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Now that the UUA General Assembly is over I can break my self imposed censorship and tell you what I did this past week. You will understand why I was reluctant to mention this until the event was over.

At GA there are several particular functions and roles that I play that make the conference tick. The first is the registration software. We use an ASP application attached to a SQL Server back end to track and process all our registrations. In the past we have accessed this system remotely from the home office but ran into problems with spotty internet connections at the convention center. To solve this problem I condensed the web and database systems onto one virtual machine to be run from a server on site. I understand that this is not the best for security but for 5 days and with the proper precautions including a separate isolated network, it works just fine.

The second task I preform is to set up the credentialing system that connects registrants to the appropriate representatives from the congregations. Each congregation is sent credential cards based on the number of members they reported in January. Each card allows the registrant to be the official representative of the congregation and gives them a vote in denominational business. This year it was even more important to get this system right because they were voting for a new President. The system matches the registrant id badge to the card they received via bar codes on each and enters them into a database via a php application.

In addition to these two responsibilities there was the UUA Presidential Election.

I was the technical lead on the UUA Presidential Election providing technical advice, planning, and implementation of the entire election process. The weeks leading up to the election I developed a php system to track absentee ballots so one could not over vote with replacement ballots. During GA I created a very kick ass crystal report that printed all the congregations, who voted absentee, and how many remaining votes each received at on site. As Catherine can attest to, I was up late the night before in the hotel room with two laptops running getting this report perfect. In an ideal world I would have finished this report sooner but outside forces conspired against me and time was cut short. On a side note, Crystal is an amazing application that really can not be faulted in its power and complexity. I fully respect anyone that can grab data from several data sources, over multiple sub reports, managing global variables, and come out perfectly accurate and formatted data, with all their hair still intact!

After the polls were closed I set up and supervised the scanning and counting of the ballots. The ballots were scanned into PDF from several workstations. Volunteers scanned the ballots with observers from both parties watching. When all the ballots were scanned and the provincial ballots reviewed, we ran the PDFs through the tabulation software (the idea of the software was from a colleague and it started this whole idea of doing the election in house rather then outsourcing as in the previous election four years ago). The one fault I give myself in this whole process is not getting powerful enough computers to process the ballots. The software going through many thousands of ballots took a little longer then I had anticipated and that our tests had shown. This provided and extra 45 nerve racking minutes where the tension was so thick in the room you could almost taste it.

In the end the ballots were accurately counted and a winner was declared. This whole process was not actually secret in that it needed to be censored, I just did not want people talking to me about it prior to the election taking me away from my other work. A bit selfish I suppose but I did not get enough sleep and rest as it was. In addition, as an impartial individual in this process I did feel the need or cared to hear who people was voting for

That is about it for my GA experience in a nutshell. It was a busy, brain busting, intense experience I am glad to have participated in; though I am glad the next election is in another four years.

Hello,

We are back from Salt Lake City and GA. Catherine and I are still recovering, we spent Tuesday and Wednesday sleeping and I think we are still feeling the ill effects of GA. After a week consisting solely and entirely on a diet of coffee, more coffee, diet coke, power bars, and the occasional club sandwich it may take the body a while to get back to normal.

Here are the pictures.

The first page of pictures were posted before, you can move onto the second and beyond for the newer pictures.

Enjoy,

Matt

Good Morning from GA. The last couple of days have been a blur of working 15+ hours each day for the past 3… err…. 4 days? It is hard to tell now. Time stands still when you are in a convention center with artificial lighting. Not that it would matter much because the sun goes down after 9:30pm. Luckily our hotel room has great curtains that keep the light out.

Please visit this site for a live stream of GA.

Other then that, everything is going well, knock on wood. Today and tomorrow are my slow times during GA. The first couple of days are busy with setup and configurations while the end are busy with tear down and other IT related activities.

For Catherine on the other hand, tonight is her departments big event, the Donor Reception and Presidents’ goodbye party. The 500+ invitees will rock away then night rubbing elbows with the top UUs in the country. It will be a sight worth seeing and be seen. I may or may not attend depending on if I can stand at the end of the day. I usually skip these events because I am afraid that if I show I will be put to work. Tonight on the other hand is supposed to be extra special so I may make an appearance.

I’m off to do some more IT related activities.

Enjoy!

Good Evening from Salt Lake City!

Catherine and I are now at our fourth Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly. We flew in this morning and boy are our arms tired. An old one but it still gets the point across. This morning we started our journey waking at 3:30am after a long sleep starting at 11pm. We arrived at our hotel at 11am and promptly took a nap.

Lunch / Dinner was at a local Olive Garden knockoff and we then drove off to go on some sightseeing. The staff GA festivities do not start until Monday at 8am. I will go into what I am doing this year as the week progresses.

Our destination this afternoon was Antelope Island on the eastern shore of the Great Salt Lake. The island is a National Park, home to hundreds of buffalo and other wildlife. There are several roads leading to a visitor center, camp sites, and a old ranch that was used to herd the buffalo. We mostly drove around the park since we are still getting accustomed to the altitude and any sudden movements caused us to be out of breath. There are a number of trails that lead to the top of the highest mountain ending at the summit that is over 6,596 feet above sea level. (Salt Lake City is at an average of 4,327 feet above sea level.) We decided to skip these trails because of the before mentioned reasons.

One thing I remember from my last visit to Utah many years ago is the enormity of everything. It is impossible in one picture to show the vastness of the landscape and skyline. As you can see from the pictures is was an amazing place to visit.

It is now 6:40pm and Catherine is sound asleep. I intend to join her shortly to get all the sleep I can before the festivities start tomorrow!

Our pictures of Antelope Island

Antelope Island Wikipedia Entry

Antelope Island official website

I have turned on comment moderation to filter out the spam I seem to be getting on this blog. I do have some non moderation solutions but they will have to wait until after GA. I am not screening you comments, just keeping you from reading all sorts of ads for male enhancement and cheap cigarettes.

Please post your comments but they may not show up right away.

Thanks,

Matt

Hey folks. It was a long and fun weekend at Bills graduation from Thayer school at Dartmouth. I will write about the weekends activities soon but for now here are the pictures.

Enjoy!

Its Sunday, the day of rest, and resting we are. On Friday night, after a day I would like to forget, I joined Matt and Kelly for a late night BBQ that made me forget the day and kick start the weekend off right. Saturday was the big day for Brighid and marked and end of an era for Catherine’s family at Braintree High school. Brighid is the last of the family to graduate high school and will head off to college in the fall. Everyone is so happy and proud! After the ceremony we had a party at the parents house that lasted late into the evening.

Check out these great pictures of the big event.

Today Catherine and I slept in, played the Wii, had some food, and slept some more. Do we feel bad about sleeping away the day, nope. Next week is the start of the countdown to General Assembly and once again Catherine and I are working the big event. More on that later, though if you would like some details check out the GA website.

Hurray for the good guys in Brookline and to the preservation of individual privacy. As you may have noticed I am not a fan of security cameras operated by government entities. Time after time they have been proven to have no effect on crime reduction and often lead to greater encroachment of our dwindling privacy.

Last night the Brookline Town Meeting rejected the trial of the 12 traffic security cameras in Brookline. One of which I walk past twice a day too and from work.

Brookline Town Meeting rejects surveillance cameras

Citing concerns over privacy and the encroachment of the federal government, Town Meeting members voted last night to end a yearlong trial of the cameras after just two months. The vote only carries the weight of a non-binding resolution, but with two selectmen already opposed to the camera program, it is possible the board will yield to public sentiment and end the program.

I know this will not be the end of Big Brother surveillance but lets hope it slows it down for a while.

Catherine and I went down to Maryland to attend my cousin Lauren and her husband Patrick’s wedding reception. It was a great party and we thank Lauren and Patrick for a wonderful time and we wish them the best.

On Sunday before our flight back up to Boston Catherine and I drove up to Baltimore to visit the aquarium and the inner harbor*.

*As a footnote there was a bit of an odor to the harbor and it has not gone unnoticed.

There are some things in life that are to be expected, death, taxes, and the hard drive failure. The latter blessed us this past weekend. For the past several months our laptop has been getting the odd blue screen of death and occasional strange clicking sounds from the hard drive. We both knew the end was near but somehow never really believed it. Why would we? The computer is only a couple of years old and we have never dropped it or dunked it in the tub.

On Saturday upon start up we got the blue screen of death and the error of no bootable disk. Not even the old reliable check disk application could bring our drive back to life. It was time to bow our heads and accept the inevitable, to move on.

Luckily we use a great backup program called Mozy Home. This application backs up our files to the cloud and allows us to restore them wherever we want through a web interface. Our 12 Gigs of data is safe though unreachable. After installing the new hard drive from Microcenter and reinstalling the Windows we started the process of downloading all the data. The process timer says it will take about 26 hours at 1.3mb per second. While this is going on, Mozy is also sending our data to us via DVD overnight mail (for an extra fee). We should have it tomorrow.

For the home version of Mozy it is $59 per year for unlimited data backup. A totally great deal for anyone who wants a hassle free backup solution that will save you when your hard drive fails or gets burned up in a large insurance payout fire.

Enjoy.