I also have a couple side projects you can check out:

• The Average Enthusiasts: a podcast I run with a friend about… nothing? Everything? Something?
• Reachable Heights: a place where I make music with friends.

These are in addition to the other handful of things I do with my employer, Skyline Technologies, my small side business, Martinez Media, my geek friends over at That Conference, and my church-fam at the Radiant Coast.

And of course, Joy, Seth, Perry, and Poppy (our newest addition) keep me busy!

Thanks for sticking around; I’ll post content when I can, but definitely check me out on all those other platforms.

git branch | grep -v "master" | xargs git branch -D

You can make this even easier by adding it as a git alias:

git config --global alias.gbr '!git branch | grep -v "master" | xargs git branch -D'

To run the command, just run this:

git gbr

Awesome when you’re finishing up a sprint and don’t need your local copies anymore!

The award was designed to honor those that innovate and help move the School newspaper in new directions and keep up with the changing times in the world of news and journalism. I am deeply honored that they would think of me when thinking of innovation at the Torch.

When I was at the Torch back in 2009/2010, which seems like forever ago, one of my top initiatives was to transition the website from a static website into something that could be fully managed by the Torch staff.

The standard process to get the web edition live was to update a set of Dreamweaver templates, export the static website, and then coordinate with an FSU faculty member to get the Torch area of the Ferris State University website up-to-date. In coordination with the Editor-in-Chief and advisors, I was able to move the Torch from that painstaking process onto a Content Management System (WordPress).

This put the website fully under the Torch’s control and would be the foundation they used going forward to deliver digital news. In fact, a few years after I left FSU, The Torch was able to partner with the local Big Rapids newspaper, The Pioneer, to migrate the site onto their WordPress hosting platform to reduce hosting and maintenance costs.

Special shout out to those that helped me join the Torch and welcome me into the family, especially two of my awesome friends James O’Gorman and Kelsey Schnell. Without James dragging me into the Torch and Kelsey being an excellent Editor-in-Chief to do that initiative with, this honor wouldn’t be possible.

For most services, and most special events, we can pull a full or half band together without much issue. We always have a vocalist or two and enough instrumentalists to fill out the set (we also use tracks, so instrumentally we can always fill it out more). However, Good Friday was looking like no one would be available except for me and our primary drummer.

In a bit of a panic, I personally reached out to everyone on our team to check if they really “weren’t available” or just needed a service off. I was coming up a bit short (it didn’t help that most of our team was already scheduled for Easter).

Luckily, after a bit of begging, I was able to get one of our talented multi-instrumental and vocal members to join me (thank you, Kenny!!). However, he was also going to be leading most of the Easter set (two services on Sunday, two songs for him each service), and didn’t want to over work him, either. We wanted to run Good Friday as a worship music-style set, so we compromised and split the set in half.

I have never, ever, sang any sort of lead vocal in front of our church congregation (and until recently, not really even in other settings); there were only two other times I had a mic to be “backup” (i.e. mixed below being audible). I mean, the usual setup for vocalists is to spend a couple months on backup before leading one or two songs and then finally getting in the usual rotation. However, I felt the push that this needed to be done; God likes to push us out of comfort zones, right?

So Good Friday comes around, we do our pre-service run-through, it’s the three guys on stage with our two Pastors coming in-and-out for the occasional scripture reading and to lead communion; our run-through went well.

Service starts, and I just let it all go. I give everything I have to God, and let the Spirit take over whenever and wherever. Was I the next breakthrough worship vocalist? Hardly. Did the Spirit move through the congregation and ignite a night of worship? Definitely and without-a-doubt.

There was even a moment where I asked the entire congregation to break their own comfort zones, and just lift their hands to worship our Lord and Savior. Hands went up so fast, anyone in that room could tell the Spirit was breaking barriers. (As an aside, that may have caused my adrenaline to spike and I totally could not find the melody of the final chorus of our last song :P).

My point on sharing this is that God can use us in ways that we might not expect, or honestly, might be fearful of without His help. Walls will be knocked down, chains will be broken, and we will have the power of God pushing us through when we are willing to put our pride, fear, or whatever else is blocking us, and carry out His will.

Does it always have to be on a microphone? No. That just happened to be my wall that had to be kicked down.

Maybe it’s something different for you.

Note: I originally shared a version of this on a Facebook group I’m a part of. If you’re a worship leader in any capacity, I highly recommend checking it out: Worship Leaders + on Facebook.

You can do that with the following set of shell commands:

sudo scutil --prefs com.apple.smb.server.plist

The following is in an interactive shell:

get /

d.add ProtocolVersionMap 2

set /

commit

apply

quit

Then run the following to restart the service:

sudo /usr/libexec/configureLocalKDC
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.smbd.plist
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.smbd.plist

You may also need to have the File Sharing service restart on every boot if it doesn’t seem to take effect. You can do that by creating this Property List file:

sudo nano /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.me.restart_smb.plist

With these contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
   <dict>
      <key>Label</key>
      <string>com.me.restart_smb</string>
      <key>ProgramArguments</key>
      <array>
         <string>/bin/bash</string>
         <string>-c</string>
         <string>sleep 60;touch "/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.smb.server.plist"</string>
      </array>
      <key>RunAtLoad</key>
      <true />
   </dict>
</plist>

And then setting the permissions on that file:

sudo chown root:wheel com.me.restart_smb.plist
sudo chmod 644 com.me.restart_smb.plist

Hope that helps!

Sources:

• If you can use AFP but not SMB to mount a file server | Apple
• Repair file sharing after Security Update 2017-001 for macOS High Sierra 10.13.1 | Apple
• Turn off packet signing for SMB 2 and SMB 3 connections | Apple
• WINS workgroup resets every time I startup my MAC

If you were able to catch my presentation, thank you for coming out to support me! If you didn’t have the opportunity, or you want a refresher on the content, then you’re in for a treat: I recorded a streamlined version of my talk as a screencast. Check it out!

All of the slides and source can be found on my GitHub Repository. The slides can also be viewed on GitHub Pages.

The Average Enthusiasts are Kenny Graham and myself. The general topics of the podcast are anything from consumer tech to gaming, with potential of things like cooking, photography, family, and more.

Subscribe and follow us to catch new episodes! You can find us on:

• iTunes
• Facebook
• Youtube
• Twitter
• Instagram

I would also love to see a pull request from anyone that would like to do a full pipeline of webpack (using loaders and such). My requirements are that you use the existing assets (mostly) untouched to accommodate webpack.

Thanks again if you made it out to my talk; I hope you enjoyed it as well as the conference!

Flying Across the US

This was my first journey across the United States via plane. It was awesome to see the changing terrain! Here’s a shot flying over Colorado:

A shot as I made it closer to California:

And landed in Seattle:

Leaving the airport:

And hopping off the light rail:

The Hotel

I stayed at a pretty awesome hotel: The Fairmont Olympic Hotel.

Inside the main lobby:

A look around the inside of the hotel room:

The Conference: Microsoft Build 2017

The conference was amazing! The keynotes were fantastic, the sessions were awesome, and the thousands of people were great to interact with.

I already did a set of recaps of the three days of the conference. You can find them here: Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.

The Conference Party

Microsoft puts on an awesome part for all the conference goers. They rent out CenturyLink Field, fill it with food and beverage vendors, have life performances and various activities.

Walking into the stadium we were presented with a pile of light-up bands.

Lots of food, activities, and people!

The field had some activities and areas to congregate.

One of the groups of Midwesterners I met up with; bunch of crazies!

Exploring Seattle

I had a little bit of time to explore Seattle before heading back to Michigan. Obviously since I was in the land of coffee drinkers, I had to hit up some of the shops (Carl makes a guest appears off to the left):

I thought this menu was pretty hilarious:

Some pretty awesome espresso; look at that color!

Some pillars as we were walking towards the Starbucks Roastery.

Our Lady!

Inside the Starbucks Roastery:

Getting their roast on!

First time experiencing a siphon brew in-person:

Hitting up the “first” Starbucks:

Pike’s Market:

The Waterfront:

I thought this wall art was pretty awesome:

And of course, what’s a visit to Seattle without hitting up the Space Needle:

Heading Home

If you have an overnight flight and can swing the expense, I highly recommend flying first class.

A Visual Recap

View the full gallery on SmugMug.

I did try to take as many photos as possible. I’ve uploaded them to a gallery if you’d like to view more of my brief travels through Seattle.

Luckily, there is a port on the side to plug-in an external power supply (it does charge over USB normally, but there’s not enough power to charge the battery and scan at the same time). Since I was in a bit of a pinch to get some documents scanned, I popped over to my local Walmart and bought one of these:

However, I wasn’t quite sure what power settings I needed. After some major digging, I found an Amazon review that lists the power output of the official Doxie Worldwide Power Adapter. If you need to do something similar, you need to set your AC adapter to an output of 6V DC @ 1.5amps with a center positive polarity. Hopefully this helps someone else!