With the PDC right around the corner, my wife and I decided I needed a better place to work from home so I could get my mind focused and get the next version of the site cranked out. This meant I was able to move into the "play room" and take over the portion of the basement where the exercise equipment resided. No, that doesn't not mean I have given up on working out, I would just rather use the gym's equipment as it is nicer quality. In fact, I just took my fitness age test and am now 46 (compared to the 76 I was 3 months ago) and was able to do 34 pushups in a row (for the pushup testers out there).
Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that we haven't forgot about you and are heads down adding some new features to get them out the door by PDC.
BTW, yeah that is one really huge bean bag chair in the right bottom corner.
I know this is a bit off topic, or am I kidding myself by assuming I have an actual topic. Anyway, today around lunch some planes were practicing for the Air Show in Kansas City and we got some awesome shots. If you are in town and the weather is acceptable, I would suggest this event. It looks like it is going to be awesome.
Here are some shots I took with the D300. Thanks to Doug for driving me to the different locations again, he is the best photo driver.
As Chris mentioned earlier, Geekswithblogs.net will have an official presence this year at the PDC. We will be a Silver Media Sponsor and will have a booth for registering members and teaching people about blogging. To keep the buzz going at the event while we are in the booth, we have invited Chris Williams and D'arcy Lussier to help us out. They are going to be an amazing addition to our onsite team. Thanks for taking us up on our offer guys!
Jerod will be sending a newsletter out this week to our members to collect information on those who are going to be at the event. Like the MVP summit, we want to give our bloggers something special for being such a great community, so please keep your eyes out for that.
Right now we are still working out the details of everything that is going on at the event, but my main focus is to finish the redesign and have it launched before we get to LA. Please wish me luck.
[On a side note, the spider pictures really don't represent the information in the post, but we went for a walk tonight and my wife hates spiders so this was my only venue for sharing them as I was told not to publish it to Flickr :D.]
OK, I have heard you loud and clear, the comments suck in SubText and on Geekswithblogs.net. I agree, but I don't have near as many problems with people being able to comment as others do. This leads me to believe the problems lay in two places, the skins or the custom HTML code fields.
Most of the time when I am debugging a blogger with comment problems they are due to some javascript they have embedded into the news section of their blog. However, this is a problem so we need to get it fixed so I need you (bloggers and readers) to comment and if you can't get it to work on the various blogs and skins, email a screenshot of the error to support@geekswithblogs.com.
During lunch today, Doug Butscher was kind enough to drive me around to take some more train pictures for Brandon's room. I can honestly say I have not had that much fun with a camera and a car in a long time.
We ended up in the bottoms of Kansas City, KS near a whole lot of steel distribution plants, but most sketchy areas that made me feel like the possibility of robbery or death was in the picture.
The fearless driver, Doug, was truly fearless. We were driving along side train tracks through gravel in his fuel efficient compact car, but we managed to not get a flat tire and got some good candidates for printing. Take a look at what we shot.
JellyTelly, from the mind of Phil Vischer of VeggieTales, is a network for children to follow along the lines of Christian videos from the 90s/00s. The idea is to get children to visit the site daily to view wholesome Christian-based cartoons and shows. With hopes to bring this to the television, but it will launch online first due to the amount of money it takes to launch a television network. This is definitely exciting and I pray he does very well.
The revenue model will be subscriptions (like Disney Online, PBS Kids Zone) instead of ads. The model is unique however as you pick your own price. The first month is free, but after that you pay what you feel the value is and what you can afford. Much like Christian radio shows, you just give what you can and what you feel it is worth. I absolutely love this model. Phil, plan on us as subscribers!
Phil has a wonderful book out called Me, Myself, and Bob that covers his life and experiences creating VeggieTales.
"A connection was successfully established with the server, but then an error occurred during the login process.
(provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - The specified network name is no longer available.) "
This is what has been causing issues with the site this weekend. Thankfully the hospital has good WiFi and my cell's bluetooth connection to the HSDPA network from AT&T makes being able to debug the servers ok. However, we will be in the hospital the rest of the day and going home tomorrow so I do have my machine on at all times to see if it is happening. Please bare with me in this case.
The weird thing is I can communicate with both servers via RDP during the time the web server thinks it can't see the database server. If anyone has seen this issue and can do some come up with some solutions besides rebooting or debugging techniques, please contact or comment.
[Update: Applying a hotfix may have solved the issue, only time will tell. Please continue to alert me if you see issues]
Addison is finally here! I can honestly say, that is the first time I have Tweeted from the hospital in an operating room. Looks like we will be here for a few days, but our room has an awesome view so we might see some fireworks tomorrow.
Geekswithblogs.net was completely down this morning with random, never seen TCP communication errors between the web box and the database. I like to call it the jealous sibling that didn't want us to leave for the hospital. I got her squared away at 5:30 and we took off.
Got to love all the bloggers we have on this site. Today we had some database issues and I started to receive emails, blog comments, text messages, IM messages, and trouble tickets about the timeout issues we were having. Thankfully it happened today, because Addison will be joining the family tomorrow morning and I will be out of pocket.
The problems should be fixed, but if they aren't ping me via one of the methods above.
Well I am back to spending the last day with Brandon as the only child, later!
My church, the Berean Bible Church, is one of the over 200 churches that are participating in an awesome event in September. We will be broadcasting the Focus on the Family's Truth Project training live on September 27th. The Truth Project is a small group program for Christians that goes over the biblical worldview for comparison to your worldview. I have been through the program and lead a group and I really enjoy the content.
My role, along with some other guys at the church is technical maintenance and audio production. Hard to believe eh? During services I run the audio equipment and ensure the sound levels are good and also work with the house lights. Since we haven't podcasted much lately, it is good to get back in audio production.
Here is a shot of my station during services and events.
Last night, in preparation for the September event, we ran a live test run with a one hour session with the Truth Project's leader, Del Tackett. The event was broadcasts over the CCN satellite network so every church involved in this event has a satellite on their building. The participants could ask questions via email or fax and Del would respond to those questions during the Q&A portion.
They are looking to do more events like this through Focus on the Family which will really help bring relevant content to these churches along with the ability to interact with the presenters.
For more information about the September event, click here or if you are in the KC metro area, click here.