Today I realized I had never posted a roll of the church IT blogs I read. So I went through and cleaned up the subscription list in my feed reader (IE 7), exported the list as OPML, and then imported it into blogrolling.com in order to quickly create the new blogroll you see on the right.

Then I realized, this could be a really cool way to link church IT blogs, using the same approach as the Methodist Blogroll. So, here goes …

Church IT Blogroll Instructions
Benefits:

• We will maintain the blogroll and update it regularly
• As links are added, updated, and deleted, it will update on your blog automatically
• A great way to keep track of the church IT blogging world and build the fledgling Church IT Roundtable/Church IT Association

Requirements:

• Your blog is focused on church IT and/or church web sites
• You update it regularly (if we see no posts for a few months, we’ll take you off)
• You provide an RSS feed of your posts (because the feed is what we’ll actually put on the blogroll)

To get on the blogroll:

• E-mail me (clif.guy at cor.org)
• We’ll check out your blog and add you if you meet the requirements

To add the blogroll to your own site, paste the following code in your blog template:

<script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript” src=”http://rpc.blogrolling.com/display.php
?r=9407d5ed585629e658efc2318e1add48″></script>

In my wee-hours haze last night I linked something totally unrelated to Andrew’s video. It’s here.

The Annex is going away. It’s worth less than it would cost to move, so what to do? I know! Blow it up, real good! Our Facilities folks invited the local FBI SWAT team to use it for practicing a hostage situation. Andrew took a bit of video showing the guys in full battle gear assaulting the Annex. And here are some pictures of the damage they left in their wake.

Annex main entrance with shattered glass everywhere:

Glass from the back door lays shattered on the floor:

A spent shotgun shell (they used shotguns to shoot open locked doors):

Smashed door hinge:

This door latch was blown off by a shotgun blast. It threw the door knob into the sheetrock wall, making a nice hole:

The black spot on the floor is from a “flashbang” – a non-lethal grenade that makes a big flash and a loud bang to stun anyone in the vicinity. You can see damage on the adjacent partition. The white powder on the floor is fire extinguisher residue:

Somehow they knocked a hole in the outside wall. Yes, that’s daylight you can see through there!

Lesson: don’t be in the way when your friendly, local FBI SWAT team storms the building!

The Leawood Police are coming in tomorrow for more training exercises. There’s nothing left to smash. 😉

Those of you who subscribe to Seth Godin’s blog have already seen his post a week ago titled “Memo to the very small.” Interesting that he mentioned churches in the opening paragraph as possible users of his method for small organizations to use the web.

People from small or technically-unsophisticated churches frequently ask us for advice about how to build or rebuild their church web site. Seth describes these people perfectly when he says:

These are businesses that have trouble dealing with the Yellow Pages. Too much trouble, too much time, way too expensive. So, should local micro-businesses just ignore the web? Or should they become experts in the art of building and maintaining a website?

His suggestion is to use Typepad with a standard template, a Squidoo lens, and a set of pictures on Flickr. Those of you who work with small churches as a volunteer or consultant, does this sound like a good recommendation?

We don’t need no stinking Neat Patch. (Sorry, Jason, couldn’t resist.)

This is one of the racks for our new office at Southcreek. It has two 48-port HP switches and fewer than 10 ports are free since we completed our moves yesterday.

On the shelf below the patch panel is our SonicWall firewall and DSL modem. These provide a backup (a VERY slow backup) for our wireless LAN bridge.

Yesterday was the last big moving day in a sequence of moves we’ve been doing for more than a week.

Below is the humble Annex, a temporary building obtained for our rapidly-expanding Children’s Ministry back in the mid 1990s. For the last several years it has been the central church office, housing our receptionists, mail room, main copy/work room, most of our executive management, and numerous other staff. It’s hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and frequently smells of animals that have crawled underneath to die! Next week it will be used by local law enforcement for training exercises before it is finally dismantled and hauled off.

Front door to the Annex with the East Bldg reflected in the glass. The sign directs visitors to the new reception desk in the East Bldg.

“We are moving! Please pardon our mess while we pack”

Load ’em up!

And move ’em out!

We’re working closely with our Facilities Department to move 50 staff people, starting yesterday through the end of next week. Yesterday was Move Day 1 when we moved 21 people from Central Campus to the leased office at Southcreek. Next Wednesday and Thursday we’ll be moving 11 people from one place to another within campus (including Andrew). And then Friday we’ll move another 18 people from campus to Southcreek. Whew!

Philip (foreground), Jeremy, and Brian working among the cubicles:

Dick Cooper, our Director of Facilities, holding forth:

Jeremy prepping phone cords:

Ian, concentrating on settting up phone extensions, amid the chaos:

Kelly Williams (center) and some of her staff from the Finance Department surprised us with lunch (what a blessing!). Uber voluteer Doug Blackwood, retired from management of the help desk at HP, is on the far right.

Here’s some of the work we’ve been doing over the last three weeks to prepare for 40 staff moving into the 9000 sq. ft. of office space we leased to replace our 13 year-old temporary building.

In the process of installing data and phone cables:
Ian and Jeremy begin installing equipment in the phone/network room:

Jerry and Kevin from WKT (our phone vendor) installing the phone system:

Ian installing a repurposed Dell 2650 for use as a file/print server (it does DFS replication with a server in our data center on Central Campus):

Another answer to Tony’s question comes from Joel Dehlin:

I.T. should not be saying no. You should give the customer(s) information about what resources you have available, and they should (collectively) make decisions about what to do with the resource. You can cajole, influence, or merely suggest, but the customers should be making these calls.

In all of that we had only one drop lasting around 30 seconds at 3:39 pm. You can’t see the excursion below -65 because the monitoring system is on the other end of the link. (The monitor needs the link to be up to grab the signal strength from the other end.)

Now, one 30 second drop doesn’t sound to bad considering it’s been raining for 24 hours. But the problem is, if we had staff working here yesterday, every phone call in progress at 3:39 pm would have been dropped. Most likely every Shelby session would also have been dropped. That doesn’t seem good enough to me. What do you think?