Jason Powell - Church IT and Other Musings

He-Man and an IT All Staff Email

Do most staff simply delete the IT emails you send out?  Certainly your emails are important or you'd not be sending them out right?  Perhaps you just need to make them a little more entertaining...something people look forward to because there's always something fun inside to find.  If you can just get them to open your email the battle is almost won.  I started long ago making funny/goofy sign offs in my all staff emails...usually tying it somehow into the main content of the email.  Staff continue to tell me they look forward to them.  Some even say they skip to the bottom of the email first then go back and read the content! :-)

Now, keep your emailz short and to the point.  Be clear, be honest, make it fun, make it understandable and make it conversational.  And of course send as few all staff emails as possible.  Don't spam your co-workers 'cause your important emails will stop being important!

Here's the email I sent out this morning ... I think this is the 1st time I've used a He-Man reference in an all staff email LOL!  Already getting lots of postive replies back ;-)

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TODAY at 2pm - possible network outage

Electrician's are doing nifty electricity stuff to a main building feed today starting around 2pm.

Their work will kill power to our key network gear (along with large chunks of the building) in the lower level which is THE CORE of the network here at The Granger Commons*.  While we do have battery backup for our gear it is limited to approx 30mins. 
The electricians hope to be done with our circuits before our batteries deplete, but if they encounter a snag we will have to manually power down our gear (IT gear does NOT like to be shut down cold!) before the batts die. 
If we have to power our key network gear down it will kill all network traffic > internet, shared drives, printing, the full monty!

How will you know if we have to power down? Stay up to date with late breaking GCC TechOps updates by following @gcctechops on twitter … don't use twitter?  No problem!  Just text FOLLOW GCCTECHOPS to 40404. Now, you’ll start receiving our very infrequent twitter updates via text message. Nifty!
Don't have text messaging?  Uh, really??!  You need help!  Your option is to goto our twitter webpage at http://twitter.com/gcctechops … and seriously, it's 2012 … get a text messaging plan already!!!

Jason … by the power of Grayskull! … Powell 

* http://www.leadingsmart.com/2012/07/what-kind-of-church-would-change-the-name-of-its-property.html

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Here's an old blog post with some other sign-offs I've used over the years :-) http://jpowell.blogs.com/jason_powell_church_it/2007/03/king_of_tagline.html

 

Happy System/Network Administrator Appreciation Day!

Hey! Go find your office geek(s) today and give them a hug ... it's System Admin Appreciation Day! :-)

July 25th, 2008 (Last Friday Of July)
9th Annual
System Administrator Appreciation Day

http://www.sysadminday.com/ for deets

GCC Cowmunications/IT/Web Team

A recent team outing for Comm/IT/Web staff ... cowabunga dude! :-)

front left to right: Kem, Lisa, Your's truly
rear left to right: Ed, Matt, Lindsay, Jami, Jeanna, Daryl

Long live the bovine!

Picture Dump

This is just a bunch of pictures that have been collecting on my camera phone I keep meaning to blog about ... so I'm just dumping them all together for your viewing pleasure with a simple blurb rather than separate blog posts.

That's how much I paid for gas Wednesday right here in Granger, IN ... $4.059!!  My first over $4/gal pump.  Sigh.

Ashlee's already starting to practice for the Indy 500

I was complaining about the lack of a nice graphical network monitoring tool the other day ... so while I was out of the office Ed hooked me up with this sweet-o graphical display.  Amazing it looks just like a piece of paper taped to my monitor ;-)

Jeff Hook giving his MinstryTECH presentation ... golly, what a sharp lookin' fella

My first drive with my Biggest Loser GPS ... on the way to the airport to head to MinstryTECH/Roundtable

This was a fun purchasing experience :-)

Our new wiring color codes

Our new IDF and wall/patch panel naming scheme

John D. and son from a recent Saturday IT Volunteer op ... doing some machine rebuilds

Feet Recognition

I noticed tonight my blog traffic was way up ... typically it means somebody pretty popular has linked to something on my blog.  Hmm, wonder who this time?

Dig into the stats and see lots of hits coming from http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=129

Kewl, a link off the Lenovo blog.  Wonder what that's all about?

Ha, they linked to my past post where I'm standing on my former Thinkpad ... too funny.  Guess it just goes to show you never know where your feet will take you ... har har ;-)

Best Political Campaign Ad ever?

This may be the best campaign ad ever!  [hat tip to Justin Moore]

"24" the lost 1994 pilot

If you were an internet user in the early 90's and you are a fan of the show '24' ... you must watch this video now!

link in case the embed code doesn't work for ya.

Did ya catch all the 90's techno sweetness?  Here are my fav's ... 

Pagers, floppies, lycos, encarta, dot matrix printers, AOL chatrooms, tractor feed paper, modem sounds, AOL channels, film developing, Windows 3.1, prodigy, geocities pages, internet charges by the hour ... ahh the memories!

The Internet Thing

Want to learn the secrets so you to can have "the flashiest clothes, dental insurance, and everything"?

Watch this now!

HT to Terry Storch

Possibilities

Please don't have liquids in your mouth when you read this new demotivator poster from despair.com ... said liquid contents will eject from your nostrils.

My Blog Gets Hacked!!! ... well, sorta

As you have seen, Tuesday evening someone other than myself posted on my blog.  This individual was going to wait until I discovered it on my own, but the suspense was killing them ... so they sent me a text message saying, "look at your blog" ... then a few moments later I got a call from said individual saying the same :-)

When I saw the post I busted out laughing big time!  "Raul" is an inside joke that goes all the way back to my college days.  Even if this individual hadn't called I totally would have known who the culprit was.  Of course I was very curious how he got into my TypePad account ... I use a username that most wouldn't know.

So now ... the rest of the story ...
First off, Rob was one of my best friends in college (Taylor University) ... I completely blame him for my academic probation my freshmen year :-)  If you look up "passion" in the dictionary there should be a picture of Rob.  He has this incredible passion for life and his passion for Jesus is unmatched.  I could go on, but suffice it to say Rob and I are still great friends 15 years later ... crud, I suddenly feel older.

Anyways, Rob has this really old computer that basically is just something his kids use for games and such.  He also has just recently started to blog and decided to do some quick blog work for some crazy reason from his kids old slow PC.  When he went to the login page for Typepad ... taadaa ... my username and password were filled in.  What?

Why is are my credentials on his old PC?  We got to thinking and several years ago I must have been at his house and gave him a little show-n-tell on Typepad ... somehow I must have clicked yes instead of no for IE to remember that login info.  So for 2+ years nobody has bothered going to Typepad on that PC ... why would they ... until tonight ... and 2 years later that login info is STILL cached.  Amazing and scary.

I purposely don't let IE or FireFox "remember" any of my user/pass stuff for any websites on any of my computers.  Why?  Because it forces me to remember them and it also keeps the above senario from occuring.  So it's some sort of poetic justice that lead to these circumstances tonight :-)

I decided to not delete Rob's Raul post ... and instead make it an object lesson for us all.  Be very careful what you do on "foreign" computers ... you never know what info you might leave behind!