Ed Buford - Just Another Geek

Jing

Tired of writing lengthy documents to explain something that you could more easily show someone? Jing might just be the aspirin for that headache. With Jing you can create a quick video including voice. It saves it as flash so you can open it with almost any browser, and it takes a lot less time than creating a doc with screen shots. The best part is that it's free... check it out.

 

Technorati Tags: Jing,Documentation

SharePoint Training - Road Trip

Life has been so busy lately that I just didn't get a chance to post about the Church IT SharePoint training, and now it's here already. So Sunday Jason and I set out for Peoria Illinois with our good friend Dave Mast, who drove up on Saturday. We'll spend this whole week in training, and from what I witnessed today, it's both exciting and scary (see manuals at Jason's blog). SharePoint really is a beast!

I'll be posting more as the week progresses!

IT Roundtable - Personal Highlights

The IT Roundtable is like taking a drink from a firehose; so much of it blew past me that I can't remember it all (I can't wait to get the notes). For me the highlights were mainly relational. I thought I'd list some of them while they are still fresh in my mind, I'm listing these in no particular order.

• ACS meet and greet at Pappasito's
  • Great Food, Great atmosphere, Fun of seeing old friends, chance to make new ones. - Thanks Dean!
• Hanging with John Dolan from Viant (works with Perimeter).
  • Always fun, thought provoking, inspiring. -John, you owe me a game of pool!  
• Joking and talking with Trace Pupke
  • He won the Best Laptop Award you know :-)
• Realizing how much I value the relationships I have with so many of the people at the roundtable.
• Hanging with Jason Lee
  • Someone get that guy a blog!
• Dinner with Jason Powell, Terry Chapman from Fellowship , Mike Gold, Gina Buresch, Vicki Dolikian,  Beth Hayes, David Jenkins, all from Willow Creek.
• Late night chat in the parking lot with Jason Powell, Jimmy Williams, and Mark Stephenson.
• Mike Gold's Presentation called Flood.
• After hours chat with the guys from DataCore.
  • Trying to get my mind around storage virtualization makes my head hurt.
• Laughing with Jason Powell
• Building a friendship with Jason Kergosien
• Dinner with David Drinnon and a personal tour of Second Baptist
  • WOW
• Getting to know Fady Eldeiry
• Food

Thanks Tony and Chris McGuffin for making all this possible. You guys did a stellar job.

Robocopy

I thought I'd take a few minutes to post about an old friend of mine.... Robocopy. It's part of the Server Resource Kit, if you don't already have the resource kit, download it here.

I won't go into detail as to how to use it, you can email me if you're having trouble with it, but here are some bullet points about what it will do for you.

• Copy Permissions
• Mirror Folder / Files
• Copy in restartable mode
• Copy only updated files
• Monitor Folders and Automagically update

And of course since this is a command line, you can script all the functions in a batch file.

For those of you who want a GUI, you can get one here.

In Texas

We're just about to kick off presentations and I thought I'd give some highlights to date.

After landing in Houston we were treated to super service by Enterprise car rental. There were nine people behind the counter and they were ready to serve. The check-in process was speedy and then the attendant walked us out to the car and made sure we were set. I've never seen service like this at any car rental place.

Then we headed to Sugar Land.

 

We checked into our hotel and we were right next door to Pappasito's where we ACS kicked things off with a meal and great conversations.

Here are some pix from the meet and greet.

 

Here's Dean eating some of the tasty food provided by ACS

....and here's Jason polishing off the last slab of ribs.

More to come.

Church IT RoundTable - Time to go...

Tomorrow I'll get up and head to Houston with Jason for the Church IT RoundTable. This was originally Jason's brainchild, and now it's taking on a life of it's own; the idea is to share knowledge, techniques, thoughts and ideas.

My favorite quote from last year comes from Tony Dye when asked what do you do for documentation?  Tony said "We've learned that bad documentation is better than no documentation, we're in favor of snippets of a document that lead to a document."

I'm looking forward to hanging out with the IT Pros I already know and getting to know other Church IT Geeks.

There is no bigger party than to fill a room full of computer geeks!

Disappearing Share

Last weekend I was told that a share I had created was unavailable so I logged onto the server from home and for some reason the share had disappeared. Perplexed, I recreated the share and got on with the rest of my weekend. Monday I went in and started looking at it in more detail, here's the whole story:

The share I created was space on the SAN, and I connected to it using the ISCI initiator. On Saturday I rebooted that server while I was working on other stuff and that's when the share vanished; unfortunately I didn't know it at the time.

The cause of this problem is that you have make the server service dependant on the ISCI initiator otherwise the server service starts before the connection to the SAN happens. Here is a KB article which will tell you how to set up your server, if you run into this problem.

Dawn of a new era

Technorati tags: Mac Switch Mac vs PC Mac Convert

In order to better serve and understand the Mac users at GCC, Jason and I have switched to Macs as our primary laptop. Jason bought us each a Macbook Pro and I have been tasked with learning to use it. You might remember about a year ago I had one in my possession for a brief time, that won't be the case, this time it's my mine.

I've had this in my hands for a couple of days now, so here are my initial observations:

It's light and compact .

It feels nice and sturdy.

The Graphics are very crisp.

There's no place for an Auxiliary battery.

The battery life is abysmal

 I'll be posting more about my observations, experiences and Mac Life in general. It's true that I am of the PC persuasion and am bent in that direction. It will be interesting to see if this Mac can win me over.

My Beautiful Laptop

I've heard it said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess this is especially true when it comes to my laptop. I've heard many "cool people" complain about the looks of Lenovo's Plain Black Wrapper. They think it's not cool enough.... well, looks can be deceiving.

Here's something you might miss about it if you're not looking carefully

Just in case you don't recognize it, it's a fingerprint scanner.... a very sweet way to log on!

Here's something else you might not notice at first glance:

Unless someone were to tell you, you might not guess that is the antenna for EVDO wireless from Verizon. Yes it has EVDO built in... how beautiful is that?

One other thing I don't think you'll get anywhere else, is the structural stability that would let you stand on your laptop.... yes!

Here's a couple of Pix of Jason standing on my T60P:

Try that with your "Cool Laptop"

This tribute to my beautiful laptop comes because I'm on the eve of giving it up, alas, all good things must come to an end. You can read more about my future transition here.

Super Service!

Yesterday I had the honor of spending the day with Jack Chen from Equallogic. He brought a loaner SAN to help ease my fears (probably unfounded fears) about recent drive failures.

What's most interesting is that we didn't ask for this special attention. Equallogic, has just blown me away with the way they've treated this case.

Since the expected amount of drive failures are about two out of a hundred per year, Equallogic is as concerned about the drives as we are. Unlike any other vendor on the planet, when they get concerned they don't just send you an email, they show up and make it their problem.

Even though we've lost a few drives, this SAN has turned out to be a great product and the service that comes with it has been unexpectedly wonderful. Even if they made a bad product (which they don't) I would still recommend it based on the service alone... but it's awesome to get both, a great product and great service!