Archive for 2007-09

Missy and I are proud to announce the arrival of Andrew Everett Russell. On Thursday evening, September 20, at 8:33 PM EDT, Andrew made his way into the world weighing in at 7 lbs, 4.4 oz and sizing up at 20.5 inches in length.

Andrew is named for my middle name and for the middle name of my grandpa, George Everett Walters who passed into God’s presence in 2001. Grandpa was a great man who served God and loved his wife and family. He left a legacy of faith, hard work and creativity. I am a musician today because of my grandfather’s influence. And I am so thankful for his great heritage. Missy and I pray that Andrew will learn from the spiritual life of his great-grandparents, grandparents and from us.

“Drew” is a sweet little bundle of pure joy and our hearts belong to him. We have already received so many wonderful greetings and congratulations and we appreciate the warmth and love of our friends and family.

For more photographs of this special occasion, visit Andrew’s collection on Flickr.

Prenatal Slideshow
Natal Slideshow
Neonatal Slideshow

Technorati Tags: baby, andrew russell, announcement, arrival, birth, birthday

I love Mozy. Everyone needs to backup, right? Until recently, most of my backup data was done on my local machine to a second internal hard disk. Works great for stuff that I “sorta” don’t want to lose. But if there was a fire, or strong enough lightning bolt or theft, there isn’t much that can be done to restore the backup. Until recently, I just stored “crucial” information manually out on a web server or DVD. That information was encrypted, so I did not worry about it falling into the wrong hands, but it was a tedious process to remember to save that stuff elsewhere. I needed a solution that got my head out of the game and on to more important things. And I want it fast and cheap.

Then I found Mozy. I first heard of Mozy through Jason Powell on the Church IT Podcast. Since then, we’ve incorporated it for our backup process at NCC so that we now have in-house, zero-second backup to disk plus the offsite daily backup at Mozy. The redundancy of it all makes me feel quite confident in our process.

As I was signing up for MozyPro at the office, I noticed MozyHome. With all the photographs I’m taking, I have been itching to discover something reliable and simple for offsite backup. MozyHome is perfect for that! For $5 USD per month, I have unlimited disk space on Mozy’s servers to backup my precious data. All the transfers to their servers are encrypted and my data is encrypted as it rests on their drives. Nice! And the best part of all of this is how darn simple it is to setup and yet how flexible it is to suit my needs. Select the folders to backup, set the bandwidth throttle or schedule the upload, and let it go. Easy.

It does take a few days (for me, weeks) to get all this data gradually uploaded to their servers. In my case, I am backing up 96.4 GB (currently) and it is estimating between two and three weeks to complete at my current average upload rate of 1.0 Mb/s. Of course, when the data is there, Mozy will just scan for the incremental changes that happen daily and re-adjust their image of my data as necessary. Once the big push is out of the way, the real efficiency begins.

Everyone needs to backup. Mozy does it well. Go do it now!

Technorati Tags: mozy, backup, data, server, offsite, encrypt, storage

I received an email this morning about a lunchtime outreach at GWU. We need to be there, so it is a very cool idea. There was one small problem with the final line of the email from Hickox, an NCC intern. Here is the excerpt:

Not to mention feed our Chick Filet addictions as well.

So I very politely replied to Hickox and the group:

“Chick-fil-a.”

Get it right or pay the price.

A few moments later, Jeremy condensed the outcome for all of us:

A classic moment in NCC office history.