This morning I hit "Shuffle Songs" on the iPod and am enjoying the surprising great mix of music. I'm on song number 31 out of 2629 and the "spin it" to "skip it" ratio is about 95%.

Vacation's over...

... and everyone is letting me know (sigh).

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving or for those of you who are overseas, a great Thursday. ;) I've been away from the full-time grind since November 17 and totally unplugged (literally) the entire week of Thanksgiving. I tasked myself to paint the dining room so that we could host both sides of our family at our house - a 3-year tradition, but the first actually in the dining room. The dining room was the "study" so the computer had been totally without electricity up until Thanksgiving and we decided to leave it off for a few days after. I must say, as much of a computer geek as I am, the hiatus from the PC was very refreshing.



On Saturday, Lisa and I did something that many of you may be shocked to find out. Let me preface by saying that we don't watch TV hardly ever. Really. Our routine (if it even exists) is catching Conan O'Brien, re-runs of Raymond and maybe Mythbusters on The Discovery Channel. So Saturday, Lisa rented Disc 1 of Season 1 of Lost. That's right, we hadn't seen one episode until last weekend. Finally, I get what the hype is about. Love it, love it, love it. We plowed through eight episodes (sans commercials) Saturday and Sunday and we're jonesing for more. But we decided to let the weekends be our time for catching up.

Talk to ya'll tomorrow!

SSL Certificates

Yesterday, my resume grew by one bullet-point and although tech-related, it was in an area I have been purposefully letting others take care of - eCommerce. As an Information Technology generalist, I know my limitations and their realization has often come to me after I've earnestly tried to "give it my best shot", but ended up putting in too much time and trouble for very little gain. Network cabling is one of those areas where I'd just as soon pay someone to get it done than do it myself; web design and web programming are others. One of my clients is a business that provides worship resources to churches and recently, they brought their eCommerce website in-house. The migration went very smoothly, performance and reliability increased, but there was one small item that eluded the web programmer - how to make the little lock on the browser appear when a customer made a payment. Welcome to the world of SSL Certificates.

Because no one had any answers and customers were starting to voice their concerns, I volunteered to research how to make the secure area of a website, at the very least, look secure. My first round of Google searches pointed me toward Verisign as the de facto purveyor of SSL certificates, but for $1,000 - you gotta be kidding me! Some of those searches around Verisign also led to accounts of questionable business practices, price gouging and overall difficulty in working with the company. Another trip around the Google world turned up weak SSL comparisons, supposedly *FREE* SSL certificates by companies with names like "Pablo's SSL Certificate-dot-com", and about 90% of the time, I was really being sold a product rather than having it explained and objectively recommended to me.

Finally, two days later, I hit a wellspring of good information when I entered the phrase "which SSL" into the search field and came up with www.whichssl.com - DUH! Here I gained a valuable lesson in SSL technology, learned the different applications for low assurance and high assurance certificates, and was introduced to such terms as "browser ubiquity". This site was answering my questions at every turn and it really seemed (and I believe that it really is) and objective site. I was a little bummed to find out afterward that WhichSSL is a resource provided by one of the SSL providers that ended up on my short list. Nevertheless, I had found what I was looking for.

So now, my client has a trial certificate on their website for 30 days provided by the Comodo Group. It was relatively easy to request, very fast in issuing and after a Wizard and a few mouse clicks in IIS 6.0, the website now shows the tiny golden lock that is bringing back customer confidence. You have no idea what happiness that little icon is bringing to me :) Incidentally, if they decide to purchase from Comodo, the price would be either $79.99 per year or two years for $124.99.

Car Observations

Hummer H2 - I'm seeing an awful lot of these monsters on the Dallas/Fort Worth streets these days and I'm wondering how can a person afford the monthly payments on a $60,000 "car"(??)

HHR - I guess it's Chevrolet's answer to the Chrysler PT Cruiser, but it's UGLY to the bone. The Andy Dick commercials were funny, however. I don't know why but sometimes, he makes us giggle out loud.

Mini Cooper S - I saw a mint-condition original (from the `60's) yesterday. It looked great and much, much smaller than their more recent descendents. I remember my mom having a red mini in the `70's when we lived in Standish; seems like it was when Leyland Motors were making them. I could be wrong. She reads my blog and might have to correct me.

Pricing Small Business Servers

I just got through pricing the hardware, necessary upgrades and software to replace a 5-year old boat anchor of a server for a church with eight users. I decided for the sake of cost to go with a 3GHz Pentium 4 Home PC (eMachine, specifically) with a 200GB SATA drive, 512MB of memory and a 16x DVD Burner. The cost: $499. I added another Gig of memory and a second 200MB SATA drive for mirroring for $300 extra. After I add in the 3-year PC warranty, APC UPS, Windows 2003 Small Business Server (Charity), Symantec Antivirus with Groupware protection and a 300GB Maxtor OneTouch drive for backups, I should be sitting at a little over $2000. Still, I'm saving well over $1000 by not going with a server-class chassis.

I took a chance with the exact same solution for a ministry about three months ago and it is flat-out fast! It runs their Exchange mail, an eCommerce web site and a very active FTP area with ZERO downtime or performance problems. Has anyone else tried to make a bargain PC into a server like this?

Now that's SERVICE!

At church yesterday, the message rocked - it was about having victory over the Storm of Worry . Halfway into the talk, our Pastor urged us to refer to the audio of a past message about prayer called "Text Message: Using Your Anytime Minutes" either directly from the Keystone website or podcast via iTunes. I made a note of this in my bulletin and was going to download it to the iPod, but since our family became members of Keystone just recently, I didn't know how far back to go to download it or if iTunes had already rolled it off the list.

To my pleasant surprise this morning, I discovered that yesterday's message AND the one Brandon referred to were the first ones queued up to download - AWESOME! This isn't just an example of how sweet technology is, but rather a testament to people putting their bits and bytes where their mouths are. Thanks Brian!

What does Stuart need?

My friend Jim Walton had fun with some Googling on his site by searching for the phrase "Jim needs" (with quotes) and seeing what was returned. You can read his list here.

Here's my carefully selected list courtesy of Google of what "Stuart needs".

• Stuart needs a really good scare.
• Stuart needs an ambulance!
• Stuart needs to fly his little plane.
• Stuart needs someone who can implement and execute.
• Stuart needs some answers.
• Stuart needs little or no introduction.
• Stuart needs adventures.
• Stuart needs to be overhauled.
• Stuart needs to be properly displayed.
• Stuart needs to return to the 19th century in less than a week.

And my favorite...

• Stuart needs another payday.
  

Couple of things I can live without

Expense Reports - It took me a month from my last trip to get around to filing them. Completing an entire itemized web page on each little receipt (even the travel agent's fee), then photocopying everything and sending it off to the Expense Reporting Department (I guess that's what they are) is just plain torture to me. My prayers are with the people who try to make sense of this stuff day after day. I'd have to be institutionalized - definitely not my spiritual gift.

Migraine Headaches - When one of these babys hits (like today), there's no amount of Excedrin that'll cure it. The only thing that works is a few hours or an overnight sleep. I thank God for my wife and family, because they understand when Daddy has a headache - it's an awful phenomenon. I don't get them too often, but when I do they can totally K.O. me.

Plug-and-Play Printers?

I was preparing some 'How-To' documents for a church on my laptop and was thinking of printing them at their location using one of their printers. But then a feeling of dread came over me at the though ot plugging in and Windows XP telling me that I have to download the drivers from the manufacturer's website then install the bloated "extra needless software printing suite" just so I can print a regular black and white piece of paper. Bleah!

Aren't we at the stage in technology where every printer (even the cheapies) should come with a base, stable, no-frills driver loaded into its firmware and when we plug in the USB cable or try to attach to it through the network it has just enough logic to be able to push the driver through the cable to our systems so that we can instantly print? I mean come on! Isn't that was Plug-and-Play is all about?

Before I sit me down to blog...

...I need to spend my time with God.

Was gently reminded yesterday that my God-to-everything-else ratio is off-kilter. I doubt I'll go AWOL from the blogosphere, but I do need to adjust how I spend my "idle" time.

Lunch today

I'm having lunch today with fellow Keystoner Jim Franke somewhere in Grapevine. Somthing's telling me to take a notepad with me - probably a good idea even if it wasn't with Jim. We've known Jim and his wife Jan for many years and they have a great heart for the Lord and teaching. Jim is a software developer by profession, but lately God has both of them traveling to churches teaching them how they can make their 'first impression' to guests really effective. They call it a Connection Ministry. I'm looking forward to our lunch.

RRAS

Normally, I use Windows Server's Routing and Remote Access (RRAS) as a VPN Server so users can remotely work from home or wherever and I can remotely administer the server and network. With Windows 2003, this just works - haven't had one problem. Yesterday, I was at a church getting them set up for remote administration and proceeded to set up their Windows 2000 server for remote access. The Wizard is practically the same as Windows 2003 RRAS, but the behavior is much different - it shut down their entire Local Area Network!! Once RRAS was disabled, everything was hunky-dory again. (???) I Googled for a while and even logged into a Windows 2003 server that has RRAS working perfectly to check settings - EXACTLY THE SAME. Today, I'll be Googling some more, but I have a feeling that it has to do with the DNS and/or Active Directory. Somehow, most of my problems with Windows networks lead me back there. Another option would be to let the VPN-enabled firewall handle the remote access task.

The Red Cups are Coming!!

What can I say? "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas..."

Fastest DNS Propagation Ever!

How about instantly? I'm changing the email address for a ministry and so last night I logged into the Customer Area of 1&1's website, created the new domain, a new subdomain for mail and pointed the subdomain's A record to the customer's public IP address. This morning I went to check the parent domain's MX records and nothing had changed. Hmmmm - Oh MAN! I could have kicked myself because I forgot to point the parent domain's MX record to the subdomain. I thought, "Great! Now I'll have to wait until the next day for this change to take effect." However, I decided to do an NSLOOKUP immediately after I had hit the 'Submit' button y'know, just in case. To my shock, I saw that the MX record for the domain had changed!! I logged into the customer's site and used their name servers to check and sure enough, it had changed there too. Still not believing, I hit three different DNS checking websites and they all confirmed that the change had taken effect. Still, I'll wait until tomorrow before I change the customer's Exchange server to make the new domain the primary address.

Chilling to Radio Shropshire

U.K. Pastor and Blogger, Ron Whiteway mentioned on his site that he was going to be a guest on a local news radio show earlier this evening (or afternoon U.S. time). He invited his readers to tune in over the Internet and so I scrambled to download and install RealPlayer, but unfortunately, realized I was two hours too late and the show had already ended. Not wanting to waste the 15-minute investment in making sure my laptop could receive BBC Radio Shropshire, I decided to give it a listen. There was a music show on called Mel Hill's Jazz Beat that played two hours of classic jazz - it was great stuff. I love all kinds of music, but this mix was just what I needed to get me through to the end of my workday. Tomorrow at the same time, there's another music show called Fretwork which plays an eclectic mix of folk and blues. Being a guitar enthusiast, I'm sure I'll like that too.

The Nocturnal DBA

Well, this is yet another night that I have had to be up until almost dawn because of work. Toward the end of the year, people start taking long vacations for Thanksgiving and Christmas and they want to make sure that all projects are completed so that when the New Year comes they can start fresh. Application Developers are slinging database code for me to execute at a blinding rate, Systems Administrators are migrating all Windows servers to Active Directory which means all of my database accounts have to be modified, and in all of the rush, details get overlooked and these activities tend to break other processes which then in turn need fixing. It all adds up to a very busy season. I can't just blame other groups for my having to work late, though because I'm on vacation next week until after Thanksgiving, so I'm trying to get all my projects done too!

You're Wrong, Brandon...

... The McRib IS Greatness!!

I haven't ever disagreed with my Pastor before, but today, in a well-executed illustration while delivering a powerful message on the subject of Temptation, he put forth the "I don't get it" declaration about one of my beloved sandwiches of all time. Don't worry Brandon, my wife doesn't get it either, however I feel confident that you're both in the minority. :)

SAVE THE McRIB!!

Remember, Remember the Fifth of November

Happy Guy Fawkes Day, Bonfire Night or Fireworks Night to readers in the U.K.! This year marks exactly 400 years since the infamous "Gunpowder Plot" to blow up the Houses of Parliament was foiled when Guy Fawkes, the man who was supposed to light the fuse, was caught lurking in the ground floor vault of the House of Lords around midnight on November 5, 1605. If you need to brush up on your Bonfire Night history, the BBC website has some really cool articles covering the details of the conspiracy. You'll also discover why bonfires are associated with Guy Fawkes Day. (Hint: it isn't because he was burned at the stake like I believed, because he wasn't. All of the conspirators were hung, drawn and quartered Braveheart-style. My apologies if you're eating while reading this.)

For those of you who are Stateside and have no clue what I'm talking about, here's a very good introduction from Wikipedia.

Sister Update: Jackie is Finally Connected!

I wrote a post a couple of months ago that my sister had just left for France to embark on a year-long teaching assignment. The opportunity of a lifetime. Well finally, weeks after she ordered it, she now has Internet access. I wrote to her this afternoon and it seems like she's loving her new life in Vesoul. She replied:

"I'm having loads of fun...I love my job and my kids...I'm such a teacher this is what I am supposed to be doing..."

We love and miss you Jackie, but at least now we can keep updated regularly! BTW, are you coming home for Thanksgiving?

The Year of the Blog

This month marks one year that I've been actively reading and subscribing to blogs. I owe my indoctrination into the blogosphere to NeoWin, a UK-based site focusing on, but not limited to Windows and PC news. Prior to that, I had only read and participated in various technology forums for the purpose of researching solutions to specific problem. But NeoWin wasn't a forum like I was used to. I experienced a website that was updated almost hourly with fresh news and people were busily "talking amongst themselves" about the topics posted. I was intrigued and wanted to find out more. Soon I discovered that many of the people posting comments had blogs of their own and that's when the "World of Blog" was opened up to me.

It didn't take long for me to stray from reading pure-tech blogs to reading blogs of real individuals around the world who actually had lives away from work. The ones I gravitated toward were honestly, passionately and authentically writing about things that interested me; Christianity, technology, family, music.... home improvements! I would read about their latest trials, victories and updates on family members. They posted pictures from vacation, birthday parties, holiday gatherings - I felt like I was starting to know these people and when I would comment on their site, most times they would email me back directly. Not since having a pen-pal as a child was I having so much fun connecting with people in parts unknown!

Then I decided to see who was blogging close to me that shared my passions. Fellowship Church in Grapevine had a couple of church tech bloggers, Brian Bailey and Terry Storch. For years I had meant to connect with Terry back when he was the Technology Pastor to share ideas about church technology, but never did. It was his blog that finally got us face to face back in January of this year and it was his blog that showed me who Terry Storch really was beyond the write-up of the Staff page on the Fellowship Church website.

Now, a year later, I've connected with so many people through blogs far beyond the folks listed in the sidebar of this site and am looking forward, Lord willing, to actually meeting some of you in the year to come. I think it was Brian Bailey who said that 2005 would be the year where more people than ever would shift from reading blogs to writing them. In my case, that prophecy was dead-on.

Rethinking the IT Services Framework: Part 1

This will be a (mega) multi-part post as I'll be gathering my thoughts about the IT work I currently perform for several churches and ministries, then architecting a better framework. My workload is steadily increasing and in the next few months, it's going to explode so changes will need to take place for survival and sanity. Right now, when I think of how things are done now, then envision where they need to be to handle the increase, I see that there's...

...too many tasks, not enough projects...
...too much randomness, not enough standards...
...too many priorities, not enough prioritization...
...too many pipe-dreams, not enough strategy...
...too much enabling, not enough empowerment...
...too many workarounds, not enough solutions...
...too much routine, not enough innovation...
...too much implementation, not enough integration...
...too much repetition and not enough consolidation...
...too much doing, not enough delegation...
...too much reaction, not enough structure...
...too much information, not enough knowledge...

...too much of me, not enough of Him......

SQL Server: Index Defrag

Today in Microsoft SQL Server, I discovered first-hand that defragmenting indexes, especially on large tables that experience a high volume of INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE transactions, can really improve query performance. In my case, it took an update transaction that was running more than 6 hours before it failed down to 24 minutes with successful completion.

First, I ran a DBCC SHOWCONTIG (table_name, index_name) statement to reveal that the index was 46% fragmented. To place that in perspective, industry experts say that 30% is too much. Next I defragmented the index using the DBCC INDEXDEFRAG (database_name, table_name, index_name) command. This only took 15 minutes, but it chewed up 8GB of transaction log space so I had to keep a close eye on it in the Taskpad view of Enterprise Manager and adjust the growth limit on-the-fly as the space was quickly diminishing.

After that was complete, I executed the update transaction and was blown away with the 97% increase in speed. I'll be checking the other indexes tomorrow and creating a few scheduled jobs to defragment on a monthly basis.