bring it on

Christmas came and went last year, and when we didn’t have a single flake of snow, I told some of my co-workers that I wouldn’t mind missing an entire year of snow.

Now that it’s finally here, I think it really looks nice.   I just wish it was warmer…

…and I think Todd should authorize the purchase of a 4-wheeler to shred through help manage the snow… you never know when that would come in handy.

the past week

Man, I’ve been slacking already on the blog…

Actually, this last week has been very crazy.  Most of it was spent up in the auditorium control room doing a complete rebuild of our video system.  Because our control room was built so quickly, there was a lot of excess wire hanging around (nothing was cut to length when we built the system, because it was 2 days before opening day).  We knew we needed to get our wires cleaned up, but we also took the week to look at the positioning of some of our gear and how everything flowed.  By the end of the week, the wiring crew had everything patched back together, and on Saturday, all of the cameras were hooked up and tested.  With the exception of one genlock issue with our Sony BRC camera, everything went off without a hitch.

Yeah, there are still a few wires peeking out of places, but trust me, it’s much better than it looked.  And yes, if you’re looking close, you see that we’ve got Macs in there.  People ask me if I’m a Mac or a PC guy, and the answer is ”yes.”  I spend a good amount of time on both platforms, so I try to make them play nice with each other as much as I can.

Even better than than the rebuild, this week we officially signed on our first volunteer video director!  This is something I didn’t think would happen so fast, but it’s amazing (and quite cool) how God provides in your need.  Hopefully we can get a couple more people on the roster for directing our live productions.  I know there’s at least that many hiding out in the congregation somewhere. :-)

Katharion: The first week.

Here are our stats after being online with Katharion for a full week.

I had to chuckle a little when I realized that Katharion is handling more mail for Parimeter in a single day than it is for us in an entire week.  I also noticed that our spam-to-legit email ratio is pretty low.  Interesting…  maybe we have a bunch of users that are getting email feeds off of forums or something.

I’m still very impressed with how much garbage Katharion is keeping off of our email server.  This not only saves our users time and frustration from sifting through their inboxes, but over time we’ll save quite a hunk of bandwidth as well.  Right now we only have a non-line-of-sight wireless connection, so that hunk of bandwidth is pretty valuable.   (That in itself is another story for another time).

So far so good!  I’ve yet to hear any ill remarks about Katharion’s services, and judging from our experiences, it doesn’t yet look like there’s a good reason not to go with them. 

Lenovo tech support – Feelin’ the love

This past week our senior pastor’s notebook died on him.  No warnings or anything, it just stopped running and would not start back up.

After some investigation, we had the culprit narrowed down to  something between the power socket on the back of the machine the and motherboard.  I put a call in to Lenovo tech support and within just a couple minutes I was on the phone with a living breathing person who was in Atlanta (I’ve called Lenovo tech support before and this is SO nice).

The phone call took place around 10:00am Tuesday last week.  On Wednesday, DHL dropped my return box off.  I boxed the dead computer, did the small amount of paperwork, and called DHL to schedule the pickup.

DHL picked up the notebook on Monday (grrr), and by Wednesday, it was BACK in our office ready to be put back to work.  Lenovo’s techs (in Tennessee, mind you) had worked on the unit the day it got there, finished it, and overnighted it back to me.  Impressive! 

It’s very refreshing to be dealing with a company who values customer support like this.  Who else is knocking it out of the part on the support end?  Tell me your stories!

Lenovo tech support – Feelin’ the love

This past week our senior pastor’s notebook died on him.  No warnings or anything, it just stopped running and would not start back up.

After some investigation, we had the culprit narrowed down to  something between the power socket on the back of the machine the and motherboard.  I put a call in to Lenovo tech support and within just a couple minutes I was on the phone with a living breathing person who was in Atlanta (I’ve called Lenovo tech support before and this is SO nice).

The phone call took place around 10:00am Tuesday last week.  On Wednesday, DHL dropped my return box off.  I boxed the dead computer, did the small amount of paperwork, and called DHL to schedule the pickup.

DHL picked up the notebook on Monday (grrr), and by Wednesday, it was BACK in our office ready to be put back to work.  Lenovo’s techs (in Tennessee, mind you) had worked on the unit the day it got there, finished it, and overnighted it back to me.  Impressive! 

It’s very refreshing to be dealing with a company who values customer support like this.  Who else is knocking it out of the part on the support end?  Tell me your stories!