Prior to starting my senior year in college, a Professor who knew my older brother contacted me about a possible technical job with a Christian ministry named Gospel Films. Heading into a double major of Computer Science and Religion & Theology, I guess my interests seemed like a good fit.

For the next decade, I worked for Gospel Films, later to become Gospel Communications International (referred to by most as Gospelcom). At the end of last year, Gospelcom closed its doors, ending a 50+ history of successful ministry in various forms of media.

A couple months ago I visited Monterey, CA, as part of a work trip and it brought back a slew of memories of conventions attended while at Gospelcom, including a couple in Monterey.  Since then I’ve been reminiscing about my time at Gospelcom. There are many questions about why Gospelcom had to call it quits after so many years, but rather than speculate about what’s already done, I’d rather highlight some of my favorite memories of my time there.

Offered Me A Start

I worked in the Internet area at Gospelcom, assisting with sites we owned and hosted, as well as those of hundreds of other Christian organizations. Based on my relatively low real-world professional experience, Gospelcom took a risk hiring me and allowing me to grow on the job. During my time at Gospelcom, I was able to watch the technical staff grow from 1 person (me) to 16 or so full time people. As a result, I was privileged to do everything from technical support and web development to systems administration and management.

Technical Development

During that time I was able to become experienced with a number of technologies. In the area of operating systems, I got to work with compiling Linux kernels (starting with 2.1?), SGI IRIX, early RedHat, Fedora Core, and RedHat Enterprise.

During most of that time I was allowed to run Linux on my desktop, generally RedHat and then Fedora. My proficiency with Pine as the email client of choice was quite impressive, lasting 13 years until I made the switch to Mac OS X in early 2006. On the server side, I learned the ins-and-outs of PHP, Perl, Apache, MySQL, LDAP, qmail, tinydns, and was able to dabble with numerous other technologies.

Considering the size or our small organization, I had the privilege of interacting with some great people in the Open Source world. I was able to write back and forth with Monty, one of the primary MySQL developers early on. I was able to attend conventions and attend sessions led by Rasmus, the founder of PHP.   I even have a picture of me with Tim O’Reilly. (I knew you’d be impressed.) While I didn’t talk with Larry Wall personally, our team did receive email from him regarding some functionality on biblegateway.com, a site we owned and developed.

I am forever indebted to Gospelcom for the chance they took on me and the freedom they gave me to grow technically. Speaking from a purely selfish perspective, the experience I gained at Gospelcom has opened a world of opportunities for me in multiple professions.

People Reaching People (How Could I Resist?)

However, what I’m most grateful for are the people I was able to work with. There were numerous people who made an intentional effort to mentor me, and I learned much from each and every one. And I learned just as much, if not more, on a personal and professional level from my peers. I’d love to list names, because I honestly believe I learned something from each person, but I fear I’d leave out a name or two from the course of those 10 years. Rest assured, I’m a better person having worked with you all.

A unique aspect of working at Gospelcom was being able to work closely with the web ministries of hundreds of other Christian organizations, including places such as RBC Ministries, Youth Specialties, YFC, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Back to the Bible, InterVarsity Press, Louis Palu, musicians, international ministries, radio stations, etc. Being able to work with those organizations, in whatever small way, was a privilege.

A Few of My Favorite Things

With a decade of memories, I fear the following snippets don’t do justice to the incredible experiences I had. Nevertheless, I give you some of my favorite memories:

• Every Wednesday was donut day. At 10:00 AM sharp, donuts were set out in the break room and freely available. In the later years, things began to morph a bit as the number of donuts lessened and additional alternatives were added such as fruit and bagels. Even so, it was a great perk and a good chance to take a break from email to sit and chat with folks.
• The drink refrigerator was a commercial-sized sliding door refrigerator. It was stocked with pop, water bottles, juices, and other beverages, and employees were allowed to help themselves. I certainly went through phases where different drinks became my daily routine: Cherry Coke, water, cran-grape juice, pink grapefruit juice, and Cherry Coke (did I mention that already?). There were obviously the expected political battles where we fought to have our drink of choice stocked. We managed to get Frappucinos for a while. The one constant drink that was ever present was Tab. It had a faithful following in the accounting department.
• Speaking of political battles, I remember the struggle to get recycling available for plastics, bottles, etc. When I left there were still devoted employees (thanks, Ron) providing paper recycling services personally.
• Working in an environment now where business casual is the dress code, I fondly look back at the Gospelcom dress code, or lack thereof. Summers were filled with sandals and shorts, and jeans were definitely the normal for other seasons. I did have a single suit that made an appearance once each year at the annual Board Meeting.
• When our technical infrastructure got big enough, we began scheduling certain upgrades and changes during maintenance windows, typically early in the morning. Those sleep-deprived mornings are some of my favorite memories. A few of us would gather in the wee hours of the morning, grind some coffee and brew a strong pot, and settle in the back warehouse to get some uninterrupted work done. Pcg would invariably kick off some tunes for everyone, the most memorable for me being Morrissey. Assuming all went well with whatever change was performed, we’d head off to Bob Evans for some breakfast, so we weren’t in the office when normal business hours started. (I mean, did we really want to hear about any problems caused by our changes anyway?) Bob Evans boasted some serious Eggs Benedict, omelets, and these biscuits with the thickest sausage gravy you can imagine.
• While we’re on the topic of early morning coffee, someone at Gospelcom first introduced me to White Heather.  Anyone want to take credit for that?  I owe you.
• Initially we hosted our entire infrastructure in our offices at Gospelcom. From humble beginnings where we literally had pen caps holding in the network connections of one of the servers, to gas-powered generators during storms (my wedding night included), to the headaches of getting multiple DS3s coming into the building. One snowy January night we moved the entire infrastructure, 7 racks of equipment in all, to a data center 50 miles away. While things were down we had a Sony Vaio laptop serving a splash page for all website requests.
• I was able to help influence Reverend Fun cartoons on occasion.  My favorites were always the ones about camels.
• I was privileged to attend a number of technical conferences, including O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention. It was great having those late night brainstorming sessions with the other Gospelcom-ers that went, but also attending all the great sessions about our favorite technologies.
• Speaking of conferences, Gospelcom hosted a conference or two every year to collaborate with, and provide training for, the hundreds of organizations in the Gospelcom alliance. They were a ton of work, and often a source of frustration in planning, but leading sessions and meeting with all the incredible folks from the ministries was incredibly rewarding.
• I always enjoyed hearing some frequent speakers at Gospelcom conferences such as Jeff Veen.  I also enjoyed McNair Wilson’s one-man dramas.
• Bonicki’s.  Barbeque chicken and pineapple quesadillas.  Mmmm.
• My closet has a sizable section of Gospelcom t-shirts.  Little did I know at the time the process to get those shirts designed and approved was a foreshadowing of the government contracting world.
• At 3:00 PM on afternoons when the weather was nice, a handful of people often headed out back to toss frisbees around.  I didn’t participate nearly as frequently as I should have.
• During the early years of my time at Gospelcom, each employee received boxes of See’s candy as a gift at Christmas.  Z loved the stuff, and shipped it to everyone he came in contact with.  I believe Z was single-handedly the largest distributer of See’s candy in West Michigan.  Seriously.  There were also years where Poinsettias and Lilies would be sent to our house at Christmas and Easter, respectively.
• Speaking of Z, he took a few of us to hear him preach at Joe Louis Arena one Sunday.  I was able to walk on the floor of the arena, check myself against the boards, get on the team bench, and walk through the back hallways.  Dream come true.  Go Wings!
• When I first started, the last day of the month was always a late night so I could compile the month-end statistics reports for Smitty.  He loved his hits and page views.
• The annual Christmas party certainly needs to be on the list.  In my early years, Z played a number game.  He’d think of a number, tell us a range, and whoever guessed it got cash.  He’d do several rounds.  At the end, anyone who hadn’t won would get a sympathy cash prize.  If I’m not mistaken, I was always in the last category.  I seem to recall Don always making a trumpet noise for some reason, too.  Anyone remember what that was about?
• I, like most people, have stereotypes about wealthy people.  Rich DeVos shattered them all.  He was the chairman of Gospel Films for many years, and was a faithful supporter.  I am grateful I was able to meet him and hear him as he shared his heart with the staff on numerous occasions.  It’s amazing to see how much he does that intentionally goes unnoticed, for everything from ministries like Goselcom, to schools, and to cities like Grand Rapids.
• Back when blogs were all the rage, I got my start with my analog blog on the whiteboard in our meeting room.
• I’ll always remember the lunch breaks where we sat around a projector and watched various TV shows.  I was introduced to some great shows, including Scrubs, Freaks and Geeks, The Tick, and Fawlty Towers.  (Did I really put The Tick in that list?)
• Paul Harvey highlighted Gospelcom during his normal daily broadcast one day.  Anyone able to find that online somewhere?
• One of the office supply stores our office used frequently provided a free box of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies with any orders over a certain amount.  The box would appear on the break counter, at which point they were fair game.  Invariably the first person to discover it would take a handful … and then send email to everyone else about the fresh box.
• When pcg moved away from MI, he had an old upright Pac-Man arcade game.  We moved it to the warehouse and Gospelcom and for many, many months talked about how to get it fixed.  It finally happened, and I was in my glory.  I was never able to overtake Luke’s high scores, however.  He was crazy good.

Are there any other obvious ones I’m missing, all you former Gospelcom folks out there?

Closing

I personally have many fond memories of Gospelcom, and it was a significant time in my life.  At the same time, I know Gospelcom was able to provide the Gospel to many, many people over many decades, and through numerous methods and languages.  I’m honored to have been allowed to play a small part.

Years ago we began storing and managing all of our digital pictures in F-Spot on Linux.  Being concerned with portability, and not wanting to be locked into a single product, I did enough research to convince myself we’d be able to export all our pics and captions if/when the time came to switch.  After all, there’s a preference allowing you to “Write metadata to file,” with a tip stating, “Enable this option to store tags and descriptions inside supported image formats.”  Surely that means other standards-compliant photo management tools would be able to parse that data.

Being on a Mac, the natural place to start for photo management was iPhoto.  I eagerly began exporting our photos from F-Spot and importing them into iPhoto.  As our F-Spot pictures imported with no tags or descriptions, moments of grave disappointment and panic ensued.  Therein began my education about the world of metadata (Exif, XMP, IPTC, etc.), taking me down a long road of trial-and-error, yielding numerous discoveries.

Setting the Stage

First, F-Spot was, indeed, storing captions in the image, I believe in the XMP tag space.  I was relieved once I was able to confirm their existence.   Additionally, I learned iPhoto is able to parse some metadata on import, just not the tags that F-Spot (and many other programs) use.

A Possible Aperture Alternative

If iPhoto wasn’t up to the task, I was willing to purchase a product that could.  After significant research, I decided to take an Aperture eval for a spin.  I enjoyed Aperture’s interface quite a bit more than iPhoto, and found it more intuitive for the basic image functions we perform regularly (importing, captioning, fixing red-eye, organizing into folders and albums, rotating).  It properly parsed the F-Spot metadata, and even clearly showed the different metadata organizational structures in its editing pane.

As a side note, I still find it a bit suspicious that Apple built one photo product to handle most metadata properly, but left that functionality out of iPhoto.  I realize they are likely trying to encourage their users to purchase the “upgrade” to Aperture, but if iPhoto is seen as an entry-level photo management tool for ameratures, would not this capability encourage more people to migrate from other platforms?

In the end, however, I opted not to go with Aperture.  It doesn’t store movie clips, meaning we’d need a separate solution for movies and pictures.  Additionally, it seemed like overkill for the type of photo management we wanted to do.

Exiftool, My Hero

Enter exiftool.  It is the only tool I could find that was able to read the XMP metadata written by F-Spot, and rewrite it to the IPTC tags that iPhoto was expecting.  Brilliant.

The learning curve for using exiftool was a bit steep, but that was mostly due to my lack of knowledge about the world of digital picture metadata and exiftool’s extensive power and flexibility.

Here’s the process I finally developed for migrating our pictures:

1. Export all the pictures from F-Spot, choosing the option to ‘auto-rotate’.  Without the auto-rotate option, I discovered that the metadata was somehow stored differently for images I had rotated within F-Spot.  I was never able to find a way to capture those captions.  Instead, by using auto-rotate, the captions were preserved as expected.  One side-effect, however, is that the F-Spot categories/tags were lost.  I quickly decided that was an acceptable casualty.
2. Use exiftool to copy the XMP tags into the corresponding IPTC tags.  This command seemed to do what I needed:
   exiftool -overwrite_original -P -F '-IPTC:Caption-Abstract<$UserComment' *.*
3. Sort the pictures into dated folders, to aid in creating separate iPhoto Events upon import.  Again, exiftool did the trick:
   exiftool -r '-FileName<CreateDate' -d %Y-%m/%Y%m%d_%%f.%%e .
4. Copy the movie (i.e., MPG) files into the appropriately dated folders, so they are imported alongside the pictures from the same events.
5. Import into iPhoto.

Thanks exiftool, and Phil Harvey.  My donation’s on the way.

Update (02/22/2009): If you’re interested in capturing F-Spot’s keywords, be sure to check out Derek’s comment below.  He’s also got a detailed post with good tips about this process to include keywords.  Thanks, Derek.

That process did the trick for our 1,500 captioned photos that were in F-Spot.  I’ve since imported 4,000 more of our pics that were not captioned, with an estimated several thousand to go.  I realize that’s not a huge photo library, but it is large enough for me to take seriously the concerns many people have voiced about iPhoto’s capabilities and performance for large libraries.

iPhoto Library Manager

So I once again set out to find options for archiving photos from iPhoto while still making them easily accessible.  I came across a highly recommended tool that provides that capability perfectly: iPhoto Library Manager.  It allows for the creation of multiple iPhoto libraries, all accessible from the same interface.  At a glance you can view the albums in each library, the size of the library, and its current status.  You can split libraries, or copy ablums and pictures between libraries.  It even provides the option to directly import photos into any of your existing libraries.  At $20, it’s a steal.

Summary

I hope we don’t need to migrate away from iPhoto for quite some time.  When the time comes, surely the image metadata standards will have consolidated and solidified, and tools will have followed along in their development, right?  Right!?

If not, there’s always exiftool.

When Ubuntu first came out, I was skeptical for a couple reasons. First, the initial graphic I saw for the distro was a group of people hugging in a circle. With a little research, I discovered the meaning behind the group hug: “Ubuntu is an African word meaning ‘Humanity to others’, or ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.” Admirable, but a bit touchy-feely for my tastes. Second, lots of early-adopters were raving about Ubuntu, and early adopting is something I tend to avoid in most areas of life.

It’s not that I disliked Fedora, but I was less and less excited about it with each release. Even though I’m not a huge fan of change, the packages, design, and functionality in Fedora weren’t changing fast enough for me. Additionally, some things that really should “just work” never seemed to do so (e.g., software updates). Mostly, though, I think I was simply bored with it.

After a good bit of research (surprise, surprise), I decided to give Ubuntu a try with our home machine. The install was very simple, without making me feel as if the install was making all the decisions for me. More recently, I upgraded to 7.10 and couldn’t believe how flawless it was. I literally clicked an option that said “Upgrade now,” confirmed that I really wanted to upgrade, and after a couple hours it was done.

I’ve been using Ubuntu exclusively for about 9 months now, and am very pleased. I love that things just work (package updates, detecting new printers, automatically handling removable devices, etc.). And I enjoy little touches they include like this:

$ dos2unix
The program 'dos2unix' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install tofrodos
bash: dos2unix: command not found

How convenient is that? I realize many of the small things I now enjoy may be bundled in Fedora as well (since it utilizes many of the same underlying packages and tools), but I feel no need to go back. I’m very content, and see no need to change … until the next upgrade.

We’ve used it close to a dozen times, both for TV shows and movies. Here are my thoughts on the service so far:

• All in all, I’m really impressed, and am enjoying the service, mostly because of its convenience and ease of use. I can browse Amazon’s site, use their 1 click purchase to buy or rent the movie or show, and within a couple minutes it’s already downloading to my TiVo.
• More recently, they’ve added the ability to browse and purchase from Unbox directly through the TiVo. It’s a slimmed down version of what’s online, but that’s probably necessary to make the interface usable on the TV with a remote.
• For some reason, closed captioning is not available with any of the downloads. There have been a couple movies where the audio didn’t seem quite balanced (voices are soft, but music and sound effects are loud), and closed captioning would have been nice.
• Unfortunately you have to wait until the movie or TV show is completely downloaded to your TiVo before you can begin watching. I wish you could begin watching once a sufficient amount had been buffered, but knowing that ahead of time it’s easy enough to plan ahead.
• Download speeds have been about real time (e.g., 2 hours for a 2 hour movie), from what I’ve seen. That’s acceptable to me, given the fact my TiVo is connected to our home network wirelessly.
• Once the movie or TV show has downloaded, you have 30 days to watch it before it’s automatically deleted. However, once you start playing it, you then have only 24 hours before it’s deleted. During that 24 hour period, you can treat it like any other show you’ve recorded, watching it as many times as you want, fast-forwarding, rewinding, etc. I can live with these DRM measures, but I would like to see something like 36 hours rather than 24. Frequently we start a movie one night (after the little guy’s in bed), and don’t quite finish it. The next available time to watch the rest is the following evening, starting at the same time. With only 24 hours, that’s too late to go back to it. If the window were bumped out to 36 hours, that would allow two evenings to get it all in, while still making the DRM folks happy.

Even though we’ve used up all of our $15 credit, we continue using the service. On weekends they always have a handful of new movies for $0.99, and with the TV season ramping up, they’ve been offering series pilots from NBC and FOX for free– even before they’ve aired. I’ll admit that’s the first time I remember ever watching the pilot for a show, and wouldn’t be surprised if we give one of the shows a try this season.

If you’ve got a real TiVo (not those DirecTV look-a-likes), I recommend trying out the Unbox service. I’ve certainly gotten good use of it so far.

I’ve had the good fortune of doing this same project in our previous houses, so the wiring portion was nothing new (I remembered, Skip!). However, this is the first time I’ve needed to cut holes in drywall to put in new electrical boxes, and drill through floor boards.

It took longer than I had hoped (surprise), but I’m pleased with the end result. Our computer and phone are now happily using their newly installed jacks. And speaking of surprises, I’m now afraid of what lies within all our other walls:

Stupid house builders. Unfortunately, it was too large to remove, so in the wall it remains.

I really enjoyed the talk, and appreciated the way he was able to handle a room full of … well … people that would show up to hear a talk about DNS architecture. He was gracious with those who weren’t quite on par with him technically, as well as those who seemed intent on displaying their own knowledge to the rest of the room.

Interesting content and a quality presenter made for an enjoyable afternoon.

A while back TiVo formed a partnership with CNET so that TiVo owners with a networked TiVo could have CNET shows automatically downloaded once a week. It’s usually a 30 minute show about various technical gadgets and toys. I don’t care about everything they review, but I usually watch each show, skipping to the gadgets that look interesting to me. I first became aware of Kim on this show as he usually makes an appearance to talk about portable media players, which I’ve been researching for some time.

I’ve been surprised at how frequently I’ve been wanting to go back and check for updates on the story. It’s interesting how you can feel like you know someone you’ve never met, just by watching them on TV and reading their writing online. I pray the whole family is found safe and sound.

Update: After the rescue of the mom and 2 daughters on Monday, there was renewed hope for finding James Kim as well. He set off on foot on Saturday in search of help. Tragically, he did not survive and was found today. Many amazing details are emerging, including reports from the helicopter pilot hired by relatives that say it was James’ foot prints in the snow that led the rescuers to the car where his wife and daughters were stranded. A truly sad story.

No, it’s not earth-shattering, and it’s not like I was using cat file.txt | wc -l rather than wc -l file.txt. (Now that would be embarrassing.) Still, it’s refreshing every now and then to learn simpler ways to do things.