Yesterday morning (Sunday) I had a nightmare scenario take place at church. We were scheduled to have a guest speaker (organization will remain nameless) speak to the congregation during the service in place of the sermon. Twenty minutes prior to the service I am in my office and the phone rings. I pick it up and it’s the guest speaker calling to say 1) she’s lost and can’t find the building and 2) asking whether I’m the tech guy and that she has a few videos she needs to show for her message. My stomach drops and I instantly remember how I’d truly considered staying in bed all day (have been dealing with a cold/laryngitis all week).

Ten minutes later she arrives (so now it’s about ten-til) and I’m handed a file folder full of DVDs and a manuscript with videos highlighted. Luckily for me, she wants three videos shown consecutively during one part and then two other videos shown consecutively a little later (so picture this, going through the menus on DVD discs trying to show one video after another while the whole congregation watches). My stomach takes a nosedive and I do a combination in my head between praying and swearing, unable to believe I’m supposed to make this work on ridiculously short-notice! I start thinking about what I can possibly do (remembering I am having serious issues with my main computer in my office and Windows has stopped recognizing all DVD drives) and suddenly it hits me, “try handbrake”. Handbrake is a nifty little program that rips DVDs. Most people use it for making copies of their purchased DVDs/Blu-Ray discs to play on a computer (or steal from Netflix) but I use it to occasionally rip conference DVDs for clients with it (a church might have a conference and send me ten DVDs from it that they want put on their website ASAP). The issue I have is I’m using ProPresenter on a four year old Mac laptop and I need the files to be properly optimized. I run to my office and go to the server remembering I have Handbrake installed there. I put a DVD in and am able to tell Handbrake I need a certain chapter and I see that it will rip to a M4V file – fantastic, that is a filetype compatible with ProPresenter and if the file isn’t too large, my computer should be able to handle it! I rip one and throw it on a thumb drive – take it upstairs and try it – BOOM! It works!

I quickly start ripping the rest and then discover one is not recognized — shoot, a bad disk! Unfortunately it’s after 10am now and the service has started — I run to the sanctuary and start running ProPresenter for the first couple songs – I know if I can get those first few songs done there’s a kid in the room who can run the rest, I just don’t want to leave the hard (and new) songs to him to manage. As I’m doing this, a lady in the congregation walks in and comes over to me – she hands me a CD and says, “I’m supposed to sing today, can you play track 4?” I take it (thinking, “why didn’t I get this earlier?”) and throw it in the CD player. Something tells me to check the output on the CD player — I look in the back and the audio cable is missing! I start digging around (in between song slide changes) and can’t find it anywhere. As sooon as the second song is done, I grab the kid and tell him to operate the comptuer – I grabbed a screwdriver and start taking apart the rack to get to where the audio input is for the CD player (converter box). I find it and discover there are no RCA jacks plugged in – Drat, I must’ve taken the CD player out and never returned them! I run to my office again, find a cord long enough and get the player plugged in. That frees me up to keep working on the DVD problem…

I proceed to run around the building trying the non-functioning DVD in multiple computers and DVD players trying to determine if the disk indeed is bad beyond salvage or not. Unable to get it working, I happen to mention the problem to my other tech guy and he offers to try it on his laptop — he puts it in his four year old Dell and the video starts playing (this is very odd, must be a pretty decent DVD reader in that laptop). Anyway, he cues it up and is able to play it with Windows Media Player. I get the rest of the videos (this is still happening during worship/announcements mind you) and am able to get it all set (crossing fingers and praying).

SOMEHOW, by the time the special musical number comes on everything seems to be set. And indeed, by the incomprehensible grace of God everything worked pretty well. I did manage to accidentally start the CD on track 1 but I had selected “4″ on the remote so that’s a separate issue. The videos all worked flawlessly during the sermon too! In fact, it went so well the rest of the family hardly believed me when they asked why I’d looked so stressed out all morning – they said it was seamless (expect for the missed CD track of course).

This is a really long post and I feel like I’m rambling but I really just wanted to express these thoughts and thank God for his help. It was really a stressful morning and I was completely exhausted by the end of the service, but at the end of it all, the service went on and the message was conveyed. Mission accomplished, thanks, Lord!

I haven’t always been the best at backing things up.  I’ve always done it, but I haven’t always been consistent about doing it.  While I’ve never lost anything really important because of a disk crash, I’ve certainly come very lose.  I’m a big fan of off-site backup, and in fact, I do backup all my important files with Carbonite.  When it comes to general stuff though, backing up isn’t always convenient.  While I could backup everything on my hard drive to Carbonite, I choose not too because of the huge amounts of bandwidth it would take to do so — if I tried to recover a music library from an online backup site it would take DAYS!  This is where Karen’s comes in.  I have Karen’s running and set to simply make an exact copy of My Documents (or in the case of Windows 7, Documents, Music, Video, etc) onto a second hard drive every night.  While this does tend to build up lots of extra data over time (like files you’ve deleted and such), it’s also a complete, easy-to-access, full backup that I don’t have to worry about.  Ideally I would also be making a full backup on an external drive that I store off-site, but honestly, I’m not too worried about it as I do use Carbonite for the *Mission Critical* data.

Note that I am running this on Windows 7 Pro 64bit (more than one machine) without any problem.  There you have it, backup, backup, backup, backup!

Until last week!  Last weekend news broke that several thousand people logged in and discovered their inboxes completely wiped out.  Gone.  Empty.  Nothing left!  I immediately realized that I’d never even thought to back up my Gmail account because well, frankly, I assumed Google would take care of that.  So, I started looking around for ways to back it up.

There are two ways to go about this – getting a mail program (like Outlook or Thunderbird) and setting up a POP3 account that will then download all the mail into.  This is a fine option, except that you’ll end up with one more program running on your machine that hogs resources.  At the same time though, you could easily open a mail program once a week or so, let it download anything new, and then close it – that would work.

The other option (and the one I settled on for now) is to use a program like Gmail Backup.

Last week, we had a major snowstorm and got about 2 feet of snow in 8 hours — the county literally declared a snow emergency and ordered everyone off the roads expect for emergency vehicles.  Unbeknown  to us, our snowplow service had performed their duties and was dutifully plowing out the church parking lot all night — this was all well and good except for the fact that our ultra high-efficiency boilers have exhaust vents 3′ off the parking lot and the plow completely covered them with a huge mound of snow.  Because the exhaust vents were covered up, the boilers automatically shut down to protect themselves from damage.  It was only because we were snowed-in and unable to leave our house all day, that we randomly logged in and checked the temperatures at church and discovered the sanctuary close to 50 degrees (meaning the gymnasium was probably even lower and could soon have pipes freezing).  We were able to call a church member, who lives a block away from the church, and have him clean out the exhaust pipes and check everything — as soon as he did, the boilers both fired up and went back to normal.
As a result of that incident, I went through and set up all the alerts for notifying us whenever there’s a problem.  I had done that initially during installation but somewhere along the line turned it off during configuration (probably to avoid getting bombarded with 1000 emails).  Now the thermostats will email AND text message me whenever the temperature drops below 55 degrees anywhere in the building.  Lucky for me (sarcasm!), it happened this morning at 3am.  When I woke up at 5am for work, I immediately saw the text messages on my phone and pulled up the monitoring website to discover once again, temperatures were getting very low (it’s 14 degrees outside, and the temperature is supposed to drop to ZERO today).  I got my act together and got over to church as soon as I could.  The exhaust vents were clear but both boilers were shut down with some kind of thermostat error.  I was able to manually reset them, check the pipes everywhere to make sure they were getting heat, and save the day!  There again, if we didn’t have the Proliphix units controlling our temperatures, we would have had NO idea, for potentially a day or two, that there was a serious problem.  Yes, we will have to do further research to figure out what made the boilers both shut down (there’s a problem somewhere) but at least we can know soon after they do go down, long before anything is able to freeze.

You might be thinking, “I’d really like to get some of those thermostats but they’re just so expensive.”  I can understand that, but let me just say, ours have paid for themselves this winter — we likely would have had a burst pipe last week had it not been for these things — and that would have cost us a LOT more money and frustration!

Thank you, Proliphix IMT 350c/w and Uniphy Remote Management!!!!

Yesterday (Saturday), I spent upwards of 10 hours ripping, editing, rendering, and uploading 14 DVDs worth of information from a recent conference to a website (have been working on it since Thanksgiving Day).  That had to happen because that project was overdue AND because I now need to focus on the video/media needed for my church’s Christmas Program in two weeks!

I hit the first snag tonight when I went to capture the video from this morning (during Sunday School, kids were recording scenes and clips for the program) and realized they didn’t use a microphone to record sound, while in a mostly-empty classroom — CAN YOU SAY EEECCCHHHOOOO!  Yes, all the footage is pretty much worthless, and now I’m going to have to figure something out right-quick.

It’s the most stressful time of the year! 

Dropbox.  This is an awesome online service that sets up a shared “folder” on your computer that actually resides on their servers.  Therefore, when you save a document in the Dropbox folder on your computer, it’s instantly and automatically synced with the Dropbox server.  When you install Dropbox on your computers and mobile devices (I also have it running on the iPhone & Blackberry), you can have instant access to any files you’re working on.  The one downside to this, over a flash drive, is that it’s over the internet, so unless you want to sit and wait for the upload/download process, it’s really best suited for small files.  Word documents, a photo or two, and text documents (which I use for lists and emails I’m editing), are the majority of what I use it for, and for those things, it’s wonderful!

Filezilla.  This is an FTP program that I’ve been using for several years.  I used to use WS-FTP, and actually used to pay for the yearly updates.  At one point, I had some trouble with WS_FTP crashing and so I decided to try Filezilla.  Almost immediately I realized it was a much better program (and it was free)!  On every machine I work on, I install Filezilla and then import an XML file that contains the sites I’m currently working with.  Every so often I import a current XML file in all of the machines so that they’re all up-to-date with my project websites.  Filezilla does not take up many system resources and does everything I need it to do, very easily, so I’m happy with it.

LogMeIn.  This site is a real God-send.  It makes logging into remote computers so much EASIER than trying to use Remote Desktop or any other service.  I probably have over 10 computers that it’s installed on and any time I need a file, or make a change to the machine, or anything else, it takes literally <20 seconds to be on it.  This service is also great for working over public wi-fi or a possibly insecure network without having to worry about your sensitive data.  Let’s say you want to do some online banking from Starbucks.  Normally, I’d be really hesitant to do that because you don’t know how secure the connection is, but with LogMeIn, you can securely log into another computer and do your work on that machine (maybe it’s one at home or an office with a secure connection).  The data passed between your computer and LogMeIn is encrypted, so you don’t have to worry about credit card numbers, or any other potentially sensitive information being seen by anyone else.

Xmarks.  Firefox is the only browser I use for several reasons.  First of all, it’s fast and uncluttered, unlike IE.  Second, because of a plugin called Adblock that blocks hundreds of thousands of advertisements from downloading and displaying on websites.  Third, because of Xmarks.  Xmarks is a little synchronization program that syncs all your bookmarks across any computers it’s installed on.  I don’t have tons of bookmarks, but I have a set of ones I use a lot, and I’m really picky about organizing them.   With Xmarks I can do that, and have them organized on any computer I work on simply by installing the program and logging in to my Xmarks account.  I guarantee if you use more than one computer, you will love this program!

Evernote.  I just started using this a couple weeks ago, but so far it’s really nice to use.  I like the fact that instead of saving a document on the machine, your only option is to “sync” — so you never forget to sync later (which I might forget if I was typing in Word or Notepad).  It does act a little flaky sometimes – have had trouble with certain keystrokes pulling it up when I didn’t want it, but assuming that works out, I will probably use it for blog and email drafts.

GIMP.  I am a Photoshop user, but at something like $600 for a single copy of it, I only have one copy (and it’s ancient because I got it back in my second year of college).  Therefore, I only have PS running on my main computer at church – the powerhouse I do for any hardcore editing or projects.  On everything else, it’s challenging to edit images quickly, but of the available options, GIMP is my favorite.  It’s slow, and it’s weird (compared to PS), but it does do a reasonable job of image editing/cropping/saving/whatever and you can’t argue with the price!  A lot of people use and like Photoshop Elements, but personally, I find it to be too consumer-oriented, and it takes me longer to do things in it than in Photoshop.

Google Talk.  As a longtime Gmail fanboy, Google Talk is the best way to use Google Chat as well as getting new mail notifications.  When installed, Google Talk pops up a small (Outlook type) box in the corner of the screen whenever a new email comes in.  For chat duties, Google Talk (although it doesn’t handle video) is the nicest way to communicate with the service — I don’t like being stuck in the browser.

So, there’s my list!

All of this is because Mr. Jobs is an expert at creating buzz and generating intense excitement for separating people from their cash. He knows how to design, package, advertise, and secretly work on new things in a way that draws interest and promotes conversation.  And I can’t help but ask myself in all this, “why can’t the Church do this?”

This is a site that I find endless ideas and inspiration from, http://www.creativemyk.com/ CreativeMYK is a community of church graphics types who both post things to get feedback as well as post things for other churches to use, for free!  I’ve used quite a few of their free graphics (you have to look carefully, there are only certain sections of the site that you can legally use in your church), and many of them are fantastic!
Check them out!