The trip is off to a good start, with milk shakes at Steak-N-Shake as a late night treat. Ritters was our first choice and Culvers our second (were trying for custard! We have some custard virgins among us!) but it was still good!

It’s time for bed, going to be a long day tomorrow! I’ve also got some server and storage infrastructure upgrades in the works that I need to find time to write about, some exciting stuff! See some of you tomorrow, and the rest of you in #citrt? We didn’t make it in in time for dinner with Dean Lisenby or Sheldon so will get to see them tomorrow along with Jason Powell!

Speaking of the national one (wow, what a natural transition! :-) it’s coming up next month! October 8-10 at Seacoast Church. Check out the official website for details. Early bird registration was extended by a month until September 8th, so you can still get in at the cheaper rate! I’m planning on going to this one too and so is my wife, unless plans change at the last minute.

You should go too. See you there!

Also, the Church IT Roundtable Fall 2008 is coming up in October, but the registration price goes from $50 to $75 if you don’t register by August 8th! The actual Roundtable is October 8th and 9th, but there are pre- and post-activites planned for the day on either side if you can make it (see the schedule). My plans aren’t firm yet, but my wife and I will likely both be there!

If a laptop user establishes a VPN connection to your corporate VPN server, and doesn’t use split tunneling (in other words, from the time they’re connected, all traffic goes through the VPN as its default gateway no matter what), assuming that you’re using a VPN client that verifies the identity of the server (rather than blindly trusting DNS, which is easily spoofable on a wireless network), the user moves from the realm of insecurity into a much more secure environment, similar to being plugged into your wired network at the office. Of course, then your office WAN connection has to support everything they do, including web browsing!

However, using a free or paid “VPN” service from a company that just turns your wireless connection into a VPN-enabled “wired” connection is only going to help thwart unencrypted wifi sniffing and other such attacks. Unless you also use SSL and other encryption technologies, those services are just giving you a wired internet connection just like your home connection rather than the easier-to-sniff unencrypted wireless. It’s better than nothing, but it’s not like an encrypted pipe into your own network.

Don’t discount unencrypted wireless attacks. It’s never happened to me, but if you hop over and read some of Security Monkey’s case files at you’ll discover that there’s a lot of bad stuff going on in the world on computers :-) Those case files are slightly modified true stories from this guy’s career! His old 2005-2007 podcast episodes are worth listening to for some cool security tips and tools as well, to digress for a moment!

I don’t have a good answer; VPN connections to the office make internet run very slowly unless you have the WAN bandwidth to support fast throughput to and from all your remote users including web browsing! But that’s a much more secure way to operate. The number of ways wireless can be hijacked, sniffed, spoofed, and hacked, especially if it’s unencrypted to begin with, is downright scary! At the very least use SSL with verified certificates for anything you do of any importance (or if passwords are transmitted) on an encrypted wireless connection. As an IT guy, I can tell you (or myself) whether a particular session (POP3, IMAP, RPC over HTTP, HTTPS, etc.) is happening over an encrypted connection or not and can be careful. However, the average user is, obviously, not going to know or even care necessarily if Outlook is using POP3 unencrypted or via SSL, or using RPC over HTTPS securely. And if they log into Gmail, they’re not likely to know that although their password is always encrypted on login, their email is transmitted in the clear unless they initiate the session using SSL from the start (using https://mail.google.com/ rather than http://mail.google.com)./ Even if their email contains passwords and confirmations for other accounts!

Stuart mentioned WiTopia on his comment to Tony’s original post. I’d never heard of them before, but I’ve seen similar services to their personalVPN product. That service appears to be, like I mentioned above, just a way to get a “wired quality” connection to the internet over unsecured wireless. An admirable service and a worthy goal even with its limitations, but what caught my eye even more was their SecureMyWifi service. It’s still a wireless service but it has to do with your own on-campus wireless access. It lets you move away from using WPA with a Pre-Shared Key (PSK), also known as WPA-Personal, and use their RADIUS services to authenticate users individually to your encrypted wireless access points. It seems a bit pricey (to me–it’s currently a $99 setup fee, $99/year for one access point, and $14.95/year for each additional access point), but we have the same thing set up using Microsoft’s free (built-in on Windows Server 2003) IAS RADIUS server in-house. If you aren’t familiar with how to set it all up, the WiTopia service could be quite beneficial! They charge per access point, but at Lakeview we have a centrally-managed access points system with one controller that takes care of authentication. I assume that the WiTopia service is based on unique RADIUS keys for each access point client; since the central controller (currently running 12 access points) acts as a single client, it should look like “one” access point to the service. Whether or not this is allowed with their terms of service I have no idea; we are not likely going to use the service since I already do this in-house for free, but I would recommend reading the terms and/or contacting them if you plan on doing something similar to remain in the spirit of their offering.

What is Facilities Management?

(View Video 1 directly on YouTube – makes full-screen option available)

Metaphors using sharp objects, plus “The Howling FMer”

(View Video 2 directly on YouTube – makes full-screen option available)

The second reason the day is a bigger deal for me is that in the past few years, I’ve made a dramatic jump in Mothers from one to three! First, I got married back in 2005, obtaining in the process stepmother Viv, bringing my Mom Total suddenly to two, which was twice as many as I’d ever had before! Then, fourteen really, really short, very short months later (did I mention they were short?), this awesome woman I married (some people call her Ruth, I usually call her Sweetie) added Mom to her title! (It’s arguable she became a mom about 0.75 months prior depending on how you count. Let’s just say I’ve been told I share some of the blame for her new title :-) Just because she’s not my Mom doesn’t mean she’s any less important than the others!

For now, she’s actually the most important on Mothers Day, because our son pretty much thinks every day is Mothers Day. As in, he should have the full attention of his mother every day, all day, whenever he wants it. Not as in, making or buying cool stuff and doing cool things for “Ma Ma” on a particular Sunday in May! Fortunately, he’s started to have fun coloring in the last couple of weeks and when my mom was watching him last Thursday she had him color a nice Mother’s Day card! I guess my mom’s still helping me out by getting something together for my son to give his mom :-) I’ll have to do a bit more work next year to fill my dad’s shoes and help my son figure out something as cool!

I say all this to say three things:

1. That moms are cool, the natural ones, the in-laws, and the one you get to personally select for your kids.
2. The older you get, the more moms you have, as a general rule.
3. Moms deserve more than we kids and dads give them.

Thanks for reading my random thoughts about awesome Moms, on the appropriate day of the year. Of course, that day really comes every day. But at least express it well on the one everyone talks about! I’ve got all three of the moms I’m talking about here with me all this afternoon…it’s great to hang out with them all. Even if we’re alternating between hanging out, games, and taking naps!

If you don’t use a podcatcher such as iTunes to subscribe to podcasts, you can subscribe in Google Reader and stream episodes from your web browser, in addition to just downloading the MP3 file from the JesusGeek post directly.

The interview was complicated by a few connection losses while recording, so if the audio sounds awesome John gets the credit for making it work anyway, and if it has any issues, blame me! I also lost my notes about which WordPress plugins I was going to talk about in my XP-to-Vista conversion on my laptop and didn’t realize it until we were recording, so that was a bit more off-the-cuff than I had intended. Live and learn!

The basic idea I gather is that the group is a way for Christian geeks to fellowship and share, similar to the Church IT Roundtable concept only smaller and not focused specifically on “church IT” and more on a shared love of Christ and electronic gadgets. I didn’t take my laptop, but without it I felt in the minority, although I think it might have been split 50/50! My Nokia N800 was charging or I would have taken that at least!

I’m sure I’m leaving someone or something out, and it was great meeting everyone, but I met a few people at lunch that were particularly relevant to my present activities. One was Neil Cox, aka IndyChristian. Neil is a local Indianapolis blogger who has been using social media extensively to help his life and with Christian outreach. I have been accumulating del.icio.us bookmarks for a while and have over 1,700 links saved, but Neil has several times that! I like Web 2.0 technology and social networking and it’s nice to meet someone else in town who shares a similar interest! Of course, Dr. Ho is also quite into social media, but is currently using Twitter the most (granted, I have been too!).

Eldon Kibbey was the first person I saw when I showed up for lunch. He was at a table by himself, but as he had a laptop open I figured it was a safe bet to head over and introduce myself. The bet was as safe as I thought! Eldon’s the Director of the Christian BusinessMen’s Connection (CBMC) Indiana and is also the Transform Indiana Moderator.

I also met Tom Buckley, who works for Exacq, a company I was only vaguely familiar with before that I’m taking a much stronger interest in now! They make security camera software that I can’t wait to get my hands on and try, both because it’s cool and because we’ve been having some security camera issues that I may get around to blogging about. (Exacq is pronounced just like the word “exact” without the “t” at the end, by the way.) Because they run a demo system in their offices that records 24/7, Exacq managed to get some footage from their office cameras of the recent earthquake in Illinois that they put on their blog and it was picked up by several news stations. Ironically, the company that installed our current security system was Vigilcorp, whose offices are in the same building as Exacq and who now sells primarily Exacq systems, which was not the case when they put ours in. We really like the guys at Vigilcorp and I really like Tom at Exacq, which is a good combination!

Alex Connor, an IUPUI student and programmer/web developer who also maintains the IndyChristianGeeks.com website, was also at the meeting banging away on some code, along with a woman who stopped in a little bit later whose name I have unfortunately temporarily forgotten.

This seems to be a great group to get to know, and an excellent way to get into the local Christian IT community and not just the online one, not that there’s anything wrong with either. But I think this may help (even though most of the Geeks aren’t necessarily “church IT” geeks in the same sense that I am, or many of the CITRT folks are) with my eventual goal of bringing together a Central Indiana Church IT Roundtable as a regional extension of the national CITRT. I’m already making contacts in that direction, but I don’t have any firm plans. If you do IT at a local church here in or around Indy, in a paid or volunteer capacity, why not get in touch with me and start a relationship? We can work towards a Roundtable, which I think would be beneficial to everyone. I’m not the most outgoing person I’ll be the first to admit (which makes meeting new people and sometimes even working with people I don’t know very well a challenge outside of my comfort zone), but if you get me started talking tech you’ll have a friend you may not be able to shut up once in a while! I’m definitely planning to be at next month’s Indy Christian Geeks lunch barring last-minute schedule conflicts!

The Roundtable, Now and Again

Each Roundtable ends with a discussion regarding the future direction of the Roundtable. Do we want to continue as-is, or do we want to become more of an official group? Do we want to stay the same size, or try and grow? Do we have a problem at all, and if so, what is it? The general consensus I think, was that we will continue as-is until we discover a problem to solve. We’ll keep inviting people, but it doesn’t matter if they come or not. That’s their problem. I think almost everyone who has been to a Roundtable has had an amazing enough time that they are excited about it and want to share such an amazing experience with others in a similar position who haven’t heard of it, and that’s where the desire to grow comes from. At the same time, the group works well with approximately the number we have (25-75), so why change it?

I agree with both perspectives, how’s that for being on the fence? Until we have a problem, we keep it small but work to make it bigger. We have local Roundtables in our area if we can drum up enough interest among the locals Church IT folks. We work on centralizing and updating the main CITRT website more often to provide some cohesiveness and a single-source-of-information without becoming too structured. We keep hanging out in the #citrt chat room on IRC (connecting online with people we’ve met in person is a tremendous boon, at least to me, and the two complement each other very well), and we keep blogging. It’s worked pretty well so far. A couple of vendors suggested creating more structure, and I think they could end up being very helpful in this area when we get to the point that we want or need to do that! Until then, we’ll stay on what looks like auto-pilot (can you tell I’m writing this in an airport?) but with the usual careful planning and assistance that the “founding partners” have provided behind the scenes with everyone else helping out where willing and able. I think that was the consensus as I heard it, feel free to correct me or provide an alternate view.

One issue that was raised in the final discussion was, “Why keep having a discussion about the group at the end of each Roundtable, does that mean we need to change or people want change?” I think that group introspection and evaluation is a good idea to see what did and didn’t work each time, since each Roundtable is different. We are very “un-group” still, and rather than a core group getting together to review and plan after the event, I think it’s beneficial to have everyone contribute to the process as a part of the meeting. I would call the discussion useful and beneficial, which is why I feel posting the details for anyone to see here is just continuing the same transparency and discussion already started in person. Of course, this is all my understanding mixed with my opinion, so feel free to disagree (comments are welcome although if you care that much, it’s likely you have a blog of your own!).

All in all, I had at least as good a time at this Roundtable as the last, if not better. I love the people and the friendships and the discussions and the shared enjoyment of technology with fellow Christians. Sure, I can read Wired or Network World magazines and see a lot of cool gadgets, but there’s no shared worldview or mission to really connect with, it’s just technology (and often, in the case of Wired, a very atheistic worldview comes through very strongly). With the Roundtable, it’s not just a meeting and it’s not just about technology. It’s an excuse for friendships and relationships (shhh, don’t tell my boss–oh wait, developing relationships is higher on Lakeview’s radar than technology, and getting both at once is quite a nice combination :-)

MinistryTECH

So what about the new MinistryTECH conference? Overall, I think it was a success. In addition to the CITRT group, many of whom were present, MinistryTECH managed to reach a wider audience due to their existing MinistryCOM foot-in-the-door history and an actual marketing budget (apparently there are some benefits to charging $325 instead of $15 to attend, and hosting a vendor exposition hall!). They also were able to attract some well-known people in the Church IT world (such as Terry Storch and Tony Morgan and others) that provided some great information and ideas to re-energize us and provide food for introspection, in addition to the great church tours we were able to take (even though I missed about half while traveling). A side benefit to the conference and the many attendees was the opportunity to mention the Roundtable to people that hadn’t heard of it. We are at least getting seeds planted and the more we can get people involved in the national (and global) Church IT community rather than hanging out by themselves, I think there will be more of a reach for both MinistryTECH and the CITRT in the future.

In Which The Babbling Stops

That just about does it for my thoughts right now. I have a lot of pictures to sort through and upload (in the range of 600-700 raw), and I’ll post them or links to them when I do that. I left my laptop off and did more Twittering than blogging or note-taking this time, but Jason Lee and several others have done an excellent job of posting outlines and summaries of many of the talks and topics, and in many cases speakers have posted their slides for download as well. In addition, a couple of talks were streamed and recorded using the uStream.tv video service thanks to Ian Beyer.

Also, this post was written primary on Sunday, April 6th (the day after the Roundtable) while I was in the Cincinnati airport on my way home, with links added later. So it’s a fresher perspective than I have now, not that I’ve had time to think about it since! Being gone for a while from work means a bit extra waiting when I return :-) Since it’s taken me a while to get this posted, Tony Dye (at least) has already managed to beat me to a lot of this. Check out his posts, and as usual they are very logical and well-considered (he also re-caps each session he attended and all of the Roundtable in posts just prior, check them out too!):

• Spring 2008 CITRT: What’s Next?
• MinistryTECH, CITRT After-Thoughts
• Roundtable Reflections, part 1
• And, for an funny hotel story: My Interesting OKC Hotel Room

I know others have posted as well, I just haven’t had time to find them all yet!

I haven’t yet figured out what to do with this information, if anything, but I had a few really good user experiences recently and thought this would be a good way to track those over time. As much as the helpdesk system tracks problems, I figure this is one way to track positive results. I’ve only given out two or three Gold Stars in the last month or so since I implemented the program. And no, I don’t tell the users (well, I jokingly told one but didn’t mention that I actually am tracking it), it’s just an internal IT thing. But such data could prove useful in the future, so I’m curious to see how it turns out over a bit longer period of time!

Shhh…don’t tell anyone…

Besides giving me an outlet to polish my writing–a never-ending process–this blog marked the beginning of the end of isolation for this Church IT guy! Little did I know, until I stumbled upon Jason Powell’s blog in some way I don’t even recall now, that there was a growing group of Church IT-ers getting to know each other online, while remaining somewhat isolated by positions that are generally volunteer or, perhaps most often with the online group, one-man IT department positions that make peers hard to come by on a regular basis. There are certainly exceptions, the churches where Jason Powell, Jason Lee and Clif Guy work included along with others, where churches are large enough to have two, three, or more IT staff, and those churches also tend to lead the way in creating and contributing to the online community (well, Jason Lee’s new to the blogging scene but has certainly started off strong). Do those guys just have the spare time, now that they have staff to do their grunt work, to spend online? (I hope you see the wit behind that fallacy–there are numerous one-man IT shop bloggers and many of the aforementioned IT Directors have bloggers on their staff, among many other reasons my question does not have merit! Arguably, one-man IT shops need the online community more than those with an on-site team!)

But I digress, because my initial question was if this blog has existed for one year already. Because I’m not sure. I managed to, unintentionally, begin this blog one year and one day before a leap year Feb. 29th. So, which is it? The 28th is the anniversary of my first post, but the 29th is the last day of the twelfth month. But don’t worry, I promise I won’t duplicate this post tomorrow, if you promise not to read it! Ironically, outside of Church IT I actually had a blog before Jason Powell (the brief 2002 foray he mentions notwithstanding), who made his first post back on Feb. 19th, 2005 (congrats!), while I started my personal blog just under four months before that, back on November 9th, 2004 (at around 2 am…not far off the time of day this blog started). It was the same day, coincidentally, that Firefox 1.0 was released. My personal blog was going rather strong until May of 2005, when a multi-month quiet period followed my engagement, and I was otherwise occupied. It picked up a little bit after the wedding (not immediately, of course…), and then, right about the time our son was born and I set up a blog just for him…it went completely dead and has thus mostly stayed. This blog is definitely more focused than my personal blog (mostly), and is about stuff I’m passionate about and work with on a daily basis. It’s been a little slower of late, but I’m looking forward to a summer free of most schoolwork where even a long workday can end happily without school deadlines looming that evening or the next. I’m taking a web design class this semester, so while I’m not debuting a new blog theme yet, I may take on the creation (or customization) of something over the summer. That, or I’ll be so fed up with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) by then, it’ll have to wait a bit longer…

Anyway: To the next year of online ChIT! (Hmmm…does that mean all this stuff is ChIT Chat?) And thanks for reading.

My only complaint about Brett’s visit was that it was too short! I’ll have to reciprocate at some point and we can continue the conversation. This is Brett’s church (I flew the helicopter over for the shot myself; looks great from my Treo’s camera doesn’t it? ha ha, just kidding–it’s from the camera on my Nokia N800! :-D

I’m looking forward to hanging out with a nearby Church IT guy for a few hours!

Tomorrow afternoon at 2 pm Eastern is the next episode of the Church IT Podcast, hosted on TalkShoe by Jason Powell, the King of Church IT (if you were at the Fall Church IT Roundtable last year where I accidentally coined that nickname, that joke might be funny :-) Don’t miss it if you can make it (I’m not sure if I’ll be there or not, unfortunately I may not have the opportunity this time). There is still the option to download a “Classic” Java client for TalkShoe chat, but they just introduced a new Web version that does not require a download ahead of time and looks more like an IRC chat window. It’s in alpha but looks nice; you can use either one you want.

Speaking of chat, if every two weeks is just too long to wait for the Podcast, you can jump in to the IRC chatroom “24/7 CITRT Roundtable” set up on the Freenode server (IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, has been around forever, or just about, in internet terms, but is not quite as common as it used to be). Justin Moore posted a couple of excellent posts talking about the #citrt chat room and about how to use IRC. He also links to Jeffrey Thompson’s screencast demonstrating graphically how to install the ChatZilla Firefox extension and join in the chat. If you’re a Church IT person, you need to be in there at least from time to time and build your network of geek friends while sharing technology tips!

So, there’s three ways you can get involved in the Church IT community without giving the seat of your chair the opportunity to rebound from your butt imprint. Go!

This doesn’t always happen; I have been included on this via phone announcement before, and I think they even remembered to tell me personally once. Actually, that may have been for a group lunch, not for a go-home-early party. At least they have remembered before… :-)

I hope everyone else from the Roundtable either had or has a safe trip home! A big Thank You from me goes out to Clif Guy and his team for the amazing job they did with the Roundtable, and the vendors were also generous with the excellent meals they supplied. I was also given rides throughout the week (to and from the airport, to and from my hotel, and to the restaurants) by Matt Bradshaw of COR, Dean Lisenby of ACS Technologies, Nick Nicholaou of MBS Inc. and Ministry Technology Institute, and David Crist of First Presbyterian Church of Bellevue, so a big thank you to all of them as well! I appreciate the rides but also the conversation.

There was myriad technical information to absorb at the Roundtable, which was worth about ten times the actual cost in value, but the biggest reason to go was to network and build relationships with others in similar situations. I was able to meet people that I had only known though blogs, and there were also many people who don’t blog that were great to hang out with. This applies to the peers and vendors both. When a vendor sends their IT person and not a salesman, they can make excellent contributions on the level we in the Church IT world are looking for without annoying us with sales pitches. Save those for our supervisors. And that’s what I experienced from everyone I talked to this time.

All this applies to the Granger Roundtable last week put on by Jason Powell, which I have not had time to blog about but was equally as informative and relational. (Hmmm…saying “relational” makes me think of databases. If you know me, you’re probably not surprised :-)

Well, that laptop battery I mentioned is almost dead, so I’ll cut this here. I suppose that’s good; they say less is more. Unless it’s a Church IT Roundtable, in which case, more is more :-)

UPDATE (at 9:22 am Central): I found power! Sometimes, going to the restroom is useful. Well, it usually is, but sometimes what you find along the way is useful as well…but my flight is delayed another half an hour now, so 11:28 is the target time. Not that I believe them this time after it moved from 10:45 to 10:55 to 11:03…

Jason Powell has asked that GCC Roundtable attendees bring a topics list to discuss, so I have to think of some stuff for that. It’s not coming up with topics that will be a problem, it’s finding the time to actually make a list! Between Roundtables, some website work (sorry, I know I promised a post about this, but I’m too much in the middle of it to write about it yet), moving (spent five hours doing almost-the-last painting today!), and schoolwork (which I need to get ahead on this week so I can have fun at the Roundtables), it’s been and continues to be crazy. At least I’m having fun with just about everything; I just wish I could add hours to the day. But who doesn’t want that? I guess I’ll settle for going to bed right now, rather than at 4:30 like last night :-)

I promise I will post at least a picture of the front very soon, after we close (and maybe after we paint/move, because that’s going to keep me busy!). It’s a very modest size house but we love it. It has four bedrooms (smaller rooms with the square footage of many three bedroom houses) and will give me the opportunity to have a home office while still giving us room for family expansion (not that those plans are concrete in any general direction yet). Because we built it (through Beazer), we got to select the design options and all that fun stuff (the floor plan was selected very much by price), and watching it come together has been very cool. And all the options actually look good together, so credit to my wife there! :-) But, by building, we also subjected ourselves to a six month wait that is finally nearing its end. It’s been a long six months!

We’ve been blessed to work with some great Beazer people at our particular community. Through observation it appears most of the Beazer folks we have worked with day-to-day are fellow Christians, and they are also good people doing good work that I am very impressed by. Our Realtor even said at the inspection that the minor cosmetic fixes needed were far less than she’s seen on many new homes, so they put a lot of work and care into this thing. I can’t speak for Beazer as a company as much as these specific people we have worked with, but I am very impressed with them. It feels like we have a relationship with them, and we’re not just customers. And that makes a huge difference to me in any transaction.

After all the people early in the week, we now are in the midst of General Council for the Assemblies of God, being held in Indianapolis this year. We’re a bit too small to hold the thousands of attendees at Lakeview, so it’s actually pretty quiet both at Lakeview and at the District Office this week, for some odd reason :-) As an outreach set up to coincide with General Council, Convoy of Hope is going to distribute tons of food to the community on Saturday. Lakeview has hosted two events in the past (Day of Blessings and Day of Blessings 2) with Convoy of Hope where we distributed food to thousands right from our parking lot, and it looks like this outreach is going to be even bigger: bigger venue, multiple churches, lots of people.

That’s the long and short of it. Lots of people at the beginning of the week, very few around the end of the week. And some posts on web hosting coming soon, because I’ve taken on a project (well, several related projects) that mean more work and more fun!