Streaming My Consciousness

Here’s a neat new idea from Terry Storch and the folks at LifeChurch… It’s called “YouVersion” and launches this week. The Bible has just gone Web 2.0! I can see some really cool potential if I can use this from my smartphone and add notes and commentary during sermons, and if preachers can feed XML with tags and scripture references. Hello, mashups!

TOTH: Jim Walton @ Church Tech Matters

I’m really starting to loathe support calls to vendors.

I’m still scratching my head wondering who came up with the idea in the first place that it was a smart customer move to send technical support overseas, and have your customers try to explain complex technical issues over a bad phone connection to someone whose native language isn’t English, and who speaks English with a thick accent. I know how frustrating it is for non-anglophones to try and explain complex technical things to me, why did the industry suddenly decide it was a good idea to make this standard customer policy?

I can tell that a lot of these support agents (especially at Microsoft) are very technically skilled, but there’s the problem of accurately communicating the actual problem to them, which prolongs the process significantly (in the case of Microsoft, up to several hours!).

Support from SonicWall has taken a definite turn for the worse of late. After you get through the ticket dispatcher (who is usually based in the US) and have your ticket submitted (BTW, Sonicwall, how hard can it possibly be to get my e-mail address right? I spell it out for you every time and yet you still manage to make it undeliverable!), you end up with some second-line tech who still seems to be operating off a script. Any time you ask something remotely complex, it’s back into holdland while he goes and asks someone who actually knows what he’s doing (or she, especially at Microsoft, where the hardcore brains all seem to be women!)

As for VMWare, it’s always an adventure in global roulette. It’s a nice distraction from India, and their overseas support folks are usually extremely fluent in English.

I understand the need to offshore your support if you offer it for free, but when I (or my employer) pay big bucks for support contracts or on a per-incident basis, I expect something other than the lowest overseas bidder.

• The New York Times talks about Vanu Bose and his quest to make software-defined radios ubiquitous
• Intel brings mashups to the masses
• DHS is starting to look a lot like James Bond’s world…

A number of years ago, somewhere around 9/11, I had a number of discussions with my friend Dwight Ordway, a fellow church geek, about equipping a communications trailer for disaster response. Dwight currently runs Trinity Technology in Ministry, an organization that is providing real time voice and data communications capability to missionaries around the world through a BGAN satellite network that currently covers about 95% of the planet. (Sure beats the typical 6-month delay in getting mail back from some of these remote missionaries in unreached parts of the world!)

Meanwhile, COR is in the process of equipping a disaster response trailer as part of their recently launched “Reach and Restore” missions ministry (we gave Greensburg a new fire truck. how cool is that?). This morning, I had an interesting conversation with Ed, one of the guys coordinating the trailer project, regarding communications capability. It wasn’t something they had given much though to beyond a box of FRS walkie-talkies.

I suggested to Ed that an effective communications platform could help them leverage that asset even more in affected communities, and started tossing some ideas his way:

An extensible mast on the trailer that would contain:
- a repeater-based 2-way comms system that would reach further, and also be capable of an all-channel broadcast in case of emergency
- data connectivity back to home for access to databases on available resources or notifying the “mothership” of immediate supply needs (know anyone in strategic or tactical airlift?
- Link back to the internet via a 3G data network or BGAN where 3G isn’t available
- local wi-fi for field teams with handhelds/PDAs or SIP phones
- a low-power FM station to broadcast information into the immediate area (could be as simple as an audio loop off an iPod)
- small phone bank/e-mail station for locals to communicate with loved ones outside the area

From an IT standpoint, I can also see equipping this team with a hardened laptop that has navigation capability and the ability to monitor weather conditions, and possibly some sort of GIS capability for effectively deploying teams. (Naturally, we’d need a few coordinator types trained on using it!)

Their primary target area is within a 50-60 mile radius of the KC metro area for things like ice storms (the trailer will be equipped with chainsaws and other such tools), but to also make the resource available for teams to go into places like Greensburg or the Gulf Coast, so the resource doesn’t sit idle. Being able to notify relief agencies like the Red Cross that we have this capability ready to move in on less than 24 hours’ notice could be hugely beneficial to those agencies as well.

What are your thoughts on how we can help these guys equip this thing? I envision something that we can roll into the area, fire up a generator (or even solar/wind power?), stick the mast up, and we’re online within an hour. It would be nice if we could get some support from communications people like Sprint, radio people like AFR for radio, and maybe even some type of federal support (DHS for funding and coordination with relief agencies, possibly FCC for licensing concerns, etc.)

While this is initially focused locally, I can definitely see potential for it being a prototype for other churches across the country. How can we geeks help? Communications infrastructure is frequently non-existent in disaster situations, and we have the know-how to fill that gap. I can also see the potential for being able to put together a “tactical mission kit” that could be brought along with a missions team and is small enough to carry via commercial air (When I worked for AFR, all the equipment for our remote radio stations – except for the antennas and satellite dish – fit in an 8U rack that fit quite easily in the Cessna 401 that we used to get around)

I’m spending Labor Day weekend at Andrea’s dad’s place in Valparaiso, IN. Much needed grandkid time for him, mini-vacation for us.

We’re such church nerds. On Friday afternoon, we went up to Willow Creek Church for an informal tour of their facility with Mark Stanger, one of their techie guys. Andrea is a theatre nerd (she even has a degree in theatre!) and was duly impressed by what they had at WC. We also got a brief tour afterwards of the IT facilities from Brett (I missed his last name), one of my counterparts there. Technically cool, and professionally informative. It’s nice to see that they face many of the same challenges we do.

Today, we got a chance to go worship at Granger Community Church and break bread (and noodles!) afterwards with Jason Powell and his family. A good time was had by all, and the worship experience was phenomenal. They’re doing some really awesome stuff at GCC that we could definitely learn from. (I found it amusing that today’s message was about work/life balance, right after having had my vacation interrupted last night by our VMWare datastore filling up and causing the database server VM to go on strike due to lack of swap space)

One of the coolest things they have at GCC is the check-in/drop-off process for the kids. If you’re a regular, you check in, get your kids stickered, and then take them to the “launch area”, which is a big tube slide where the kids slide down and pop right into their classroom (unfortunately, Clara wasn’t quite old enough for those classrooms, so we had to cart her down the stairs (where there is a really cool fish tank). Faith went down her slide and popped out the mouth of a giant whale. They have cameras at the top and bottom so you can see them popping out the end and into the classroom. Faith was duly impressed. My immediate thought was that it’s a great way to deal with separation anxiety problems – the kids get a rush of fun, and immediately forget that they’ve just been taken away from mom and dad… and there’s no turning back. I think there’s a metaphor in there for the Christian life too

The worship experience was, in a word, WOW. They’ve done an incredible job at GCC to make the entire experience immersive and seamless. There’s smooth and logical integration of music, drama, and multimedia that all blend into the message. There’s some really cool technical wizardry going on behind the scenes, but you really don’t have a chance to focus on that, because the experience is so engaging.

On the way back, the kids snoozed, and we passed two things of note…

Valpo has a ski resort. OK, not really a resort, more of a lump in the terrain with a chairlift. To wit:

Where I come from, that would barely be worth bothering with as a sledding hill. Note the snowboarding halfpipe in the second picture.

The other thing that we saw was another Living Water(s) church, that is even smaller than the one Clif’s wife planted:

And, while I’m posting nerdy pics from my phone, I finally got our rack in something close to its final configuration:

From top to bottom:

• Sony LIB-81A Tape library (8 slots, 1 AIT-3 drive)
• Galilee (DR Server) – Dell PE2650
• Buffalo TeraStation and TeraStation Pro (archival storage)
• Jericho (ESX Node) – Dell PE2950, 2xIntel 5160, 12GB
• Jerusalem (ESX Node) – Dell PE2950 2xIntel 5150, 12GB
• 8-port KVM Console
• Dell/EMC AX150i iSCSI SAN (1.5TB)
• UPS for the SAN
• Dell PowerVault 220 (12×73GB SCSI) (attached to Galilee for DDT backup staging)
• APC Smart-UPS 2200 (x2)
• Whitebox security controller PC (in the bottom of the rack)

This makes up almost our entire infrastructure except for telecom and networking.