Earlier tonight, I made a blog post referencing how busy I’ve been and how it’s prevented me from blogging.  However, when I was typing it out, I made a small error that could have caused a lot of misunderstandings and phone calls…

Here’s what I should have typed…

Some of you might be wondering where I’ve been the past couple weeks.  I haven’t quit blogging and I haven’t quit my job…

Because of my oversight, here’s how the original sentence read, as published:

Some of you might be wondering where I’ve been the past couple weeks.  I haven’t quit blogging and I quit my job…

You can see where this might have caused some turning-of-heads, and a sudden spike in executive meetings at the NewPointe offices.

Fortunately, Jason Lee happened to be reading through his RSS feeds and noticed my error.  Thanks to the #citrt IRC channel, he was able to contact me about the mishap.  After a mild heart attack, the post was edited, and the offending post was replaced with the corrected version.

Two take-aways from this short story…

1.  Communities such as CITRT are invaluable. 
2.  Make sure you proofread your posts before posting … no matter how long you’ve been blogging.  A single misspelling or missing word can turn a simple post into a press release.

Some of you might be wondering where I’ve been the past couple weeks.  I haven’t quit blogging and I haven’t quit my job — things have just been pretty crazy.

There are a lot of changes underway in both video and IT, and over the past 2 weeks I’ve been in the middle of a lot of testing, communicating and coaching.  Blogging - even reading blogs - has been all but a foreign concept for the past few days … not that I want it that way.

My goal for the next few days is to bring things up to speed a little bit on what I’ve been doing and what I’ve got coming down the pipe.

…to any of you who got RSS-spammed by me over the past 24 hours.

The new theme that I switched to was not as great as I thought it was.  A fault in the code somewhere was forcing all my text to wrap around any pictures instead of putting the picture on the same line, but this ONLY was happening on the web site.  As a result, my RSS feeds looked horrible.  Since most people that I know are feed-readers, this was unacceptable, and I’ve decided to switch back to my old theme until I can get the problem resolved.

Update:  After searching through the theme author’s site, I was able to locate the offending code and make the proper adjustments.  Things SHOULD be looking better.  Here’s hoping…

I had forgotten that I posted a ridiculous 7 times the day after Christmas, so I was a little surprised when I saw this spike in my Google Analytics graph this morning…

No, I don’t look at my Analytics report that much…

I’ve been looking for a new theme to ring in the new year with, and although it’s a little late (I wanted to get it tweaked a little), here it is. I’m usually not a fan of yellow, but for some reason this stood out to me and I really like it.

Some of the formatting is going to need fixed on a few posts, which I’m not opposed to dealing with…just don’t expect it to happen this week.

It’s been a crazy week this week.

Jeff, my summer intern, finished up last week and is now headed to Mount Vernon for school.  He added a great deal to what we were doing here in terms of video, and he’s going to be missed a LOT.  Consequently, I’ve been picking up some slack in the video area. 

I’ve been kicking around the idea of turning this blog into more of a “general church tech” deal instead of strictly IT.  Why?  Well for me, it definitely matches my job a little more.  My title is IT Director for sure, but I have a good deal of involvement in all things technical around the building, from our Symnet audio network to our lighting, and even our HVAC system at times.  It keeps me busy, but it’s very rewarding from a learning standpoint.  I haven’t made a final decision on shifting the blog yet, but by the end of the week I’ll have my mind made up.

I’ve had the opportunity to get back into music lately, and I’m loving it.  For me, this means, playing bass guitar, drumming, working on ProTools projects, and sometimes even singing.  I’ve had the opportunity to fill in the past couple of weeks with the worship team, and it’s been nothing but a blast.

So that’s a little snapshot of what I’ve been up to, in case you’ve been wondering why the posts have ramped down as of late.  If I do end up changing this to a “general tech” blog, you can bet I’ll have more to talk about.  We’ll see how that goes.

I was about ready to type up a completely different post explaining tonight’s work night, and I just discovered that none of my permalinks are working.  What gives??

Looks like work night isn’t over… at least not for my WordPress installation.

Update:  After dorking around on WordPress’s support site, it looks like the “Pretty Permalink” structure I was using no longer works.  According to WordPress, this permalink structure requires Apache’s mod_rewrite module.

So what’s up with that?  Did Bluehost turn it off?  Is it malfunctioning?  I guess I’ll find out tomorrow morning when I call tech support.  I changed my permalink structure to at least get it working again, but any link pointing to a single blog post (that uses the old structure) is now broken.  What a pain…

Update #2:  I decided, on a whim, to change the permalink structure back to its original state (”pretty”) just to see what would happen.  Lo and behold… it now works.

This is one of those times where I’m not going to ask why, I’m just going to be grateful.

There’s been some Blog Tag going on through the NewPointe staff as of late, and I’ve been tagged 3 times already. Basically, this means that I am being asked to post 8 random facts about myself.  Here goes..

1. I hardly ever watch TV.  In fact, I watch more TV at other people’s homes than I ever do at my own.
2. I love thunderstorms, which might be a little odd for an IT guy.  I LOVE to sit on the porch and take in bright flashes of lightning and huge peals of thunder.  The bigger the storm, the better the experience.
3. Food fact #1:  I like love to eat vegetables.  I can munch on veggies any time, anywhere.  They’re delicious.  The one vegetable that I don’t care for?  Beets.
4. I am far FAR better at listening to other people than I am at talking about myself.  Not only that, I enjoy listening more than talking as well.
5. I have acrophobia, which tends to be a hindrance when it comes time to pull cable through some parts of the building.  I’m good up to about 17-20 feet, and then I start to “lock up.”  I’m working at this though.
6. Depending on what time of night it is, and how much caffeine I’ve had, I can be pretty easy to freak out if you use the right tactic.  (Disclaimer:  I do not guarantee that my reaction won’t cause you physical pain, in fact don’t be surprised if it does.)
7. I love riding my motorcycle around.  It’s a 400cc Honda that’s almost as old as me, but it runs and it’s inexpensive to insure.  Someday I’ll get a bigger bike, but for now this one does good for me.
8. Food fact #2:  My favorite food?    SUSHI!  I think EVERYONE needs to at least TRY it sometime.  There is absolutely NO OTHER FOOD ON THE PLANET that tastes like sushi.  Just for the record, I also really like sashimi, which is raw fish (sushi is NOT RAW, thank you very much), but at $2.50 for 3 bites, I don’t eat it often.

Is any of this surprising to anyone? 

It feels almost foreign to be blogging after being out of it for so long.

I haven’t been on vacation or anything, I just haven’t had a lot of time lately to think about new posts, much less type them out.

Today I feel caught up though, finally.. *whew*..and better yet, I’ve got some stuff to talk about.

More to follow.

>> I took some time earlier this week and upgraded my Wordpress installation to version 2.2.  I was expecting a possibly a small face lift and some more features, but there really isn’t much to note aside from my theme getting whacked and RSS icons getting plastered all over the top of the header.  I upgraded to the latest version of the theme and that seems to have fixed it, and all my plugins seem to be working as well.  Just for good measure, I added Digg icons at the bottom of the posts.

>> Has anyone else ever dealt with credit card readers on their network?  We’ve got one set up in our cafe area at the moment, and we are getting quite a few read errors during transactions.  It’s a pain because any read error totally voids the transaction and it has to be restarted.  We’ve tested this reader on various locations in our network with the same results (which actually makes me breathe easier).  The only thing I haven’t tried at this point is putting the reader on a separate VLAN, but I haven’t had time to get that far yet.  If anyone has any experience with credit card readers, I’d love to hear any advice you have.

>>  This Thursday the Video Department received some much-needed help!  Mr. Jeff Conn has come aboard for a summer internship and will be working mainly in video post-production.  Jeff has already lent quite a bit to the video team with his editing skills.  It’s going to be a tremendous blessing to have him around!

>>  On Friday I entered into some new territory (for me, anyway):  SSL certificates.  Though it’s a little embarrassing to admit, SSL implementation has been on my to-do list for some time now but had never made it to the front burner.  Between Friday and Saturday, I managed (with some how-to advice from John Dolan) to get a CA set up and get a certificate set up on our Exchange server for OWA and OMA.  OMA wasn’t a huge deal, because we only have 2 Windows Mobile devices checking mail on our server, but it’s still nice to know that it works.  Thanks for your help, John!

Next week my primary goal will be getting SSL-Explorer up and running for our non-notebook-toting staff.  I’ve been having some issues with the community edition, such as the WebDAV URLs not opening correcting on the client end.  Hopefully by the end of the week things can get smoothed out.