Sorry for suddenly going silent since Wednesday morning.  There has been a LOT going on since then.  I’m just going to take a few moments and recap the week.

The IT Roundtable at Granger was awesome.  I had a chance to sit and soak in some dialog from individuals that I consider to be much sharper than myself.  I’ll post more later about some stuff that I took away from the ITR.  Mega-props to the Granger IT guys for making this happen!

Thursday was a myriad of meetings, phone calls to make, and orders to place.  We’re gearing up for budget season again, so I’ve been working on next year’s goals and what it’s going to take to accomplish them.

On Friday I spent most of the day tinkering with a Miranda DVI-Ramp2 as we demo it for this weekend.  I’m pretty pleased with what it’s capable of.  After that, it was off to the Swiss Festival in quiet little Sugarcreek, Ohio for some walking around, running into people we know, and just basically enjoying the fall weather.  The best part of the festival?  Fried cheese.  No lie, man….best stuff ever. (4 out of 5 physicians disagree).

Well, unfortunately it looks like we won’t be doing any live streaming.  However, the audio from the Roundtable will be recorded and will be available in one-hour chunks at a location to be determined.

It was not a good idea for me to stay up late in the last days of my vacation, because I had a LOT of trouble getting to sleep on Monday night.  I woke up at 3:10am Tuesday morning with about 3.5 hours of sleep under my belt, packed my things, and headed for Granger.  I actually made it about 100 miles before I had to pull over and get some truck driver-grade coffee in Norwalk.

I pulled into Granger about 9am and checked in at my motel.  About 5 minutes later I received a call from our office…our Quickbooks server had quit working abruptly and of course, as you would imagine, it was payroll week.  Fortunately the solution was simple:  I restarted the QuickbooksDB service on the server and things were rolling again.  Still trying to figure out how it stopped though.

I spent the remainder of the day at GCC, working on some various items, one of those items being the audio recording/streaming for the Roundtable.  We will definitely be recording the Roundtable, and hopefully we’ll be streaming, too.  Check back around 8:50 to find out.

I don’t think I’ve ever been as tired as I was last night when I finally stumbled (yes, stumbled) into my motel room to get some much-needed shuteye.  I’m feeling very rested up this morning, though, and man am I stoked.

Tune in later for more Roundtable updates.

If you’re charged with the task of maintaining your organizations Active Directory, check out this article from Microsoft TechNet Magazine, “11 Essential Tools for Managing Active Directory.”  The article covers 11 free tools to make your administration job easier, and free is always good.

This morning I walked into the NewPointe offices after 2 weeks of being on vacation.  Don’t get me wrong, I would still rather fish, but it felt great to be back to work, also.  To add to that, the domain controllers that I was having problems with yesterday seem to be holding time just fine.  There were a few tickets that piled up over 2 weeks, but that’s about it.  All-in-all, it was a great first day back from vacation (or “holiday,” if you’re reading from across the Atlantic).

I’m headed to bed here in a few minutes, and then I’ll be driving out to GCC bright and early tomorrow for the 2007 Church IT Roundtable.  Nothing like coming back from vacation and going straight into a road trip.

It’s now 11:12am, and I just walked back to my desk to check something. It now appears that DC #2 as well as all our PCs on the network are now 1/2 hour off… the other way!

I’m going to add the syncing program to DC #2 and see if that doesn’t resolve the issue.

This is too weird.

Update: After installing TimeSync on the second DC, things seem to be back on track at least for now. Hopefully they will stay that way.

Another Update:  I actually watched DC #1 fall out of sync by 2 hours a little later in the afternoon.  Not knowing what else to do, I went ahead and rebooted both DCs simultaneously.  It’s been about 24 hours now and I haven’t seen any clock skews as of yet.  Isolated incident?  We’ll see…

Yesterday I came in to install updates on all our servers.  I updated every server except our #2 DC.  No particular reason, I just forgot.

I walked into the building this morning and sat down at my desk only to notice that my computer clock (along with everyone else’s) is exactly 1/2 hour off GMT-5 time.  The only clock that isn’t off is the one domain controller that syncs its time externally, which is not the aforementioned #2 DC.

After installing updates on the forgotten DC and rebooting, everything seemed to go back to normal.  In fact, all of the PCs on the network synced back to the correct time almost instantly.

Aside from “Patch your Domain Controllers simultaneously,” I don’t know what the moral of this story is, but it’s definitely an interesting issue.

One of the big issues we have in the control room right now is this:  How to scale DVI video from our Keynote and Pro Presenter systems to HD/SDI, add sync to it in the process, and not break the budget?

Why is this a hot issue right now?

Pro Presenter:  Our CG computer is using a Blackmagic DeckLink HD to genlock the system’s output and send it to our switcher in HD/SDI.  I would LOVE to move to version 3 of Pro Presenter (we’re using it in other locations and it rocks), but because there is no way to get it to utilize the DeckLink’s HD/SDI output, I’m stuck using version 2, which, while it is still nice, is miles behind version 3 in terms of functionality and ease of use.

Keynote:  We use Keynote to put graphics (announcements, message notes) up on the screen, keyed over live video by our switcher.  We’re using a Blackmagic product here as well (a Multibridge Pro) to output HD/SDI from the computer, sync it, and feed it to the switcher.  The problem here is that since the Multibridge doesn’t support Core Image, Keynote has to be set up to do software rendering…. at 1920×1080.  This leads to very slow slide changes and makes it impossible to do any sort of smooth transitions or motion graphics on the slide.

Note that this is NOT a knock on Blackmagic Design products.  They are what they are, and they do exactly what they’re designed to do (and they do it well).

I’m looking to bump things up a level in terms of functionality and user-friendliness.  I’ve found 2 items so far that can make this work, and there’s a good chance we’ll get to trial both of them:

Miranda DVI-RAMP 2:  I’ve had my eye on the DVI-RAMP 2 for some time now, and we will actually have a demo of it showing up next Thursday.  The unit is capable of scaling and converting from DVI to HD/SDI.  The unit can also sync to a reference signal and act as a frame sync at the same time.  As an added note, the DVI-RAMP 2 is platform-independent.  Mac, PC, whatever; as long as it’s DVI, you’re good to go.

Matrox MXO: I just stumbled onto this piece of gear a few days ago.  The MXO has got the same basic principle as the Miranda unit, except that it will only work on Macs (which is fine for us).  The one thing that catches my eye is the fact that the MXO is about 22% of the cost of the DVI-RAMP 2.  Does that mean it’s only 22% as good?

Any video people reading this that have gone down this road before?  I’d love to hear any thoughts you have on this matter and what you’ve done to get around it.

I’ll post more on this as things pan out.

I’ve seen this posted on a couple different forums and TUAW as well.  It looks like Microsoft has set up a site to show off the upcoming Office 2008 for Mac.  From a first look, it looks like MS is just showing off the new look of the software and talking about functionality from a very general standpoint.

Now if you’re an IT dude (or dudette) and you deal with Macs, I’ve got a pretty good idea what you’re thinking.  What about Entourage?  Well… the site doesn’t mention anything specific about Entourage functionality as of yet.  I myself am REALLY ANXIOUS to get a look at any improvements in that part of the package alone, especially with PC-to-Mac user conversions on the horizon.

Here’s hoping…

I don’t know if I like having the weight of my iPod (plus the case) resting on its connector, but to each his own.  This method definitely wins the “budget prize.”

Check out the article here.