3 More Days

Our church sent out requests for ppl interested in meeting with new members to help direct them into community groups. It turned out that I was talking with our receptionist about getting into a group of singles, even to just look around outside her church. She is such a nice gal that I think she needs a companion and I suggested finding one at a church rather the bar scene. So I mentioned it to the gal in an email in response to her email request from the church. She emailed me back promptly to inform me about the resources on the church website that I already knew of. Yesterday she calls me here at work and wants to meet with me to find my commitment level and to plan out this people broker deal. It is so ironic about this and the men’s mentoring ministry needing people brokers as well.

I plan to meet at the church this afternoon. I like to plan a visit with the IT ppl there after such meetings. Seems as if I do quite often! I entertained Keven the IT guy with a change in the audio streaming of the sermons online. Currently they are RealAudio and hosted off site. So he uses a ram file to redirect to it thus making it confusing for the average user to try downloading them for later user or even for burning to CD. So I suggested using mp3 or ogg formats. Of course we would keep the ra files until we get good stats in to gauge their usage. I’m hoping this works out because I so desperately want to be helping out with something computer related for the church.

What have I been up to all week? Let’s see… Friday I got the PC installed at the bosses house in the evening. Had to run to pick up my daughter from a birthday party then back to the bosses house again to finish up. She enjoyed running around their house with me. Yes running! They weren’t home so we got to have a little fun. Monday I got two more Linksys WMP11 cards and a surge protector for the bosses house. Then back out there to install the protector and also took some cable tamer tubes to cover the gaudy wires under the desks. Before going out there me and my friend Scott met at another friends new office for his Mac business. I referred him to my bosses wife as she is interested in getting a Mac. Also spent some time at another friends computer business. Looking to buy a couple Athalon PCs from him. So I was out of the office most of the day Monday. Spring fever I suppose. Tuesday I stayed put in my office just tinkering around with odds and ends cleaning up a bit. Today I have been doing about the same and making plans to upgrade our payroll system just getting familiar with the major jump in the version. Gotta play it safe you know.

Got my MySQL Cookbook in today! There were two extra surprises in the box too. Linux Server Hacks and Running Linux 4th Edition. I ordered Running Linux and Linux in a Nutshell for my brother last week online. This shipment was for placing a banner ad on our local LUG site for OReilly books. So I have a couple extra books to hand out at the next LUG meeting I guess!

The Pain of Conviction

The Men’s Mentoring Ministry meeting went off last night. Got out about 10PM. Made for a long evening spent at the church with the normal Wednesday night service before that. I mentioned what I guessed the meeting would be like yesterday. I wasn’t too far off! What I feared most was that we’d all be lined up and those in the known click crowd would be team members and hand pick from those on the wall for teammates. But as I had guessed it… the place was packed with very ambitious guys wanting to disciple and mentor. That is awesome you know! A rather large number on hand were very open about speaking out and even against some ideas. Today I (as one who didn’t speak up) emailed the leader of the ministry my thoughts and suggestions. As I am already a part of a couple mentoring groups wasn’t looking for more ppl. I wanted more resource information and training opportunities. The outcome of this meeting has possibly opened my accountability partners eyes to a real need for commitment in getting together. We both suffer sins of the flesh yet need mentors ourselves.

The home PC is still not working in Windows. I had gone into safe mode and removed the hotfix driver and the hardware device listing. Again… in normal mode it detected the device and installs it. Up to the install everything runs fine, but after it’s installed it crawls again. Checking the BIOS I only have the option of PCI or AGP as the video selection. Oddly I did notice the on-board NIC was enabled which I changed, as well as sound was disabled!?! Sound was never a problem however and to the best of my knowledge the change made no difference. So I’m running out of plans. I guess next I just need to go with the flow. You know… “can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”. Well I will try deleting the Matrox driver and keep the Intel installed or just dump them both. Then try reinstalling the Matrox drivers later. Currently the display properties do show that it is using the Matrox drivers. My guess is that a shared library got overwritten.

Got some progress out of the QC wireless today! Found a driver and firmware update available. The new config utility works great and easier to get around in. Only one problem and that is it’s a bit slower in bringing up the network. But hey, it beats having to set the WEP password every boot.

This week must have had a hex put over the DLT tape backup unit. Friday one workstation was turned off by mistake. Monday the boss turned his PC off. Tuesday had a tape failure. Wednesday I accidentally left the tape cleaner in the drive. However I was able to remember that type of error will start the job the moment it gets a writable tape and so I had the correct tape in for Wednesday. Tonight will prove the broken spell. I should ping the bosses PC since he left on vacation…

Yet another virus out this afternoon! ClamAV calls it Worm.SomeFool, Symantec coins it W32.Netsky.B@mm. So far we have had only four.

This afternoon I offered a suggestion to the church IT manager. Currently the sermons online are in the RealAudio format. It is also packaged as a streaming method. I mentioned that several ppl have asked me how to download them. This proves to be a much larger task for them than they expected. View the ram file for the actual URL and wget the ra file to your disk. Then I run a vplayer command that plays it through RealAudio to a wav file, then I use that to burn an audio CD. What’s so hard about that? So I suggested offering a couple quality versions of a mp3 format. He took the bate! So now he wants me to draw up a plan for the transition. We don’t want to scare the folks already used to this system at hand. Cool, then we could measure the stats to see what ppl like. Now if I could figure how to incorporate using Linux to do this from home. Time to think about this now.