General Work

Boy it has been a long time since my last post. I knew it had been awhile but didn’t realize it had been a few days short of a full year. Makes me feel like a bit of a failure as this was something I was hoping to do every month or so.

So much has happened over the last year. Things at HDC have been, interesting. Like most churches we are working with a tighter budget. And like many churches we are still trying to maintain the status quo. Unlike many churches we have even been trying (and thankfully succeeding) to expand our ministry.  Early last year we launched a new campus in the “next door” city, which is nearly a 30-minute drive from our main campus.

I think we were all a little leery of launching a new campus in a recession but I think everybody on staff would agree it has been a success. I stopped by last weekend to see how things were going with the iPad check-in system and was amazed at how full the place was. Before the second service started I helped the campus director setup every single one of their extra chairs in preparation. It was pretty cool to see so many people at a video-campus that was less than a year old.

Since we haven’t been able to spend money on new purchases we have been working like mad to do near-zero-cost upgrades. Most of it has been software related (OS upgrades, rolling out some custom software that we have been sitting on etc.) as well as Arena related.

Arena & Phones

One of the things we did was a major upgrade to our phone system (Asterisk on Linux) and then tie the CDR (Call Detail Records) into Arena.

Jon and David over at CCV wrote what turned out to be a great framework for phone system integration. Because of the limited documentation my initial response to it was undeservedly cold. David was kind enough to make their internal integration code available to the community and that shed a lot of light on the situation. With a few tweaks for our specific setup we were able to get the CDR integration working in pretty short order. This allows us to see who a person (probably) talked to on the phone. It should make our secretaries lives a lot easier when dealing with those “I’m not sure who I talked to, but could I talk to them again?” calls.

At the same time we upgraded our Asterisk installation.  This was way, way past due. We had originally setup the Asterisk server nearly 3 and a half years before (it ran as our voicemail system for about a year before we switched our phones over to it). As such, it was running a very old OS install (so old they were not providing updates to it anymore) as well as running 2 major versions behind on the Asterisk version. This was a pretty big update. Jumping so many versions took some heavy documentation reading to make sure nothing broke.

We are currently in the process of rolling out a new application to our desktop computers. It provides a small phone icon in the Mac Menu bar at the top of the screen which gives the user access to see the phone’s call history records without having to mess with trying to navigate on the phone’s 2-line display. It also interfaces with Arena to do caller-id lookup and show a popup to the user of who is (likely) calling them. I say likely because with home phone numbers a single phone number might match a number of different person records. We still haven’t figured out how to deal with that so right now it requires a single match only. We don’t really want to end up displaying a list of 6 people the phone number might match.

Computer Management

I found a new software system called munki that is designed to provide package installation and upgrade management in a centralized Mac environment. I am in the process of replacing our own in-house system with this one as it is open-source and actively supported by the community developing it. In simplest terms, it works like Apple’s Software Update system to check with a central repository and see if any new packages or upgraded packages are available. It also supports removing software automatically. One of the nice things about this system, and a major improvement over our old system, is that it supports different software catalogs for different computers. So for example, our Communications team might get one catalog that includes the full Adobe CS5 suite and everybody else only gets Photoshop. As I said, we are in the middle of making this switch. We have over 120 computers on campus. Takes some time.

Home

Things at home have been cold the past few months! But thankfully not as cold as the last few years. Over the summer last year I purchased a wood burning stove and installed it myself. I was at-least smart enough to begin working at the start of summer. Although that did make for some fun explanations to inquiring people who wondered why I was installing a wood-burning stove in the middle of Summer. Re-doing my garage may have been a lot of heavy lifting, but installing a wood burning stove yourself puts a whole new meaning in the term “home improvement”. It probably would have been an easier job if I had not let myself get carried away.

On top of building a hearth for the stove, tiling the wall around the hearth, cutting through the ceiling, etc. to get the stove installed; I had decided that it was taking too much room in my living room. Therefore I made the obvious decision to rip out the small serving counter separating the kitchen from the living room. The floor under the counter was different than the rest of the kitchen floor. Oops. Again I made the obvious decision and decided to rip out the old linoleum and replace it with a wood floor. Whoever installed the linoleum must have thought using 5-times as much glue as recommended was a good idea. Oops.

However, I managed to get everything finished in early November (yes, I had said I started at the beginning of summer) and have been enjoying a much warmer house this winter. I still have a lot of work to do to keep the house warm (drafts, windows, etc.) but sitting in front of a roaring fire in a stove you installed yourself is very satisfying. Now if I could only remember where I put the marshmallows…

Future

I have plans to do a better job this year of posting both general helpful tips in my blog as well as full pages with information on how to make your life easier as an I.T. Administrator in a Macintosh environment. I do not call this a new years resolution as it really has nothing to do with a new year. I honestly didn’t realize how long it had been since I had even been to my own site. This has been something I have been telling myself I would do when I have time, and guess what? There will never be time unless I make the time. We’ll see how it goes!