Daryl Hunter - Church IT Guy

January 2010 Update (Time flies)

Here's a summary of the last few weeks:

• ice
• snow
• rain
• ice
• snow
• rain

Do you see a pattern?

From January 4 - 25, I participated in a 21-day "Daniel Fast" along with the large majority of the staff at my Church - lifechurch.tv.  This was a time of "resetting / rebooting" for many of our staff.  We have the privilege of serving a world-wide community of people who have either already stepped over the line of faith, and of course those that think we're totally weird.  For me, personally, the Daniel Fast was a time of reflection on 2009 and anticipation of 2010 - includng my three words.

For those of you that like to keep me accountable on my "read" word for 2010, my reading list for January 2010 has been:

• The Servant by James Hunter - finished and currently in a staff bookstudy
• Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey (still have about 100 pages to go)
• First Break all the Rules by Marcus Buckingham - finished
• Good to Great by Jim Collins (an annual read for me) - finished

About 10 days ago, I flew to our home office in Oklahoma with Greg Kamer with The Mirazon Group.  They, Mirazon, are our partner of choice when working on deep Microsoft, Virtualization and Storage technologies.  I've personally engaged with them for some very large "forklift" migrations, a lot of brain share, and even a few smaller licensing opportunities.

For this project, Greg & I worked with one of "my guys" - Mark Burleson - to build a MIcrosoft Search Server environment.  We have a large file server, and initially are indexing just over 1TB of data.  Soon, maybe if I can be convinced, we'll index our "users share" also - adding another couple TB of data to the mix.  The project has been great, and we had a great chance to provide a "search" tool for both our PC and Mac user groups. I look forward to rolling this out to our staff very soon.

While working on Search, we spent a lot of time talking about Sharepoint and what all that can offer to us as a staff.  We also spent a lot of time discussing a large Wireless project - and have been totally blown away by technologies from Ruckus Wireless. I'm sure you've noticed I'm a HUGE Cisco Evangelist.  I've been using Cisco products for well over a decade - closer to 15 years - and am fairly biased towards them.  I'm a "right tool for the job" kinda guy, but really believe in Cisco.  For this particular project, I've been pleasantly surprised and excited about the Ruckus gear.  I'm looking forward to learning more.

Oklahoma was fun, but we also got stuck for a few days.  Our flights out of Oklahoma were canceled Thursday, Friday and Saturday (we left Sunday) because of a giant ice / snow storm that effectively shut down the Oklahoma City region.  The bad news is that we really missed our family.  The good news is that we had a chance to work on some other random projects like:

• Provisioning a Cisco 6503-E, and aggregating it to our core Cisco 6509, and prepping it for our soon-to-come Wireless project.
• Stubbing out our newest Campus - launching sometime in March/April.  We built the routed and switched network, provisioned the Active Directory Site and Domain Controller, added wireless, and tested all that goodness.  So, that's fun.
• Provisioned a backup/secondary SIP router - we have migrated from PRI to SIP for our primary DID block(s) and will be moving toward full-SIP everywhere it makes sense.  Our Primary SIP Router is a Cisco 3725 and our backup SIP Router is a Cisco 2811.
• Provisioned a backup / DR-based Cisco VG248 Voice Gateway at our DR site.  Over the last year, we've worked hard to remove SPOF - single points of failure.  You can read more about that project here. This VG248 will provide emergency based "walmart phones" in a true disaster situation.  It also will help provide analog lines for random projects we do - kind like the Dave Ramsey Town Hall project last Spring.
• Provisioned a new physical Server 2008 R2 DC for our Central Campus.
• Provisioned two new virtual Server 2008 R2 DCs - one for Central and one for our DR site.
• Provisioned our 2x virtual Exchange 2010 Enterprise boxes - just installed the OS and joined the domain.  That project will be coming very soon.  One box will be at Central and one at the DR site and we will be using HA technologies for database redundancy, failover, etc.

Anyway that's a lot of stuff.  And I'm still sleepy.

This next quarter (1Q2010) will be CRAZY exciting.  Never boring for sure.

What's been going on in your world?

My 3 Words - 2010 - Read, Share, Play

Let's take a quick break from the typical techno mumbo jumbo...

I'm a fairly goals-driven person.  I am a high achiever and "compete" with myself to become better at my career (technology) and become a better leader. For the last several years many people I admire and trust have been employing the @chrisbrogan "Three Words" philosophy in their life. I've watched them have laser focus on their families and careers.  And I wanted to experiment this year to see if it could help me gain focus.

Here are my 3 words for 2010 - Read, Share, Play.

Read
I love to read.  I read a lot.  I read "funny" books, I read blogs, I read trade magazines, I read my Bible, I read Inspirational / Motivational books, I read Leadership books.  This year I will read 40 Inspirational / Leadership books.  More than anything, I want 2010 to be a time when reading is more than just something I "do" but something I'm always looking for.  I'm "okay" at this, but want to be better.  I always want to learn more.

One area to be careful here - for me - is hoarding that information.

I recently read a statement by a philosopher named Publilius Syrus that helped me understand this more clearly.  He wrote "it is no profit to have LEARNED well if you neglect to DO well."  This year I will DO well.

Share
That leads us nicely to my next word - Share.  I am looking to "share" my gifts and talents and knowledge more readily this year.  I have a tendency to be a data nazi.  I love data.  I love "updates."  I love learning more and more and more.  When asked, I will share - but THIS year I want to be more proactive with that.  I want to have a mental capacity to process my learning with a "oh, so and so might enjoy that" - and then follow through and share that.  No, I won't be espousing technical diatribe if it's not wanted.  I will be nice about it.  I want 2010 to be the year I'm thinking more about what I can "share" based on my learning. I'm hoping this bleeds over into the opportunity to invest more in a few specific people in my life.  I want to find an active and fulfilling volunteer role at my local Church where I can use the things I'm good at.

Play
This one is very important to me.  For those of you that only come here for random techno stuff, I'm married to a great gal and have 3 boys.  Nathan is 4 1/2 and is a trip.  He's very smart and really into numbers and math and learning.  He's mini me.  Jacob is 3 and is our monster boy.  He's VERY into Monster trucks, and cars, and animals (dinosaurs especially) and loves to play with his LITTLE brother.  The baby is Andrew - he's 8 months old (Born 5/5/09).  He's developing very fun gross motor skills.  He's crawling all over - hard to keep up with.  His newest trick is pulling up on everything.

Over the last 15 years, I've forgotten how to play.  I know that sounds silly.  There was a time when playing is all I did.  In the last 15 years, I've cut my hair (don't ask), got real jobs and traveled the world, went to rehab, went to college, went to grad school, went to Seminary, and for the last 7 years have focused my career on serving the Church doing non-profit IT work.  I'm a leader and a geek and very focused on being "better" at that.  But, I'm learning more and more that I don't know how to play with my kids.  This year I'm going to do better.  I've already become VERY acute of my attitude on this - and have taken time to play games, and do stuff they like, and generally just hang out with them.  It's hard because I'm a grown up and they are kids and we don't have much in common.  Don't judge me - this is hard for me!  :)  I'm REALLY looking forward to growing in this area and I hope that those of you that know me in real life will ask me how I'm doing with this  and keep me on track.

So - there you go.  Read, Share, Play.  That's my focus in 2010.

What's yours?

Rebooting My Workflow

So, the last few weeks have flown by. 

In many ways, both physically & electronically, I've rebooted my workflow.  I've had a GTD-like work process for quite a while, but have gotten sloppy as of late.  So, I took about 10 days and "refocused" my Inbox (currently at zero), my Deleted items (currently at zero), reorganized my email-system and de-cluttered my physical office (I threw away tons of "stuff" that I was honestly never going to read or look at again - papers, cables, gadgets, etc.).

My reorganized email system (Exchange 2007 SP2 / Entourage 2008 EWS) looks like this:

For those of you wondering - here's a quick overview of GTD - Getting Things Done.

How do you keep up with your tasks?  projects?

How do you keep your "RAM" clear - so you can focus on the most important things of the day?

How often do you think we should "reboot" our workflow?

Am I the only one that has been spinning my wheels lately?

#discuss #honesty