Archive for December, 2007

When we installed our Cisco VoIP system over a year ago, we purchased the entry-level Cisco Catalyst Expresses.  I must say that we made a wretched mistake.  The old saying of pay now or pay later does play true in this case.

Today, I was forced to deal with Spanning Tree Protocol errors across the main core switches, therefore, cutting off access to the users to the entire network.  The issue with these cheap switches is there is only a web-based gui and no console, so if your network goes down, you have no way to gain access to the error messages.  Beyond that, in our case, with STP, we cannot see which port the error is on or what MAC address is causing the issue.

So after a largely frustrating day with no idea of what is causing the fluctuations of up and down, I regret our purchase of low-end switches and will hope to slowly at least replace all core switches with 3560′s or higher. I’ll start digging into it more tomorrow on an off-day.

If anyone has any ideas, do let me know.  How many others have done the buy cheap now and had to pay for it later?

So Christmas morning, the opening of the gifts, is over. And here are the results.

• unChristian by David Kinnaman
• Chazown by Craig Groeschel
• Confessions of a Pastor by Craig Groeschel
• Revolution by George Barna
• English Standard Version Thin Line Bible with Celtic Cross
• Talespin Vol I
• Disney’s Rescuers Down Under
• Disney’s Cars
• Call of Duty 4 for the PC
• Christmas Story Leg Lamp Ornament
• and some dress shirts and sweaters

An addendum to my birthday gifts, I also received Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

I have a lot of reading to do!! Yay.  I love books.

Lord God, we praise you for creating man, and still more for restoring him in Christ. Your Son shared our weakness; may we share his glory, for he lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The following is a poem written by two men who I well respect as spiritual leaders and can be found among many other free resources on Tony Cooke Ministries website.

‘Twas the Fight Before Christmas
By Tony Cooke and David Beebe

‘Twas the fight before Christmas,
And all through the house,
Not a creature was peaceful,
Not even my spouse.
The bills were strung out on our table with dread,
In hopes that our checkbook would not be in the red.
The children were fussing and throwing a fit,
When Billy came screaming and cried, “I’ve been bit.”
And Momma with her skillet, and I with the remote,
She said, “You change one more channel and I’ll grab your throat.”
When on the TV there arose such a clatter,
I sat up on the couch to see what was the matter.
When what to my wondering eyes should appear,
The cable was out, it was my worst fear.
“The Cowboys, the Celtics, the Raiders, the Knicks,
Without the sports channel I’d soon need a fix!”
And then in the midst of my grievous sorrow,
I remembered the times I had promised, “tomorrow…”
“Not now, my children, but at some soon time,
Dad will play with you, and things will be fine.”
Now under conviction, I looked at my wife,
Where was my kindness? Why all the strife?
My heart quickly softened; I now saw my task,
Some love and attention was all they had asked.
I gathered my family and called them by name,
And told them with God’s help I’d not be the same.
We’ll keep Christ in Christmas and honor His plan.
No more fights before Christmas – on that we will stand.
My children’s eyes twinkled; they squealed with delight.
My wife gladly nodded; she knew I was right.
It was the fight before Christmas, but God’s love had come through,
And just like He does, He made all things new.

Almighty God and Father of light, a child is born for us and a son is given to us. Your eternal Word leaped down from heaven in the silent watches of the night, and now your Church is filled with wonder at the nearness of her God. Open our hearts to receive his life and increase our vision with the rising of dawn, that our lives may be filled with his glory and his peace, who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

Merry Christmas!

Today (the 24th that is), was my birthday.  To those who ask this question, yes, having your birthday right before Christmas is not usually a winning combination.  Every year, a large majority forget that it’s my birthday, even though I see many of them at the Christmas Eve church service, etc.  I don’t say this for sympathy or anything like that, not looking for that at all.

Even though I know and understand that people are very very busy this time of year, I still wish to be remembered and appreciated.  I didn’t hear from a few people that I would have loved to today, whether that is me being selfish or whatever, I don’t know, but I felt kind of down that they didn’t call.  I wanted to feel remembered and appreciated for being me on my “special” day.

How many times do the people in our congregations or staff members or neighbors feel the same way our churches or work places?  People have a want to be remembered and appreciated.  They want to be noticed and feel like they mean something in our busy lives and schedules.  I know people who have written thank you notes for when the Pastor asked how their son was, and he remembered the son’s name.  The parents felt special at that moment and felt cared for, not just another tithe check.  I’m not saying that we are pandering or playing towards people, but trying to come in on a personal caring level.

What steps are we taking to ensure the best possible relational interaction as the church?  What can we do to help people not fall through the cracks?

Well ok, not really, it got bigger!

I got B.B. King tickets for my birthday!!!!!!!  8th row in the orchestra area!

I also got

• Streams in the Desert by L.B. Cowman
• The Great Mouse Detective  (I love Disney films…)
• James Bond: Ultimate Edition Vol 2  (yep love bond films as well..I’m a tech guy.. what’d you expect =] )

I have finished In a Pit With a Lion On a Snowy Day by Mark Batterson.  I found that book to be absolutely amazing.  It is a recommended read to everyone.  Mark challenged me to assess what I was doing and my thoughts on what I wanted to do versus what I felt I can do.  

I had a whole bunch of thoughts and quotes I wanted to put up on a post, but due to the recent winter weather mayhem, the craziness of recovery at work and the lack of immediate access to a working computer, with free time, when I needed it, I lost all the thoughts I had.  So you get a condensed version.

There have been a few things on my list that I’ve always thought about doing, but always kind of shrugged them off as nothing more than a mere whim.  After reading the book and what it had to say, I have come to the internal conclusion that they are, in fact, God inspired.  I’ve mentioned one of the thoughts to a few close friends, as I do not feel it is the time to publically discuss them, though I cannot promise they won’t be influencing my future posts.

As for the other books, I have tentatively placed Going All the Way by Craig Groeschel on hold.  I just don’t feel that I can commit the time to read and post on it adequately with everything going on; work, storm clean up, and Christmas stuff.  I will pick it back up. 

Instead, I have started reading Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens by Neil Cole and The Big Idea by Dave Ferguson.  I think both will be good reads.  

So yeah.. winter is here in the great state of Oklahoma.  Winter usually means ice and lots of it.  This time though, it was a little bit different.  The ice stayed in the trees! Well, until it caused the trees to come crashing to the ground and destroying lots and lots of them. 

 I’ll try and get some pictures up..jeremy…

Due to the heavy ice formations on lines and trees, power is out at my house and caused a lot of outages across Green Country (This part of OK is called that for some strange reason.. haven’t figured it out yet…)  My house is actually without power..I’m typing this from a friend’s house.

My Cisco Callmanager and Unity servers took a beating too.  The UPS overloaded last night causing the servers to fluctuate many many times and it corrupted the OS.  I ended up having to call in a brilliant Cisco Engineer to help keep us back online as we had no outside phones….  

Anyway, I need to go so keep this part of the county in prayer as well as the terrible atrocities that have happened in Colorado.

As a few of the great bloggers of the Church IT Roundtable have been talking about customer service, as well as another prominent blogger, I have a story I’d like to share as well.   

A friend of mine purchased an item off of woot.com the other week.  By the way, the woot up right now is stinking cool..remote helicopters..  He only purchased one of the mp3 player, but ended up receiving two.  Woot sent the most amazing CS reply I’ve read.

In our rush to unload our warehouse of the SanDisk 1GB Media Players, we shipped you two units instead of one.  While we are excited to have these MP3′s out of our warehouse, we feel it only fair to warn you of the responsibility ahead.  The extra SanDisk’s playback, power usage, song loading and general upkeep are in your hands for good now. We know this is a burden you did not request – twins are usually unexpected arrivals – but we’re confident you are up for the task.  Just be glad one of them isn’t Danny DeVito.  For those not ready for this life experience we recommend giving your second SanDisk to a good home as a gift or charity contribution.  If you become desperate for relief, perform your own “will it blend” style experiment, post it on a blog and rake in some Google ad sense dollars. Best Regards,

Woot Member Service

How amazing is that.  Anyway, that’s all of that story.

On another quick note, I was able to get a pre-screening of The Golden Compass, which I know some of you have expressed concern and thoughts about.  I will try to get my initial thoughts over the controversy out soon.

*EDIT: I changed some of my horrible writing and when I updated the post disappeared from the page, but was still there so I just deleted it and re-posted it.

Alright, so Bowl Championship Series (BCS) standings are in.. I think if you take the conference out of the title you may get the explanation..

Ohio State vs. LSU?? I understand why Ohio State.. Granted I am bias, but they did play awfully well too. I think OU should have gone.. Stoops did an amazing job and did beat Missouri 2x and by 21 points on a neutral field..

That being said, I am tweaked about the treatment from random people and some sports writers. Example, Wojciechowski at ESPN.com

“One-loss Ohio State reached a national championship game by doing nothing more strenuous than clicking the TV remote. Congrats. The Buckeyes will go 50 days between their last game and their next.”

Granted, he later goes on to say this isn’t meant as a total rip, but that was after he knocked the Bucks again. I say if you are going to rip anyone about OSU’s schedule, go start in on Notre Dame. They need to stop being so prideful and join the Big Ten, give us 12 teams and have a conference game at the end. You can’t blame the school for their schedule. I hope OSU kills LSU in the end so it quiets some people.

I also don’t like how no one says OU is good, it’s the other team didn’t play well. OU beat Missouri last night by 21 points, mind you that was the second time this season they beat Missouri. After the game, though, all I heard was Missouri didn’t show up to play, they weren’t on their game..not they just weren’t good enough at their best to beat OU.

And who cares about USC..everyone talks about USC this and USC that.. They couldn’t even pull away from Stanford this year.. UCLA last year..anyone else?

OK that’s all for now.. I think it’s about time for playoffs

Go Bucks!

Pitt just knocked out WV from the cursed #2 spot..

OU is leading Mizzou..

Here comes another BCS mess..but one thing remains true..

O.H..!