Recap of the week…

Sorry for suddenly going silent since Wednesday morning.  There has been a LOT going on since then.  I’m just going to take a few moments and recap the week.

The IT Roundtable at Granger was awesome.  I had a chance to sit and soak in some dialog from individuals that I consider to be much sharper than myself.  I’ll post more later about some stuff that I took away from the ITR.  Mega-props to the Granger IT guys for making this happen!

Thursday was a myriad of meetings, phone calls to make, and orders to place.  We’re gearing up for budget season again, so I’ve been working on next year’s goals and what it’s going to take to accomplish them.

On Friday I spent most of the day tinkering with a Miranda DVI-Ramp2 as we demo it for this weekend.  I’m pretty pleased with what it’s capable of.  After that, it was off to the Swiss Festival in quiet little Sugarcreek, Ohio for some walking around, running into people we know, and just basically enjoying the fall weather.  The best part of the festival?  Fried cheese.  No lie, man….best stuff ever. (4 out of 5 physicians disagree).

The Roundtable audio verdict

Well, unfortunately it looks like we won’t be doing any live streaming.  However, the audio from the Roundtable will be recorded and will be available in one-hour chunks at a location to be determined.

GCC IT Roundtable – The day before.

It was not a good idea for me to stay up late in the last days of my vacation, because I had a LOT of trouble getting to sleep on Monday night.  I woke up at 3:10am Tuesday morning with about 3.5 hours of sleep under my belt, packed my things, and headed for Granger.  I actually made it about 100 miles before I had to pull over and get some truck driver-grade coffee in Norwalk.

I pulled into Granger about 9am and checked in at my motel.  About 5 minutes later I received a call from our office…our Quickbooks server had quit working abruptly and of course, as you would imagine, it was payroll week.  Fortunately the solution was simple:  I restarted the QuickbooksDB service on the server and things were rolling again.  Still trying to figure out how it stopped though.

I spent the remainder of the day at GCC, working on some various items, one of those items being the audio recording/streaming for the Roundtable.  We will definitely be recording the Roundtable, and hopefully we’ll be streaming, too.  Check back around 8:50 to find out.

I don’t think I’ve ever been as tired as I was last night when I finally stumbled (yes, stumbled) into my motel room to get some much-needed shuteye.  I’m feeling very rested up this morning, though, and man am I stoked.

Tune in later for more Roundtable updates.

Active Directory Management Tools

If you’re charged with the task of maintaining your organizations Active Directory, check out this article from Microsoft TechNet Magazine, “11 Essential Tools for Managing Active Directory.”  The article covers 11 free tools to make your administration job easier, and free is always good.

Work, sleep, drive.

This morning I walked into the NewPointe offices after 2 weeks of being on vacation.  Don’t get me wrong, I would still rather fish, but it felt great to be back to work, also.  To add to that, the domain controllers that I was having problems with yesterday seem to be holding time just fine.  There were a few tickets that piled up over 2 weeks, but that’s about it.  All-in-all, it was a great first day back from vacation (or “holiday,” if you’re reading from across the Atlantic).

I’m headed to bed here in a few minutes, and then I’ll be driving out to GCC bright and early tomorrow for the 2007 Church IT Roundtable.  Nothing like coming back from vacation and going straight into a road trip.