I know I speak for the entire Paravel team when I say that Dan Aykroyd rules and so does the album artwork Reagan put together for Derek Sholl.  This month alone I have seen Dan as Mother, Austin Millbarge, and Dr. Raymond Stantz.  Here’s to you Mr. Elwood Blues.

Here at Paravel, we have been hosting many of our sites on a couple of Media Temple DV accounts that we have sentimentally named Zuul and Gozer.  These have performed well and we have overall been really pleased with the service.

When the time came for us to launch one of our largest projects to date we decided it would be best to isolate this site from all our others and give it a unique hosting account of its own.  Without doing much research, we  signed up for a Media Temple GS account and launched the site after months of testing.

Sure enough, days after our October 2008 launch date we began seeing unacceptable amounts of down time.  Some days we would see at a few instances of down time, about 15 minutes or so.  Lately we have seen full days of the GS servers being down on and off all day, with about 50% uptime.  

Initially, when opening support tickets with Media Temple and waiting 4 hours or more for a response we’d hear back that the problem is likely related to our DB queries created by our site built on cake php.  We did extensively look into this, but having over 20 sites successfully running on very similar code, we felt like that was a cop out.  Lately, MT customers on “cluster 2″ of their GS servers have been checking the system status over at media temple, getting vague answers as to what is going on.  The most Media Temple has done to “make it right” with customers is offer free months of GS service.  I can respect that, but I’d prefer more concrete details as to what is going on.  It’s like going to your favorite burger joint, getting food poisoning from the beef and returning to complain only to get an offer for another burger.  

Over the past 3 weeks we have been monitoring the site on the GS service and have since made the call to move the site to our much more reliable DV servers, which we are happy with.  I truly hope Media Temple can sort this GS service situation out.  The purpose of our posting this isn’t to bash MT, rather to help our friends out there on the inter-web avoid a similar waste of time, worry and resources.

Well, I can honestly say that Paravel has made it big.  We will be teaming up with one of the coolest cafes in the lone star state… The Blue Bonnet Cafe

I have been enjoying their pie happy hour since before knee boarding was cool.

Fast Fwd to 1:50 to see a “quint-flipple”

Stay tuned as we are all really excited to be working with such a Texas Institution.

Today i’ve been on location representing TEAM PVEL at the first ever #churchtechcamp at Fuller Seminary in Los Angeles, CA.  What is #churchtechcamp?  Well the website says:

#churchtechcamp is a localized unconference for people of faith to gather and share their own best practices and “in the field” insights.

I’m sure this camp is just like other camps (foocamp, barcamp, wordcamp, rubycamp, etc etc etc… the list goes on and on).  A group of thinkinker coming together to discuss a topic.  It’s got all the pre-requisites:

• Speakers
• A live webcast
• People blogging about it

Being the first of it’s kind - and hopefully not the last - there was a lot of open discussions after brief presentations.

The morning has focused mostly on using the web & technology for The Church.  The main theme was discussed how an “Opensource Church” or “Church 2.0″ would hurt/help/change The Church.  Here’s a break down of the mornings talks:

1. Ex-CIO of Saddleback Church, Eric Busby speaking on Missions and Technology.  And the following discussions talked about how technology can serve “missions”.
2. Matt Frazier (or was it Lance Bauslaugh) then spoke about their “web 3.0″ app, Unifyer, which allows churches to create “sites” which users can determine which part of that “site” they see.  It’s a reaaaaal cool concept and even before I knew I was going to see them speak, I thought it was a cool product.  This spawned an intense discussion about 
3. Robert Yang of Kindle (a realtime online prayer resource) wrapped up the morning.  Kindle’s product really speaks for itself and how useful it could be to a church or community.

After a “user-generated lunch”, the afternoon was comprised of a series of “powertalks” about the church.  Quick summaries follow:

1. First John Saddington (Human3rror & gospelr.com) spoke about online communities. His site has a pretty-pretty powerpoint presentation on the topic.  I recommend having a look through it. 
2. Then Tony Steward put on the nerd glasses spoke about how to GTD (”Get Things Done”) and various productivity applications for download and on the web.  
3. DJ Chuang then talked about whether or not blogging still matters.  Which is quite a good & relevant question according to a recent TechCrunch article “The State of the Blogosphere”.  Are blogs dying?  Experts might say “Yes”.
4. Lastly Andrew Seely  to using Twitter (and other stuff) to foster community.  It was a brief yet poignant talk.

In all i enjoyed the first #churchtechcamp and I think it’s a great group of men and women who look forward to aiding the Church. Not just being hip, tech-saavy, mac users -but into a incubator of innovation.   It fostered lots of discussion about how the church can use current and emerging technologies to make a “glocal” (Glocal => Global + Local) impact to communities.

And with that, I’d like to shamelessly self promote my “freetime” side project: SOSOJU.org

hopefully it speaks for itself, but it’s in super beta right now. why i choose to code up super projects in my freetime *much to my wife’s chagrin*, i don’t know

But what I do know -thanks to #churchtechcamp-  is that gifts are to be used for world benefit and not for selfish ambition.  I think the secular (atheistic even!) group of thinkers TED, bears a similar cross:  How can we use technology to better the world?

Paravel Design has joined the Marble Falls Chamber of Commerce.  Whorray!  We’re official!  We’re legit!  Our plan for world domination continues. Seriously though, Marble Falls - we love you.

Feel free to stop by and see us at the Paravel HQ