It has been a whirlwind. Things around here just haven’t stopped lately. Between the phone system move, data center stuff, the christmas production and closing up end of the year things there hasn’t been a dull moment and the days have been long. Here is a snapshot of things happening.

 As you may have seen on Jason’s blog we recieved our new racks and promptly starting filling them up. First with the move of the phone system.

While the phone guys were working their fingers off, we decided to start moving what other equipment we could.

Once we got the core switch(HP 5406zl) in and wired up the phone guys were ready to move our T-1. (Note: Rememer when VLANing that switch port numbers do not increase linearly)

We got the T-1 and our firewall and VPN moved all at the same time and wired up and ready to go.

 When we ordered our battery backup from APC This is not at all like I expected.

The phone guys were then able to proceed through each extension and getting it punched down in the new rack. Looks much neater now.

Once the phone guys had finished, I took a moment to examine the cable they had removed from our previous location.

With all this excitement stress levels can run high, Jason came to the rescue with a great Christmas gift. R/C Helicopters!

Once we had relieved our stress with some pilot action, I was on my way to a rehearsal for our Christmas production and noticed that our lobby was now a park…with an ice rink!

And to end things out we had finagled a couple pans of brownies out of some co-workers but our second pan must have been rushed out of the oven because it was not finished. This is Jason spreading the middle like butter. There are however some who think this is how brownies should be…those people are wrong.

 Things have definitely been crazy round here lately, but the mood is good. Christmas is my favorite holiday and this is shaping up to be a good one.

I happened to be in my local Best Buy lately and as I was going through the checkout, I found this sign

The sign reads: “Due to a critical system failure, our prices on the sales floor may not be correct. However, the prices are correct in the registers.” 

Evidently their system is; You shop for what you want, They charge whatever they feel they should at that time. So I understand that system problems happen, but how can you have a store where all the displayed prices are incorrect? They couldn’t just start writing prices for now? Maybe I’m being to critical. Whatever happened to stores that honor the shelf prices?

….that is of course if you agree to take a survey every two weeks and let them monitor everything that happens on your computer for three months. They are taking some extraordinary steps to get in and see what you are doing here. In my experience even people who use their computer exclusively for freecell don’t like the idea of being watched…at all! Let alone the possibility of 24/7 surveillance.

I might do it though. Link

Yesterday(Friday) I was privileged enough to be able to take part in the Northwoods Christmas party. It was a great time spent with staff in Chicago. I considered posting a photo journal of sorts but then I lost all of that ambition. So here are a couple of highlights and thumbnails of the whole trip.

While perusing the blog of Tony Dye, I happened to notice that today is a special day. 

It seems like only four months ago that I sat in on my first Church IT podcast…. Well, it was only four months ago but in those for months I have taken part in some great discussions, met most of the people involved, and been to two roundtables. Looking back it’s a whirlwind but the church IT community is a great one.

Kudos to the ‘king‘ of course for starting the podcast. It has been a wealth of information as well as a great place to interact with peers. I’m glad to be a part of it.