Brian @ Wongside

Charlene and I have a really packed weekend. We’re heading to SLO for the CCF Alumni Reunion BBQ. Sunday morning, we’re leaving the CCFAF festivities, and heading down to LA/Orange County for Tiffany and Don’s wedding. Monday morning we wake up super early, and catch a flight out of Long Beach back here to the Bay Area. So fortunately, we have most of the day on Monday to rest and relax. But it’s going to be craziness.

I’m just glad that for the next two weekends after that, we’re taking it easy. Praise God for rest!

Note: I originally intended this to be one post, but it grew to be a monstrosity of a post, bordering on article-length, so I decided to divide it into two parts and post this part tonight. The other part will go up tomorrow. Today’s post focuses on the new technology and the math behind why it’s so incredible. Tomorrow will focus on more commentary and what this could do to the industry.

I’m no soothsayer, and I’m not prescient enough to know exactly what this is going to do, but Amazon Web Services just announced a new “feature” linked to S3 called AWS Import/Export.

Instead of taking hours or days to upload your data over the Internet to Amazon’s data centers, you mail them a hard drive, server, or rack of servers (up to 8U and 50 lbs.) they hook it up to their servers, load the data for you, and your data ends up on S3 automatically.

I’ve gotta note that the name of the service is currently a bit misleading. This is really only AWS Import; it’s  a service where your data is loaded into AWS. There’s currently no way to get the data back out the same way, though that feature is pending. So at this time, a more appropriate name would be AWS Import. We’ll have to wait and see how long it takes them to get the Export functionality up and running. But in either case, it’s going to be fast.

How fast?  Well, let’s consider this in terms of MB/sec?  Here’s the math* :

Suppose you’re the average Joe (or Brian) like me and you’d like to upload 1 TB to S3. You’ve got a speedy cable (upload) connection at 1 MB/sec (8 Mbits/sec).

You’re uploading a million megabytes.
1,000,000 megabytes ÷ 1 megabytes/sec. = 1,000,000 seconds
1,000,000 seconds = 16,666.67 minutes = 277 hours = 11.6 days.

So in order to upload that one terabyte of data, you’ve gotta leave your computer on for 11.6 days of continuous uploading. That doesn’t mention the potential headaches of needing to restart failed downloads, or the sapping of your speed by your neighbors, or the kids downloading HD movies on iTunes.

Now let’s compare that with the deceptively fast method of sending data via “snail mail.”

On the fast end, we could send the 1TB hard drive via overnight mail. Then let’s conservatively estimate that Amazon doesn’t get around to transferring your data until the following evening. That gives you 48 hours of “wasted” travel time. But once they begin transferring, it goes at the speedy, but somewhat conservative clip of 100MB/sec.

1,000,000 megabytes ÷ 100 megabytes/sec. = 10,000 seconds
10,000 seconds = 166 minutes = 2.7 hours
2.7 hours + 48 hours (travel time)= 50.7 hours

So by mailing our hard drive across the country and “wasting” time in transit, we’ve actually saved 226.3 hours or 9.4 days. What a time savings!  Even if you didn’t send your drive overnight, and it took a few days to get there, you’d still be ahead of trying to upload it yourself. Kinda crazy to think that, in a sense, sometimes the fastest transfer method is really one of the oldest.

*For ease of math, let’s assume all numbers are base10, meaning 1MB=1million bytes. I know…I know on most operating systems, 1 MB = 1048576 bytes, but this is for ease of math.

Fortunately, it only took me about 15 minutes to update the links I had to Lynn’s web page.

• A whole month!
• Engagement Photos Posted
• Teaser Photos
• Best of the Best
• Liz and Amish’s Wedding

For historical purposes, I noted on each of those posts that they were updated today. Let me know if I missed any.

I was contacted by a writer of ALCF’s Abundant Living Magazine a couple of weeks ago. I guess they have a picture of me running sound in the GX room for the Student Ministries Department (SMD), and they wanted a quote from me. The question?

We wanted to know if you could provide us a quote about how serving in the ministry has enhanced your walk with Christ.

How has serving in this ministry enhanced my walk with Christ? Interesting question…

And quite frankly, as I pondered it, I was really stumped. I guess I never really stopped to consider it.

Ultimately, here’s a few quotes I was able to come up with for them:

• Running sound for Student Ministries has allowed me to use God-given talents to serve the students in our church, and its a blessing to share and serve with them.
• As I’ve led this ministry, it has been a blessing to watch students grow and take ownership over the area of Sound and Audio.
• I’m blessed that Pastor Kevin was willing to find a place for me to serve our youth even though I’ve been unable to commit to attending every week due to my work schedule.

Does that work?  I have no idea. I guess I’ll find out when the issue of the magazine comes out.

But in the mean time, I’m left pondering the original question. And in fact, the broader context of the question itself: Should (every) ministry enhance my walk with Christ? For that matter, what does it mean to even say that a ministry even “enhances my walk with Christ”?

It’s something I’m still wrestling with even a few weeks removed from the original query.

I guess, in a very real sense, I’ve always figured that ministry was just something to be done.  With apologies to Descartes: I’m a Christian, therefore I participate in ministry. It was never really something to be questioned. I do it out of obedience to Christ. If I’m tired, and don’t want to get out of bed to participate in my ministry, I get out of bed anyways. It’s my duty. And on those days when “ministry” is really a synonym for “drudgery,” I do it anyways because I’m supposed to.

Maybe it’s not supposed to be that way. Maybe I should always be passionate and blessed by the ministries in which I participate. Maybe they should all enhance my walk with Christ. If they’re not a blessing to me, I shouldn’t do them.

But that position doesn’t make sense either. Since when is my personal pleasure and gratification the gauge by which I measure my ministry? I’ll guarantee you that Jesus wasn’t feeling personal pleasure or gratification in the Garden of Gethsemane. Quite the opposite.

So perhaps the balance lies somewhere in the middle (as it often does). I guess I’ll need to do more research on this matter. I certainly don’t consider it resolved in my mind.

What do you think?

I’m not sure to what we owe the pleasure, but Lynn has posted a new slideshow from our wedding on his blog. Maybe it was an updated slideshow to go with the new blog, or maybe it was just because he had photos of us lying around, or maybe it’s because he wanted to show off his SlideShowPro skills. In either case, it’s a win for us, and a very nice slideshow.

It’s simply amazing to me how a bit of music added to pictures gives such a new dimension to them. It makes them that much more real, tangible, and memorable.

Thanks, Lynn!

If you’ve read my blog for any reasonable length of time (say greater than a month or two), you’ve heard me mention our wedding photographer, Lynn, before. Well, he has a new blog and domain name called I am LKC. I love the new layout, and if you look carefully in the sidebars, you’ll notice that Charlene and I are featured rather frequently. I wouldn’t say prominently as it’s kinda subtle, but we do show up three times. Technically, Charlene shows up three times. One of the pictures is of her and her bridesmaids, so I don’t show up in that one. But it’s cool.

I’m flattered we showed up at all.

The one major bummer is that since he migrated his blog to the new domain name, it broke all my old links to our engagement, wedding, and wedding slideshows that Lynn posted. I guess I’ll either have to go back and fix them, or maybe Lynn can get them redirected. (Please let it be the latter.) They currently just redirect to his main page, not the actual posts themselves.

The new layout is totally Lynn, so he definitely hired the right guy to do it. Congrats, Lynn.

Charlene and I have the pleasure of attending Liz and Amish’s wedding today. I don’t know them really really well, but before we were married, Charlene and Liz were room mates. So they know each other pretty well. They even shared a bathroom! Talk about intimacy

But now Charlene has a new room mate, and starting today, Liz will as well.

Congratulations, Liz and Amish! We’re excited for you, and welcome to the club.

Updated 5/21/2009: Updated links to Lynn’s new blog.

It’s been a few days since my last post. And for the rest of the month, the postings might be kinda sparse. I’m working on two projects simultaneously at work, and that just makes for madness this month. So please forgive me for the delay in posting anything this month. When things improve (hopefully in June), I’ll be back to regular postings.

While I object to the title of the article (She’s not an “abortion foe.” What a polarizing and inflammatory title!  Can’t she just be a supporter of pro-life?), I’m glad that someone decided to write last week about Mary Ann Glendon.

Glendon is a conservative Harvard law professor who was U.S. ambassador to the Vatican under President Bush. Notre Dame announced that it would be awarding her the Laetare Medal during commencement on May 17.

Since then, Glendon has chosen to decline acceptance of the award. Her reasons are quite simply that President Obama, a staunch supporter of abortion, will be giving the commencement speech. Glendon cites the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishop’s “express request of 2004 that Catholic institutions ‘should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles’ and that such persons ‘should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.’”

I’m greatly encouraged to read that in the past two weeks or so, we’ve had three strong examples of people standing for what they believe in spite of the consequences. Carrie Prejean, Rich Snyder, and Mary Ann Glendon, I salute you and your desire to hold fast to your convictions. 2 Timothy 3:12 promises

In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.

This may only be the beginning, but let us not forget the admonition of our savior:

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

-Matthew 10:28

I may not agree with everything that Glendon stands for, but I do applaud her for standing in support of her own beliefs regardless of the outcome. May we all be more like her.

Charlene’s parents live in Stockton, so besides the fact that three of their kids already live here in the Bay Area (with one possibly moving here in the next few years), maybe they have yet one more reason to move here.

According to an article in Forbes Magazine Stockton, CA ranked number 5 on the list (behind Detroit, Memphis, Miami, and Las Vegas) with 885 violent crimes per 100,000 people.  Apparently, “Stockton is a major transit point [for Mexican drugs] along the I-5 corridor on the way to Seattle and Vancouver.” My guess is that with Stockton foreclosures making national top 10 lists, the worst of the danger is yet to come. It’s well known that in cities with abandoned buildings, especially homes, crime rates increase.

Maybe it’s time to pull out those moving boxes…