marcelk.org

Within my church organization, I’ve been asked to help organize and run activities for the youth in our area. The biggest activity is what we call “stake youth conference”, which is basically 3 days with 250 youth, age 14-18. It’s not a small task.

As we approached this year’s youth conference, one of our big challenges is in managing the information for all this. We need information for planning, ordering, assignments, medical, legal, and other needs. Having good information is very helpful, and missing or incorrect information really slows things down. In the last few years, here is how our Stake has managed information for youth conference. We are far from perfect, but perhaps there is something here that could help you. And maybe you can leave a comment that would be helpful for us.

Part of our approach here is to use functionally-effective but cost-effective tools. For much of this, we used products from Google. Part of what I like about the Google Workspace suite (Google Sheets, Docs, Drive, etc), is that each document is hosted online and shared in real-time, instead of needing to email around attachments and having to synchronize edits. The other nice thing about Google Workspace suite is that it versions all the changes, so if somebody deletes a paragraph or cell by accident, it can be recovered via Version History.

Spreadsheets as Databases

Yes, we are using spreadsheets as a database. For the level of info we are tracking and the people involved, this works fine. A couple of the things I was careful about was making sure that the Readers was limited only to the need-to-know, and the Editors was limited only with the need-to-change. For example, the centralized attendance sheet (automatically fed by the attendance form) was editable only by me, and I was just correcting errors.

Initial Planning

This took the form of a Google Sheet. We called it the “master sheet”, as it either held data or pointed to where data was held.

We created a spreadsheet with the following tabs:
• Role Assignments for each member of the leadership committee
• Schedule for the 3 days of conferences
• Registration dashboard
• Expenses (planned and actual)
• Volunteer needs (role and quantity)
• Ward focal points (name, email, phone)
• Class topics / teachers / locations
• Service projects: locations, size, liaison, requirements, waivers
• Meals (time, menu, cost)
• Equipment to bring / set up for each venue (shade tents, watercoolers, etc)
• Packing list for youth (sunscreen, water bottles, etc)

Initial Communication

We created a website with Google Sites. On this website was links to the registration forms, a high-level overview of the activities (no place names or times listed), and the email address of one of the Stake leaders to answer questions. This was all on one page. We also bought a helpful domain name from GoDaddy that would forward to the Google Site so we could give an easy-to-remember pointer to the youth and parents via the ward leaders. Because we have a Spanish branch in our Stake, we used Google Translate to have a 2nd page that was a Spanish translation of the main page, specifically for the parents in that branch (all the youth are English-proficient). We were being careful not to post any personal youth information or specific times+locations on the website, for privacy reasons and to not enable any lurkers to just show up.

Registration

Of course we need to figure out who is planning to attend, and what their characteristics are. The way we chose to do this was with a Google Form. Because the data entered in the form (responses) was pushed into a spreadsheet visible only to the stake leaders (write-only, not readable), we could put the link to the form on our website for the parents to find easily. We did verify that all registrants were actual members.

For the data that we need, we worked to consolidate all of it to a single form. This form was intended to be filled out by parents.

In previous years, we had a separate “Honor Code” form we asked both the youth and their parents to fill out. This year we consolidated down the Honor Code points to a core set, primarily pointing to the FSY booklet, and asked the parents to check the boxes.

Regarding late registration, we didn’t turn anyone away. And yes, there was a good-sized handful of youth that were registering late, even up until the day before conference started. Our intention was that we “want to make room for everyone who wants to attend”, even if it means more work for the leaders. Some were move-ins, some were guests, and some were regular members who simply forgot to register before the publicized deadline. Even though we had a publicized deadline of 6 weeks before the conference, about 1/3 of the final attendee count missed the deadline. The planned registration period ran for 4 weeks.

Guests

Early on our Stake decided to open up attendance to friends of youth. There wasn’t a pre-set limit because we didn’t expect a lot, and we would cover the costs of the guests just like they were a member. We felt that the missionary value was worth it. And we encouraged each ward to have at least one non-member friend to attend. So our registration form had a spot for guests to register. After we received a registration from a guest, we would go back to the ward to find out who the member-friend is, so we could make an effort to pair them together during assigned activities. In 2022, we ended up with 10 non-member guests, and want to see more in the future.

Ward Focal Points & Ward Reports

As we collected registration responses automatically into a Google Sheet from the Google Form, we wanted to share the registrants with the ward leaders so they could (a) see who was missing, and (b) that registrants were eligible (age, ward membership, etc). To help do that, we created a Google Sheet for each ward. But this sheet was not editable by the ward, instead it was a single query formula into the main registration responses that showed only those from their ward, and only selected fields (name, age, etc) that were pertinent to registration. Because it was a query and not a copy of data, this means it was live, so as soon as someone new registered, their ward report spreadsheet would get automatically updated. This saved a lot of emails regarding “can you send me the latest list”.

So then we asked each ward for a focal point to review this ward report of their registrants, and specifically to help chase down the youth/parents that weren’t registered yet but that were eligible and likely to attend. Of course there were some folks on family vacations, summer jobs, etc., but we wanted to make sure every eligible youth had the opportunity. Since the ward leaders know their youth the best, they did well in that role. We created a sheet for each ward that would query just their ward’s youth from the master response sheet. It worked well.

We asked the ward leaders to pick a focal point. The focal point should know the youth in the ward, and have good follow-up skills.

Church Permission Form

Since youth conference is a multi-day event that has more activities (and thus risks) than a usual weekly youth night, we use the church headquarter’s full-page Medical and Permission form, and require one to be filled out for each attending youth.

An artist friend has access to the Adobe Suite, so using the PDF editor there we were able to modify the headquarter’s PDF form to fill in the top section with the activity details, and then save that as a new template. This avoids requiring parents to fill in that common part.

In years past, we’ve shared this modified PDF with parents, asked them to print at home, and then fill it in with a pen and give to their ward leaders, that I can then pick up a hardcopy for each youth. It has been difficult to execute this. At my employer they use a tool named HelloSign for managing online signatures of documents. Since they trust it, and it comes from the same parent company as dropbox.com, we decided to use it. Here’s how it works:

Using the modified PDF mentioned above, it gets loaded into their tool as a template using their web site tool. Then for each field that I want the parent to fill out, using their tool I graphically draw a box around the area of the PDF that would otherwise be written on with a pen. Do this for all the fields, and give each field a name. Then for the signature line, draw a special box around that with their tool. Save this template. Now, for each registrant that I receive a registration form for, I go back into their tool, select the template, type in the name and email address of the parent (which we ask for in our Google form), and then hit the send button. The system will sent a link to the parent’s inbox. When the parent clicks on that link, they will see the template with all the fields on the PDF that they can type in to, to provide the medical information. And they can also draw on the screen of their phone (or similar for a PC) to provide their signature. That all gets captured in a document that gets sent to me. If they don’t do this submission, the parent will get a couple email nag notes. I can also go into the tool and manually send the parent a nag note whenever I want. And the tool shows which parents haven’t responded yet.

This gets the church permission form into a totally online format. No hardcopy collection needed, but the softcopy looks like the hardcopy. I ended up printing each softcopy at home, and putting them into a binder that I could give to our nurse, so that we’d know the medical details in case anyone got hurt or sick.

HelloSign has a 30-day free trial so you can see if it works for you. We used the monthly plan at $20/month, and we kept it active from the opening of registration until the end of the conference.

From what I can tell, there may be an option to automatically pre-fill the document-for-signing to the parent with personalized data, though it may take some extra software and a higher-priced subscription tier, and maybe writing some custom code. If that was the case, then it may be possible for the attendance form to ask for those questions in the Google Form, and then the modified PDF could be pre-filled with all the medical and personal data, and needs to be only e-signed by the parent. That would be the perfect solution, but for now we have the decent solution. This year I ended up reading through all the HelloSign submissions and manually copying-and-pasting the allergies + medical needs back into our centralized attendance sheet. The personalization described above would get us out from doing that as well as making it easier for the parents. Something to investigate for next time.

Third-Party Waivers

A couple of our third-party partners required their own waivers for their venues/activities. One was a ropes course, and the other was for a service project. They had their own system for collecting these waivers. Luckily, they could be filled out online by parents, AND these partners were able to periodically provide the list of all the waivers they had received from our group. This made it pretty easy to determine which waivers were missing, so the ward focal points could go a chase those down.

There was a lot of chasing down. The parents did pretty good on filling out the attendance form, but each additional form we asked for had lower and lower submission rates. So we learned the hard way to minimize the number of forms.

In the centralized attendance response Google Sheet, we added columns to put a simple “Y” for each waiver that the partner confirmed as received. Anything without a “Y” needed to be chased down by the ward focal points.

Volunteer Signups

There were two groups of signups we asked for. One was for food contributions of snack items (i.e., diced fresh fruit), and the other was for ward leaders to attend shifts as helpers/chaperones. We used a SignupGenius for both. Although the ads on SignupGenius can be annoying, we stayed with their free tier of service.

We did not put the links to the SignupGenius on the website, since it listed the times and locations of the conference. These links to the signups were distributed via email to parents and ward leaders.

T-Shirts

We have a tradition of getting a t-shirt for each youth, that has a custom print. For the design, we use the church’s base design, and then add a small customization, such as our stake name and year. Typically a youth is capable of designing that. We’ve established a relationship with a local screen printer who can order the blank shirts (large lead time needed because of supply chain issues) and paint the design on the fabric.

On our attendance form, we ask for the desired t-shirt size. We order a few extra for the Stake Presidency plus late registrants. We ended up paying about $10/shirt.

Special Food Needs

There may be youth with special food needs such as allergies (nuts was a common one) and preferences (vegetarian). I manually copied-and-pasted these non-blank values from the submitted medical forms into our centralized attendance sheet. Then I created another Google sheet that queried for non-empty values to give a count/description to our food helpers.

Given a Google Sheet that serves to collect responses from a Google Form, it is possible to manually append columns on the far right that will co-exist with the cells that are filled in by the form submissions. This is where I put these extra fields: church permission form flag, waiver flag, food needs, medical needs.

Medical Needs

Similar to the special food needs, there was a surprising amount of youth with needs that were both physical (i.e., recently broken bones) and mental (i.e., panic attacks, autism). In reading through these, it became apparent that there are a few youth that would not respond as expected to discipline if needed. I also manually copied-and-pasted these from the submitted medical forms into our centralized attendance sheet.

I also printed all the Church Permission & Medical forms, sorted them by ward, and then sorted each ward by name, and put it in a binder. This we would take with us on activities, so if anyone got hurt, we would be able to quickly look up any allergies or issues.

Name Badges / Lanyards

Each year we’ve had a personalized badge and lanyard for each attendee. It made them feel official, it served as a visual proof of check-in, it included on the back generic schedule information, and the front had not only their name but also their personal assignments for classes and service project.

Avery is the company known for printing badges on the perforated card stock, which you can then tear along the lines and put into a badge holder. I like having the large 4×3 inch format instead of the smaller ID badge size 3×2 inch format. Avery uses 4-digit codes for each of their templates, I like 5392.

To support all that card stock, Avery has a pretty good app for doing a “mail merge” for printing out the personalized data on those cards. It is called “Avery Design & Print”, and from their home page can be accessed via the Templates menu. You’ll want to create an account, since it’s a web-based app and you’ll be able to save your work online using that account.

Basically I created a spreadsheet that had the personalized data fields: firstname, lastname, ward, class names and times, and any other info we wanted. Then you export that as a CSV file. Next, go into the Avery Design & Print web tool and start a new project. Do the “Import Data Mail Merge” to upload your CSV file, then you can add the data fields to a sample card. Then add any static text, graphics, and do any formatting and layout and graphics you want. It even supports text rotation and opacity, in addition to font types and sizes. You can also get a PDF preview of what they all look like, and send it to your printer. It’s a surprisingly good web tool, I recommend it.

The first year I bought the Avery card stock and tried to print this mail merge on my home laser printer, the first couple sheets came out OK, then the following ones had problems with the toner coming off the paper in flakes. What I ended up doing was skipping the Avery perforated card stock and just printing on regular plain white everyday paper. However, this loses the perforations for separating the pieces. To get around that, I found a PDF file from Avery that prints a thin line on the whole sheet that shows where the perforations would normally go. So I print all the mail merge badges once, then stick those papers back in the printer’s input paper tray to print again to get the lines on them. Then I borrowed the guillotine paper cutter from the ward library (the one with the big cutting arm on the edge of a hard slab) and simply cut along the lines. Tada!

To complete the package, I created another Avery Design & Print project using the same 5392 template, but instead of having a bunch of personalized data via the Mail Merge, I just use static data so each card looks exactly the same: this is where we put the schedule and other general information. Do the same double-print to get the lines printed for cutting, and insert this in the badge holder facing the opposite side out, so now the badge holder has a front with the personalized info, and a back with the general info.

Regarding the clear vinyl badge holders, I got these ones from Amazon (250 for $40). For the lanyards, it is possible to get ones custom printed, but I found these ones from Amazon in a generic color that worked fine and were much less expensive (50 for $17 = 250 for $85).

I did feel a bit bad for using Avery’s tools without buying anything from them.

Pre-Conference Communications

So before the conference started, we needed to communicate out to the participants their assignments for the activities when they were split up. Instead of manually sending out 250 emails, since we had the information in spreadsheets, this is what a mail merge would be good for. But not just creating a personalized document that could be saved and printed, but actually emailed. After doing some hunting around I found that OpenOffice could do that. They have a help document that describes how to do it:
Creating Mail Merge Documents From Text/CSV or Spreadsheets. It’s not trivial to set up, but if you can get it working, it is a huge time saver. It creates the email body, and actually sends the email, all in one automated step. So sending to 250 recipients is as easy as sending to 2 recipients. It differs from a regular document-generation only mail-merge in that you also configured your outgoing SMTP server. There are instructions for doing that via Gmail. To the recipient it appears to come from your personal Gmail account.

In-Conference Communications

The challenge here is that when sending communications to the youth, our experience is that the youth don’t look at their email inbox. Sending emails is supported, it’s easy, but most of the youth don’t see it. It’s not uncommon to get an email bounce from a youth saying that their inbox is full. Instead their focus is on social apps and texting. Last year we used Remind to try to send messages to the youth, because it is the app used by our county school system, so the youth are familiar with it and generally have it already installed. However, Remind requires the recipient to manually opt-in, and after repeated requests we got only about half of the youth to join our Remind group. And in the free tier of Remind, outbound messages are limited to 160 characters, and group size is limited to 150 members (we expect ~250 conference attendees). So this year we gave up on Remind, and I went looking for a group-texting system that doesn’t require opt-in.

What I found is Textedly. I tried the free trial, and although it was a bit expensive, it gave us the function I was looking for. The original goal was to both email and send SMS messages to parents and youth each day, describing what was going to happen the next day and what they needed to do to prepare.

In the registration form, we asked for the preferred email address and cell phone number for a parent, and the same for a youth (all the youth had an email address, and almost all had cell numbers). So that gave us our recipient list. With some queries and a little bit of manual effort I was able to get a list of all the email addresses for parents and youth in a single spreadsheet column, and I could copy-and-paste that into my Gmail client, and send a daily email address from my personal Gmail account. (Yes, apparently Gmail will let you send an email to 400+ recipients. The reason I didn’t use the church’s LCR tool for mass emailing is that it doesn’t let us filter out the non-attendees, especially the under-14 youth.) Some additional queries and manual work and I was able to build a separate spreadsheet of our SMS recipients (parents + youth) based on registration data. This sheet included their name, “parent” or “youth” designator, and cell phone number. I was able to upload this sheet as a CSV file to Textedly. Because I had a parent/youth designator on each person, I could select to send a message to all or to just youth or just parents. Sending an outbound message is called a “campaign” in Textedly, probably because most of their customers use it for marketing.

One of things about Textedly is that normally a message (costing 1 credit) is limited to 160 characters. The biggest message you can send is 3×160 characters for 3 credits. However, the nice but somewhat hidden thing is that if you include an image in your message, then it becomes an MMS and you can send a message up to 1600 characters at a cost of 3 credits. I just included a small image of the conference logo, and then was able to include the full information I wanted to send, same full content as went out in the email. 400 recipients at 3 credits for each day’s communication got to be expensive, so I switched to sending text messages only to the youth, but emailed both the youth and parents. When I did that, in the last text to the parents I said “keep an eye on your email inbox”. I ended up spending $56 for a month of service and the message credits included in that tier, and another $20 for additional message credits. All in all, it worked pretty well. It included a STOP handler, and you could see any text replies. They did require our organization name to be at the beginning of the outbound message so it was more clear who it was from, but that ate into our character count. Being able to effectively reach the youth where they are was worthwhile to us. This worked pretty well. Unless I find a better solution, I plan on doing the same next time.

Conclusion

Yup, it’s a boat load of work. And with the right tools it’s still a lot of work. But I can’t imagine how hard it would be without the right tools.

Do you have any suggestions for better ways to do this? If so, please leave a comment!

Gluttons for punishment, or doing all the fun over again from 9 years ago: I don’t know which. But had another wonderful 3 week road trip this summer.

Stats:

• duration: 21 consecutive days
• driving distance: 6890 miles
• total hours driving: 120
• average mpg: 25.5
• gas consumed: 270 gallons (generally around $4.50/gal)

Monuments / Parks / Museums / highlights visited:

• Big Pencil: Wytheville, VA
• New River Gorge National Park: Glen Jean, WV
• Cathedral Falls: Gauley Bridge, WV
• Sternwheel Regatta (just missed it): Charleston, WV
• Blenko Glass Factory: Milton, WV
• Mammoth Cave National Park: KY
• Moonlite BBQ: Owensboro, KY
• City Museum: St Louis, MO
• Badlands National Park: SD
• Mount Rushmore National Memorial: Keystone, SD
• Devils Tower National Monument: Sundance, WY
• Glacier National Park: Kalispell, MT
• Garden of One Thousand Buddhas: Arlee, MT
• family reunion: Kamiah, ID
• Utah Olympic Park: Park City, UT
• Caputo’s Market and Deli: Salt Lake City, UT
• Little Wild Horse slot canyon: Green River, UT
• Goblin Valley State Park: Green River, UT
• Silverton, CO
• Georgia O’Keefe Museum: Santa Fe, NM
• Meow Wolf Museum: Santa Fe, NM
• Route 66 Midpoint: Adrian, TX
• Parlor Doughnuts, Nashville TN

Marcel is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This is an address he gave in a congregation on February 27th, 2022.

Is it reasonable to expect to understand all things about the gospel right now? I don’t think so. We operate a lot on faith, which is less than a perfect knowledge. Even if you don’t understand something, or even don’t like something, do you trust God? Can you really move forward in the darkness with the Lord’s guidance?

The church is led by Christ. But it is administered by people.

In case you didn’t notice, the people in the church are imperfect. This includes your quorum and class members. And your leaders, including us on the stand. And you.

Leaders and members are not the only places where we expect perfection. In what other ways?

• Temple recommend, keeping commandments
• Callings: serving and being served
• Policy (for example, masks and activities during Covid)
• Body image, job title, house (can’t come to dinner at my house unless spotless), family (We Don’t Talk About Bruno)
• Marriage
• Be alike, that we should compare our characteristics and situations to others and find sameness

Yes, we strive to do our best in these areas, but should we really expect perfection? No.

A wise person said that all frustration comes from un-met expectations. Think about when you’ve been frustrated, I bet it was caused by un-met expectations. Frustration leads to anger. Disappointment leads to doubt. We, even in the church, have too much anger and too much doubt.

My favorite BYU Devotional is the one by Brad Wilcox on Grace. Look it up now, and watch it with your family. That is your assignment for today. Go to YouTube and search “Brad Wilcox Grace”. He uses the metaphor of piano lessons: what the Lord requires of us is not perfection, but practice, practice, practice. Wherever you happen to be in the gospel, work on doing your best, and work on taking steps of forward progress. That is what we are asked to do. God will meet you where you are today, wherever you are, and encourage you and help you to make improvements. Perfection does not exist in mortality, so let go of the idea of finding it here. It is an unreasonable expectation. It will not be met. Expecting it to be met will cause frustration. Ups and downs and imperfections are normal. You are in good company with all of humanity.

I’ve heard it said that in church we are a bunch of amateurs practicing on each other. And with our families, we are a bunch of amateurs practicing on each other, at really close range. Don’t expect perfection from people. So be patient with others and don’t expect perfection from them. And the hard part, be patient with and don’t expect perfection from yourself, because you’re a person too.

God is not setting us up to fail. He is letting us learn by having experiences in an imperfect world that teach us things we can learn in no other way.

God is not setting us up to be loved less. He is letting us have opportunities to develop more Christ-like love for others.

What we learn and how well we love is up to us.

I have 5 kids. I’m amazed at how different they are from each other, coming from the same parents, growing up in literally the same house. I love them all. Isn’t it similar that all of us, God’s children, coming from the same heavenly parents, are different and unique. Don’t be frustrated by your uniqueness, because it is a gift from heavenly parents. Your uniqueness is a blessing from God to serve those around you in a way that nobody else can. And to see the world in a way that nobody else does. Belonging and fitting in doesn’t mean we have to all be the same.

If we look at the temple recommend questions it’s not about perfection, but about making forward progress. Three of the recommend questions specifically use the word “strive”. The Miriam Webster dictionary defines strive as “to devote serious effort or energy: endeavor”. It’s not about binary success or failure, it’s about serious effort and energy. If the temple let in only people who were perfect and fully successful, nobody would be there.

So when we think about our efforts in the gospel, in our qualification for the temple, it’s not about perfection now. As Elder Jeffrey R Holland taught in the October 2017 general conference, be ye therefore perfect, eventually. We are now in the Telestial kingdom. The Lord would never give us a commandment He knew we could not keep here. If we continually press forward, then somewhere in eternity our refinement will be finished and complete. But right now, not yet.

Why do we need the temple? Our Stake President has said being a good person isn’t enough. Covenants and Ordinances, including those in the temple, bind us to Christ. As evidence, that is why we have proxy ordinances in the temple, to bind families together, and to bind us all to Christ, even those people that are already good.

The atoning help of Jesus Christ is not something you reach after you have endured to the end. He is not waiting at the finish line. His atoning help is for you right now, wherever you are at. He is with you every step of the way and will help us get to the finish line. Just reach out your hand, right now, and take His. You are loved now.

If we inspect our spiritual foundation, it should include principles like these:

Matthew 22:36 – Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. [Note that last sentence – this is a foundational element.]

You existed as a spirit before you were born on earth. And you will continue to exist after your earthly death.

You are a child of a Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother and they love you perfectly. They love you not because of what you do or don’t do, but because you are theirs and will always be theirs.

God listens to your prayers. Every single prayer from every single person in its entirety.

The Church of Jesus Christ is being restored on the earth.

There is a plan.

There is a way for you to return to God and your family.

The Holy Ghost testifies of truth, and you can receive personal revelation.

You have a purpose and are of divine worth.

Jesus Christ has already paid the price for your mistakes and shortcomings. You can be forgiven and redeemed.

God wants us to receive all that He has and all that He is. All of it.

Brothers and sisters, you are awesome. No matter how you feel about yourself, you really are awesome. You have more talents and you have more potential than you think. You have infinite worth. You are the leaders of tomorrow and today. What you contribute, even when it is imperfect, makes a difference.

Get a temple recommend. Go to the temple, participate in covenants and ordinances for yourself and as a proxy for others that didn’t get a chance. The temple is not the end, it is the means. For an hour or two, step out of the world and into the kingdom of God. Find peace. Find answers. Find belonging. Find a greater purpose. See the ordinances that are done for every person that ever lived, one at a time, by name, because they matter, and you matter. When you look at life, remember that you can do this. You belong.

This I say in the name of our foundation, Jesus Christ, amen.

Marcel is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This is an address he gave at a funeral of an elderly friend on June 18th, 2021. Personal information has been removed out of respect for the family.

We met at church. There is a program at church where we are all asked to look after each other, by assignment, and I was assigned to her. Somehow, we clicked. She did most of the talking, and I did most of the listening. 

It may seem unfair that she left us and had to go through all those health issues, and it isn’t what we want. I hear you. So how do we reconcile those feelings? If I may, I’d like to step back and think about the bigger picture, and the context.

Things are not always what they first seem. But when viewed in a larger context, we can understand the purposes beyond what is immediately visible. At work when my manager asks me to do something which on the surface doesn’t make sense, at least from what I can see at that moment, I need to dig into it and understand it more. There always is a good reason. When I understand the context, even when the assignment doesn’t change, then it’s easier for me to get on board. Similarly, in my personal life, when I understand the context in which things happen, especially for the bad things, it brings me patience, peace and hope. Or in other words, to get on board with God.

The first step to viewing the larger context is to understand what the real goal is. My own kids may think that my goals for them are to have a clean room and good grades. But as a parent, my real goal is above having clean rooms and good grades. 

It is for them to grow up to become their best selves, to realize the great potential they have, and for them to have everything I had and more, and to feel loved and to give love to others. Those are my top-level goals. Other parents here today, I think you want the same for your kids. 

I believe God wants the same for us: to become our best selves, to realize our tremendous potential, to have everything, and specifically to have love. This is demonstrated when God says (Moses 1:39) “Behold this is my work and my glory: to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” We are His children, we are His purpose, and He loves us perfectly.

We believe that as individual spirits, we existed long before we were born on earth. Back then we were in the presence of God as spiritual infants, where we could grow and learn. Which we did. But we could only go so far without the unique experiences and challenges of having a physical body, where we would learn great lessons from difficulty, including pain, disappointment, and loss. When difficulty is self-inflicted via a bad decision, we can learn a lesson from that experience too. 

Because it is in those difficulties that we can finally develop an appreciation for truth, health, joy, and love. And in particular to develop compassion and understanding. We learn the most when things are rough. This is illustrated when God spoke to a prophet that was going through a lot of difficulty caused by things outside of his control:

D&C 122: “And if thou shouldst be cast into the pit, or into the hands of murderers, and the sentence of death passed upon thee; if thou be cast into the deep; if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thine enemy; if the heavens gather blackness, and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good. The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?”

Here’s what that means: How much better will we be able to teach and serve and love, to have insights, compassion, understanding and empathy because of our difficulties here on earth. These experiences make us better people. It is how we grow and progress. Christ felt the pains of all people across all time, and we shouldn’t think ourselves exempt from difficulty.

The purpose of this mortal life on earth is to learn and do. It is not the end. It is a step in our eternal progression. And to progress, we must both enter this phase and leave it. Otherwise our progress stops. Although at this point, this earthly life is all we know, it is not all there is. 

Death is a separation of the spirit from the body. We lay the body down in the ground but the spirit continues. It continues to learn and to serve. Lying in this casket is her body, not her spirit.

Eventually with Christ’s return, the spirit and the body will be reunited, the same spirit with a perfected eternal physical body, without the flaws of mortality. Never to experience death, sickness, or fatigue. No more stenosis, no more iron deficit, no more blood pressure problems. No more cancer. No more birth defects. No more chemical imbalances of addiction or depression. No more diabetes. No more achy joints. No more hair loss. This is what we call the resurrection.

The reason we call Christ our Savior is that what He did enabled for us two saving things:

(1) to be resurrected, meaning that after our death on earth that later our spirit will be reunited with our body in its perfect and complete form. In summary, to make our bodies perfect. 

(2) to be cleansed from the bad choices we’ve made and the spiritual damage we’ve received. In summary, to make our spirits perfect. 

With this perfection in both body and spirit, we can live with God. Christ enables us to be saved from permanent physical death (resurrection), and to be saved from spiritual death (separation from God). And in order to enable this for us, Christ paid an infinite cost in His pain and physical death in Gethsemane and on the cross. And He did it because he loved us. And in doing so He learned our pains, so that He understands us perfectly. 

So you may ask: where is her spirit now? We believe that she is in a place called the Spirit World, as an active and aware spirit, there to await the 2nd coming of Christ and resurrection of our bodies. While there, there is work to do. She can serve and teach and invite other spirits there to accept Christ. And she can also see us here and cheer us on. I suspect she is here right now, watching and listening. And I suspect that on occasion she’ll have a role as a heaven-sent angel to provide us protection or inspiration. And she’ll do well in that role because she knows us and loves us.

She still is, but she’s not here. At least not here that we can see and interact with. So I talk about her in the present tense, not the past tense. Is, not was. And I encourage you to do the same. 

Yes, we are separated from her for a time, and we’ll miss her during this separation. But the separation is temporary. It is not permanent. 

I remember as an 8 year old hiking the Grand Canyon. From the upper rim to Havasupi Falls on the floor of the canyon. ½ mile of elevation change straight down, 12 miles of distance including switchbacks. And then repeat on the way out, but all uphill. Even though I was exhausted, when I took off my backpack, I felt so lightweight like I could fly. It was a remarkable feeling. I was unburdened. 

But being temporarily burdened made me physically stronger, tired, and taught me appreciation of freedom from burdens.

In the time I’ve known her, she’s had a lot of medical issues. So much pain for so long. It must have been a heavy burden. I think she feels unburdened now, and it must feel remarkable, like she can fly.

I can only imagine her joy at being reunited with her husband and them having a chance to catch up with each other.

I’ve told my wife that for my funeral I want there to be a party. A chance to remember the good things, and to laugh at the rest. To not be sad about my progression. Everything is going to be more than OK. 

My goal is to have lived a good life, to make the most of the short time that we have on earth. To prepare myself for the next step. To recognize that this experience is temporary, and that death is an expected and necessary gateway to achieve something greater than we can even imagine. I think she has done that.

This is what I wish for her, as written in Mathew 25:21, and adjusted for gender: “Her lord said unto her, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”

After having a couple Raspberry Pi’s doing miscellaneous things, and working my way up to a Plex server where I needed real storage and video transcoding crunching power, it was time to do something real. But I didn’t want to spend a lot of money. Here’s what I did.

Hardware

I wanted a decent machine that had more horsepower than a Pi, a 64-bit CPU, space for multiple mass storage 3.5″ internal drives, was relatively quiet, and relatively inexpensive. A used PC tower would fit this bill nicely. After some hunting around on Newegg for refurbished systems, I settled on a Dell Optiplex 790 mini tower. For $168 I got a machine with space for 4 hard drives (2×3.5 + 2×5.25), a 2nd-gen Core i5 at 3.10GHz, 8GB RAM, 4 internal SATA ports, and gigabit ethernet. It did come with a single 500GB drive with a fresh copy of Windows 10 Pro preinstalled, but I replaced that with a used 2TB disk I had laying around the house upon which I installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to make this a headless server (no monitor/keyboard attached, just sshd).

For mass data storage I bought two Seagate Ironwolf 8TB NAS drives at $200 each. The NAS drives are designed to be on consistently and accumulate a lot of spin time, as opposed to a generic PC disk that are expected to be powered off when not in use.

Then I did some re-arranging of the hard drives.

First, take the OS disk that is in the bracket at the bottom of the case, and mount it in the 5.25 bay right below the DVD drive using a 5.25-to-3.25 adapter like this one. Now the two drive brackets at the bottom of the case are empty, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Second, pull out the DVD drive that came with that refurbished PC. Replace it with a bracket for $20 that will allow a random 3.5″ internal drive to slide in to a hot-swap SATA slot. That way I can use other various internal-style drives on-demand without having to open the case. Useful for wiping that stack of hard disks from previous PCs that I’ve been meaning to do. Ubuntu includes support for NTFS filesystems, so a simple mount command can make Windows data available here to migrate in to my mass storage disks. To bring the inserted drive online without a reboot you can use the command “/usr/bin/rescan-scsi-bus.sh” as root from the sg3-utils package via “apt install”. But to do so, I believe this bracket needs to have been powered on at boot time.

Third, now that the two hard disk brackets are open at the bottom of the case, that is where I want my two mass storage drives to go. I plan to run them in a mirrored configuration, to protect against drive failure. So I aim to put the two Ironwolf drives there. But Dell uses a blue plastic caddy tray to hold the disks here instead of old-school screws, and only one caddy is present. No worries, I can get another one just like it from Newegg marketplace for $12.

For the SATA cables, I attach the OS disk to SATA port 1 on the motherboard, the two mass storage Ironwolf drives to SATA port 2 and 3 on the motherboard, and the hot-swap bracket to SATA port 4. That way when I use the hot-swap drive and power it on and off using the built-in switch on the front of it, it will get assigned the /dev/sdd device name at the end of the list, and not impact the sda assignment for the OS disk or the sdb/sdc assignment for the mass storage disks.

After I unboxed the refurbished Dell upon arrival, it wouldn’t boot up to the POST / BIOS menu. I was worried I was going to have to return it as being DOA. As a bit of a wild guess I started re-seating the internal components, and after re-seating the RAM DIMMs, it finally booted. Easy enough for a $168 server.

Operating System

It’s got to be Linux. It’s what I’m familiar with, is highly configurable, and has lots of network application software. For the sake of ease, I chose Ubuntu 64-bit server 20.04 LTS so that I can have some stability without having to do major upgrades. Running “apt update + apt upgrade” is pretty darn easy. Download the ISO from the web site (“Manual server installation”), write it to a USB thumb drive with Etcher, boot the PC from the thumb drive via the BIOS menu, install to the OS hard disk, and in short order I’ve got Ubuntu up and running. During installation, select the “Minimal installation” because you don’t need a lot of user apps and graphics for a headless server. Create a login id and don’t forget the password.

Now for the mass storage drives. I’d like them to be mirrored, so in case one drive has a catastrophic failure, my data is still intact. I’ve heard lots of good things about ZFS, so let’s give that a try. It’s powerful but can be simple. And it helps that Ubuntu has support for ZFS and instructions for setting it up. I create a mirrored pool with sdb and sdc, use the “lsblk” command to verify the device names, looking for the ~8TB devices:

$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop1 7:1 0 55.4M 1 loop /snap/core18/1944
loop2 7:2 0 55.4M 1 loop /snap/core18/1932
loop3 7:3 0 69.8M 1 loop /snap/lxd/19032
loop4 7:4 0 31.1M 1 loop /snap/snapd/10707
loop5 7:5 0 31.1M 1 loop /snap/snapd/10492
loop6 7:6 0 69.9M 1 loop /snap/lxd/19188
sda 8:0 0 1.8T 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 500M 0 part
├─sda2 8:2 0 465.3G 0 part
└─sda3 8:3 0 1.4T 0 part /
sdb 8:16 0 7.3T 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 7.3T 0 part
└─sdb9 8:25 0 8M 0 part
sdc 8:32 0 7.3T 0 disk
├─sdc1 8:33 0 7.3T 0 part
└─sdc9 8:41 0 8M 0 part

$ apt install zfsutils-linux
$ [...commands I forgot to write down to create the pool and mount points]
$ zpool status
pool: pool0
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub repaired 0B in 0 days 02:05:31 with 0 errors on Sun Jan 10 02:29:33 2021
config:
NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
pool0       ONLINE       0     0     0
  mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
    sdb     ONLINE       0     0     0
    sdc     ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors
$

Now I create the ZFS datasets, all under the /data mount point. Here is how it looks when done:

$ zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
pool0 1.73T 5.31T 104K /data
pool0/logs 2.08M 5.31T 2.08M /data/logs
pool0/plex 1.73T 5.31T 1.73T /data/plex
pool0/preserve 376M 5.31T 376M /data/preserve
pool0/smbshare 36.7M 5.31T 36.7M /data/smbshare
marcelk@filesvr:~$

Applications

Now what server applications to install and use? This is where it gets to be fun.

Plex

First, the main driver for this server is for Plex. I started off playing with Plex server on the family Windows PC for music with their free license to try it out. But I waited until Plex had a sale on their Lifetime Plex Pass, had a good experience and am ready to move up. So, start with installing Plex from the official repository via apt, and I can automatically get updates too, which seem to come out every couple of weeks. Then I shutdown the trial one on the Windows PC, and move all my content over into the usual Plex naming scheme for directories and files and for extras.

Why Plex? For starters, for music management. Instead of using a subscription service where I can pick any song and stream it, I have pretty specific tastes. I like to buy MP3s online and stick with those. I buy only a couple new songs a month that I like, which is much less money than a subscription service. And I’ve ripped my old collection of audio CDs. My main use case is that I don’t stream music to my phone to play, but I’d rather download the whole library and play locally, so that I don’t incur cell data usage when in my car or otherwise out-and-about. (I get by on 1GB of cell data a month, pre-pandemic.) Rip your CDs into the lossless FLAC format, and Plex will automatically compress it down to the desired bit rate in an MP3 file for local synchronization to your portable device. And with Google discontinuing Google Play Music, where I had uploaded my MP3 library for syncing back to my phone, and liked it, I wanted to exit cloud-based providers and just manage it myself. Plex offers a pretty good system for managing your music on a local server, and syncing to devices. I hadn’t really thought much about ripping movies to host in Plex, but after a trial that looks to work pretty good too. So might as well get a Blu-ray drive for the family PC where I can run MakeMKV in Windows to rip DVDs and Blu-ray discs and host those in Plex too. A ripped DVD is about 5GB, and a ripped Blu-ray is about 30GB. So in 1TB I can fit about 166 DVDs or 33 Blu-rays. I can run the Plex app on my Roku to watch these movies on my big screen TV in HD, or on any other local device using the Plex app, or on a PC using the browser interface. Because my TV’s old-school physical Blu-ray disc player does such a good job automatically up-sampling a DVD (480p) to HD (1080p), it’s still best to use the DVD discs on that big screen. But on a phone or tablet, the lack of upsampling is not very noticeable.

And I should mention since I don’t have cable TV, I’d like to be able to record over-the-air TV with an antenna and have it appear in Plex as a recorded TV show. That is pretty easy to do with a device like the HDHomeRun Connect Duo for $100. In retrospect, since I have stations in my area broadcasting in ATSC 3.0, I should have upgraded to the HDHomeRun Connect 4K for another $100 more. Once I have the Plex server up and running, it is really easy to get the Plex server to send commands to the Connect Duo to have it record shows based on the schedule I set up in Plex, copy the show from the Connect Duo stream and store it on Plex, and play it back on-demand in Plex. It’s a DVR!

And as I digitize some old family photo albums with a flatbed scanner, I can host those in Plex also. (My phone camera photos have been going into Google Photos, but maybe I’ll export them down to my Plex server too.) So I’m using Plex for music, playlists, movies and other shows from discs, recorded TV shows, live TV, and some photos.

Plex does have the capability to enable remote access to your server, to allow your phone or other devices to reach your Plex server on your home network from the outside. I did not enable that, because I don’t want to have any possibility of a connection being initiated from the outside to be able to reach inside my home network. That is what my firewall is for (accept established+related, otherwise drop). Yes, Plex will say that their solution is good, but all software has bugs. Here’s a recent one. You may be willing to take the risk to get the benefit, but I’m not, and instead will use Plex’s sync capability so I can play music and pre-selected video content while away from home, instead of making it reachable from the Internet for streaming.

httpd: nginx

Next, of course I’ll need a general purpose web server for whatever documents I want to have available on my home network. Nothing fancy, perhaps a home page with pointers to other places, such as the webgui admin consoles for my devices. For that I’ll choose nginx. And I’ll use the default index.html in /var/www/html for now, and let it appear on port 80. I don’t really care about SSL inside my home network, so I won’t bother to set up port 443 service and certificates. Since the Plex server runs its web interface on port 32400, might as well as add that as a first link in the index.html file on my new home page.

I do have a collection of product manual PDFs that I’ve collected, so I don’t need to keep the paper copies around. Let’s upload those to the /data/preserve/Manuals directory, and add a location stanza to the /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

    location /manuals/ {
            alias /data/preserve/Manuals/;
            autoindex on;
            autoindex_exact_size off;
    }

WiFi AP Manager

I use WiFi access points in Ubiquity’s Unifi product line. They require a manager application (controller) for configuration, reports, and software updates. It is not small. I had been running that controller on a Pi 3, would be nice to consolidate it on this server. I install that application from their repository so I continue to easily get updates via apt. They seem to update every couple of months. I export the controller’s config to a file, copy that file from the Pi 3 to my new server, import it into the new controller, and shutdown the old controller on the Pi 3. This webgui runs over https on port 8443, might as well add that as another link in the index.html on my nginx home page.

Unfortunately, the Unifi manager requires Java 8. Yes, version 8. It’s a good app with a bad pre-req. So amend the instructions to include this:

# apt install openjdk-8-jre-headless
# apt-mark hold openjdk-11-*
# apt install unifi
# service unifi start

mDNS / Avahi

This is something you need to install, but it will “configure” itself via the applications that use it. Avahi provides an implementation of multicast DNS (mDNS) and DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD), perhaps better known as Bonjour or Rendezvous or zeroconf. The avahi-daemon is probably already installed, and there really isn’t any config you need to do. Want to use the avahi client to see what services are on your LAN? (Use ctl-C to stop after a while, it will keep listening forever)

$ avahi-browse --all --no-db-lookup
$ avahi-browse --all --resolve

• _googlecast._tcp: devices that can you can Google-cast to
• _ipp._tcp: CUPS printer (Internet Printing Protocol)
• _afpovertcp._tcp: Apple File Sharing / AFP server
• _smb._tcp: Samba server or Windows file sharing

Windows File Sharing: Samba

Yes, there is a family / gaming PC running Windows 10, so some kind of Windows file sharing (SMB) is needed. And honestly, MacOS seems to play decently with SMB, so it is a good lowest-common-denominator. And heck, the Linux SMB client works too. Follow these instructions to get Samba server set up. I use pretty much the default config, and edit /etc/samba/smb.conf to add the following shares. The first is just a general scratch space that is readable and writable by everyone (easier than a USB stick), and the other two are simply read-only raw access to the ripped movies (mkv) and music (mp3) files.

[share]
comment = Shareable Space
path = /data/smbshare
browseable = yes
read only = no
guest ok = yes
create mask = 0666
directory mask = 0777

[music]
comment = Music MP3s
path = /data/plex/Media/Music
browseable = yes
read only = yes
guest ok = yes

[movies]
comment = Movie Discs
path = /data/plex/Media/Movies
browseable = yes
read only = yes
guest ok = yes

Apple file sharing / AFP / netatalk

My spouse is an Apple fan: a big iMac desktop, iPhone, a couple iPads, AppleTV, you get the idea. Would be nice to provide Apple file shares for her, especially when backed by the same common storage as Samba for cross-platform sharing. I could set my server up to also act as a Time Machine backup server for her too, but she has enough local USB drives to handle that. Netatalk will give me the Apple File Protocol (AFP) server on Linux.

$ sudo apt install netatalk

Then edit /etc/netatalk/afp.conf. Here is what mine looks like, I didn’t bother to enable Time Machine. And note that the “mimic model” value will make my server appear on my wife’s client as an icon of a rack-mounted Mac, using the name in the “zeroconf name” setting. (Hmm, this feels similar to the Samba configuration.)

[Global]
; Global server settings
uam list = uams_guest.so, uams_dhx.so, uams_dhx2.so
guest account = nobody
mimic model = RackMac
zeroconf name = file server
; log level = default:debug

[Share]
path = /data/smbshare
case sensitive = yes
read only = no
file perm = 0666
directory perm = 777

[Plex Music files]
path = /data/plex/Media/Music
case sensitive = yes
read only = yes

[Plex Movie files]
path = /data/plex/Media/Movies
case sensitive = yes
read only = yes

Logging

And since we have plenty of storage here, might as well set up a logging server so all my logs are centrally located. So rsyslogd will take care of that for me.

UPS / Battery Backup

I have a UPS (battery backup) connected to my broadband modem, firewall, and one WiFi AP. So in the event of a power loss, I’ll still have internet+WiFi for a bit, at least for about 6 hours until the battery runs out. Since this server is physically located right there, it would be nice to integrate my server to the UPS, so I can automatically gracefully shutdown my server when the power is out for more than 60 seconds. I have an APC BackUps 1500, and attached the cable that came with it to a USB port on my server. Here is the config I use for that:

# apt install apcupsd
# vi /etc/apcupsd/apcupsd.conf
  UPSNAME 1500
  UPSCABLE usb
  UPSTYPE usb
  DEVICE
  TIMEOUT 60
    
# apcaccess status

Printer Server

Because my family laser printer is located elsewhere, out of reach for a USB cable, I have a Raspberry Pi with Ubuntu acting as a print server for all my machines. CUPS is the way to do it. I can print from Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. I still find it pretty cool to print to paper from my phone, I’m old school.

DHCP with static assignments

This part may be a case of me being a neat freak. I currently have 41 devices on my home network, all of them set up for getting an IP address dynamically instead of statically. So if something goes wonky and I see an IP address behaving weird, I’d like to know what device it maps to. For the router I use (a Mikrotik hEX, which is awesomely configurable and performant for my 1GB fiber ISP) I can show the list of active DHCP leases, and convert each one to a static IP address over DHCP based on its MAC address. And I can put each one within a chosen range. The current ranges I have are for local network infrastructure (i.e., router, smart switches, WiFi access points), server / PCs / printers (including Chromebooks and laptops), media devices (Chromecasts, Rokus, etc), and smartphones / tablets. Every once in a while I’ll look to make sure the list of dynamically assigned IP addresses outside my static ranges is empty.

Cleanup

With Ubuntu installed to bare metal instead of as a virtual image, I don’t need cloud-init running, and the messages get a little bit annoying. So remove it.

Assuming you’d like to get access to a shell prompt on this server remotely within your LAN without a physical console, apt install sshd . I also like to add to /etc/ssh/sshd_config the line PermitRootLogin no just for safety, which means you’ll need to ssh in as a regular user before doing an su or sudo, no direct login as root.

If you are like me and running it as a headless server without a monitor/keyboard/mouse attached, you can disable the graphical UI (X windows) and get the resource savings for that. But since you’d still like to login on the rare occasion with a monitor/keyboard in case the network is inoperative, you can enable a getty (text-only) login prompt on /dev/console. Me being old school, I also like to the see the boot progress on the console, in case anything goes wrong.

# systemctl get-default
graphical.target
# systemctl set-default multi-user
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/default.target → /lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target.
# systemctl get-default
multi-user.target

Then edit /etc/default/grub and make the following changes, then run update-grub and reboot:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""
GRUB_TERMINAL=console
GRUB_GFXMODE=1920x1080