Scotty, we need more power!

I particularly enjoyed working with my co-workers in the News Room this year.  Since we had the extra day the entire operation had a significantly lower stress level throughout for everyone.  Some things broke and had to be fixed.  Some things had us running in circles for awhile.  We had our challenges like we do every year but this year has to stand out as one of the better ones.  We had time to actually talk to each other during the week!

Derek and I get stoked at the Media Center booth.

One of the big new items to come out of this year’s work is that we will be meeting at the Raleigh Convention Center for the next two years!  I am excited about being able to sleep in my own bed for part of the week but I will miss Greenville.  From an operations standpoint the Greenville Convention Center fit our needs quite well.  It remains to be seen how things will work in Raleigh but I’m not worrying about that this year.

Bishop Gwinn’s State of The Church Address stands out as one of the highlights of conference in my mind.  He delivered a powerful message to the people about a variety of topics including cross racial appointments.  I have never seen him get so emotional before.

State of the Church Address – Bishop Gwinn from NCCUMC.org on Vimeo.

Another of my highlights has to be the African Children’s Choir.  What a joy they were!  This group of children from war torn Africa inspired and moved everyone in the crowd.  How can anyone watch this and now smile?  I shot this video from backstage with my Droid.  Apologies for the poor quality…

That brings us to the end of the 2010 North Carolina Annual Conference.  I look forward to seeing everyone next year.  Now it’s time to break all of this stuff down and head home.  I’m going to take a day of rest tomorrow and then dive right into the building move.  June is a busy month!

Affected browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari.  All are running the latest patches as of this writing.

Steps to remediate for Windows XP users:

1. Start – Run
2. Run the program “cmd” for the command line
3. Enter “ipconfig /flushdns” and hit Enter
4. Restart the browser

Steps to remediate for Windows Vista/7 users:

1. Start – All Programs – Accessories
2. Right click on command prompt and select Run As Administrator
3. Enter “ipconfig /flushdns” and hit Enter
4. Restart the browser

I have seen some small issues with Ubuntu and Mac laptops.  We resolved those by dumping the browser cache, restarting the network connections and restarting the browser.  I will post an update as I learn more.

Update: June 10th @ 5:24 PM

I’ve done a good bit of googling and found out that the issue is most likely linked to our brand spanking new Linksys WRT320N wireless router (relevant threads can be found here and here).  Apparently that entire family of routers has trouble with DNS requests.  I didn’t see a sticker on the box when I bought it that said something along the lines of “I suck at DNS.”  Who knew?  I updated the firmware at our dinner break.  We’ll see how it goes from here.

Ignite Raleigh

A good friend of mine invited me to attend the Ignite Raleigh event this week.  Neither of us really knew what to expect but we decided to go anyway.  We had a blast!  The Lincoln Theater was packed with over 500 attendees.  Everyone was walking around with their smart phones out, Facebooking and Twittering the event live as it happened.  It was techie paradise.  Of course yours truly rolled in with a nearly dead Blackberry battery…

The presentation format was the best part of the evening.  All presenters were limited to five minutes.  They could use 20 slides that automatically rotated every 15 seconds.  Anyone that went over their time limit was instantly Rick Rolled.  The presentations were varied and, of course, straight to the point.  The theme for the evening was “enlighten us, but make it quick!”  The tight time limit guaranteed a succinct presentation.  It was refreshing to not get bogged down in details.  We saw some very clever powerpoint presentations.

Some of my favorites:

• 19 Reasons Why Raleigh Is Better Than the Silicon Valley by Wayne Sutton.  Wayne laid many of the reasons why Raleigh is better than our west coast friends.  Turns out one of the reasons is because we have big nuts!
• What Would Jesus Tweet? by Derek Brown.  This was a pleasant surprise.  There was an audible groan from the audience when the topic was introduced.  He killed it.  By the end of the presentation he had the attention of everyone in the building.  This one was my favorite of the night.  I hope this video goes online.  If it does I am going to download it and keep it for later.

All of the presenters did a great job.  I hope video will be posted shortly.  When it is I will share some of my favorites here.  You should follow their Facebook page or Twitter page.  I’ll definitely be attending this next time!

The DDoS problem is a whale of a different color, however. All you people who I’ve warned over and over again to install or update your security software, everyone who can’t stop visiting HotSexyLibrarians.com or downloading music and movies from Igotyourfiles.com, and all those noobs who insist on opening every single e-mail attachment they get—you did this. You and your zombie PCs are to blame.

Many of the news reports I read yesterday used the phrase “denial of service attack” and then the acronym “DDoS.” So, what’s the extra “D” mean? Turns out it stands for “distributed,” which, in this case, means the attack does not originate from one place. Instead, it comes from millions of places. Put simply, a denial of service attack is not come from one big server somewhere in Russia, China, or North Korea that attacks a commercial enterprise’s servers here in the U.S. or elsewhere in the world. If it was, companies could find it easier to block, or at least stop, the attacks when they begin. A DDoS is different. Yes, it’s coordinated, but the coordination is spread across thousands, if not millions, of PCs around the world.

Yes, that’s right.  It’s all our fault.  All of us that are operating infected computers.  Please be sure to update your software and run a strong antivirus program.  There will always be someone out there writing malware, attempting to trick us into installing it.  It’s up to us, however, to make sure that we have fully patched and protected computers.  Let’s hope Twitter comes back soon.  Be sure to take this offline time to patch your computer(s)!

One of the many ways in which the internet powers individuals is the ability to take concerns public.  Dave Carroll entrusted United Airlines with a $3500 guitar and they destroyed it.  Fed up with bad customer support he decided to take his situation public.  The speed at which information travels across the internet never ceases to amaze me.  In just a few days this video was viewed over 2.5 million times.  His Twitter feed has over 1,600 followers.  That’s a lot of activity!

Dave heard back from United within two days:

Even the guitar vendor had to get in on the action:

Peek-A-Boo!

The family and I visited the Museum of Life and Science in Durham today to participate in their Dinosaur Trail Preview.  The trail officially opens up on July 25th, but is now open for members and special guests.

A few days ago the museum posted an invitation on their Twitter feed for all bloggers and tweeple to come by for a special sneak peek.  For a few hours this afternoon people were walking around the trail snapping photos and updating their twitter feeds, facebook pages and flickr accounts.  It was a lot of fun seeing some familiar names and placing them with faces.  My children had a blast.  Some parts of the trail were still under construction but the majority of the big exhibits were ready.  We can’t wait to come back again when the trail is completely open!

Here are some of the pictures we took during the trip:

Dinosaur Trail Preview

What if this works?

During our annual conference I was heavily exposed for the first time to the new Rethink Church campaign coming from United Methodist Communications (UMCOM).  Being on the conference staff I have heard rumblings about this initiative, but this was the first time I a full presentation.  The communications folks started talking about this months ago when they came back from their big annual meeting.  I watched the presentation on the floor of conference, watched the DVD movie that was passed out and read the fliers.  I met with the UMCOM representatives and discussed the project.  I even discussed it with our own Communications Director.  I realized after doing all of this research that this project may be leaving our people in the local churches wondering what the heck this is all about.  Here’s a summary of the different resources I used to research this big project called Rethink Church.

The new campaign doesn’t seem to be just one website.  It appears to be three different websites and directions.  UMCOM has done significant work on some of their older and more established websites as well as launching completely new ones.  Let’s discuss each one in turn.

Rethink Church
I first started at the Rethink Church website.  The website address redirects to the umcom.org web template.  This site contains the majority of resources for the Rethink Church project.  It fully explains what the advertising campaign is and how it is carried out.  I found the Rethink Church 101 page to be particularly helpful.  The What If video is worth viewing.  How can we propagate it via the social networks without the ability to embed it?

Find-A-Church
My search then brings me to the Find A Church website which had been completely revamped.  This domain name also redirects to the umcom.org web template.  It looked almost nothing like the older site that I was sending people to.  This appears to be a major thrust of the new campaign.  The site has been updated with a new Google Maps widget and links to the appropriate Conference/District websites.  As before the information is as up to date and helpful as the individual church enters into the system.  As long as they enter the information the site is very helpful.  If they don’t participate (or maintain updated data) then the site isn’t very useful.  That’s not a knock on the UMCOM effort however.  The old adage about garbage in/garbage out definitely applies.

Ten Thousand Doors
The last piece of this new campaign is found at the Ten Thousand Doors website.  This site seeks to match up interests with United Methodist churches in the visitors immediate area.  You can pick from a list of multiple attributes such as Advocacy, Hobbies, Family Life and Volunteering.  You then enter your zip code and a mileage radius for the search criteria.  I’m not sure how these attributes are assigned but they are certainly interested.  If I had to guess I would say it was when the church updates their Find A Church information.  This site also integrates with Google Friend Connect and the major social networks.  You can also read news updates from various sources.  Some of them are pulled from United Methodist sources.  I’m not sure where the other news sources are chosen.  They don’t seem to have a whole lot of relevance to UMCOM or Methodism specifically.  The most interesting parts of this website are the comment forums and the ability to find volunteer service opportunities via Google Maps.  These are possibly the two most useful features of the entire campaign.  These sections allow people to communicate with each other as well as easily match up their skills with nearby service opportunities.

Social Networks
You can follow along with the major social networks as well.  These areas are fairly self explanatory for seasoned social network veterans.  I recommend them all.

• Twitter feed
• Rethink Church Facebook Group
• 10 Thousand Doors Facebook Group

I wish all of the different domain names were built into the Rethink Church website.  It’s a shame that they redirect away and lose some of the branding.  That may be a technical issue with the back end system but it’s still a shame.  Overall I like the new tools available on the Rethink Church website as well as the revamped Find-A-Church site.  These changes are encouraging.  They seem to be designed for people who are not already exposed to the United Methodist Church.  We’ll see how it goes long term.  I hope the outcome is positive.