Fri Feb 7 10:18:57 PST 2003

I’ve been thinking a lot about the church website recently. Mulling it over in my head, looking at various other sites and site-building tools and thinking about the overall design goals and purpose of the website. The key to a good website (or any communication tool) is to understand your goals and your audience. Once you understand those two, you can use tools (websites, verbal speech, written documents, etc.) to achieve your goals. I’ve attempted to condense my thoughts together and summarize them in a meaningful way. You could say that the goal of this document is to enable me organize my thoughts, ideas and research into a single place.

The church website is currently only focused outward. It contains some limited information about the church that would be helpful to non-members, and more specifically, people who have not attended the church before, but already have some church background. I feel that there are some particularly strong points to the current design and content.

1. Provides basic theological beliefs. Useful for people looking for a
church who already have some church background

2. Provides contact information and directions on how to get to
the church

3. Overview of ministries, but nothing specific
4. Overview of Sunday services and times, but again, nothing specific

I’d like to suggest that the website can be a much more useful tool for the church in a couple of areas. First, it can be reshaped into a communication tool for the members as well as non-members. Second, it can be developed to provide more useful information to unchurched people. Third, it can grow into an organizational tool for the staff.

There is one issue that often comes up, and that is that not all church members have access to the web, and we don’t want to create a "digital divide" within the church. This is certainly a valid concern. I believe that the key to avoiding such a problem is to ensure that the website mirrors and complements our printed material, instead of attempting to replace it. This is an issue that those who update and support the website will need to keep in mind on a regular basis. Also we can set up one or more systems at the church that could be used to view the church’s website exclusively (making it difficult to abuse). Even very low end systems could be used to do this with minimal cost and effort.

Reshaping the website to be a communication tool with the existing members about church events, news and messages will likely require some substantial restructuring since it changes the primary focus of the site. Also, it requires that people (most likely the staff) add content to the site on a regular basis (I’m thinking 10-20 pieces of information each week to be effective). The key to the site being useful is that it contains up to date information on events, news and messages from the church. Getting this information on the site can be partially automated and made part of the normal flow of work for the staff. I’ll attempt to go more into detail on this later on.

Consider the different kinds of printed material that the church produces on a regular basis, the Sunday and Saturday night programs, the newsletter, announcement letters to groups of people. I think they contain information that can be classified into a couple of categories:

1. Events – Usually upcoming with information about when, where, who,
what and occasionally even why. Also, there is sometimes event
summaries, like when we had the Mexico Mission trip people come back
and show photos of what they were working on and what happened.
These might be classified as news.

Examples of events: Most of the middle sheets in the program, the
calendar in the newsletter, letters sent out to parents of youth
about an upcoming outing. The order of events and the sermon title in
the Sunday morning program.

2. News – Information that isn’t usually tied to an event that people
would likely participate in, and may or may not require any
particular action by the reader.

Examples of news: Family Matters, giving information in the program,
a change in who is on the trustees committee, a request for help in
the nursery on Saturday nights, an update letter from missionaries.

3. Messages – Communication not regarding any particular event. Usually
intended to educate or encourage.

Examples: Pastor’s column on the back of the program, sermons, an
article in the newsletter about how to raise Godly children, the
article about why the elders believe that it’s OK for women to be
ministers. A page describing the purpose of the house and grounds
ministry, or the meaning of worship.

Naturally there are sub-categories to each of these, but I believe that most of the communication of the church can be put into these three broad categories, and that the properties of the information in each of the categories is unique to the category, and the distinctions useful for enabling a discussion of the categories as distinct entities instead of discussing the information at a finer granularity.

As a quick aside, orthogonal to categories like Events, News and Messages there are ‘topics’ like "youth", "missions", "music" that we can group information into to allow people to more easily focus on their interests. For example, I don’t have youth or children, so I generally only skim over any announcements involving youth and children. To enable efficient communication, a mechanism for easily filtering out or highlighting topics of interest would be highly desirable.

Let’s now take a quick look at an implementation of news site to give our imaginations a bit of a kick-start on how other people have organized similar information. The first is http://slashdot.org/ one of the largest ‘geek’ news websites. It’s a pretty busy layout with a lot of information, but down the middle you see the most recent news stories in chronological order, but just the summaries. Clicking on the ‘read more’ link of a story reveals the rest of the story (assuming there is one) and also comments submitted by other readers. Along the sides are boxes with links to other areas of the site including pages that are built with just specific information from a category or a topic (just book reviews, or articles on the topic of space for example). Also, frequent users of the site can set up filters so that they see (or don’t see) particular topics or categories of articles on the site more easily.

Also of interest to us is the behind the scenes activities that go into supporting the site. To do this we need to have some insight into the lifespan of a ‘story’ in the slashdot site. To summarize:

1. A user (could be anyone) submits a story

System Message: WARNING/2 (<string>, line 73)

Enumerated list ends without a blank line; unexpected unindent.

2. A site author (restricted to trusted people) edits the story,
assigns it to a category and a topic, and the releases it
3. The story now appears on the front page of the site for a time, it
can now also be commented on by other readers of the site
4. As the story ages, it gets displaced from the front page by newer
stories and moved to the ‘recent news’ section where only the
title appears
5. After getting displaced from ‘recent news’ it can still be
found through the search engine, or other links that people set
up manually.
6. After a specified period of time, new comments are not allowed and
the story is ‘archived’ meaning that all the information is kept,
but no new comments can be made to the story.

The slashdot site does an excellent job of handling News items, but in other areas of interest for us, Events and Messages it doesn’t do as well, since it wasn’t designed to support those categories of information. I think that Messages can be handled in a similar manner to News, but we need to archive them differently than News since the usefulness of Messages is not as limited in time as News items are. A Message may be useful and important for many years, where a News item may only hold vague historical significance after a month or even week.

Events are a more rich data type. They contain not only basic text like News or Messages interspersed with possibly a few images, but information about a date, time and location that users will want to search or sort based on those values, so they must be made explicit to the underlying software to enable such searching and ordering. For example, providing a list of events in the order that they were submitted to the system isn’t particularly useful to the users. At a minimum they want to seem them in the order that they will (or did) occur, and preferably in a format that they are familiar with, like a month view with the events inserted on the correct days or perhaps a week view. This was already attempted on the current website, but because it is usually not up to date with reality, it isn’t useful to people.

Events have a dual nature. First they inform people of an upcoming event, and after the event is past, they can inform people of what happened at the event. By modifying the flow of a story in Slashdot to include multiple editing steps to add information (like pictures, additional text, lists of people in attendance, etc.) the dual nature of Events should be supportable, and the creation of an alternative view (a calendar view) would provide a clear and recognizable interface for users to navigate.

So we still haven’t addressed the fundamental issue of how to provide current, regular updates of information to the website. If the website isn’t kept up to date with a sizable amount of useful content, it won’t be useful. It’s a kind of ‘critical mass’ problem. I believe that the key to keeping the content up to date is to make it part of the normal working behavior of the people generating the content, which is usually the staff. And the key to enabling the staff to get the content on the website is to integrate it as part of their normal working behavior. This is probably the most difficult problem to solve for any website.

Let’s take one example of how this might work (Note: I’m making some big assumptions about how the staff and office works. A more careful analysis should be made before implementing anything).

Each week James writes a column for the back of the program. He writes
it in his favorite editor (probably MS Word) and then emails it to
Laurie to be included in the Sunday morning program. She cut-n’-pastes
it into the space reserved on the back of the program, cleans up the
layout and fonts and then prints the program which people read and
then recycle.

Now let’s change the flow just a little:

James writes the program in his favorite editor (most editors should
work) then uploads or exports the text to a web form, fills in a few
fields like Category and Topic and publishes it on the web. He then
emails the link to Laurie who cut-n’-pastes the text from the web into
the program and does the formatting and printing…

By inserting a fairly minor change, we got the information on the web where it is now visible by a wider audience (people who missed the service, lost their program, or maybe haven’t ever been to our church), it could be commented on by readers more easily (if we want that feature) and it is archived in a known, searchable location which can be useful for both members and staff to use for reference (e.g. Do you remember James’ column from last month about caring for others?).

So the basic theory is that most of this stuff needs to be typed into a computer anyway. By doing a very small amount of additional (or more structured or specific) work, it can be then transformed by programs to be externally visible and archived, leveraging the existing work for larger benefits.

So I’ve talked a lot about providing up to date information that will make the site more useful for members, how to organize that information and how to get the content to the site as part of existing workflows. There are other usage models for the website that I believe are worthy of attention, but would inherently be helped by solutions in this first area.

Making the website more useful for the unchurched is an area that I think the current site isn’t particularly good at. Most of the information is really more oriented at someone who knows who Jesus is and what a Church service is like. Also the information is rarely specific about what we do and what we care about. Now if we start implementing something like the ‘Events, News and Messages’ concept above, we can create a section of Messages that talk about what Christianity is about, what the Church is for, and similar topics. A visitor to the site could also start to get a feel for the Church activities by looking at the Events and what the Church cares about by looking at the News articles.

Basically, if done well, we expose the activities, concerns, dialog, and inner workings of the Church to the rest of the world for them to see what we are all about. If we are who we claim to be, they should see Jesus by seeing who we are and what we do.

The website can also be a useful tool for the staff by providing a framework for organizing and archiving information. Clearly the church needs a unified calendar for keeping track of all the major activities from all the ministries. Currently it’s kept on a giant poster in the office. But if that calendar was moved online, it would be easier to maintain, and also easier to take places (just print a copy, or connect to the website).

Additional tools could be developed to reserve resources to help ensure that the vans or rooms in the church aren’t double-booked. Or attach attendance lists to Events (but hide them from non-staff website viewers) to better track who is showing up to various activities. The idea is that if you can think of something that you want to track or automate, it is likely it can be integrated into this process to help you spend less time in the office and more time out in the field working with people.

As an archive tool, such a website could be very valuable for looking up information on various previous events since they would be archived. For example you could check the sermon title, or list of songs from the previous year’s Easter service to remember things that worked, or didn’t work. Uploading photos and attaching them to events could provide a searchable repository of digital photos with wide-ranging uses.

I’ve discussed a lot of wide-ranging uses and suggested some fairly major changes to the status quo. What we also need to keep in mind is how changes like this will help people grow closer to God, and at what cost. If there are other activities that will help more at lower cost, then we should pursue those opportunities instead of going down these paths.

Some example sites (of style and structure, not content)

http://www.slashdot.org/ — example of a very dynamic and well-organized story-based news site.

http://www.lottadot.com/calleria.pl?month=1&year=2003&#167;ion= — An example of a calendar built as an addon to slash.

http://www.wildfaith.org/ — slash-based site for "peace" with great graphic design and a more static layout than most slash sites. Their events page appears messy and poorly laid out.

Thu Feb 6 20:38:26 PST 2003

I’ve been looking into a number of blogger, groupware, Content Managment Systems packages for possible use both at home and potentially for use on the church’s website. I recently purchased a copy of ORA’s Slash book and have read about a quarter of it to try and get a feel for how Slash works and how it can be extended and such.

The one thing that really impressed me was that the developers have a very clear and complete understanding of both their workflow and dataflow. The tools (which they have gone through several revs of) then implement and support those flows in a very clean and clear manner. It’s a great example of software engineering where the problem was well understood, and then the solution was implemented to support that problem, making common activities simple and quick, and uncommon activities are proportionally more difficult.

Unfortunately, for my needs, I’m really like the ‘look and feel’ of the blogger solutions like Moveable Type. But in reality, the key to solving the problem is clearly defining the workflow and that dataflow. And I’m fairly certain that a ‘blog’ or ‘story’ metaphore is not the correct solution for all of the church’s data, although the slash workflow and framework still retains a lot of appeal. Slash is extendable, but at some substantial cost because that’s not a common activity :-)

Fri, 24 Jan 2003 21:27:32

OK, I thought this answer that I got was particularly good :-)

The Internet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:

&lt; Oracle most romantic, why are roses red?

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

} Because if roses were transparent, then the reason men } give them to women wouldn’t be the only thing that was. } } You owe the Oracle an opaque diamond.

Fri Apr 18 09:02:30 PDT 2003

A couple of things. Last weekend we picked up about 20 pounds of buffalo meat from Aleta and Jon. Most of it is ground meat to use in burgers, and there are a few steaks and ribs too. I wanted to jot down Aleta’s mixture for buffalo burgers since buffalo meat is incredibly lean, it needs a little help to make good burgers, and they turn out incredibly good:

2 pounds ground lean buffalo 2 small eggs 2 tablespoons french dressing (other types work also) 1 teaspoon garlic powder some lemon pepper.

I also have been working some with importing even more photos into the photo gallery. I scanned in some of Laurie’s stuff and I’m trying to import all my old digital photos. I first tried doing it all in one big chunk, but that turned out to be a very bad idea ™ as it corrupted the database. I ended up having to quickly hack the .dat files back into shape and I’m now trying smaller chunks. I’ll hide the albums and slowly organize them into events and other sections.

I also tried out freevo again after realizing that the MythTV packages for RH8 were just too much of a pain to install and I’d have to recompile the whole thing again anyway. I actually got the music part working fine and the photos mostly work with the gallery directories, but all the thumbnail and sized photos show up as well, which is mildly annoying, but it shouldn’t be too hard to add a minor patch to fix that. The annoying thing that I didn’t realize until now is that it appears that my Hauppage TV tuner card did not get the /dev device entries created for it, or the modules aren’t being loaded correctly under RH8! It might be possible that my playing around with the webcam interfered with the loading of the drivers. I’m planning on rebooting soon anyway, that might clear it up, but I suspect that I’m going to have to do soem more serious work to get the tuner back up and working correctly again :-(

Sun Apr 14 22:47:56 PDT 2002

It’s been a pretty packed past few days. On Thursday I met with Eric (music & stuff director at SHCC) and we talked for a bit. He doesn’t want non-members on the music team, viewing it as a commitment issue. Which is understandable. and I can certainly understand his point. Honestly, I’m not real sure that I want to get involved with the primary Sunday morning worship. I would need to significantly improve my playing and my overall music comprehension. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing, but I’m not sure that I’m willing to commit to that kind of a learning curve. I should probably get down to 5-Star Guitars and start taking some lessions, regardless of what else I do, since I do want to do more things musically, and with the nifty little 4-track recorder I got earlier in the week.

Friday and most of Saturday we were Lan gaming. NFS 5 , Army Men RTS, Serious Sam the Second Encouter, Unreal Tournament CTF. We tried the latest Dune since it is a better RTS than Army Men, but it was radically unstable. We also played a little NFS 3, but at this point Ryan, Jason and I know the maps and cars a little too well so we were stomping poor Ed. Brian made if for Friday, but not Saturday, and Ed and Dad joined us for both days, but Dad left a little early on Saturday. Jason, Ryan, Ed and I finally figured out that to get a 4 on 4 game of Army Men competitive for us, we had to build no offensive units. So we took over the map by building guard towers and pillboxes! It was certainly the most interesting challenge of the night. The other weird thing is that in NFS 5, damage and handling problems are only applied to the car hitting another car, not to the car being hit. Which we were a bit bummed out by, because we wanted to do a ‘stop the other car from finishing’ destructive race. Maybe we just need to find the right settings…

Phebe’s parents were in town, so she ended up spending most of the weekend with them. They brought Lydia’s piano, which is now in the front room. Which is really starting to collect musical instruments and gear at a somewhat alarming rate. Two guitars, a bass, cello, piano, hand-drums, a 4-track recorder and a lots of music papers. We do need to get some shelves or something for all the little bits and papers, and a microphone or two for the recording deck. We did play one board game all together: Captain Jack’s Imaginary Polar Expedition. It’s an interesting cross between several other Cheepass games. It has a few nifty aspects and seems like it will scale fairly well. But it doesn’t really feel like a challenging game to me for some reason.

On Saturday morning I went over to the church and met with James to practice for Tuesday night Bible study. We picked out some songs and went through them. It should go OK, but the last song is going to be a little hard to play quietly like James wants during the prayer time. I mentioned to him the membership thing and he said that I could just do it on ‘any Sunday’ or he needed to put together a new membership class sometime in the near future anyway, so I could just join in with that. The latter option appeals more to me, but that may just be because I don’t like standing out too much. Overall, I’m OK with SHCC, but I do have some nagging issues here and there, so maybe the membership class will force me to drag those out into the open and deal with them.

Sunday service was long but really good. Baby dedication, good music and some testimonies from people who went on the mission trip to Mexico a few weeks ago. People seemd really impressed by people who by our standards are extremely poor being willing to help others and really be happy despite their harsh situation. I keep thinking about what can be done to really help resolve the issues of poverty in places like that. Fundamentally, while delivering food and other supplies does help them short-term, it seems like there needs to be some foundational or infrastructure changes that need to take place to make a permant change in the society. And considering that there are groups of people here that have similar problems, they might hae the same fundamental problems that could be addressed in similar ways.

So after service, most of the usual crew were heading out to visit the tulip farms south of here, but since we had scheduled our AD&D session for 2:30, that wasn’t going to work out for me. So I went home, and then went out plant shopping with Phebe, who wanted to pick up some plants for the side yard that she and her Mom had cleared out on Saturday. She really likes shopping for plants. I wasn’t really getting into it, but I did find some intersting Bonasi plants, and one of the tags even had a website, www.cascadebonsai.com on it. They are out in Sweet Home, and I’ll probably scope out their website more later. It might be good to take a workshop or short class on starting bonsai instead of guessing at the basics.

The D&D session was a bit long, and we ended up fighing our way through a ton of stuff, but we found some nifty stuff along the way (loot!) and have enough experience to level up, but it takes a week of gametime to actually level up, and we are on a ‘rescue & recovery’ mission, so we are trying to keep the gametime to a minimum, but we seem to keep going back to town every ‘day’ to recover and get new spells. I practiced my guitar after that. Shadow was being a bit of a brat, as he saw a cat out on the porch and was pawing at the window to try and get out. Overall he was pretty cranky anyway, what with lots of people being around for most of the weekend.

Wed Apr 10 17:54:07 PDT 2002

It’s been a fairly busy week. Sunday evening I went with a group to the Steven Curtis Chapman concert and it was really good. Lots of great music, and he also had one of the missionaries who was the son of a group who were killed by a tribe of south american natives and his aunt and he went back and lead them to becoming Christians. Also, one of the tribesman who had killed his father was there too, and they had a really great testmony about how these people who were basically living as hunter-gatherers came to follow God and are actually now reaching out to other native groups in the area.

The concert was also really visually stunning. Whoever is doing their lighting has a great sense of color, depth, texture and timing. Very impressive, and really helped contribute to the performance. They had large flat objects hung in the background at slightly different depths that were painted blue and yellow in a marbled texture so that they could shine different colored lights on different sets and get really fabulous effects. Also, they kept the singers in generally white light so that the colors on them weren’t all washed to one color, and that was nice.

Monday I worked a bit late and then mowed the lawn when I got home. It didn’t quite need it, but the weather was going to be bad for the rest of the week, so it was basically the last time I could do it for a considerable length of time. I then spent the rest of the evening practicing guitar with Jason (he played base of course). Later that evening I went to send James mail about which songs to play on Tuesday, and didn’t have an open VNC session on pooh, and I’ve disabled telnet connections for security reasons, so I went looking for a quick-n’-dirty SSH client for windows. Turns out that it’s a lot harder than it looked. I spent half an hour looking around without a lot of luck (downloaded two products that failed to install correctly or work). So I gave up a little after midnight and walked downstairs and started the VNC session on the console.

Tuesday night Bible study went OK. Turns out that they know a slightly different arrangement to ‘We Will Dance’ which turned into a big mess. Anyway, I’ll hopefully get to practice some on Tuesday with James and we’ll get it figured out so it won’t be so incredibly clumsy. Actually was a pretty small group this week which is kinda a bummer. Also found that the Xerox printer attached to pooh isn’t working. I’m not sure what went wrong. It’s still pingable, but it doesn’t seem to be accepting print jobs. It could be that some of the recent RH patches to the print drivers confused it, or that my pulling the mainboard out of the printer invoked some kind of problem. I’m not real sure what to do about it at this point. I may try using the parallel port to see if that helps the situation out some. But that means I’ll need to find a parallel port cable, since I don’t know if I’ve still got one.

Mon Apr 8 23:54:05 PDT 2002

Much to talk about but little time to do so…

First up, music plans for Bible Study for the next two weeks:

Almighty Shout to the North We Will Dance Oh lord you’re beautiful Holy, holy, holy Lord Create in me

Other set…

Ah, Lord God Shout To The North Behold The Lamb of God Sanctuary Create in me a clean heart Strength of my life

Which I’ve actually swiped from earlier. Although I’m not sure we should be doing Shout to the North two weeks in a row.

Sun Mar 24 00:35:36 PST 2002

A fairly quiet, but fun weekend do far. On Friday evening we contintued the Dungons and Dragons (D&D) game we started last week and overall it’s going pretty well. We ended up in a fairly large battle most of the night before withdrawing all the way back to town. We lost our "guide", but he wasn’t much help really. Jason thinks that has an idea about what is going on. He thinks that the goblin village we nearly invaded is there to guard a tower we saw in the room that likely leads down to the "outcast" who he think guards the tree with the nifty apples and is also the Druid with a large frog who pissed off the villagers. It seems pretty plausable to me, but our ability to wage successful combat against so many adversaries is somewhat limited, which might make gaining access to the tower difficult.

Also saw Blade II Saturday afternoon. It’s an OK movie, but e directing and the writing left somethin to be desired. It falls sort of the original in a lot of ways, but wasn’t too bad. Basically, the story and the director were key elements of Blade, and without them the style and smoothness of the first movie are gone.

I need to make a decision about the couches soon. Phebe has people coming to clean the downstairs carpets, and they can also do the couches when they are here, but at $12 a linear foot, and 12-13 feet of couches, that’s around $150 to clean them and it’s unclear if they will last long enough to justify the cost of cleaning them. On the other hand they are over 15 years old and as far as I know have never been cleaned, so cleaning them might be a good thing to do on principle alone. Even if I get new couches fo rthe living room we would likely hand the old couches off to somebody, and it would be really nice if we cleaned them up a little first…

Sun Mar 24 22:57:02 PST 2002

Fun day. Church was a little odd since many people were off on a mission trip to Mexico. Speaker was from the church planting organization. Found out that "Our Place" is one of their plants, which explains why it hit the ground running and with such a good PR organization. Had lunch (well technically breakfast) with Caroline and Laurie after church which was nice and they invited me to a Oscars Award party later in the evening at Dana’s place. I dropped by home and the Jason, Phebe and I went down to Home Depot. I got the rotary saw that Mom got me for Christmas finally returned and picked up a rake to try and clean some of the dead junk in the lawn out with. Won’t happen untill much later this week since I need at least decent weather and Monday I’ll be busy moving furnature to for the Tuesday carpet cleaning and there’s Bible study on Tuesday evening, plus putting everything back together sometime Wednesday or so.

Anyway, the Oscars party at Dana’s was fun. Lots of people I didn’t know there, but it wasn’t a big deal. Didn’t really expect ‘A Beautiful Mind’ to do quite as well as it did, and while ‘Lord of the Rings’ didn’t do too bad in terms of number of Oscars, it missed some big ones, but it could be that they are waiting for all three to be released so they don’t jinx the other two and also don’t end up giving them Oscars multiple years in a row for different movies that are all done by the same group, and basically the same project, just released in three parts.

Wed Mar 20 07:13:16 PST 2002

Bible study went pretty well last night. I got a call from Pastor James late yesterday saying that he wasn’t going to make it because he had too much other stuff going on (he’s leading a mission trip to Mexico later this week) so I would have to lead the music without him for the next two weeks. Not a big deal, just not entirely expected. So last night we ditched the list of songs that I had prepared and just did requests, mostly ones that we hadn’t done before there, so I was a little rough, but not too bad.

Also yesterday we got a postcard in the mail from AT&T Broadband claiming that they were actually now ready to sell us "lightning fast" internet service after a year and a half of snubbing us. On one hand I’m tempted to just ignore it because they weren’t willing to work with us before, and their acceptable use policy had some issues with both hosting servers and VPN, both of which we do on a regular basis. But on the other hand the increased bandwidth for what is probably a substantially reduced price would be pretty nice. I’m considering if we could actually get both and effectively use two at once.

In theory it’s possible to use a pair of WAN lines, and just route traffic based on where it’s going. We could route incoming web and mail traffic to the IDSL, and run the VPN connections (.intel.com) over that and then let general surfing/game traffic run over the cablemodem. On the downside, it wouldn’t significantly improve our 2-person VPN solution any, which is one of our weak points, but it would improve performance when we had more than 2 people online or doing non-VPN activities.

Of course doing a dual-link network would involve somehow cramming yet another ethernet card in pooh, or putting both the outbound links on the same server port, but in theory that could work as long as both of them don’t confuse pooh too much about his own identity in terms of DNS and those other issues. Maybe I should look into those 4-port network cards again.

There’s one available from D-Link, a DFE-570TX, but there’s not a lot of information about using it with linux. One user claims that he can only get it to run in 100MBit mode if he uses the de4x5 driver explicitly. which might be an option, but some of my network devices that I’d want to hang off of it are 10MBit interfaces, like the printer and I think the 802.11b WAP is a well.

And I also found this rather disturbing conversation between Matthew Callaway and Jeremy Jackson on the linux-kernel list:

&lt;> This is a reproducible oops, and my guess is that it’s related to &lt;> the tulip driver included in the 2.2.18 source tree. We’re using &lt;> a D-Link 4 port NIC, and it appears that it doesn’t work well with &lt;> IPV6 interfaces. &lt; &lt;I have had problems with this NIC as well… Redhat’s installer/kudzu &lt;tries to use de4x5 (sp?) module … bad news. But it works fine using &lt;old_tulip module with only IPv4. Same with 2.2 series and 2.4 series &lt;kernels. FYI

But maybe this message in early 2001 from Avi Green is cause for hope:

&lt;I’m using 2.4 with DFE-570TX cards in a bunch of routers and other &lt;machines and I’ve never had any problems with the cards. I use the tulip &lt;driver in 2.4 in some machines (not routers) and in the routers I use an &lt;optimized version &lt;(ftp://robur.slu.se/pub/Linux/net-development/tulip-ss010111.tar.gz is the &lt;latest stable version)

It might just work, although I’d like to try it out in a spare machine for a while before risking pooh’s stability.

Wed Mar 20 23:20:01 PST 2002

Fun stuff, the fans from www.pcmods.com showed up. 4 low-volume (and very low noise) panaflow 80mm fans. I put 2 in my P4P system which should help out the overall thermal performance without increasing the noise. Another went into the backside of Pooh to try and increase his airflow some since it had just the power supply fan and felt a little warm. I do have the case basically maxed out, so increasing the airflow seemed like a pretty good idea. The last one I used to replace the front fan in Ryan’s machine which made a huge difference in how loud that machine is. It was annoyingly loud, and now it’s acceptable.

Cat’s bugging me for dinner. Constantly trying to get my attention in the hopes that I’ll feed him. I don’t want to feed him until I actually go to bed or he’ll try and get me to feed him again when I do head for the sack.

Mon Mar 18 22:59:28 PST 2002

Been quite a while since the last update. Been pretty busy with work, but that’s no real excuse. Anyway, been spending some time practicing guitar and getting song lists ready for Tuesday night Bible studies. This week:

Ah, Lord God Shout To The North Behold The Lamb of God Sanctuary Create in me a clean heart Strength of my life

It’s also been nice having a laser printer to dump out hard copies of all the songs and words on a semi-weekly basis. Fortunately, we’ve gone through enough of the songs (most in a 2-hour practice last Wednesday that nearly killed my poor little fingers) that we can build a more stable list to use for a couple of months, instead of printing out new stuff each week.

In other unrelated news, I haven’t done much with setting up PVR stuff under either windows or Linux. Maybe that’s a good thing as I’m doing a bit less TV watching and spending more time practicing my guitar and other activities.

I’m also looking more seriously about getting some kind of new PDA/MP3 player and/or phone. Maybe it’s just toy-itis, but I’m starting to think that I do want an MP3 player, and a PDA with a keyboard (even a thumbboard) would be nice. The Sharp Zarus looks pretty nifty. I can see that as a viable solution if I can get an 802.11b wireless network card in it so I can access all the .mp3 files on the Linux server anywhere in the house. I may need to get a new phone in the near future (not too near I hope) since my nice Nokia 6160 has a weird issue where if it gets bumped wrong it turns off. Maybe a phone with better sync and organizer features will cover the bulk of my needs and then I can just get a cheep mp3 player…