Whoever finds God…

..finds Life. And for me, that life is leading to Edmond, OK..

After 3 years of employment at RHEMA Bible Church/Kenneth Hagin Ministries and 13 years growing up in the church, I am leaving to take an IT position at LifeChurch.tv.

I leave Rhema with much affection and still plan on being involved as an alumni of Rhema Bible Training Center. I’m going to miss my good friends and co-workers, but the internet will help with the distance.

My transition will take place over the next four weeks and I will start down there mid-July. Looking forward to new adventures and new peoples.

I’m both excited and scared as this is the first real time away from home. Good thing is, it’s not too far from home!

More later. If you aren’t, follow me on twitter..

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Pike’s Peak, originally uploaded by churchiee.

Ok bad pun, but alas I do work IT..

This is a picture I took this past summer while in Colorado Springs, CO looking towards Pike’s Peak.

I had this big post about strategic planning and thoughts about looking forward but.. I lost it.. I’ll have to do it later.

Enjoy!

*Edit* Oh and go check out Derrick Henslee’s blog.  He is the worship pastor for Tulsa’s Lifechurch.tv’s campus.

I started my Domain Controller server change-overs today.  I have two old servers running as DC’s that I am replacing..  I didn’t get started ’til 3p.m. and just now calling it quits for the day.

Will work more on tomorrow.

My plan is to be able to just have to do any troubleshooting on Monday, besides switching over to the new Cisco 3560 I have in to replace an old Dell 12-port gig switch and a Cisco CE 500 12-port gig.  This will give me more control and features..

Thanks to Dave Mast and all the other citrt guys on the idea of how to deploy the DC’s among the other help..  VM here I come!

So it’s been a few days since I last posted..ok more than a few.

Happy New Year to all.

I was hoping that this new year would start out alright, but the Buckeyes didn’t feel it was a good year for that.  Granted, they weren’t supposed to have gone anywhere this year, so I still have to give them some credit there.

I am currently in Peoria, IL at the Sharepoint training that Mindsharp is doing for the Church IT Roundtable.  Jason Lee and the Northwoods Community Church staff, as well as Fady from Willowcreek,  have done an amazing job on getting this set up and hosting. More on this later.

Here are some pics:  Justin Moore’s Set

Anyone know of a like widget to post directly into Wordpress?  

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 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.

Our school, Rhema Bible Training Center, has three years, two being the normal length and an optional third year. I have the privelege of talking to the third year Pastor and Missions groups. The third year is more hands-on then the previous two years. They get to work with other churches and participate in weddings etc.

I am going to be talking about technology in ministry, specifically for new church plants and new ministries. I’m coming with the mindset that they don’t have resources for a tech staff and aren’t extremely proficient in technology anyway, beyond normal surfing and word usage.

I want to provide them with a good overall view of some areas of technology that could help them in productivity and accessibility. Some ideas are hosted applications (Google Apps, 37signals), the use of blogs, hitting the idea of ChMS, free hosting (dreamhost.com)..

I don’t want to overload, but I don’t want to let them go away without some great resources.

Any thoughts or ideas?

Side note: Cat chases bear up a tree! Thanks to Jeremy Marx for the link… go encourage my fellow Database Admin to start blogging!

Over the past year, I have been involved in many new projects at work. I love doing new things, though they can take a lot of time and energy. One thing that I wish I had earlier was a group of like-minded tech people to bounce ideas off of and hear what they are going through as well. After searching for information on ministries using Fellowship 1, I ran across a few blogs; one of them being Jason Powell of Granger Community Church.

Finding that blog and then the Church IT Roundtable set off a series of discovering a whole world I never thought to look for. I have since found and added to my RSS reader numerous blogs from IT and communications staff members, leaders, and pastors. Many of which can be found on the blog roll on the right..

Well to list some of the projects I am immediately engrossed in, here we go.
PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM
ChMS Selection
SAN Storage and Consolidated Backup Selection
Complete website redesign and backend creation
Collarboration Software Selection

Again, going through some of these now, knowing there are others who have gone before us and have graciously offered insight into their experiences is going to be a very valuable and helpful asset.