My no good, very bad Sunday

The alarm blared through the sweet nothingness of sleep. I awoke and immediately took in the ambient sounds of drizzling rain peppered with distant beats of thunder. To most people this is not the kind of day one jumps out of bed. Rather, it looked like the kind of day to curl up in front of a warm fire with endless cups of coffee and good novels. However, its Sunday. I have a job to do. A job I love doing. Managing the tech portion of Sunday worship awaits. I jump out of bed and get ready.

It is a typical Sunday morning getting 3 children ready for church. Actually, its a little better than typical. There are no arguments about clothing choices. For the most part the children respond to directions with a sense of urgency, accomplishing their morning tasks of eating breakfast, getting dressed, teeth brushed, hair done, etc... The rain never ceases. Claps of thunder send Lannom (age 2) to my arms as he laughs and says its "scawy."

We make it out to the car in the rain and get to church. Getting kids, computer, bags, and Bibles loaded up in the rain is not pleasant, but manageable. We get to church. The first ones there, as normal. I love being the only one in the church on Sunday mornings. Its relaxing. Its peaceful.

The whole family has jobs to do to get ready for the sound check and video check. We each do our tasks, setting out microphones, turning on equipment, powering up monitors and projectors. Its a finely tuned dance. All is going according to plan.

The first problem crops up when Erin attempts to test the Media Shout script. The script runs, but there is something wrong with the display. It will flash the graphic for about 1/2 a second and then go black until the next cue is fired.

Meanwhile, I have started Media Shout on my laptop because I need to move my announcement script from my computer to the worship laptop and integrate it with the worship script. Problem two arises. When Media Shout starts on my laptop, it immediately begins running the announcement script, on my Primary (and only) display. It takes over my whole screen. I can stop the show, but I can't get to the script or the GUI to tell Media Shout that I want to run in Single Screen mode. See, I had last worked on the announcement script when I had 3 displays running. I had put the management GUI on screen three (to my left). Now, I was at church where I didn't have 3 screens, nor did I have my hardware to make 3 screens. Media Shout was running from screen 3...that I didn't have access to.

I attempted several things to force my computer to ignore the multiple displays to no avail. However, I couldn't focus on that problem. I had to fix the worship laptop. So, I went over and got that working. Not sure what it was, but a reboot and ensuring snug cables solved the problem.

Back to my laptop. After 40 minutes, several reboots, several End Tasks, and monkeying around in the Display Properties, and the ViBook software, I was finally able to force Media Shout to my main (and only Display). I quickly threw some scripture slides into the script and packed it and transferred it. I usually do all this Saturday, but I had been too busy. I can guarantee you that the packed script will be on my USB drive before Sunday morning from here on out.

As all this is going on, the preacher's notes for service arrive via email. Service starts in one hour and the notes are just coming in. Also, one of the other staff members approaches us and wants us to add a picture of the preacher on his wedding day because they want to rib him about turning 40. Also, the video that will be shown during the sermon has just arrived and needs to be incorporated into the script and sound checked. So, with less than one hour to service starting, we have a lot of work to do. While all this is going on, we have two people being trained for working the Tech Team. Erin is attempting to teach Andy how to do all this. He suddenly looks like he is considering "un-volunteering."

Anyway, as the announcement slides roll, I see the one about turning your cellphones down. I remember that I haven't turned mine to vibrate and pull it out of my pocket. I notice I have a little message icon. I check my text messages and it appears that at 1:59 AM, I had received a text notification that my database server at work was down. Nothing I can do about it right now. I have to get the stuff for church done.

As service starts and everything is running smoothly, I establish my VPN to work and attempt to start troubleshooting my crashed server. For some reason, I can't remote desktop to any of my machines. My computer is ignoring my LMHOST and HOST files and returning strange external IP address whenever I try to connect via a host name. I try to connect via IP addresses. I can finally get into some machines, but not the database machine. It appears as if I am going to have to go in to the office. Looks like I will be foregoing my nap today.

After church, I help Erin get the kids home. We feed them. We put them down to rest. I drive 30 minutes in the rain to go to work. The database server is completely locked up. I can't even log on via the console. I then spend 3 hours working on that problem. A failed hard drive in the mirror had caused the crash. After getting the machine back up and verifing the integrity of the data, I went home.

No more problems the rest of the day.