For the second time in 6 months, I’m packing boxes and getting ready to move to a new place.  This time, instead of moving my office from Sugarcreek FMC to NewPointe, I’m moving my living space from Sugarcreek to Dover.

This wasn’t a rush deal, really it wasn’t.  I didn’t HAVE to move out immediately, but between my workload and other things, the timing was just right.  I had mentioned yesterday that I already had my eyes on an apartment that has good looks, great location and pretty reasonable price  (and the landlord is pretty cool too…he’s an IT guy!).  Things worked out really well over the past 24 hours, and today I was able to sign a lease agreement for the apartment.

So I’ve been packing for the move.  I knew I was going somewhere, so I began packing before I even knew I had a lock on the apartment.  Some people say “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”  I’m saying that “you don’t know what you’ve got until you try to put it all into cardboard boxes!”  GOOD GRIEF!  I’ve got some lessons to learn on excess, for sure.

99% of the packing is done though, and now I’m gearing up for the fun gruesome next stage… transport!

This week was a relatively light week in the IT and Video departments, which has come in real handy.  I had the opportunity to take Friday off to do some apartment hunting.

I drove around the Dover/New Philadelphia area today and checked out about 5 different apartments (and talked to their respective landlords as well), and so far I’ve found one that I really like.  Good price, good living conditions, a good amount of flexibility, and a VERY nice quiet location (right now, the house that I’m renting is off of a state highway, and I would really like to find a quieter dwelling, so this is huge.)

Hopefully, if things work out, I’ll be going into the moving process over the next 1-2 weeks.  I’m hoping I’ll be able to post something decent during that time, but I’ll make no guarantees.

As for the Time-Warner install, they haven’t been around since Wednesday.  Hopefully next week NewPointe will make the jump to cable.

I turned into the driveway at NewPointe this morning and saw something new and exciting near our bridge…

  

The cables (that were installed by Adelphia before they moved out) have been here a long time, but there’s a jumper at end of the cable headed to the road, so someone’s definitely been doing some testing.  Plus that large green hood wasn’t there yesterday.  I’d say it’s a safe bet that Time-Warner has been on-site.  Sa-weeeeet!! 

Hopefully I’ll have more to post on later.  I don’t see any signs that the tech has been in the building yet.  Schedule-wise, this would be a GREAT week for the cable installation to happen.

More on this as today’s events unfold…

Update:  Looks like just the construction is happening today.  By the end of the day though, we’ll have a verified signal coming into the building, so it won’t be long until our internet access is provisioned and our modem arrives.  I am seriously PUMPED about this…for those of you who haven’t followed the story up to now, this is our first hardwire connection to the internet since we moved out of Sugarcreek.

 

Here’s the splitter that was installed in the work room.  I’m half-tempted to hook a TV to it to see if anything will come in.

Again, it’s been one of those weeks where the IT/Video guy is doing a lot of running.  It’s not bad, but just enough to keep me away from a computer for anything beyond repairs or email.

• I’m falling into an odd sleep pattern during the weekend that I am starting to like:  I’ve been sleeping on Sunday afternoon and evening, and then in the late evening I’ve been getting up and going to the church to take care of some IT issues.  Some would call that sick and wrong, but I’ve yet to find such a span of time that’s so free of distractions.  During the 8 or so hours I have before the staff rolls in, this gives me a chance to do maintenance on PCs that would be otherwise occupied, and also work on servers that I can’t bring down during the workday.  PLUS, since I’ve napped it up all afternoon, I’m wide awake the whole time.  I’m not suggesting that people do this…. this is just what works for me for the moment, and I justify it by staying at home on Fridays.

• After a few months of doing repairs and upgrades in my cubicle, I finally managed to land a storage space to use for a workbench area.  Trying to work on machines in a cube is just too messy.

• Jason has a great post on his blog regarding the importance of planning and testing backups.

• More NewPointe bloggers have hit the scene:
  • Danny Bunnelle, our music director, has begun blogging on all things creative.  You can find his blog, “iBlogCreativeStuf” right here.
  • Our very own Kevin West has also entered the blogging realm.  You can find his blog, “See The Invisible” over here.

• I realized this past week that warm weather makes me feel profoundly happy.  Winter, although it usually averages out the same, always seems to take longer than it should.

• I’m going to be moving.  I’m sort of looking forward to it, but not the actual moving process…. so much work….and SO much JUNK.

 Hopefully things will calm down soon and I’ll be able to get my brain realigned.

I strolled into the control room this morning to do some editing, and found a note on one of our monitors that cracked me up.  Apparently one of our staff has witnessed OS X’s “jumping dock icon” for the first time. 

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In case you can’t read the handwriting, it says “Coach, pick me!”

Perhaps you had to be there, but I thought it was funny enough to warrant a post.

With everything going on last week in the land of video, I had this one thought in the back of my mind… it was like a splinter, causing me to cringe out of nowhere and sometimes causing severe discomfort.

That thought?  DST updates.

I don’t think it could’ve happened on a more hectic week.  What with 10 video pieces to crank out, all airing on or BEFORE Sunday, I was really wondering “where on earth is this going to fit in?“  I already had plans to set up WSUS, but I wasn’t sure how that was going to work out, and after reading all the KB articles on the Exchange Calendar Tool, I was about sick to my stomach wondering how this was all going to come together.

I decided that we would go the WSUS route to get our updates.  I set up a VM, and ended up taking the host machine to my house to download the updates (yes, I have MORE bandwidth at home than I do at the office….for now).  After I downloaded what we needed (and then some), I took the server back to the office, reconnected it, and set a GPO to point all of our computers at the new WSUS server, now loaded with every critical and security update we would possibly need at the time.  After doing some random spot checks, it appeared that on Friday, every last server and PC (except our lonely Win2k box in the control room), had received the DST update and was ready to roll.

*whew*… ok.  So far, so good.  Now, it was time to update Exchange and all of our calendars.  The Exchange patch installed with no issues, but I had MAJOR issues trying to update everyone’s calendar using Exchange Calendar Update.  I decided that since there were only about 30 calendars to update, and since everyone worked in the same office area, I would load up the Outlook calendar update onto a flash drive and spend my Monday visiting everyone and updating their calendar.  Was this the most desirable course of action?  No, not by a long shot.  I’m all about remote administration, so this was not in my Top 10 List of Things I Wanna Do On Monday.  However, it worked out very well.  The update tool worked like a charm, and by the end of the day, everyone’s calendar was back in order.

Was this smooth?  To me, yes.  The process went MUCH smoother than it could have.  It amazes me sometimes how God shows up on the scene when we humans think that we’re pretty much hosed.  I honestly don’t know HOW the update process went as smooth as it did… it just did.  I’m amazed, but really, should I be so surprised?  No… that’s just how God works.  I just kinda stand there with my jaw dropped.

One of the highlights of this past week was the installation of a new piece of gear for our video system.  Since we’ve moved into the new control room,  we haven’t had a way to record our productions straight off the switcher (which runs un 1080i), and instead have had to resort to loading tapes into the cameras when we wanted to capture something on tape.

Enter the Blackmagic Design Multibridge Extreme.  When it’s connected to your Mac or PC (via a 4-lane PCI-e connector disguised as a DVI cable), it serves as a capture/playback device that can take in just about any signal you throw at it.  We set this unit up in the editing room alongside a Mac Pro with a fat RAID 0 array in it, and were able to record this past weekend’s services straight off our production switcher in 8-bit uncompressed HD with no dropped frames.  As much as I like the idea of recording uncompressed, there’s no way we can use 1.3 TB of disk space every week, so next weekend we will definitely be moving to a compressed format.

Another cool thing about the MBE is that if you disconnect the PCI-e cable, it becomes an conversion tool and will up/down-convert just about any signal between NTSC and HD-SDI.  If you’ve got an audio source and are upconverting to HD-SDI, the system will also embed the audio signal for you if you choose.  This is EXTREMELY handy for when you need to route a signal with audio to another location in the building.  The only drawback regarding the upconversion process is that the unit will not up-scale to HD, you will need a separate piece for that.  (We’re using AJA’s HDP to convert HD-SDI to DVI and extract the audio)

The only other thing I would caution would-be buyers on this unit (specifically Mac users) is that while it CAN act as another monitor on OS X, it does NOT support Core Image, so don’t think you’re going to get Keynote to work in HD without turning on software rendering (which, I might add, is PAINFUL at 1920×1080).  This rules out using software like ProPresenter 3 as well.  However, we ARE using an earlier version of Pro Presenter in a very similar setup with no issues (we’re using a DeckLink HD instead of a Multibridge for that machine).

On a side-note, the only way I’ve found so far to get a DVI output into our HD-SDI switcher is to use Gefen’s DVI to HD-SDI scaler and then run it through an HD-SDI frame sync.  Has anyone found a cheaper solution?  I’d love to know about it.

I’m very excited about the opportunities that this is going to open up for us.  With the right people, we would be able to offer a whole message series on DVD with some kickin’ menus and packaging.  We’ll also be able to provide podcasts of the service as well.  Cool stuff!  I’m already thinking about snagging another one of these units so that we can downconvert to NTSC on the fly and offer it as a live stream.  We’ll see how that goes.

If any week could be described as the “perfect storm,” this past week was it.  Between video projects, 3 different events, and rolling DST updates out to all of our PCs and Macs, this past week was absolutely nuts.  When you see the end result though, and when you see the stuff that took all week to do affect other people and cause change in their lives, that makes up for all all the time that had to be spent on it.

This week we had First Wednesday, which is always amazing.  The theme of this month was ‘Deal or No Deal.’  You can read John’s scoop on FW here. 

On Friday we had a night set up especially for our volunteers.  Tim Hawkins was on the scene and had everyone there in absolute stitches.  I must admit, it’s been a long long time since I’ve laughed that hard.  The BEST thing about this evening though?  EVERY volunteer was able to enjoy the evening with no obligations whatsoever.  We trained a few staff on using cameras and some of the control room equipment so that we didn’t even need to use our volunteers for IMAG.  All the food was cooked and served by staff.  All-in-all, a great night.

On to Sunday!  The Elements series has been amazing so far.  This weekend was no different.  Danny gives an excellent account of what went down, and he’s much more eloquent than me anyway. :)  Our live production teams did an AWESOME job, both in the control room and on the floor.

Was this week crazy?  You bet.  But the end result was life change for everyone involved.  That makes up for it, ten-fold.

Sorry for the lack of a post over the past few days.  Things have really piled up fast in the world of video, so I’ve been scrambling hard to get them done.  I’m definitely ready to go back to the normal pace.

Until then, have a Happy DST Weekend if I don’t see you before.

I’ve got a USB-to-Serial cable that I bought from Radio Shack that allows me to use my notebook’s USB port to cable in to devices like our managed switches and our phone system.  I was afraid that I might have to replace the cable when I realized that it doesn’t have Vista drivers for it.

However, if you go here, you’ll find a forum post with a fix for this.  I downloaded the fix and attempted driver installation, and things are working just fine now.

Just thought I would throw this out in case anyone else is using one of these cables.