General

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.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
-Albert Einstein

Note from Mark:  The same thing may not be the same exact thing, per se. Just because its a Granny Smith Apple and not a Red Delicious, does not mean it is still not an apple.  If a granny smith apple isn’t working in your orange basket, don’t go assuming a red delicious will.  Go try some bananas.

Are there areas in your life, ministry, department, family that you may be experiencing insanity? 

Finally, the trend of TV online is getting there.  I really like this, though, the speed of the streams is still lacking.USA Networks finally put Monk and Psych up! NBC has episodes of Chuck and Life online as well.   Good Times. 

Alright so the craziness I think has subsided.. for now at least.  I am starting to reconnect back to the world around me and also back to a somewhat normal lifestyle… that’s my plan at least.  That being said here is a quick list of what’s going on!

• - I have three books I am starting to work on.  I will be putting my thoughts as I go on here.  Every last one of these guys are great bloggers so go check out their blog if you aren’t already!
  • -In a Pit With a Lion on a Snowy Day by Mark Batterson 
  • -Going All The Way by Craig Groeschel
  • -The Blogging Church by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch
• -Video games are back!  I haven’t really touched any games since Christmas, but in an effort to have some fun I picked back up Day of Defeat:Source and Counter-Strike:Source; both Half-Life based.  I am excited about Call of Duty 4
• -Went to a lunch provided by VMWare, Equalogic, and Riverbed.  Some amazing technologies for sure. I still am in the stages of trying to figure out what is the best SAN-wise. 
• -My mac is busted. LCD is going out.. Anyone have a g4 aluminum screen that they dont need anymore?
• -I did get leopard installed though.. Pretty slick so far.
• -Being that I am in Tulsa.. Kent Shaffer over at Church Relevance linked to an article in Charisma Mag that I found very good overall. 
• -And lastly, MinistryTech is coming!

I need to spend some more time on the site.. it needs a lot of help still.Anyone out there planning on going to MinistryTech??