Becca and I are enjoying a cabin in the mountains.

(Only the cost of the Amazon Services.)

I began to accrue a lot of backup expenses on my S3 account lately and adding those on top of the cost of running my own virtual EC2 instance, I started to look for ways to cut costs. A big part of the cost was my large backup volume that was being managed by JungleDisk. This worked well, and was trust-worthy but I wondered if there was a more naunced approach I could take.

The easy answer to all of this is simple. 5 bucks a month for crash plan is a way better way to do this. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, just go do that. The only problem with that is I’m not sure I totally trust crash-plan. And I enjoy running things like this for myself.

So, I trimmed down the number of directories that Jungle Disk will backup to S3 way down. Then I set up a new vault in Amazon Glacier. Then I found CloudGates, that service allows me to setup an FTP server that will forward uploaded files directly on to Amazon Glacier (or S3). And, allow me to request a Glacier archive for download, then grab it from the same FTP end point when it’s ready. It’s a pretty neat hack.

It’s important to note that Amazon Glacier is a super-slow long term archive system. Storage in it is cheap, but retrieval is costly. It’s perfect for redundant off-site storage that you need just in case, but hope to never actually use.

FTP backup is something that’s been done forever. There is a simple way to do those backups for free on windows with a script. I’m using a free program called Cobian Backup to run the backups, and it’s very robust. I now have my photos, videos, and music all being backed up to the glacier service through FTP. It’s there for the very unlikely event that I lose the physical NAS in the house where all the backups are sitting right now on a mirrored disk array.

So, all my files are sitting on a hard-drive in my computer. They are backed up weekly to a NAS which keeps everything redundantly on 2 disks. Then I have the large bulk of files important files backed up to Glacier in big 7zip files. In addition I have a smaller portion of my important documents backed up separately to Amazon S3 for immediate access in case of emergency. And of course we use a free account with Dropbox to keep our active working documents sync’d across 3 computers and stored on the Dropbox servers.

That’s a lot of redundancy, and I expect my backup costs to drop down to near Crash Plan levels. I feel confident that I can recover from hard-drive failures quickly and easily with my local backups, and I feel pretty confident that with some time and about $30 I could pull down everything important from Amazon Glacier onto a new machine.

Introducing: Service Blazer

When you call a company and get a customer service representative, how do you feel during  that process? Powerless? Frustrated? Confused? Impatient? Those are feelings I’ve often felt. I’ve spent a lot of time on phone calls with customer service at big companies, like insurance companies, and it’s hard to keep all the facts straight; what they promised, what you are supposed to do next, what paperwork is required. During most of the important calls I jot down notes on a scrap of paper, that ends up getting lost or tossed, and when I need to refer back a few weeks later, I have to trust my memory. So, a few months ago I started thinking about a better way to track all of this. It seemed like the perfect opportunity for a web application. So, I began to write it. I’ve just launched it in Beta, now you can track your customer service calls at ServiceBlazer.

It’s not perfect. There will be some rough edges, but please let me know what you think. It’s a free web application that you can use to track all the details of your customer service issues. They big companies all have support ticket tracking systems that let them manage their version of what happened to your call. You should have the same power. Get organized and stop feeling like big companies are taking advantage of you. Hold them to their promises, remind yourself when it’s time to call back and follow up on their end of the deal. In the call logging screen you can record the length of time you talked, who you talked to, what your reference number was, and your feelings about the outcome of the call.

I hope this tool can help me track my calls better, and I hope it’s useful to other people too. It’s also exciting for me to actually launch a real software as a service product for the first time. It’s free right now, but I might charge money in the future if you want to upload more than 5 documents, or if I come up with some extra special features. I also hope that enough people start using this tool, that big customer service companies will come to me and ask for a report card on how Service Blazer customers rated them.

Personal Notes

I wrote this application in ASP.Net MVC 3. I started it a long time ago and have worked during little spots of personal time for a while. It’s pretty exciting to design and build a whole product from scratch just for myself. I used Twitter Bootstrap for a lot of the user interface elements, then tweaked the look a lot. A lot of it isn’t “right” yet. I haven’t made the site mobile friendly. I haven’t enabled OAuth or even Email support, yet. Part of my plan for this service is to create something that can provide a little recurring income to support Becca and I as we pursue our missions trips and whatever else God has in store for us. I hope people get excited about it, and I will learn a lot from trying to market and support it.

This workbench is pretty cool. I built it yesterday out of furniture that was either broken or inconveniently located around our apartment. It is awesome. My father in law and I took 3 annoying pieces of furniture and turned them into one awesome piece of furniture. My man cave is coming together!

This is a post about using the web application Trello for managing a lot of big picture and detailed todo lists. It is quite a nice product for a lot of things. I started using it during the first 2 days of it’s existence, and it immediately caught my eye. It was a solution that I started recommending right away in various contexts, but I was still using Nozbe for my personal “system”, and wasn’t ready to leave that app behind until April of this year, when I decided I wouldn’t pay that much each month for a sloppy experience. I’ve tried to adopt many different project management tools over the years. I like many of them for many different reasons, but lately I’ve landed on using Trello for personal, business, family, and ministry projects.

Trello is not perfect at everything, but it’s good enough to be used in all of those areas of my life. And everyone in all organizations can join the website for free, which is something that the highly specialized GTD style tools can’t say. The value of universal participation far outweighs the value of a more focused or powerful user experience. The fact that it’s free even for the administrator is unbelievable too. I hope we get the chance to pay for the service in some way in the future, rather than the company turning to an ad based revenue model.

Part of the joy of Trello is that it’s very free-form and flexible. It’s designed to look like a bunch of index cards on a white board. This is a concept that seems pretty easy for people to pick up. The real happiness appears when you realize how easy it is to drag the icons representing your friends, family, and coworkers onto the tasks that you feel like they should be responsible for.

My System

So, here’s how my system looks right now. I’ve created 3 organizations, one for me and my wife, one for my team at work, and one for the ministry I serve in at church, Celebrate Recovery.

Home

I  have only one board under my family organization right now “@Home” you may recognize this as a GTD context. It is. Mostly. I’ve thought about adding a board called “@Errands” and including a list for each store like Groceries, Hardware, Pharmacy, Walmart, Target, etc. I haven’t done that yet, because it’s convenient to see every home related task on a single board. It’s a balance between focus and convenience. The more general the boards, the easier to find the task you should do. The more specific, the easier it is to focus on related tasks and ignore extraneous things. Assigning tasks is pretty simple. We each put our ideas on the board, and assign ourselves to them, and move the cards between the standard lists: “To Do”, “Doing”, “Done”. But, I’ve added a list on the far left called “To Plan” and one on the far right called “Icebox”. This helps a bit to focus on things that are actively needing action right this moment in the To Do list.

Ministry

I serve alongside a group of 15 other people who all work together at making Celebrate Recovery happen each week. There are a wide variety of roles and responsibilities in this ministry. So far we’ve coordinated everything on paper at our monthly meetings, and last year added an email list serve through Groupspaces. Now we can add another level of formal information tracking to your system. Trello is great at managing nested arrays of data, not just projects with tasks, once you understand that it start becoming an attractive tool for many problems. So, not only do I use it to organize a specific project, like a missions trip, or a special anniversary service, but we use it to organize a board for each weekly meeting, and the  monthly leaders meeting agendas.

When it came time to organize the weekly meetings and track who is doing what each week, it wasn’t clear how to do it. I considered Planning Center Online, but it was too focused on Church services worship teams, not for our ministry meeting format. I thought about creating events in Groupspaces, and asking people to sign up for the event and choose the checkboxes for their area of responsibility or spot in the rota. And, we’ve tried a shared Google calendar, which doesn’t really handle multiple simultaneous events terribly well, and not everyone had a calendar app or would know how to import the iCal file.

So, I create a new board for each weekly meeting, about one month in advance. The boards are copied from the previous week, so we get a template to start with. Each board has several lists: Unowned Ideas (usually empty), Before and After (setup and teardown, coffee, cooking, AV), Child Care, Announcements, Large Group (teaching, worship), Small Group (rotating leader slots).  This allows for more than 20 cards to be organized into sensible categories, and gives us a place to make comments about specific upcoming events, and it acts as a central reference point about who is doing what each week.

In our group we have 14 of our leaders signed up and able to access Trello. The can use their computers or the smart-phone apps. It’s always ready when someone has a question about planning, and it’s a great place to capture tasks as we talk about them during a meeting. I can now follow a conversation during a meeting and type in ideas on our board, then before we move on from that conversation I try to record who is going to “own” each item on the list. This helps people track what they have signed up to do. Although, for me, the better I track all the things I agree to do, the busier I get. I should be able to look at my Cards summary in Trello and say “Nope, I’m too busy”. :-P

Business

The business side has been up and running the longest and is the most hands off. In the team I work with, we don’t really track our specific development projects in it, because there’s already a bunch of tools that the corporate Project Managers use instead. We use it to track high level things, like which team member is working on which enhancements or projects. And, we also track which changes are on deck, in development, in testing, and when they got deployed in which release dates. This is probably the most common use of this tool, it was made by a company who mainly builds software for development shops. One other creative use is to track our outages and “significant impacts” on our website. We create a new list for each month, and record each incident as a card, with a color coded label for the cause. This could have gone on a shared calendar, but it’s really easy to see a lot of time compressed into a single view this way.

In Conclusion

It’s free, and very usable. Getting people to actually adopt any project management tool is going to be much harder than setting up a system in Trello.

Here’s something I started this morning, maybe part of an upcoming design project. I love the iPad.

¡Hola! ¿Como Estás? Me llamo Timotheo. Me esposá, Rebecca, y yo estamos aprendando Español por un viaje.
I think that’s something like:
Hello! How are you? My name is Timothy. My wife, Rebecca and I are learning Spanish for a trip.
We’ve been using a program called Anki for studying spanish flash cards for several months. We really enjoyed sitting down and expanding our vocabulary a few nights a week. Now we’ve stepped it up and started taking classes every week with a local language instructor. Our spanish has been improving at a good pace.

It’s surprising to me how much I actually enjoy doing this. I don’t really remember liking spanish this much when I was in high school. I think learning a language scratches an itch in my brain. Expressing myself verbally is so fun, that learning  whole new way to do it is truly exciting. So, now we’re learning a lot and hoping to become conversational soon.

The big reason that we’re motivated to learn spanish, is of course our upcoming trip to Peru. We are going in October and will be working to bring Celebrate Recovery to churches there. It’s quite exciting to imagine trying to use this in a conversation with a native speaker and hoping to understand them at their incredible rate of speech. I’m also enjoying the process of setting up website and using tools for organizing the trip. Right now our tools include, blogs and PayPal donations of course. And then we’re using Trello for a lot of basic task management. Then I’ve been using another website called Managed Missions to track our fundraising progress and communicate our internal deadlines and meetings. Sorta. It’s hard to follow through with all of that, since this is the first missions trip we’ve organized and we don’t know everything to do for even the few people that are coming.

Wednesday I was lucky enough to spend the day sorting through some of the houses that were lost in the fire that swept through a month ago. It’s amazing to serve in this way. It was really sad when I realized that there isn’t a lot that we are able to find in the ashes, but the few things we found seemed really meaningful to the home-owners. I can’t really put myself in their shoes, it’s the sort of thing that’s impossible to really understand. I do feel blessed to be part of a group of volunteers who were trying to make things better for people that have lost so much. Samaritans Purse is a really neat organization and I’m glad I got to participate. Their last day of working in the Springs is this Thursday.

Becca and I had a great time this weekend celebrating my birthday and our anniversary. We turned off our phones and disconnected for a couple days. One of my favorite activities was on Saturday morning when we rode our bikes down to the farmers market, which is pretty close to us. There is something so satisfying and uniquely freeing about riding a bike to a neighborhood market. We picked up some ingredients for a fun brunch and enough to pack a picnic lunch for later. We shopped for a bit, grabbed some coffee from Jives, and biked home with the groceries on my cargo rack.

I truly enjoy cooking new things, and trying to invent recipes based on intuition. What I came up with was really fun. On the side: Soft scrambled eggs like Gordon Ramsey taught us on YouTube. Fresh baked sourdough bread, lightly grilled, spread with herb chèvre, topped with cold smoked salmon, and thinly sliced carmelized onions. And, a few thick slices of tomato lightly sprinkled with sugar for another side.

The fire has done it’s damage, for now. It rolled through a neighborhood a couple miles to the north of us. We were never under an evacuation order, we just watched and had a lot of things packed and waiting in our living room. Now that the very brave firefighters have gotten things covered I think most of the community is heaving a sigh of relief. That is little comfort to the many people that lost everything in the fire-storm, but we praise God for his goodness. Our close friends who lived in the area didn’t lose their house. We have an opportunity as a community to pull together and help our neighbors out. Becca and I will be praying for blessings on them and guidance, and looking for the right chance to go and assist those people who are in need right now in our community. It’s hard to know where to get started.