot of ideas about how to increase our efficiency, which I think is great so long as it doesn't make things more diffcult for those we serve. Do you advocate for users in your organization?

Skypecast - Cooler than I Thought

I came across the Skypecasts beta directory on Sunday, I don't even remember how. I have been aware of Skypecast for quite a while now through Jason Powell's blog, and had always thought of it as an alternative to hold on-line meetings. I was blown away to find a directory of open discussions taking place about all sort of subjects!

I clicked on a "Join this Skypecast" link for one of the entries, and found myself listening in on a Arabic speaking discussion as though I was standing in a public square in Saudi Arabia and just walked up to a group of people, listening to the conversation. This is wild!

I began thinking, the potential of this is huge. This is not just free conference calling, this is a globally accessible public forum. If you want to hold a discussion on any subject all you need is to download Skype, advertise the discussion in whatever manner you chose, and host and moderate it. The barrier to holding a discussion is broadband Internet access, a computer, a headset with microphone, and the knowledge to get Skype installed and a Skypecast created. This is exactly the flat world that Thomas L. Friedman discusses in The World is Flat. I found people hosting their own sociological and political discussions, some of them with very controversial subjects, with people from all over the world participating.

Think about that for a moment. If you were to mash the technical ability of Skypecasts up with the right social networking service, you could bring a great deal of the worlds population closer together than ever before. Say you're a student and you are writing a paper on antibiotic resistance. You've got a few questions that you're not able to answer through the Internet resources, so you set up a Skypecast for next Wednesday evening and publish this event through a social network service, asking for help from any experts on the subject. On Wednesday you get to talk with a couple other people writing similar papers and you all share resources, and in the middle of that you get a leading expert join in that has seen your advertisement for the discussion and now multiple people benefit.

The potential uses for churches and small groups really excites me. Imagine a globally diverse small group that anyone can be a part of, or just listen in on. A pastor can host a discussion on applying the scripture to your life, and interact with real people with real questions in a moderated format. I think these sorts of technologies will ultimately re-define the roles of evangelism and caring in the physical church to include the global community. The phrase, 'your neighbor,' will not mean what it used to mean.

I haven't posted here much, so to reiterate why this interests me so much, I am very driven to get churches on-line. By that, I mean encouraging churches to utilize web ministry and enabling them to use technology for ministry and evangelism. Why? Because I strongly believe that on-line evangelism will be highly important in reaching future Christians, and that God has many great things in store for technologies such as Skypecast and social network services.

United Methodists Reaching Postmodernists

A disappointing thought crossed my mind as I drove home early Saturday morning from a late night out. (The late night BTW was much less harmless than it sounds. My wife and I attended a high school musical in support of a friend, and we stayed up late conversing about different subjects.)

What if, on the whole, the United Methodist church can not reach postmodernists? I mean simply can not do it. What if the things that make a worship United Methodist are exactly those things the postmodernist revolts from?

I began thinking about the church reaching the postmodernist, and recalled conversations that I've either witnessed or been a part of. They all go something like this:

UM Pastor: "You say that the service doesn't speak to you, but give me an example of how would you change it?"

Postmodernist: "There needs to be more music. It needs to be cool, not boring. Hip! It needs to be more emotional and less institutional."

UM Pastor: "But those are not specific examples of what you would change about the service today. I understand what you said, but I don't understand how you want us to do that."

The conversation usually goes down hill from there, with the postmodernist trying desperately to explain what hip and cool means and how they could be so very moved if it were done better. Both parties walk away having no idea what the other meant.

I've heard at least one pastor explain this as, "They aren't able to explain what they want." That baffles me, as I'm pretty sure I just saw human beings who speak the same language converse about what they want. This ends up sounding like the modernist saying they are open and willing to improve the worship experience, as long as they don't have to change anything about it at all. Why can't you just be happy with the way it is now?

To me it comes down to this: The answer that modernists are looking for is which portions of the service today need be changed to reach postmodernists, without changing or losing the structure of the worship? What the postmodernist is trying to answer politely - everything. That being said, I'm sure there is a middle ground. I believe that churches that are successful in reaching postmodernists are those finding ways to say yes rather than no, and still hold in their hearts the significance of denominational traditions. Those that tie the significance of a worship service too tightly to the rigid procedural tradition may have a really tough time reaching postmodernists.

Where does your church apply the significance of worship? The process, or the expression? Are they doing church, or being the church?

Mac vs. PC

"As a Mac user, I wish Microsoft would run an Apple-like ad about the process by which Mac users get service for broken hardware. It would be really hard for Apple to respond, because their system for dealing with broken hardware is itself horribly broken. They need serious incentives to fix this." - Dave Winer

Just last week my team at Resurrection and I were joking about exactly this idea. (We support both PCs and Macs.) The Apple commercials are terribly funny, no doubt. But Apple would have you believe that their stuff never breaks. In our parody commercial, Mac would be broken and a poor, hapless user would be striken by the question, "How do I fix this thing?" PC would answer, "I don't know." Then the user would ask, "Who DOES know?" Followed by nothing but dead silence.

When PC is broken, we call our friendly Dell service person, who comes out a day or two later and fixes it. It's painless and nearly effortless. When Mac is broken, we are faced with a small number of bad options, all of which will cost us a lot more time and brain damage than calling Dell. Surely Dave Winer and us aren't the only ones who have faced this issue. Does Apple care?

Visual communication

I've posted before about the importance of visual communication in our world. Unfortunately, I've spent my whole life honing my ability to communicate with words. That skill will be nearly obsolete by the end of my life. Seth Godin points us to an example of how ordinary people can use video technology to communicate. Wouldn't it be cool to use this video to teach church staff about web technology? Would it be even cooler for all of us to learn how to communicate this way?

From Vision to Reality

This past week in our bi-annual all staff meeting Adam, our senior pastor, said something that coalesced a reoccurring thought I'd had for a while. He mentioned a list of large projects our church had either completed, or moved from the idea stage to a living process. Then he suggested that to do this repeatedly and continually succeed you have to go through a strategic planning stage. That's a simple statement right? So now - everybody go do that and succeed much more often .... If only it were that easy.

I'm sure that statement is in a thousand books and repeated by even more people, but the reason I'm blogging about it today is that it seems to be one of those statements where the absorption and understanding of it are worlds apart from the action and ability to perform it. Why is that? Is it simply a factor of the human condition, or is a skill that can be learned and honed? I would lean toward the latter.

Pastor Andrzej from
Katowice, Poland

The idea that strategic planning is a critical ingredient of any vision to reality project is at first too simple to be so profound. One of the questions I have been asked on multiple occasions, after people learn I work at Church of the Resurrection, is "Why is Resurrection so successful?" The last time I was asked this it was from pastor Andrzej while I was visiting him in Katowice, Poland. Pastor Andrzej has been a United Methodist pastor for more than 25 years and is currently positioned in a thriving church with a congregation more than 100 strong. To put this in perspective, the United Methodist presence in all of Poland is less than 4,500 people.
Pastor Andrzej, spoken in my poor English as "ahhn-jay," is a person who comes off very calm, with waters just underneath the surface that are roaring to bring God's Word to the non religious.

Up until now, my answer to the above question has been these things, in short: One is leading with prayer. Another is effective leadership, and the last is an uncommon hive of people who possess a drive from within to do things with excellence. These are still accurate, but what I may now add to those is effective strategic planning.

I think if there were a great suggestion for pastors striving for success in ministry, it would be to educate yourself in strategic planning. When Adam spoke about this at our all staff meeting, Andrzej came back to my memory. He and I had discussed the importance of prayer, and asking for God's guidance. No one should underestimate this, but God rarely lifts those of us up who are sitting back waiting for Him to take the wheel and drive.

It made me wonder what programs or resources we have set up for our local pastors, as well as our International pastors. I couldn't find much searching through Google, though it may have been the keywords I was using. My co-worker Chuck, who you can see in this post's picture, recommended this book by Kennon L. Callahan.

Would anyone else who has read this recommend it? Does anyone know of other resources out there that focus on strategic planning in the church?

Nerds on retreat!

We got out of the office for a day-long retreat yesterday. Most of my IT team was there:




Clockwise starting from left (goofy guy with Texas Tech t-shirt):
Chuck Russell - Internet Communications Director
Jeremy Grabrian - Desktop Support Specialist
Ian Beyer - Network Administrator
George Smiley - Desktop Support Technician (part time)
Brian Slezak - Software Developer
Leo Johns - web consultant (part time)

Oh yeah, and the end of the table with a laptop, a flat-panel monitor, and no one sitting there - that's me. ;-)

Fun With Statistics

So I am perusing the new Umc.org and looking at findachurch - which has been vastly improved - see Resurrections Page here. I decided to play around with the Advanced Search functions - mostly because I couldn't type in 66062 - my zip code, and see Resurrection come up - that's crazy do you know how many resurrection people don't live in the Church's zip code - I'll tell you - most of them, anyway tangent averted back to my point I found some interesting stuff when i searched for churches by size. Here are my results (More than 1000 means between 1000 and 2000 etc)

33 United Methodist Churches with more than 2000 in attendance
136 United Methodist Churches with more than 1000 in attendance
649 United Methodist Churches with more than 500 in attendance
3093 United Methodist Churches with more than 200 in attendance
5348 United Methodist Churches with more than 500 in attendance
8746 United Methodist Churches with more than 50 in attendance
10905 United Methodist Churches with more than 20 in attendance
4648 United Methodist Churches with less than 20 in attendance

So 818 who have made it to 500 + and 3900 approximately who have made it over the 200 barrier. Interesting stuff. Of course since our worship attendance is over 8000 now and they have us listed at 6300 (This is GCFA's fault not UMC.org's by the way) - I dont know how accurate those counts are but there probably pretty close.

Chuck

Who is using the new Blogger?

Who out there is using the upgraded version of Blogger? Is it cool? Should we upgrade?

MailFrontier is nearly perfect again

Last week we finally had time to focus on our spam problem. With some assistance from our friendly SonicWall tech support person, we installed a software update and tweaked our configuration. Turns out that at some point we white-listed everything from cor.org, no doubt to address a false positive situation, but that was a bad idea - too much spam is spoofed to come from your own domain. With the new software and the tweaks, we're back to nearly perfect, and just in time for the long Christmas-New Year's break when many of our staff take vacation. Almost no spam is getting through to our users' inboxes. Wee hoo!

SonicWall, I owe you an apology. When properly configured, SonicWall Mail Security is every bit as good as the spam filter built-in to Outlook 2003.

Guy Kawasaki talks about evangelism - the Christian kind

In case you missed it, I found it very interesting to see Guy Kawasaki reveal a bit of his personal faith in this recent blog post. In the post he includes this link to presentations at a church leadership conference in Hawaii this Fall. I'm glad to know Guy is interested in the original meaning of evangelism and not just his borrowed use of the term.