Tony Dye

Failure & Success

"Success is 99 percent failure."

- Soichiro Honda

The Outsourced Brain

the Sacred Order of the External Mind

"...I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less."

- David Brooks, NY Times

Ministries and Departments

Here's a silly curiosity.  How many ministries does your church have?  How many departments does it have?  Is there any relationship of those two numbers?

   

VMWare's New SMB Bundles

Wendy Perilli of VMWare wanted me to pass along information on the new SMB bundles being offered.  Here's her message, with the link:

From: Wendy Perilli
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 12:45 PM
To: Dye, Tony
Subject: Hope all is well...

Hi Tony.

Hope all is going well for you all.  Wanted to get your feedback on the latest SMB bundles we announced from your community… can you post the SMB press release or link to the new www.vmware.com/smb pages?  I’d love to see what your community thinks about the new SMB bundles features and price points.  [...]

Take care J

Wendy Perilli

Director, SMB Product Marketing

650-427-1580: NEW Office Number

408-507-6366: Cell

wendy@vmware.com

Are You Ready for the End of DST This Weekend?

This weekend is the end of Daylight Saving Time, right?  Well of course not -- it changed this year to end one week later.  Unless, of course, your computer never got the patch.  Or if the patch doesn't work.  I'm remembering the "joys" of the spring change and the things that didn't all quite work out...

So...what time will you be getting up Sunday morning?  How many times will you have to check the time before your Sunday services?

The Scarcest Resource

"Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed."

– Peter F. Drucker

Update on my Father

Update 10/24/2007, approx 3PM Eastern.  "He's escaped" (with permission) -- he's home now, where he should be able to rest much better.  Thanks all for your prayers and concerns.

My father has now spent five full days in the hospital related to his hernia surgery.  Thanks to all of you who have prayed, commented, sent emails, called, stopped me in the hall, or otherwise expressed concern for my family.

The question I'm most commonly asked is "how's your father doing?"  My smart-Aleck response is that he's nearly 90-years old and and he's in the hospital, so that sort of sets the upper limits on how well he can be doing.  However, that's actually a pretty accurate overall answer.

He has almost no remaining symptoms from the hernia, or the surgery -- that was remarkably quick and the healing is amazing.  The remaining issue the hospital is working on is getting him back to full alertness and energy.  He's received some medication at night that knocks him out, but also agitates him, so in effect he's in a struggle all night fighting hallucinations.  (Now that we know what's going on, there's a new order in his charts to not use that sleeping aid.)

The real irony is that the surgeon and I talked this morning and he said what my father really needs is to be at home in his own bed because its so hard to get any rest at the hospital.  But, he's not strong enough to go home yet, so he has to stay longer, "to get more rest."  The thing is, the Dr. is absolutely right -- the hospital is doing all the right things, or at least making all the right attempts.

So, the real answer is that my father will be heading home to rest, as soon as he's sufficiently rested. 

Zoho Link Test

As originally published on 10/21/2007:

If I do a link here, to a wiki page on zoho, will that page then be indexed by Google for general searching?  Let's find out.  Church IT Podcast, Episode 16.

Update, 10/23/2007:

From: Google Alerts [mailto:googlealerts-noreply@google.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 3:53 PM
To: Dye, Tony
Subject: Google Alert - (CIT OR "church IT") podcast

Google Web Alert for: (CIT OR "church IT") podcast

CIT Episode 16 09202007
CIT Episode 16 09202007. ... Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 16 September 20, 2007 ..... try to generate ideas for that. Do the Church IT survey!

---

This as-it-happens Google Alert is brought to you by Google.

So, I think that means the answer is YES.  Once there's a link to a zoho public page, Google will find it!  (that makes sense, I just couldn't previously find good evidence of it)

Morning Prayer

I spent the night again at the hospital with my dad (original story).  At 7:30 AM, what a pleasant surprise -- prayer over the hospital system speakers!  Not what I would have expected for a big commercial institution.

Are We Still Using Megabyte Tools?

During the Optimus Solutions seminar, Doug Shofield, the IBM presenter, said something that speak volumes to the storage management issue.  This is NOT a direct quote, and I don't know if he might have been quoting someone else, but here's the idea:

"We've quickly moved from Megabytes to Gigabytes to Terabytes to Petabytes, and we're evening touching Exabytes.  Are we still using tools designed for Megabytes, to manage those larger volumes?"

Something to think about...  If anyone has a direct quote on this, please let me know.