Tony Dye

Exceptional Customer Service

These are the roses I gave my wife Thursday evening for Valentine's day.  But, and this is a very important but, I did NOT buy my wife roses for Valentine's day! (there's another story about that, but for another time)  So what's going on?

Well, let me back up a bit.  Mark Higgins is our account rep. at  Clear Choice Telephones.  Clear Choice is who we use for our basic phone maintenance.  It's a rather interesting arrangement - we send them a check each month, and in return, they do pretty much absolutely nothing for us.  And we're very happy about it!  Now before you use this as the final proof that I'm crazy, let me explain a little.  Clear Choice takes the responsibility for our maintenance, but they rarely do any of the work themselves.  Instead, they've built relationships with lots of other vendors, and when we have an issue, they find the right person/company to solve it.  And it's all covered under our agreement.  It's been working well for us for quite a few years.

OK, so back to this Valentine's story.  Because Mark was seeing us on Valentine's day, and because he believes in "protecting" his customers, he protected me.  Automatically, just because he was coming to see us, and in case I'd forgotten (I hadn't) to buy flowers, he covered me.  WOW.  That's rather exceptional service from a guy (and company) that "don't do anything for us."  Let me know if you'd like me to make an introduction so he can do nothing for you, too.

Valentine's Day Memory

Just a quick little personal story here.  Today, Valentine's Day, is Trisha's and my anniversary.  Our 25th!  Well...actually that's not exactly true.  Today is the 25th anniversary of our first date.  Yup, that's right, our first date was on Valentine's day.  There's part of this story that we'll never fully understand, but the short version is: we have an arranged marriage (and I can highly recommend arranged marriages).  Trisha's family and my family grew up in the same church.  We actually knew each other, barely, in our teenage years.  Somehow, and this is the part where the story isn't quite clear, her father, or my father, or possibly even the two of them together, conspired to have us go on a date, and the date they arranged was at their church, in front of people we had known all our lives.  Talk about pressure!

Well, somehow we suvived it.  And...the rest, as they say...is history...

Thanks John!

A friend just moved and took a new job, starting in December.  Why would anyone start a new job in December, just before all those holidays and such?  Oh...wait...December 17, 1990; that's when I started with Intergraph!  My old buddy from Lanier, John Allen, convinced me to come to Huntsville, Alabama to visit this, at the time, Unix-only company, to consider a new position managing the PC Lab.  The irony is that this company did not want to embrace PC technologies, they just wanted to understand them enough to know how to compete.

Well...things sure do change.  By mid 1993 we had relationships with Microsoft & Intel, we became an early NT adopter, were one of the first Microsoft Exchange beta sites, and even began to move away from Unix and the Clipper RISC process toward Intel and Windows.  Wow!  Some pretty exciting days, and for me, some connections that have been so valuable in many, many, ways.

John, I never imagined what that first trip to Huntsville would turn into through the years.  So, one more time, I want to say THANKS!

Would You Do It Again?

Most Saturday mornings, I meet with a group of guys for some discipleship time.  Now "discipleship" might be stretching a bit -- at the moment, we're going through a non-Christian book (but by a Christian author), Integrity by Henry Cloud. In a section on "trust," and "character," the question comes up about someone you've hired before; "would you do it again?"

That got me to thinking about a lot of the wonderful people I've had opportunities to work with through the years.  Going beyond just who I've hired, I got to thinking about everyone I worked with, or for.  Which of those people would I eagerly jump on an opportunity to work with again?  I'm sure this is an incomplete list, but any of these people are on my "wonderful" list and I would love to work with them again!  I'm specifically leaving out people who I currently work with, well...because that just wouldn't be fair.

• Cindy Pruitt (Credit Data)
• Mike Childs (Credit Data)
• Tracey Rice (Credit Data)
• Pam Parker Smith (Southeast Data Services)
• John Allen (Lanier, Intergraph)
• Jeff Barber (Lanier)*
• Kevin Davenport (Lanier)
• Barb Fraser (Lanier)
• Jim Totten (Lanier)
• Leanne Whitson (Intergraph)
• Nathan Stewart (Intergraph)
• Kerry Webb (Intergraph, XLConnect)
• Stephen Wareham (Perimeter)
• Cheryl Flanagan (Perimeter)**
• Tavie Allan (Perimeter)

Who's on your "I'd absolutely do it again" list?

* I'd already started working on this post and had Jeff Barber in mind.  I'd lost track of him and was wondering where he was.  Last night I ran into him at a restaurant!

** Cheryl has been doing some contract work for us.  Monday, December 3rd, she's coming back on staff, so here's a case where I do get what I want!

1984

November 22, 1984.  It was a Thanksgiving day that year as well.  Twenty Three years ago!  That means we're starting the 2-year countdown to a 25th anniversary.  What great thing can I do for my bride on a Church Staff salary?  Hmmmm..

Who is that guy who still has a tiny bit of hair?

Happy Birthday Cheryl Flanagan

Way back in 1999, when Stephen Wareham, Jim LaBarr, and I, were trying to figure out how to solve all our IT problems, we found a solution far beyond our wildest dreams.  That solution was Cheryl Flanagan.  Cheryl came on as the fourth full-time member of our staff, initially as our department admin, but very quickly taking on responsibilities in helpdesk, support, documentation, and pretty much everything else.  She is one of those wonderful people who you can put into ANY position, and she will not only do what's needed, but find ways to add responsibilities and just make things better and better.

Then in 2002, Cheryl left our staff to become a full-time mom.  We've recently been blessed to have her spend some time with us again, helping with our ProVision CRM project.

Anyway...that's all just a bit of random background.  The whole point of this post is to wish Cheryl a happy birthday!

Cheryl, with son Alex and daughter Heather.

Nope...I won't give her age away.  I'll just say that she's younger than Jason Powell and leave it at that.

Data Center Visit

Thanks to old friend Mike Walter and new friend Roy Keely, both of Xcentric, John Dolan and I got to visit the Suwanee Data Center.  This insignificant sounding place is only about 3 miles from my home.  But try this out for significant:  168 THOUSAND square feet of raised floor.  10+ Tier-1 backbone connections.  What a place.  Redundant everything.  Multiple power feeds.  Multiple fuel feeds.  Enough on-site fuel to keep the place running several days, even without additional fuel.  Amazing security, including some fascinating "trap" rooms.  Rows and rows and rows of power, air conditioning, racks, and cages.  Such massive and redundant Internet connections that you can almost feel the bits flying around.  Neat and orderly.  Clean!  Somebody with OCD could really feel at home in this place.  (gosh I love this place :-)

Just a wild thought.  What if a few churches got together and filled up a rack with a set of servers, disks, and maybe tape drives to use as a common secondary data site?  Or a shared disaster recovery site?  Or even just a remote site for web hosting at a location with incredible up-time, and bandwidth.

Oh yeah, Google has a huge dedicated section of the building.

Update 2/22/2007: Several have asked for "more pictures."  Well, I would if I could.  Security at the Data Center includes a 'no cameras' rule, unfortunately.  But, to save you from poking around thier web site, here are a few pictures from the site.

Another Side of Stephen Wareham

Anyone reading my blog, or involved with either ChMS discuss or ITdiscuss, is probably already somewhat familiar with Stephen Wareham and knows some of his heart for church technology.  Well, there's a lot more to this guy.  What you might not know, but probably won't surprise you, is that he's a musician.  A pretty darn good one!  And, the real point of this post, he's finally started to blog.

Dr. Daniel Amen

Dr. Amen is a very interesting author.  He's done some fasicnaiting imaging studies of the brain and I've enjoyed pretty much every book he's ever written.  Well, he's got a new one, Sex on the Brain.  Hmmm...I'm not sure I'd want to let anybody know I was reading it! Of course, I could always tell my wife that we need to help with some scientific research :-)

Apologies to Jeff Hook

I've had a bad link to Jeff's blog on my sidebar.  It's now corrected.  If you haven't been to his blog recently, here's the link.