Kenya Update

So, I got some more details about how people can help financially with my Kenya trip. You can either write a check, or donate online. WePartner is a fully recognized 501(c)3 organization, so you’ll get a receipt at the end of the year for tax purposes.

If you want to write a check, go ahead and make it out to WePartner, and then you can either hand it to me (if you live around here) or mail it. I’ll gather them all up and then pass them on in one package to WePartner. If you need my address, send me an e-mail, Tweet me (@jerquiaga) or send a Facebook message. :)

If you’d like to donate online, you can go to WePartner’s site and go to their Donate page. Just make sure you put Josh Erquiaga Kenya in the note section at the bottom.

Again, thanks so much to anyone who is thinking about donating to help out. It’s still one of the hardest things to ask for help on, but you can check out my previous post if your curious why I’m asking. Thanks, and I’m looking forward to getting out there and helping out!

Kenya!

Well, it looks like I'm going to Kenya next month. Through a strange series of events and people who happen to know someone who in turn knows someone, I got connected with a man by the name of Fady who runs an organization called WePartner. WePartner (www.wepartner.org) is an organization that tries to help connect people with needs in their communities. As Fady is an IT guy by trade, a lot of the projects he's been involved in have been IT projects. They've also done a lot of work in the Middle East (Fady grew up in Egypt). Recently, someone from the Rift Valley Academy in Kenya contacted him about getting some help with their systems. At the same time, I had mentioned my trip to Malawi to a friend, and he had been talking to Fady about Kenya, and he connected the two of us.

I got a chance to talk with Fady a bit, and surprisingly, it seems that I have just the skills they were still looking for for their team. After that first chat and a conversation with my wife, I decided to join the team!

Both my wife and I have felt like Africa is a place we'd like to be involved with for a long time. Our trip to Malawi cemented that for us. We've also always been more of the service missions type of people than evangelistic missions type of people. It's just the way we're wired. The chance to go and use the skills that I've been developing over the last decade on a missions trip seems to be a dream come true.

The hardest part of planning for any missions trip for me has always been fundraising. That being said, a wise person told me along time ago that fundraising is an opportunity for people who either don't have the ability or desire to go on these trips to be involved. So that's where you come in friends. The trip is going to cost about $2,000. I will be paying a significant part of that, but if you're interested in helping financially, I would love to have you partner with me in this. I'm still talking with WePartner about the details of how people can donate, so I'll follow up with those details shortly. Thanks, and we're off to Kenya May 14th!

A Quick Note About Hyper-V

Just a quick note to anyone out there running Hyper-V in a cluster situation. We seemed to have a strange issue where occasionally when we Live Migrated a Virtual Machine from one host to another, the host that the VM was being migrated from would crash. After banging my head against the wall repeatedly, and then checking and re-checking my cluster configuration, I ran across this TechNet Forum thread: http://bit.ly/vmcrash. Basically, it seems that there is now a known issue with Windows Server 2008 R2 and some newer AMD processors. We’ve got dual quad core Opterons in each of our cluster nodes, and this seems to be exactly the problem we were experiencing. The hotfix is not publicly available yet, but if you call Microsoft product support and mention KB 981618, they should be able to get you the current hotfix. I installed it on all three of our nodes, and it seems to have resolved the issue for us.