How nifty is that?

The story starts last Wednesday when Brandon (one of our music/video interns) and I went to Big Jim’s for lunch.  For reasons unknown, I took my car keys out of my pocket and put them in the cup holder of his car.  We had lunch, we came back to work, all was well … except that I forgot that my keys were in Brandon’s car. 

I had forgotten all about my keys until after band rehearsal which was around 12:30am.  Brandon had already left, which didn’t matter because I had long forgotten that my keys were still in his car.  After searching everywhere I could think of looking (I had only been in a couple areas all day), I gave up hope of finding my keys.  It was 2:30am, and I was exhausted.  I found my way to a room with a comfy couch and crashed there for the night, hoping to get some decent rest.

I woke up about 6 hours later (I actually had a shower and a change of clothes), and for no apparent reason, updated my Facebook status something to the effect of "Dave has lost his car keys."  About 15 minutes later, Brandon (who is way more into Facebook than I am) showed up at my desk with a grin, plopped my car keys down on my desk and said "Did you lose these?  I saw your Facebook status and remembered the keys in my cup holder."

So there you have it — I experienced a tangible benefit from being in a social network.  I wish I could say that it wouldn’t be the last time, but the jury’s still out on that.

For me, blogging is a bit like exercising:  If I stop doing it, I eventually find it very hard to get back in the groove.  There’s been a lot going on lately at NewPointe, and I’ve had a tough time breaking away to write anything even resembling a blog post.

I’m going to make an effort to get back into posting.  There’s a lot of cool stuff going on at NP that’s worth talking about, so bear with me as I try to get my blog on again.

Local admin privileges — to reinstate or keep locked away?

This has been on my mind a lot lately, mainly because I’ve been thinking about ways to better serve our users at NPCC and make things easier for them.  I know the local admin discussion is not a new one by any stretch, and you can also approach it from either side of the fence.  It really comes down to what you determine to be "acceptable risk."

This is what I’m kicking around in my head right now — what if I made each user a local admin for their respective machine?  Currently, only laptop users and one, maybe two desktop users have local admin rights to their machine. 

The advantages of giving back local admin?
1. Users can install software without having to ask me or wait on me to arrive on the scene.
2. Users can update programs on their own (Yeah I’m talking about you, iTunes) without my approval.
3. Those flash drives that require an extra piece of software before they mount (which I hate) can be used without my being on the scene.  In addition, the end-user can be walked through the process of reassigning drive letters if their flash drive somehow manages to interfere with our standard drive mappings. (boo)
4. Users can install fonts on their own without having to ask me.
5. If a user is done with a program and no longer needs it, they can uninstall it on their own without my help.

Now, the disadvantages and dangers of putting local admin back in the users’ hands?
1. Users can install software without having to ask, regardless of whether this software is legit or not.
2. To guard against the above, I will need to implement a monitoring solution that tracks software installation.  Spiceworks might be a good place to start with that.
3. I’m going to have to create a list of software that it supported by NewPointe IT; I don’t have the resources to support every piece of software that gets installed on a machine.  What happens then, when a user installed "unsupported" software and it wrecks their system?  That will need to be spelled out as well.
4. Any process that runs while the user is logged in will run with local admin privs.  Again, machine monitoring and logging will be a must.

I haven’t made a decision on this yet, but I’m very interested to hear anyone’s argument for or against users running with local admin.  What are you doing in your organization, and what factors led you to that decision?

Those of you who follow me on Twitter probably noticed a post from Saturday about some "BIG changes" on my horizon.  Those of you who are on Facebook regularly probably also saw some very intriguing changes to my profile.

Well, I’m here to set things straight remove all doubt:  Jess and I are indeed engaged.  (You can read her iteration here, which is way more creative than what I’m dishing out.)  This happened Saturday, around 7:40pm, for those of you who are uber-statistical.

How’s this feel?  Surreal, for sure, but still very exciting (for both of us).  I’m sure it will sink in more as the days go on. 

Based on the amount of similar questions each of us has received in the past 24 hours, we thought it would be good to put together the following set of frequently asked questions for your enlightenment and reading enjoyment.

The Dave and Jessica Engagement FAQ

Did you get down on one knee to propose? No I didn’t.  I was nervous though.

I bet the proposal was mind-blowing! It got the job done.  The proposal wasn’t dramatic or fancy, but it resulted in a positive response, and ear-to-ear grinning that couldn’t be wiped off with a baseball bat.

Did you guys set a date? Right now we’re looking at the beginning of August.  August 9th was the date that we officially began dating, and it just so happens that 08/09/08 falls on a Saturday. Hmmm…

OMG WHERE’S THE RING?! Check back in two weeks time. 

Are you guys planning a huge wedding? No we’re not.  We both would like to keep things as simple as we can, from both logistical and budgetary standpoints.  We decided we want our ceremony to be as uncomplicated and as fun as possible.  In fact, Jess just said she’d like to wear jeans at the ceremony.  Perhaps that’s pushing things a little…

Am I invited?  We don’t know yet.  Like I said before, we want to keep it uncomplicated, and sometimes that goes hand-in-hand with a small guest list.  However, that’s not set in stone.

We would be more than happy to answer any other questions if you wish to leave them here for us to answer.  Just keep it sensible and family-friendly. 

Nine days ago, I wrote about a Power Mac G5 that seemed to have a very adverse reaction to percussion instruments.  Long story short, this machine would seize up as soon as I played a snare drum next to it.  Very bizarre.

I decided that I would start troubleshooting by keeping the machine in the same environment that it misbehaved in.  I loaded up a Pro Tools track and began playing along with it.  Much to my surprise, however, the Mac held on for quite a few bars before seizing up with it’s all-too-familiar half-second-repeat of WAV output.  I tried playing along with and without the ProTools hardware (a M-audio FW1814) attached, but it was the same story.  Eventually the finicky PT box would lock up and leave me wondering.

Just for kicks, I took the cover off the G5 and checked out the machine on the inside, looking for anything obvious that would be causing the issue.  While I was in there, I popped the RAM chips out and reseated them.  I put the cover back on the machine and started it back up, expecting to get the same "leave you stranded" ProTools experience that I’d been getting all morning.

But what’s this?  After loading a PT session and playing through it, the mac had yet to crash, or even show the slightest sign of instability.  This was unexpected, but very cool at the same time.  I went ahead and restarted the PT session and played just as I normally would (loudly) on the snare.  Not even a hint of a crash.  What happened?

All I had done (that I knew of) when I was inside the case was unseat and reseat the RAM chips.  Had they been loose?  Was there a piece of dust or something else placed so strategically on the RAM or elsewhere on the board that just the right vibration frequency would cause it to momentarily short out a circuit?  It seems a little far-fetched, but those RAM chips did not feel loose when I popped them out.

So for now, this is a continuing investigation.  I’m definitely happy to see that this machine is seemingly able to holds its own, but I’m not confident enough to put it on the auditorium stage for the band to use. (Ever been playing drums to a Pro Tools track and then have it crash during performance?  Yeah, you’ll remember that feeling. )

I posted a picture earlier today of a Mac that had crashed during an install DVD boot.  The machine was slated to get wiped, reloaded, and set up as a Pro Tools rig for the Main Auditorium.  Not thinking much of it, I went ahead and cleaned the machine without doing an reinstall of OS X.  I installed our audio hardware and Pro Tools on top of it, and loaded a couple sessions to test things out.  So far everything seemed to be working real well, and since I was playing drums for the rig’s first time on stage, I’d be able to further test the unit first-hand.

I carted the new rig over to the Warehouse (our Jr./Sr. High environment) and hooked it up.  It tested just fine.  However, once we started warm-up, things turned ugly.  The G5 mac locked up almost instantly when we began playing a Pro Tools-aided song.  I rebooted the machine, played the session back to make sure it was ok, and strangely, it was just fine.  However, when we went to actually play along to Pro Tools the machine crashed again.  What was WEIRD is that the mac would only seemed to crash while we were playing our instruments.

After a few more minutes of "experimentation," it became strangely apparent that the crashing was being caused by my snare drum.  Now before you write this off as "the IT guy is on weed" or something, consider the process we took to get here.

• We ran the PT track with no band, and machine did not crash.
• We ran the PT track with everyone in the band except me for a few measures.  As soon as I began to play the snare drum, the computer seized up.
• We ran the PT track again, this time with the band, and every drum on my kit except the snare.  The machine ran just fine until I started hitting my snare, after which the machine locked up again.

As it turns out, we ended up playing the worship set without and back-up tracks, and it was still good.  The whole situation is just weird though.  I know there’s an underlying cause for the crashing (why else would an OS X install DVD not boot?), but being able to trigger it with the snare drum?  That’s just goofy, and honestly, I don’t even know where to start with this one.

More on this weirdness as the situation unfolds.

This is rare, so I thought I’d grab a picture of it as a keepsake.  This happened while the system was booting an OS X install DVD.

I’m not rejoicing or anything … like I said, something this rare is worth a picture. 

What started out Friday as a every-33-minute interruption has now become a drop-dead outage as of about 5:45pm today (my FTL drive didn’t make the jump in time, Jason).  In an attempt to not go on-site, I’m currently on the phone with Time Warner tech support for the 3rd time in 36 hours.  On a Monday morning, a 1-minute drop every 30 minutes would be quite an inconvenience, but it would be doable, but again we’re an F1 church, and F1 Contributions requires an internet connection to work.

The rep that I talked to was able to reset the modem remotely, but unfortunately no data is passing through.  So, I’m about to go on-site to power-cycle the modem and follow up on the ticket if any further work is needed.  I’m hoping like crazy that this isn’t going to be an issue that bites us on Monday morning.

We’re getting hammered with snow today, and I’m diggin’ it.

I don’t mind snow if it actually SNOWS … I mean a good nonstop 7-8 inches, and not the stuff that’s half rain either.

Well today we got that — so much so that our offices are closed and might even be closed tomorrow depending on what happens tonight.

Here’s some pictures I took while out today on a quest for some kerosene.

No, I’m not 30 years old … I was just trying to solicit your attention.

Most of you know that I’m in the Church IT Biggest Loser contest that Jason has put together.  What a lot of folks don’t know is that I already started a weight loss project back in mid-November.

When I started this, I weighed in at 278.  After much diet tweaking (and by that I mean "lowering my intake") and a steady amount of exercise, I got a nice reward today when I stepped on the scale…

For those who find that LCD hard to read … it’s showing ‘247.6′  Yep.  I’m down 30-plus pounds as of today.  While I can’t register that loss in CITBL, it feels good to have reached this mark.

The next goal?  Yep, it would be 40.  You’ll know when it happens, too.