IN THIS WEEK’S POST: I lock myself in the Spider Hole to get work done, I make many more long-distance calls, and oodles of slides for Annual Conference 2016.
Well, it’s official! I have worked the required number of hours for Hendrix to count my internship for any sort of credit! I hit the 120 hour mark on Thursday at 2PM, to tons of fanfare (and by fanfare I mean a Center for Technology staff meeting). However, I’m honestly just getting started. Though I’ve only been there for 4 weeks now, I feel like I’ve already started making my mark on a few things, and that makes me really happy, as I not only wanted to gain experience by working in a technological capacity for a non-profit, but also contribute in a meaningful way to the group as a whole.
But before we dive into the changes, let’s review this week’s Annual Conference work.
With Annual Conference right around the corner, the whole Conference office has been buzzing with activity. Between the tons of video footage being rendered, the double- and triple-checking of the agenda that is finally set in stone (but still subject to change), and all of those slides that I’ve been working on putting together (see last week’s post for more of an explanation), it’s been quite the eventful week. However, seeing it all come together is a very beautiful thing. It looks very, VERY sharp (if I do say so myself), and I attribute that to the efforts of the whole group. Everyone has been working together to put out the best possible product, from video to graphics to just the text on each slide, and to see everyone so passionate about it is inspiring. It’s one of those things that makes me happy that I got to be here at this office, working with this particular group of people.
But it’s not all Annual Conference (at least for me!) I’m proud to say that I put the finishing touches on the first REcharge Initiative computer, and it was a fantastic moment to have figured out the exact process I need to do in order to bring each old computer back to life. I really hope to bring that whole project to fruition in a meaningful way in the coming weeks and months of my internship. I’ve also been working to help out my co-workers by contacting a ton of people about their organization’s logo! Remember last week when I posted a screenshot of all of the numbers I called for logos to put in slides? Well, I’ve taken it a step farther and contacted every group that I could find connected to the Arkansas Conference, and asked them for a set of high-resolution logos. I have then taken those logos and compiled them into a space where if we need one, we can just get the file from our personal archive instead of contacting them every time (and hoping for the right graphic and format for the situation and all). And by every group…
I’ve also finished up my work on the network storage units (NASes) in the office as well, expanding the storage space on both the main and backup NAS and working out a set of procedures for backing up to the backup NAS.
My final project for the week involved docs.arumc.org. This website serves as the repository for all of the public files of the Conference. However, it wasn’t mobile-friendly, and it lacked new features such as thumbnails and searching. Therefore, I took on (as a side project) improving the website and organizing it, and here’s the current result of that:
All that I did was change out software (it now runs on h5ai), but hopefully after Annual Conference, we can all take on cleaning it up and organizing it to make it a useful portal for all things United Methodist in Arkansas!
And that’s about it! Next week brings the fun stuff, so expect me to have more to say when Annual Conference comes.
Until next time,
Jacob
BONUS:
Sign credits: Jacob Turner (I sat in a server closet for a few hours, I needed to have fun somehow.)
JacobTurner.me 