(Continued from Part 1…)

Fast-forward a few weeks to today… we are still on non-line-of-sight WiFi access, and it’s still OK. However, we’re also finally getting snow in Ohio, and when the snow comes down we notice a pretty good drop in our bandwidth. This makes things pretty tough on our staff. Again, we’re F-1 customers, so almost everything we do relies on that internet connection.

I was at lunch and I got a phone call from a rep at Time-Warner. I was very curious to know what this was about. He was calling to ask about our cancellation at our old building (apparently it hadn’t been processed). He asked about our moving, where we we going, and…”so what are you guys doing for internet access?”

I proceeded to tell him the story about how we had gotten a bodacious price tag from them to activate the cable that was already installed. He said “That sounds really high. Let me look up your location and run the numbers again.”

The rep sent me an email with the numbers that he ran. I about fell out of my chair.

• The installation fee for the cable would be WAIVED if we signed a 3-year commitment.
• The monthly cost would be $140 with a $300 one-time setup fee.
• The $140/month price tag would net us a 6Mb x 512k connection with a static IP. (I would order more, for sure.)

What happened to that $4000 installation fee? The 5-year commitment? The $500/month cost? Apparently it was a miscalculation!

Needless to say, the prospect of having another internet connection in the building REALLY has me stoked. Not to mention, the price is well within our reach. I ran the numbers down to Todd and Mike, and they were equally impressed. We’ll definitely talk about it more, but things are certainly looking up right now.

More on this as it progresses…

I’m going to backtrack here a little bit and share a story that I should have been blogging about months ago.

In May 2006 we placed a call to Adelphia (our local cable company back then) and asked how much it would cost us to have a cable trenched to our new building. The response from the local office was “if you provide the trench for us, we’ll install the cable for free.” Fantastic, right? I figured we would have no problem at all getting wired for internet access, and from what Todd and I can tell, the bill isn’t going to go up unless we put some more static IPs on the account.

Fast-forward to October. I’m back from the first Church IT Roundtable at GCC, and I’m PUMPED. Things are really coming together with the new network. The cable from Adelphia is physically in the building, actually in the room adjacent to the server room. However, Time-Warner has since taken over the area, so we’re now dealing with a whole different group of people (you can’t deal with just the local office for business-class internet access, apparently). We’ve got a couple calls into their Columbus office, and boy were we in for a shock.

It turns out that TWC calculated that we would have to help cover the construction cost for the cable install. WHAT?! Didn’t Adelphia say that all we had to do was “provide the trench?” Apparently Adelphia’s word didn’t stick during the turnover process, because these guys are asking for money, about $4000 (!!!) just to pay for the cable install. On TOP of that, our monthly bill would be over $500/month, and we would have to sign a 5-year commitment! YUCK!!

I was sick…like the STRESSED sick that you have when you smell that burnt electronic smell coming from the server room. What are we going to do? DSL isn’t available at the building, and a T1 is just as expensive. Can we do WiFi only? I had planned on using it as a backup…but for a primary (and sole) internet connection that is mission-critical?

Todd and I spent a lot of time talking about this, and we ultimately decided that we should just wait it out a little bit and see what our options are. To get us by, we hooked up with Lightspeed Wireless and installed a non-line-of-sight antenna on the building. The install happened 2 days before our staff took occupancy of the new office.

The WiFi service has proved to be pretty solid. Yeah, there’s some latency, but over all things have gone better than I expected. We’ve had a couple outages, but we’ve been blessed to not have an outage during a Sunday morning. (We are Fellowship One users — enough said.) I still get pretty nervous from time to time though. Fortunately, Kyle (Lightspeed’s CTO, and also an attender at NewPointe) constantly monitors our IP address. Kyle has already called my cell phone 2 minutes after I rebooted our firewall just to make sure that things were ok with our connection. Talk about going the extra mile!

I’ve noticed today that Google Reader is just not being very nice at all. I can read one feed, and after that it locks up IE. I haven’t seen this before today.

The problem first showed up this morning on my desktop computer at work. I figured it was just an isolated issue and didn’t really give it much thought. I’m home now though, and I’m noticing the same thing on my home PC. Is this a Google Reader issue? Freak coincidence?

Update (One hour later): I tried browsing around Google Reader with Firefox, and things appear to be working just fine. Great…so that means it’s browser specific, and I’m still very curious as to why this has happened on 2 completely different machines that I used today. I wish my laptop was here…

I’ve had Todd Colucy’s blog on my blogroll for some time now, but I wanted to add a couple more NewPointe staff to the list:

John Bunn, our Director of Group Life, has had a blog up on smallgroupleaders.com for some time now, and it just never registered up until now.  It looks like he’s moved his blog since I saw it last, but you can hit it up right here.  My bad, John!

Dave D’Angelo, our Director of Communications, has entered the blogosphere as well.  You can check him out here.

With our staff getting bigger and each of us having a tighter focus on our jobs, I think it’s cool that I’m able to stay in touch with what’s going on with Dave and John over this medium.  I would love to see more of our staff get into blogging over the next few months.

It was only after much thought and encouragement that I started blogging, but the process of putting a site up on Wordpress was almost compulsive.  So, over the next few days, I’m going to tinker with the look of my blog.  It may be looking a little weird during some visits.  Just be patient.  It will come out looking good.

Last night I stumbled across a neat little program that allows you to burn ISOs to CD or DVD for free.  It’s called ImgBurn, and it’s a pretty straight-forward program.  You load your ISO, hit the copy button, and you’re good to go.  I used it last evening to burn the Windows Vista ISO I downloaded from Microsoft’s VL site.

It looks like you can actually put ISOs into a queue as well if you’ve got a lot of stuff to burn, but I haven’t had a chance to mess with it much.  It seems like a good enough tool to pass along though.

I’ve been meaning to write on this for awhile now.  Last year was filled with all sorts of challenges and opportunites, and I wanted to touch on just a few things from 2006 that have made life in NewPointe’s IT world more enjoyable.

1. Virtualization.  Hands down, the best thing to happen to our servers.  VMware is totally reshaping the way we do server deployment and recovery planning at NewPointe.  The ability to have multiple installations of Server2003, XP, or even Linux running on a single box is HUGE, especially when money and space are both a little tight.  You can even do a physical-to-virtual conversion on your existing servers.  I haven’t had a chance to try that out yet, but I’ve already got a test box ready for it.
2. Helpdesk system.  It used to not be a big deal to just take word-of-mouth requests.  Anymore though, it’s all but impossible to remember them.  Our Facilities crew has felt the same way for some time now.  Right after we moved into our new building, we had the opportunity to roll out WinRT (the Windows-ported version of Request Tracker) to our staff.  They have all done a terrific job of embracing the system, as direct email and walk-in requests have all but disappeared.  WinRT’s interface is friendly enough for anyone to use, and it’s got enough features and flexibility to support most smaller organizations and get them started.
3. Volunteerism.  With a new building comes a new network, but we had a pretty unique situation that almost left us with a very limited infrastructure.  In the end (about 8 weeks prior to opening day), we had to pull our own cable to extend the network and phone system out of the office area.  It was volunteers that made this possible, because there’s no way that I could have pulled that cable myself, especially through the ceilings (I have acrophobia in a big way).  I get a stomach ache when I think about how crippled our network would be had we not had volunteers step up and make it happen.  We owe much to our volunteers for this as well as many many other things in our facility.

There are plenty of other things to talk about in 2007, but these are the 3 items that really brought positive change and momentum for us in the past year.  I’m looking forward to seeing what 2007 has in store for us.