Luxury

Did you know April is National Poetry Month? Did you know that most of us are poets, even if we never put it to paper? Maybe you have confined yourself to the trite and true "roses are red" genre. Maybe you are a fan of the bawdy limerick (There once was a man from Nantucket...). Maybe you take long walks, find a shade tree and try your hand at the haiku. Maybe you re-write the lyrics in your head to your favorite songs. Or maybe you prefer to just read the works of others. No problem. It's all good, as the young people say.
I stumbled across an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Garrison Keillor, who is as delight a writer as any I've ever read. I commend this piece for your pleasure here. Won't take you more than a couple of minutes. It is how I discovered the existence of National Poetry Month.
The first poem that comes to mind when I think of poetry is usually Luxury, by Nikki Giovanni. For those of you who have never been exposed to it, I hope it moves you. To those who already a familiar, I hope your souls is warmed, as when you unexpectedly bump into an old friend.

Luxury

i suppose living
in a materialistic society
luxury
to some would be having
more than what you need

living in an electronic age seeing
the whole world by pushing a button
the nth degree might perhaps be
adequately represented by having
someone there to push
the buttons for you

i have thought if only
i could become rich and famous I would
live luxuriously in New York knowing
famous people eating
in expensive restaurants calling
long distance anytime I want 

but you held me
one evening and now I know
the ultimate luxury
of your love

If you are up to it, share your poetry, or share poems that you love.

Nostaglia in a Nutshell

I recently had the opportunity to travel back in time. Seriously. My son's friend Davis had an NES Classic, which is a small scale replica of the original Nintendo Entertainment System, which released in the US in 1985.

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As a child coming of age in the 80s, the NES defined my childhood as much as anything. I say 80's, what pops into your mind? Michael Jackson's zipper jacket? His Billie Jean, Beat It and Thriller videos? Madonna and Cyndi Lauper? Yes, yes. All of these things are quintessential. But so is Mario, Princess Peach, Toad, Yoshi, and Tetris!!

So when Davis offered to let me borrow his system (which I suspect he had grown bored with, having already owned a PS4 and recently acquiring the new Nintendo Switch), I happily obliged. I have to say, I was unprepared for what came next.

The NES Classic does not come with cartridges you have to blow into before inserting just right - it has 30 games preloaded. Classics such as Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Super Mario 1, 2 & 3. Kid Icarus, Legend of Zelda. Mega Man II, Metroid, Contra. (I've got to stop fanboying or I will never finish this blog post with any dignity.) The games brought back such sweet memories.

When Super Mario 3 came out, I bought with my own money (which made me feel like a man) and stayed up all night playing it. Beat the game in a day, but I didn't realize I had an eye appointment the next day. My dad took me to my appointment, and bleary eyed and exhausted, I did poorly on reading the eye chart and was given a prescription for glasses. Ah, the folly of youth! Playing SMB3 in my 40s was like being Quantum Leaped into my 17 year old body. Some of the little known tricks erupted like lava from deep within my memory banks (the same memory that refuses to tell me where I last laid down my cell phone). I cannot convey how wistful and delighted I felt.

The kids came in and dutifully slammed the graphics. "This is the flower of 1987 technology!!!", I retorted. A friend came by, saw the little wonder, and started scrolling through the titles. When we saw Tecmo Bowl, he went nuts. He started a game, and as I falling into a wormhole, was taken back to his childhood. Nostalgia is a powerful thing.

The kids each tried their hand at Punch Out, which in my day was Mike Tyson's Punch Out, but I guess Mike Tyson's name doesn't carry the cachet that it used to. No matter. I watched these whippersnappers get pummeled by Glass Joe, Don Flamenco and Piston Honda. Primitive graphics aside, these games still can suck you in. These youngsters got a feel for how hardcore our games were back then. Some of those games - if you died, you started from the very beginning. No "save anywhere" capability. Pah.


The NES Classic. Making Gaming Great Again.

Oatmeal Sucks

...when you are eating it right.

I have managed to wean myself off of those flavored instant oatmeal packets that were once my mainstay. I thought I was taking the healthier option than day, the three egg omelet or the three donut breakfast - and maybe I was. But I have found a more excellent way. It isn't sexy or glamorous, but it gets the job done.

Plain, steel cut oats. Someone commented on my work blog about a method of cooking oatmeal in the slow cooker, so that you aren't letting yourself be maneuvered into bad trade-offs when you find yourself starving and absolutely cannot wait 30 for oatmeal to cook. I've tried it, and it is now a part of my routine. It will actually last about 3 or four days, and the idea of reheating oatmeal, while once unthinkable, is now de rigeur. Here is the recipe.  Take one cup of oatmeal, two cups of water, and one sup of unsweetened almond milk and stir into a small crop pot. Cover.  Turn it on low. Go to bed. Easy breezy.

The problem is that it is just very bland. But what are our objectives here? To become a gourmand? Or is it to avoid at all costs losing your feet, going blind, or dying before 55? Level set with me here, sir!

So I've made peace with the fact that every meal is not going to be an experience. Some of these meals -MOST of these meals- should be enough to satiate the hunger just enough to last until the next mealtime and provide the nutrients my body needs to heal itself. Nutrients I have either crowded out with tons of sugar, salt and fat, or subverted by making the the redheaded step children of my diet. That's it. I have finally disabused myself of the notion that at least for now, flavor is not a top concern. And that is okay. It's not nasty, it is just plain. And I can chop and apple or a peach or a few strawberries and throw that into the mix, and the meal improves considerably. I am adding sugar, but it is sugar with lots of fiber as well. This is the path for me now.

I think of oatmeal the same way I think of grits now. I don't want to eat it on its own, but with some other ingredients, it can be pretty filling. With grits, I expect them not to be be sweet, and so I cook them with no butter or cheese, and usually add green peppers, onions and tomatoes. With oatmeal, I expect it to be sweet, so I supplement with fruits. But why must it be so? I'm going to see if I can find or create some oatmeal based recipes that are outside my experience. Thinking outside the bowl, if you will. Just thoughts.

Will revisit later.

Afraid to Be Happy?

Something happens to some people when they get kicked by life. Not all people. God knows that there are those who were either born with -or somehow acquired along the way - the ability to roll with it, or to let it roll off of them. They slough off the bad things as if it were dead skin on a reptile. They discard it, wriggle loose from it, and go on about their business. Their troubles are are on the side of the road in their rear-view mirrors, and they open up more and more distance. I don't know how they do it.

Some of us are not so fortunate. Or maybe we are fortunate in a different way. Some of us, we get knocked down, done wrong, screwed over, etc. and it takes a long time to heal. Being diabetic and also getting older, I have noticed it takes me longer to get over colds and I am slower to bounce back from the rolled ankle or pulled muscle. Some of are like this in our hearts.

I don't have a solution for this. I was just thinking, and this is where my thoughts took me. I've heard the phrase, "once bitten, twice shy" and wondered what I meant and why it has to be like that. Now I know. You but your trust in someone, and inevitably, that trust is broken. Sometimes it is a small wound, sometimes it is earth-shattering.. I have been on both ends of it, and even the small ones can make you swear off trusting anyone, ever again. Sometimes, we refuse to embrace happiness because we fear that misery is presenting itself to us in a clever disguise. Sadly, when we have our shields up like this, we are in poor position to discern, and thus, potential happy opportunities are turned aside.

The point is not to rush you back into taking hopeful risks, but maybe to nudge you a little. Life is short, and fear is a terrible companion on your journey. The sooner you can shake it, the better, and the sooner it will become a memory as you head into a brighter sun.

A Quick Challenge

I saw this on Pinterest, and it has stayed with me. it says so much in just two sentences.​



Are you still in learning mode? This applies to both personal and professional life.

In my personal life, I am learning to take better care of myself. In my youth I assumed myself to be invincible. In middle age I see that was a delusion. A useful one, a common one, but a delusion nonetheless. These old bones creak and pop. I am not invincible. My battles with diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol are daily reminders that this once glorious temple is under siege. So, that's one thing. I'm learning about the world around me, learning from my children even as I impart what little I know to them. I pray that I never lose the desire to keep learning and improving. I am learning to be more disciplined, for sure. I am learning to plan more. I am learning to listen more and talk less. I am learning to playing piano better, although I've been dabbling in it for more than 30 years. There is always more to learn.

In professional life, we are adopting a set of new tools to be learned and mastered. In my experience, not long after I achieve some expertise with these tools they will be replaced, and the circle of life will begin again. Hakuna Matata. I have worked on various flavors of Agile and they each have had their own peculiarities. This current iteration is no different, so there are lots of things to learn, to iternalize, to make habit-forming. As always, I'm being challenged to learn new programming patterns and languages to meet the always evolving needs of the business. In this arena, I couldn't stop learning if I tried.

There is more I could rattle off about what I'm learning, but in keeping with the pithiness of this quote, I shall leave it here. Happy learning! 

The Power of Significance... And the Dangers

I've been reading a book called "How to Stop the Pain" by Dr. James B. Richards. I wasn't expecting much from it, but it has actually had some pretty good insights. And one that has particularly resonated with me is his concept of significance. I will try to give you the J-Notes version.

The main premise is that we magnify our difficulties in dealing with things based on the significance we attach to them. Say you see your co-workers standing around, laughing and talking. You approach and they fall silent. They aren't cold, but you feel like something is off. Later on, you may conclude they don't like you, or were gossiping about you. You take these speculations and get all worked up. Turns out, they knew your birthday was coming up, and were planning to take you out for lunch, and even baking you a cake.

This is a trite example, but there are many cases large and small​ where we aren't quite sure what is going on, and we make a judgment that leads us to dark places. This is what the author writes:

"...it is not the intensity of the offense that determines the pain; rather, it is always the significance we attach that determines our pain. This being the case, one person could have an extremely intense experience with very few destructive results, while another could go through an apparently harmless experience and, because of the significance attached to it, have devastating results."

This is so true! I think of who have gone through so much more than I, and still are vibrant and positive. And I have known people who couldn't enjoy anything, because they ran everything through a cynical, jaded filter. The extent to which we personalize and magnify is the extent to which we will struggle to resolve it.

Not everything can be shrugged off. But some things must be, for the sake of our own well-being. I find this both daunting and liberating. Something that seemed like the end of the world at the time must be re-evaluated with the passage of time, when there is more clarity and less emotion involved. Note, this doesn't mean white-washing history. It doesn't mean blocking out hurts. But it does mean that we do not carry the rawness from the event with us forever.

I once rented my home out to a family who initially presented as solid and upstanding. The husband and wife had a falling out and she abruptly left with the kids. This situation (in the words of Ron Burgundy, Anchorman) "really got out of hand fast" (see Anchorman Post-Fight Scene). He stopped paying his rent (first on-time, then stopped altogether) and he fell into the bottle. He trashed my home, and instead of trying to work with me to get caught up, ended up compounding the situation by forcing me to incur court expenses to evict him. It turned into a mess, and it bothered me for a while. However, now I think if I bumped into that guy on the street, I could be civil, and even kind. It was tremendously stressful at the time, but now, it's just something that happened, and life has rolled on.

I'm sure many of you have much more painful things in your past, and this post isn't meant to compete for saddest story. However, it is meant to encourage you, to challenge you to look at things with a different perspective. After all, things in the rear view are supposed to get smaller and smaller the further in the distance they get.

Le roi est mort, vive le roi!

JIRA is dead, long live Rally -er, Agile Central!

In an email sent on 2/10, my employer announced (belatedly) that there would be a changing of the guard. For those of us in software development and/or project management it has become a common practice to use some type of tool to track requests and issues and to chart progress towards goals. Without such tools, the logic goes, code would never get moved into production environments in a timely manner. Projects would consistently run late and over budget. "These tools are a must!", the vendors of such tools tell us.

Well, as a crusty old hacker with over a decade in the biz, I can recall the days when all project management was done with Word, Excel, Visio (if you were lucky), and Outlook. I can sum up the era thusly:


But as our modern day Psalmist (and Nobel laureate) Bob Dylan was written, the times they are a changing. Like it or not, the means to have much greater control, insight and feel for projects large and small is upon us, and JIRA, made by Atlassian and used extensively by my company for years, was just good enough to make this cynical old guy a believer. Long live JIRA!

When I was managing a team of talented developers, our mission was to automate automate automate whenever possible. We were to automate testing, automate workflows, automate the extraction of reporting. It was a lot to handle, and being one of those absent-minded professor types who can never find his glasses (on top of your head, sir) or remember anything (yes, we finished that last week, sir), JIRA just made it so easy to keep tabs on many things at once. I could see what my team was doing, they could see what I was doing. We knew if we were on track or falling behind. We could reallocate resources with aplomb, we could shift priorities on a dime. In short, we were agile. We were actually embracing the spirit of the Agile Manifesto, and delivering value more rapidly and with higher quality.

The genius of JIRA, IMHO, was its simplicity. In Agile, one of the core ideas is the concept of the information radiator. Check out this link here. JIRA deftly managed to craft a UI that showed a team everything that was being done, had been done, and what still needed to be done all in one place without overwhelming the viewer with too much data. You could drag and drop tasks and issue from one state to the other and continue on with your work. It was pretty slick, I have to say.


Of course, this is the part in the movie where something goes wrong. There has to be some tension in any good story, right? Well, in their infinite wisdom, the powers that be decided to move away from JIRA and to start using a rival tool called Rally. Cue the clouds of Mordor blocking out the JIRA sun. I went through the training. I didn't like the tool. The UI was not as intuitive, packed with more options than I can ever need, and most damning of all, required me to... change. Not cool. I accept that my projects will change, requirements change, priorities change, political landscapes change -but don't mess with my process once I've got it to where it is working just right! I resisted the move to Rally for as long as I could, a modern day Luddite. Even when I went from Informatics to IT, and everyone on my new team was using Rally, I clung to the dream that we might go back to my beloved JIRA. Not happening. Rally (which recently changed its name to Agile Central) is not a bad tool. I can still manage my projects well. I can still be transparent with my team. But the tool is simply not to my liking. I will climb its learning curve, and may come to appreciate its strengths at some point, but please, indulge me in my grief for a moment. After about a year of supporting both, JIRA is officially being sunsetted. It will go into read only mode on April 3 and decommissioned altogether after a sufficient period of mourning has passed. I'll miss you JIRA. No good thing lasts forever.

Caught Myself Slipping

**I apologize for the wonky direction these musings took me!

I usually get up at around 5:30, and today was no exception. I got the kids up and out the door by 6:30, then took my insulin and other medications. I took time to pray and read a devotional. After a fairly smooth start to the day, I logged in and kicked off my daily reports. So far, so good...

My insulin requires me to wait 30 minutes after injection before eating, which apparently is just long enough for my body to convince itself that it has been deprived of sustenance for weeks and not hours. I head to the kitchen to make some oatmeal. I had two boxes of instant oatmeal in the pantry, one of Strawberries and Cream and one of Blueberries and cream. I poured two strawberry packets into a bowl and added almond milk, then nuked it in the microwave for 90 seconds. When I removed the bowl from the microwave and gazed upon the bubbling goop I thought, "These strawberries look pretty puny. Why aren’t you using real strawberries? And for that matter, why are you using instant oatmeal at all?" That's when my mind went through its Kafkaesque process of chaining totally unrelated thoughts together and came up with Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. This was a book I finished in July of 2016, and its message can be summed up in just seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. --What a revelation!

This seems so obvious as to border on the absurd, but he makes the point (and I have to concur) that over the last 60 years or so foods have been largely replaced with "food-like substances" or "foodish products". In the desire to give foods a longer shelf life and to produce them more profitably we have processed them to the point where there rarely resemble anything found in nature. I don’t want to turn this into a book report (although if you are curious, I do highly recommend his work) but his main premise was to avoid eating anything our great grandparents wouldn’t recognize as food. He writes:

"Avoid eating food products containing ingredients that are A)unfamiliar, B) unpronounceable, C) more than five in number, or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup."

So, suddenly my breakfast has gotten a bit more complicated. What's in this oatmeal? I pat myself on the back for having (mostly) avoided bacon, sausage, ham, eggs, and pancakes laden with butter and glistening with syrup, but I think further changes may still need to be made.

Here is the ingredient list for the instant oat meal: Whole Grain Rolled Oats (with Oat Bran), Sugar, Creaming Agent (Maltodextrin, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil [Adds a Dietarily Insignificant Amount of Trans Fat], Whey, Sodium Caseinate), Flavored Fruit Pieces (Dehydrated Apples [Treated with Sodium Sulfite to Promote Color Retention], Artificial Strawberry Flavor, Citric Acid, Red 40), Salt, Calcium Carbonate, Guar Gum, Oat Flour, Artificial Flavors, Citric Acid, Niacinamide (One of the B Vitamins), Vitamin A Palmitate, Reduced Iron, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (One of the B Vitamins), Riboflavin (One of the B Vitamins), Thiamin Mononitrate (One of the B Vitamins), Folic Acid (One of the B Vitamins).

Wait, these aren't even strawberries?? I'm done! Caught myself slippin'. Thought I was being all healthy, but this is not truly the case. I've got a canister of Quaker Steel Cut Oats that I once read were better for me, but I only tried them a few times because it takes 25-30 minutes to cook. Wah! What’s in it?

Ingredients: Steel Cut Oats.

Well, shoot.

Let’s compare, shall we:

​	​Instant Oatmeal	​Steel Cut Oatmeal
​Calories per Serving	​130c	​150c
​Sugars	​11g	​1g
​Fiber	​2g	​4g
​Protein	​3g	​5g

So, as a diabetic, I see that the steel cut oatmeal has a distinct advantage in helping me keep my blood sugar down. I will have to be disciplined and not go for the quicker, more convenient option with the nutritional liabilities. 

Live and learn.

Monthy Health Check-In #1

I intend to be more consistent in 2017. By this point, many people have abandoned their resolutions. Gym memberships go unused, the healthy eating goes out the window, and as far as getting organized? Well, I had a book that was going to help me with that, but I misplaced it. Life keeps moving. But I am resolved to be a bit better this year. I've already talked myself into new month resolutions, to avoid the arbitrary tendency to put off changes to coincide only with the party in Times Square. There is too much at stake at this point in my life. So here we are at the start of February. I'm going to do a post-mortem on January, look at what went right and what went wrong.

Weight: My weight is down 10 lbs. I was 235.6 on January 2nd, I hit 225.6 this morning. So that's good. Results would probably been a little stronger if I didn't have some off days. It's tough to find good options when dining out. I went to the gym times in January, more than the last half of 2016. It is not quite 3x a week, but it is something to build on.

On 1/24 I went to have my labs done. I expected things to be a little worse than normal because of holiday festivities. Here is the mixed result:

Blood sugar: 191. Last result was 232. This is good. It needs to get down to around 110.

A1C (another blood sugar test): Six months ago, this one was a brutal, red-alert, sound the klaxons 12.0%. Three months ago is fell dramatically to 8.1, and I was feeling pretty invincible. This one, however, showed that it had crept back up to 8.9. Target is 6.1 or lower. More work to do here.

Total Cholesterol: This one was 165, down from 276. Healthy is 0-200. This is a huge win!! Yes! Yes!! By cutting meat, dairy and oils from my diet it, I saw huge improvement. Now, I know some might say that this is being extreme, but it is the only rational response, IMHO. You can see the results are in a very short time. And I wasn't as strict as I should have been. I cut my cholesterol intake by maybe 85-90%, and that was that. I asked my nurse practitioner if I could come off of my cholesterol meds, but she said no. My triglycerides were still too high (195 when they should be between 30-150), so I have still got some work to do, but this was very encouraging.

Blood pressure: Still too high. She took it while I was in her office, and it is improved, but I only have the bloodwork results in front of me.

Summary: Some good, some bad, none ugly. Overall I am pleased but not complacent. My strategy is to continue to bring my weight down. As my weight comes of, the blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol all fall at once. I'm going to keep on pressing on.

Find your Creativity

Last weekend my girlfriend and I took a kids-free trip to Colorado, for the stated purpose of just getting away and doing something out of the ordinary. I have to say that we were wildly successful in this endeavor -we tried skiing for the first time (loved it), we snowmobiled for the first time (loooooved it), saw amazing sights, and visited some of our great national parks (Garden of the Gods -OMG). We also went tubing on a steep and fast slope with two other couples, we ate good food, and had good fellowship. It was exhausting and relaxing, and had the side benefit of making me a more relaxed and creative team member when I got back on the job. And speaking of creative...

One unexpected outcome of the trip was a rekindled desire to harness my creative energies. In hindsight, this should not have been surprising, because I met a friend of mine for dinner one night in Denver, and I should have known he would rub off on me in some way (he always has).

I met Alan Brooks on 12/31/1990, at a New Year's Eve house party in Atlanta, GA. Alan was a member of a Christian rap group called Hosanna Hype, and I was producing hip hop beats and dabbling into rap myself, which many young men were doing at the time. This proved to be a fortuitous meeting. We needed each other. Hosanna Hype had no producer, and so they would rap over instrumentals of other artists, which I think limits you from developing your own identity. I had been making beats on the Roland TR-505 drum machine my father had gotten me for my 15th birthday for years, and recently had starting laying simple melodies and bass lines down with a Yamaha PSR-500 keyboard I bought in my freshman year of college. I liked to rap, too -used to write rhymes in high school and college. I have fond memories of me and my best friend from college, Troy, rapping in the Down Under to enthusiastic crowds of slackers avoiding getting to their classes. But I hated the sound of my voice. If anyone recorded me, when I heard myself on playback, I'd be mortified. So I was starting to want to write music for others and leave the microphone alone. Turns out, they liked my music, and I liked their rapping. I joined Hosanna Hype.

We recorded several songs together, performed live and became friends. Then life intervened. I became a father and husband, joined the Navy. He went of the school, started doing his thing. We went our separate ways but stayed in touch. Over the years he has continued to record and perform, and has also branched out into writing and hosting a podcast. He actually started his own comic book, called The Burning Metronome. I'm proud of him and amazed at his continued nurturing of his gifts. This is in stark contrast to me, as I will go through spurts of creativity, but often months and months of it being dormant. So when we all sat down to dinner, and caught up, and he regaled my girlfriend of stories of us when we were much younger, the seeds were being planted in me to dust myself off, see what jewels I had inside of me, and the oh so important last step: bring them forth and share them with the world!

Since I've been back, I've actually made an effort to practice my instruments, to write a little more, and to even inject more creativity into the code I write at work. It's liberating, it is refreshing, it makes me happy. Sometimes it makes other people happy. But we should express ourselves creatively even if no one likes our art but us. Creating things helps us feel more alive, but life often forces us to but those gifts away to do more practical things. Bills must be paid, and kids must be clothed and fed, but surely there is time to plant a garden, or to learn (or re-learn) that instrument, or to draw or doodle or paint, or to craft. Surely there is space for that. And if not, let us carve out such a space. Your soul will be blessed.


I thank my friend for unapologetically living a creative life, and inspiring me to do a little more of that myself. May that inspiration pass to you as well, and may you pass it on to others.

So Far, So Good

Two weeks into 2017 and I am doing pretty well about keeping my resolutions. Spoiler alert: this post will be a little personal.​

I'm 44 years old, with type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. In 2016, I was put on insulin by my PCP, who was alarmed at blood sugar levels that I had allowed myself to get used to. Thank God for Cigna's incentives to get health screens, and thank God for Cigna providing a team of nurses come to the downtown Chattanooga office to take away any excuses not to get this important task done. Thank God for the particular nurse that took my vitals, who was warm and kind and friendly and deft with the needles (hallelujah). When she saw my numbers, her eyes grew serious and sad. Small talk ceased. "I'm going to talk to you like you were my own son...", she began. "These numbers are bad. Bad bad. You have kids? You want to be around to see your grand kids? You want to be confined to a wheel chair because you had to have your feet amputated? GET THESE NUMBERS UNDER CONTROL!!!" I don't remember her name, but I thank God for the wake up call. After long stretches of avoiding doctor visits (because I knew the news was going to be bad), I found an excellent, engaging care provider (shout-out to Kathy Dodd, Nurse Practitioner) and started bringing my numbers down. Thank God for Kathy Dodd, since I am counting my blessings as I write.

So finishing out 2016, I had cut back drastically on meat, eggs and dairy consumption (the main sources of cholesterol), cut back on refined sugars (which by definition diabetics have difficulty getting out of our systems), and got off my butt and strove to be more active. I kind of went off the wagon a little during the holidays, but I think I have reached my mental tipping point. It is more natural to eat healthy than to eat the typical American diet. I don't think of it as a chore. I'm more mindful, I think is what I'm trying to say. And that's a good thing. With the holidays over and 2017 underway, I am focused on eating healthy and being active. Every now and then I will eat some meat or have a brownie, but I am miles away from where I was before my health screen. I hope others are sticking to their commitments and making good choices. We should encourage each other. We should give positive reinforcement to each other. If you stumble, just rise again and get back on track. Maybe we should set new month's resolutions instead of new year's resolutions. This can help us level set when we find ourselves falling short of our goals.

I will end with this: my 1/2/17 weight was 235.6. My weight today is 228.2. It is working. Slowly but surely. My goal is to see 199 on the scale this year. Yes, I'm putting it out there. So far, so good.

Continuous Improvement

Recently, I had the opportunity to lead a project that involves developing an internal website for the company. This is joy for me, a programmer now wearing the title of Project Manager Senior Specialist. I never want to get too far away from writing actual code - even if I become CEO, I will want Visual Studio installed on my machine. Programming is a passion of mine. However, I haven't done a web app in several years, and I am a bit rusty. Fortunately I have the hoarding tendencies of a packrat, and so I have kept IT books on several subjects at the ready, hoping, praying for such an occasion. I can hear them saying earnestly, from the end of the bench (bookshelf), "Put me in coach, I won't let you down!!"
So upon opening my copy of Programming Microsoft ASP.NET MVC I found the following quote, which I took as both a blessing and an admonition:

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. -Mark Twain

What a wonderful sentiment. And what a wonderful time to be alive, with so many wonderful books out there to consume and be influenced by. And since it is the new year, why not resolve to read some really good books? My goal is to read 42 books this year, up from 33 read last year. Even if you only read one, take advantage of the joys of literacy. Some people never read a book after finishing high school - to me, this is profoundly sad. Reading the right book(s) can change your life. And by changing your life, you may change your world.

Doing vs. Being

I have been re-reading a book that I fell in love with, many years ago. The of this very thoughtful -and thought provoking work is Seasons of Life by Charles R. Swindoll. He divides the book into four sections, each corresponding to a season, and talks about topics of interest as we go through life. The book has a Christian perspective, yet never comes across as preachy. My mother was given this book by her best friend, who later died from cancer while still a young woman. It brought my mother joy, and now it does the same for me. And in a small way, through this post, I hope it does for you.
I read from Autumn: A Season of Reflection, and the essay was titled Doing vs. Being. He talked about a class reunion, and a trip down memory lane through the pages of an old yearbook. There was a section called "What Do I Want to Do?" and the seniors were given the opportunity to make bold proclamations of what they thought they would accomplish when they entered the real world. It's at this point where he pivots, and wonders if we focus too much on what we do, rather than what we want to be. Let me quote:

Doing is usually connected with a vocation or career, how we make a living. Being is much deeper. It relates to character, who we are, and how we make a life. Doing is tied in closely with activity, accomplishments, and tangible things -like salary, prestige, involvements, roles, and trophies. Being, on the other hand, has more to do with intangibles, the kind of people we become deep down inside, much of which can't be measured by objective yardsticks and impressive awards. But of the two, being will ultimately outdistance doing every time. It may take a lifetime to perfect... but hands down, it's far more valuable. And lasting. and inspiring.

So gentle reader, I want to encourage you: before you make yet another to do list to squeeze more goals into your already busy life, make time also to look inwardly, to think about what aspects of your character you want to be stronger in. Think about what you want to model for your children, or your employees, or your boss or coworkers. Do you need to be a little more patient? A little more disciplined? Whatever it may be, save room in life to perfect the intangibles. That was my takeaway. I hope it will be yours as well.

President-Elect Trump... It Just Rolls Off the Keys

I honestly don't know where to begin. It has been nearly a full day, yet I am still struggling to make sense of the news that Trump, the birther, the exaggerator, the liar, the flip-flopper, the celebrity (remember when Republicans made that a back-handed compliment for Obama?), the white supremacist, the misogynist, the trampler of the 1st amendment, mocker of the the disabled... whew. I could list his honorifics to the thousand word limit, and that would just be the foreplay. Man... I never thought he would pull it off. I never thought that many Americans would look past all of those disqualifiers. And like many, I wonder what maddening misadventures lie ahead for us, the passengers in this clown car. I posted the following clip to my Twitter account, because it seems to encapsulate exactly what just happened here. People thought they were using someone as their tool, only to have the script flipped on them with astonishment.

Roll the tape...

You played with fire, 'Murica. I can't imagine a happy outcome to this protest, but who knows? We shall see. I'm profoundly disappointed with the will of the people.

The Impact of Telecommuting, A Personal Perspective

​I started on a new team on 10/3, leaving Enterprise Reporting in CIMA and moving to the Portfolio Delivery Office in IT's Core Operations. After more than 4 years in Cigna, this was a welcome change, even though I am not altogether sure of the finer points this role will require. Ah well, all things will be revealed in the fullness of time.

One thing that has become very clear after just a few weeks, however, is the impact of working from my home. In my long career, this is a first. I have had opportunities to work remotely one day a week, two days a week, even as many days a week as I wanted, at my discretion. I've had no option at all. When I worked as a field service engineer at Siemens, I had no central office to speak of, as my job consisted of roving from hospital to hospital fixing imaging equipment like x-ray machines, CT machines, etc. My work van was my office. The rad tech lounges of hospitals throughout Georgia, Northern Florida, and South Carolina were my makeshift offices. My setup now is totally different. And I'm still getting adjusted.

One thing I have immediately noticed is the cost savings. My commute into the Chattanooga office was 46 miles, round trip. I used to have an Acura MDX, which, though stylish, got only 16 or 17 mpg. It also required premium fuel. Traded her in for a fuel-sipping Mario Kart-like handling Nissan Versa Note. That cut costs significantly. But teleworking has been even more profound. Fuel costs are drastically reduced. Dining out (when I should have been brown bagging it anyway) is greatly curtailed. My painstakingly cultivated closet full of plaid and striped oxfords and pastel polos? Who will see them? I imagine over time I will spend less on clothing, and less on laundry. The optimistic way to view this is to see this as a significant pay raise. And that isn't everything. But it is something.

The Free Form Model

I don't know what I am going to say. I don't have an outline, I have no theme. There are many thoughts running through my head. There are many things I want to do. I want to practice my guitar, but the kids are asleep at it would disturb them. I want to practice on my keyboard. I've fallen into the predictable pattern of slack off on practicing for weeks at a time. Today I played for a while, and it felt good.  I should do more.  I want to clean up my desk. My office is a mild mess. I want to read. I have several books I've started -but which one is the one I need write now? I have no idea. I want to play chess. I love the game, and I am so competitive that my mood rises when I am triumphant and crashes when I fail. And I am failing a lot lately. My rating (a numeric approximation of strength and skill is about 150 points lower than where it should be.  But when you lose to lower rated players, your rating falls more drastically than when you lose to your peers.  Exhale.

When all else fails, when I am spinning around in a tizzy within my own head, I know to write. I know to talk myself down. I know that if I will seclude myself, then I can diffuse myself. If I will still myself, then writing will help me heal myself.

So that is what I am doing.

And I am starting
to feel

better.

Encouragement

It seems that encouragement has come up frequently in the last couple of weeks. In my devotions, in Bible study, in sermons and in conversations - it seems like I am getting a concerted and concentrated re-education on this vital component of life.

No one receives too much encouragement. Most receive too little. It should not be confused with compliments, flattery or attention. I think I spent many years confusing these, and making many a poor decision as a result. Flattery may give you false confidence, but encouragement gives you the nudge to keep pressing on. Compliments may serve the motives of the giver, but true encouragement is centered on you fulfilling your own best purpose. You don't really even need to know what someone is going through to encourage them. They could be struggling with substance abuse, relationship issues, a test of integrity - things people are often reluctant to share. But a general encouragement can put wind in the sails and carry you to specialized results.

So encourage someone. Every day. Encourage many people. Every day.

Review of "Of Thee I Zing

Of Thee I Zing: America's Cultural Decline from Muffin Tops to Body Shots by Laura Ingraham
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book was a mixed bag. On the one hand, conservatives are frequently seen as humorless and mean spirited. I have many conservative friends, so I know this is not the case, but many of the people who are the public face of conservatism seem to validate the stereotype. Not Laura Ingraham. She seems to have a fairly developed sense of humor, though she is not as funny as her counterparts on the left like Paul Begala or Bill Maher. Yeah, I continually found myself comparing this book to Bill Maher's New Rules books, where similarly, he delights in commenting on the quirks and peculiarites, and even the flat out ass-backwardness of our culture, politics and religion. But Maher is a seasoned comedian, and so his material is much more polished and edgier than Ingraham's. She's a little funny, but not that funny. Not funny enough to carry you through her whole book without eventually finding her shtick tiresome and lame. And as far as mean spirited? Yes, she does rub that way at times, but who among us doesn't.

I listened to this book on audio. My kids listened to it with me at times, and they liked it. They usually roll their eyes when I subject them to some boring nerdy tome, but they would ask to hear this one by name. So good job Laura, you have two young fans in waiting. For myself, I found many of her points to be valid, but hey, what can you do? This is a free country, and people are feel to live like slobs and act like jerks. It's the dual nature of freedom. It doesn't turn everyone into well-educated, well-behaved, thoughtful considerate people. It just doesn't. Laura zings liberals, which I can handle, and occasionally displays racial insensitivity, and age and gender insensitivity as well. But in this type of book you are bound to offend SOMEONE, so you may as well offend EVERYONE.

The book suffers from being too long, and losing steam with too far to go before the end. There was no conclusion or recap, which I found odd, and so after a long period of wondering "When will this book be done!!???", I was quickly jolted to a "That's how you are gonna end it??!!"

It's funny that the previous book I finished, Ross Douthat's Bad Religion, touched on some of the same themes as this book did. They both dinged (or zinged) Elizabeth Gilbert Eat Pray Love for its self centered "spiritual but not religious bent". They both expressed disapproval for the Money Preachers, both citing Creflo Dollar, my old pastor, about the shamelessness in contemporary evangelical Christianity. Both Douthat and Ingraham are Catholic, and they bring a welcome outsider's take on what seems to now be considered "mainline Christianity". One section that I found very disturbing was her opposition to women in ministerial capacities. She tries to make a fundamentalist case by going back to the 12 disciples. She reasons that because they were all male, that Jesus did not feel like women belonged in leadership roles in the church, and was thus setting a precedent. By following this logic, one could argue that the disciples were all Jews, therefore there is precedent for no goyim to be pope or priest. This is ludicrous, of course. Her own church doesn't even follow the Bible's teachings this literally. After all, they forbid their priests to marry and claim the first pope was Saint Peter, but the Bible clearly states that Peter was married! "And when Jesus was come into Peter's house, he saw his wife's mother laid, and sick of a fever." -Matthew 8:14. I am disappointed that a major conservative figure relies on such tenuous arguments to support her points.

In conclusion, I guess I could recommend this book to my conservative friends, but truth be told, it's not a great book. It's alright. I like the author, generally speaking, but the book was mediocre.

View all my reviews

My Brief Review of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

This was a very well-written, well researched, far seeing survey of Christianity in the United States. I learned a great deal from it. Part One is foundation and background. There are sections in Part One that were dry, but if press on, you will be richly rewarded. In Part Two, the heresies are dissected and exposed, and you may find this to be a hard teaching, because the heresies are embedded deeply into wide swaths of the church. You probably have given little that to at least one, and followed it because you trust your church leaders. But when taken in perspective to the historical church, and two millennium of orthodoxy, his arguments are very strong and solid. I have had my doubts about the prosperity doctrine for years, finding it patently oversimplified and a complete failure, except for those who peddle it. I have family members who have tried to live out its principles for decades, and they have little to show for it. The masses don't prosper material, no matter how devout they are, no matter how hard they try. And the fault is always with them. This book also made me examine some decisions I have made in my life, influenced by religious conviction or religious rebellion or religious doubt. I think I have fallen prey to the heresy of the god within mode of thought, where people convince themselves that God wants them to be happy, and so, go ahead, do what you want, regardless of the collateral damage to others. This is not freedom, this is anarchy. All in all, I am glad to have stumbled upon this book. It will resonant with me for some time. I highly recommend to believers and unbelievers alike.

What and Who Do I Want to Be?

Take your medications, religiously. Watch what you consume, religiously. Watch what you say, religiously. Focus on getting out of debt. Focus on your children. Be diligent in your writing. Be professional in your work. Work when you should be working. If there is no work, study and assimilate new work related skills. Exercise religiously. Practice your guitar 2 times a week for 30 minutes per session. Practice you keyboard 3 times a week for 30 minutes per session. Be organized in your finances, and in your record keeping. Be honest, be a person of convictions. Do not trust yourself. De-clutter. Forgive others. Forgive yourself. Work your way up to 8 hours of sleep a night. For the first third of the year, strive for 6 hours of rest.

Barack Obama Must Win Tomorrow

It seems likely that Obama will beat Romney tomorrow night, but the show ain't over 'til the fat lady sings. That being said, she has yet to even warm up. Anything could happen, with documented shenanigans going on in FL, OH, and PA. I really, really, REALLY hope progressives carry the day, because the conservative agenda is something that I find to be not in the best interests of the majority of our country. Short post. That is all. I will be on pins and needles until it is called.

Lord, Save Me From My Packratting Ways

I like to hold onto things, and it seems I am not alone. My wife once told me, when asked what I should do with a snazzy but non-functioning fob watch (the kind that clips to a belt look instead of going on your wrist), "I'd throw it away, but you, you like holding on to broken things." I have to admit, she was right. I do. And the depths of this insight can take me to strange places, but that is another blog post. For this post, I recently did an inventory of the PCs in my household. There are six, yet only 3 people live here. This does not include tablets and phones and laptops, which often are used for tasks formerly carried by the sturdy, trusty desktop. I thought, I need to get rid of one or more of these. The least powerful is a Compaq Deskpro with a Pentium III (eek!) processor, a 20 GB hard drive (yikes!), 256 MB of RAM (ay caramba!) and not much else. What is this fossil doing here? It's as if I operate a home for lost and abandoned tech. What followed was a fair bit of soul searching, about the nature of my reluctance to let things go, especially when they serve no useful purpose. As Ogion wryly points out to Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea, "What, after all, is the use of you, or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the open sea?" This is what I wrestled with. I didn't know if this old workhorse could still serve a purpose, perhaps as a Linux box, or a Primary Domain Controller in a Windows network. Reluctantly, I was able to part with a PC I will never use, having tired of trying to conjure up a practical use for something that had it still had a purpose, it would already be fulfilling that purpose. No. It had outlived its purpose. I was just too sentimental to release it and let it go. Eventually I removed the RAM, the hard drive, the video card, the DVD-ROM drive, the dual monitor video card (does AGP even ship anymore?), and I retired the old gray mare. She truly wasn't what she used to be. Maybe pieces of her will find new purpose, but regardless, I am learning to let go, and it is long overdue.

I Know Nothing, Lady Bracknell

Decided to do a quick lookup of what exactly is "affect". They use the term frequently on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, usually when appraising a suspect's guilt. "He has very low affect." What I found on affect and mood was very enlightening. I feel smarter already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(psychology)

Affect refers to the experience of feeling or emotion.[1] Affect is a key part of the process of an organism's interaction with stimuli. The word also refers sometimes to affect display, which is "a facial, vocal, or gestural behavior that serves as an indicator of affect" (APA 2006). The affective domain represents one of the three divisions described in modern psychology: the cognitive, the conative, and the affective. Classically, these divisions have also been referred to as the "ABC of psychology", in that case using the terms "affect", "behavior", and "cognition". In certain views, the conative may be considered as a part of the affective,[2] or the affective as a part of the cognitive.[3]

Mood, like emotion, is an affective state. However, an emotion tends to have a clear focus (i.e., a self-evident cause), while mood tends to be more unfocused and diffused. Mood, according to Batson, Shaw, and Oleson (1992), involves tone and intensity and a structured set of beliefs about general expectations of a future experience of pleasure or pain, or of positive or negative affect in the future. Unlike instant reactions that produce affect or emotion, and that change with expectations of future pleasure or pain, moods, being diffused and unfocused, and thus harder to cope with, can last for days, weeks, months, or even years (Schucman, 1975). Moods are hypothetical constructs depicting an individual's emotional state. Researchers typically infer the existence of moods from a variety of behavioral referents (Blechman, 1990).

Hmmm. If a mood is a hypothetical construct, like reality is a social construct, then are moods even real? I went to look at views on this and found this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism

Social constructionism proposes that the notions of "real" and "unreal" are themselves social constructs, so that the question of whether anything is "real" is just a matter of social convention.

The smartness I gained, I think I just lost. I may even have gotten dumber. Flowers for Algernon.

Short Review of Bait and Switch

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream by Barbara Ehrenreich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read her earlier work, Nickel and Dimed, and really loved it. It moved me. This book was good, but not as jarring. A lot of this I already know. Still, Barbara Ehrenreich is one heck of a writer. The writing to me resonated more than the subject matter, although don't get me wrong, the subject matter is a call to action. Really enjoyed this, as one writer who appreciates not just the story, but the style of delivering it.

View all my reviews

Death and Taxes

A friend of mine posted the following on her Facebook wall:

Each time the USA Olympians win a medal of any level - I hear "$$Cha Ching $$" Thank you, Democrats for taxing those who worked hard and sacrificed their lives and all of their financial abilites to achieve their goals. Taxing medals...yet one more example of ridiculousness. REMOVE NANCY PELOSI ...she supports it.

As expected, there was a flurry of anti-tax and anti-democrat sentiment.  But I had a different take on it.

I'm sorry, I can't work up any outrage on this.  They are competing in events they are passionate about.  As a Chess player, I know that any Chess tournaments or matches I compete in, the winnings, if there are any, are subject to taxation. As a writer, sales of anything I get published are subject to taxation. I don't see why this is a big deal.  This is pretty much how they make their living, so why shouldn't it be taxed, just like the rest of us plumbers, doctors, teachers etc.  There are two things that are inevitable, right? Death and taxes, so it can't get worked up over this.   

But your post made me think, did Obama get taxed for his Nobel Peace prize?  I looked it up.  Turns out that Nobel prize winners are taxed, just like Olympic medalists.  Here's an article I found from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2010/10/14/irs-is-taxing-my-nobel-prize/ 

"Most of us will never win a Nobel Prize, but if we do, it comes with a tax bill.  Our old friend the IRS gets a cut of the roughly $1.4 million USD ($10 million Swedish kronor) cash prize.  The 2010 winners may not be complaining, but some may be surprised.  See Life After Winning a Nobel Prize.  Martin Chalfie, won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, lamenting that since the Reagan era when the tax code was changed, the IRS collects tax on prizes just like any other income.  
President Obama cleverly avoided tax on his Nobel Peace Prize last year—and got great press—by regifting it."

But note that the article shows that the people responsible for this state of affairs is not the Democrats. The change to the tax code happened in 1986 under the REAGAN administration.  Even so, I can't get worked up over this.  You are laying the blame at the feet of the Democrats and Pelosi, when this is clearly something that was been in effect for decades and was implemented by the Patron Saint of Conservatives, Ronald Reagan.  I hate throwing the cold water of fact on hot flames of emotional rhetoric, but I think this is overblown.

I'm curious to see how others will repsond.

The Beginning and The End

I am a diabetic.  I don't know if I have ever revealed it online, but my family knows, and most of my friends know, so it's not a secret.  When I found out, I was devastated; it was a dark time in my life.  I think that was about 3 years ago.  I have been uneven in my attempts to manage this deadly disease, as I suspect is the  case with many people in similar circumstances, but on the whole, I am trying to get healthier, and beat this thing.

I purchased a book last weekend called Dr. Neal Barnard's Program for Reversing Diabetes: The Scientifically Proven System for Reversing Diabetes Without Drugs.  There is much in the book of which I already was vaguely aware, but this point in my life I guess I am at a "perfect storm" moment, where everything has converged at once in a fearsome, potentially deadly way.  I was already on blood sugar meds, then I was put on high cholesterol meds about a month ago.  And this past week, I scored the trifecta, high blood pressure meds.  This is intolerable.  I have been looking long at hard at myself lately, and one of the things resulting from this introspection is the need to be be more aggressive regarding my health.  I was told early on in my diabetes diagnosis that with diet and exercise, I could severely limit its ability to kill me, cause me to lose limbs, and go blind.  And for a while, I did that.

Last New Year's Day, my wife and oldest daughter and I went on a challenge to see who could lose 20 lbs. first.  I was at the heaviest I have ever been, 260 lbs. when we began.  I won the challenge, getting down to 240, and I was encouraged to keep on losing, but I seemed to plateau, or hit an invisible wall.  I could not break into the 230s.  Eventually, I got frustrated and my went started to increase, then yo-yo.  I few weeks ago I began to force myself to walk more, and eat better, and this week, I was pleased to see myself weighing 235.7 lbs.  Yay.  I am encouraged to break 230.  I don't know how long its been since that was my weight.  Sad.

Anyway, back to the book.  I had been following the conventional wisdom and thinking that if I cut back on sugary foods, that is a good step towards improving my numbers. I also make the effort to cut out red meat from my diet as much as possible, because everybody knows that red meat is high in both fat and cholesterol.  I could confine myself to chicken and fish, right?  I am a huge seafood lover (no pun intended), and so this type of restriction allowed my to eat what I already preferred, making it feel less like a restriction and more like a license.  Well shoot.  According to this book, "since animal products are the only source of cholesterol in the diet, leaving them off your plate eliminates all the cholesterol from your diet."  That's what I want, to have my cholesterol levels so low that I can stopped taking meds to lower them.  But I thought I could do this while eating chicken and fish and shrimp and crawfish.  And I can, but at a penalty.

Imagine you are $10,000 in credit card debt (I know this scenario isn't hypothetical in the least to many people, but bear with me).  If your goal is to pay that thing off as quickly as possible, is it smarter to send them the minimum balance, or to send as much as you possibly can?  The answer is obvious.  Is it smart to buy the occasional shoes or video game or meal on the card, in effect adding to your debt as you are lowering it?  Of course not.  That is working against yourself.  You could still get out of debt, but you are making it take longer than it needs to take.  The best thing would be eliminate the debt as quickly as possible, and not add to your burden at the same time you are trying to lighten it.  Similarly, I am in debt on my cholesterol card, I've rung up so many charges that my bank account (my body), has been unable to pay to keep at manageable levels.  Financially, I know what I have to do.  Now, regarding my health, I know what I have to do.  I'm not just going meatless (pork and beef), I'm going without all animal products.

The blunt truth from the book:  Some [fish] are lower in fat than chicken, while others, such as salmon, are quite high.  But all fish have fat, and much of it - between 15 and 30 percent - is saturated fat.  All fish have cholesterol, too.  Some, such as shrimp and lobster, are much higher in cholesterol, ounce for ounce, than steak.

Ouch.  That hurts.  But taking pills everyday - especially for slackers like me who are forgetful or busy or both - that hurts worse.  So I am getting the meat and eggs out of my kitchen, out of my freezer, out of my kitchen, out of my life, at least until my numbers supports their re-integration into my diet.  I have to do this.  I am going to make it enjoyable and successful.  Let's see how this goes.

Don't Punish People For Making Healthy Choices

My son and I were out and about, and we decided to get something to eat. Ended up going to Checkers, a burger and fries joint that does a few things well. Joshua orders the chicken finger meal, but I have a bit more difficulty. I am diabetic, and I am overweight. I am actually very motivated at this point in my life to do something about these conditions, and today highlights why it can often be so much of a challenge.

One good thing to do if you want to lose weight is to avoid fried foods, so all of the combos are out because they come with fries and you can't substitute them. Okay, no prob, I'll just get the sandwich of my choice and not the meal. That also removes the second hazard, the soft drink.

Soda is a huge contributor to obesity, and most people are oblivious to the high amounts of sugar soft drinks contain. Sugar, if not burned off quickly through physical activity, will be converted and stored as fat. One of the things I remember best from my diabetes education class is "Don't drink your calories!!!" -Meaning that people don't realize how many calories they are putting into their bodies just by their drinking habits. If you want to lose weight and or reverse diabetes, drastically curbing your soda intake is a big step in the right direction.

So I ask for a water, and the lady returns after taking my money with a ridiculously small cup of water. I say politely, "I'd like a cup of water in the same size as my son's soda." The lady says, "Well, I'd have to charge you two dollars for that."

...

Why do businesses feel like they have to gouge their customers every which way but loose? The cup itself doesn't cost that much. It costs pennies. The water doesn't cost that much, since they give away these piddling courtesy cups on demand. So give me a reasonable explanation. Ah, of course, there is none.

After haggling with the cashier and the manager, they give me 3 courtesy cups, thinking they are being true to their best practices yet giving the customer what he wants. But I really have to say, this was stupid, and better late than never that I should start becoming more health conscious. I now am compelled to be a provocateur whenever I'm going out, forever tilting at windmills. If you can help Americans become fatter and fatter, you can also encourage them to be healthier and healthier.

RAD, SCHMAD!!!

I know I should be in bed, but I am waiting for the iOS 5 upgrade to finish installing on the iPad, so I am stuck here, watching the status bar. I figured, why don't you write something in that anemic blog of yours. Well, sure, why not? Is there anything better I could be doing right now, besides sleeping? Anyone who knows me knows I have been an insomniac since at least my college years in Champaign, so why fight it. Just type, and express yourself.

Today, what stuck out to me is how we misapply the RAD concept. RAD stands for Rapid Application Development, which is supposed to mean a new(ish) method of cutting through the standard SDLC and going from wishlist to functioning solution in a nibmle, efficient manner. One would think that leaving the I/S oasis to found my own kingdom/fiefdom in the desert would be liberating enough - no more of the farce of TRMM project management, no more CMMI forest-killing documentation, and yes Lord, no more Rational ClearCase/ClearQuest. Glory!! However, this is not all there is to whittling away all the excess, and arrive at something leaner, cleaner and meaner. I think in some respects, the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater, and, as originally stated, some elements of the RAD concept are misapplied. My iPad is not upgraded, so I am stopped, just as I was getting warmed up. Yes, this can serve as a proper introduction to a what will likely be a series of blogs on what RAD is and isn't. Goodnight, my friends.

Quote of the Day

This is from Microsoft SQL Server 2005: Database Essentials Step by Step, by Solid Quality Learning:

"The importance of analysis cannot be over-emphasized. Your first and primary objective is to know your business and design a model that appropriately describes your business data and procedures. You database system will be limited by your design and will inherit any problems built into that design that are caused by a lack of understanding of your business needs."

I was rereading this trusty companion just to make sure I hadn't drifted away from sound doctrine, and this passage's relevance to my current project hit me quite forcefully. We are relying on contracted consultants to design and develop a system for us based on proprietary technology that we do not fully understand. I think this is not the best approach, but I am not in a position to make such calls, and at any rate, it's too late to call the cattle back to the barn.

I just have a feeling I will be pointing to this quote in the lessons learned phase of this project. When asked why we paid so much for a system that doesn't address our needs, I will point them here, and bite my tongue.

New Year, Same Resolutions

Every year people attempt to reinvent themselves through the ritual of New Years. It's an arbitrary edifice, a contrived construction, born out of both hope and desperation. Why do we torture ourselves? Why do we set ourselves up to fail?

My Resolutions
----
Walk in love
Manifest the fruit of the spirit
Get more sleep (I think getting 6 hours a night is a good start)
Exercise consistently (at least three times a week)
Watch what I eat (this mainly deals with refined sugars)
Put a serious dent into this book you are trying to write
Collect all your poems, lyrics and short stories into a single notebook
Manage finances better
Continue to organize yourself
Be more productive
Read 24 books this year
Beat 12 video games (and don't buy another game until at least July)

This is quite ambitious, but I will not fail.

Epiphany

The only way I know how to live
is to kill myself every day.

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Test

I just downloaded an app for the Droid that will let me post to my blog from my phone. How sick is that. Let's see if it works (although the idea of lengthy ruminations on this little keypad is... yeesh).

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A Father is a Father, and a Mother is a Mother

Happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there, from my own father, Joseph Jenkins (AKA Mobarez Abdul), to all the other fathers out there.

I hate to be the one to do this, but I feel a strong compulsion to make the argument I am about to make. As texts and phone calls pour in from around the globe, and wellwishers using all manner of new media (Facebook, Twitter, IM, etc.) give me encouragement, praise and support, I see the occasional "Happy Father's Day also to all the single moms out there doing it by themselves." I tensed at the first text I read with this idea, but quickly relaxed and went about my business. When I logged in to my beloved Facebook, I saw many of these types of posts. It is an itch that must be scratched. I clearly have a problem with this.

First of all, a little background. My mother was a single parent for most of my childhood. Even when she remarried, it was painfully obvious that our stepfather was interested in her, but not her three children. She got very little support from him when it came to child-rearing. My paternal grandmother was also a single parent, raising five children on her own, and is, as you might expect, a very strong woman for having gone through the experience. So I believe I am not just talking about things just to be talking. So here goes...

A woman who does the mom things and the dad things with her child or children is not both mother and father. She is mother raised to another power. No matter how good she is, no matter how good a job she does, she cannot fill the void the missing father has left. My mother did a phenomenal job with us, I think. We grew up in severe poverty, but she never let us internalize that ghetto mentality. We are all self sufficient and well socialized. But as a young man, I was filled with intense anger towards my father for not being there. It took a long time to resolve. It has shaped my behavior in attitudes in ways I probably do not realize. My mother was not both mother and father. I still needed my father.

It's weird, because I know his father was not there for him. You would think he would not want the cycle to continue. But it did. For whatever reasons, he was not in my life (or in my siblings lives') the way we needed him to be, and it has left us all affected in different ways. Does this diminish the absolutely outstanding job my mom did? No. It shows just how drastically, how desperately we need fathers. How desperately we need both parents in our lives.

I remember when my father's father died, I was asking my dad, and my aunts and uncles if they were they going to the funeral. They were unanimous in their refusals. They were unanimous in their resolve. He wasn't there for them in life, why should they be compelled to be there for him in death? They still carried residual damage from his absence, all those years ago. I know my granny, and she is a tough as they come. As loving and dedicated and protective as any mother could be. But all of her grand gifts could not obliterate the need for the man of the house to actually be in the house doing the hard and inglorious work of raising his children by her side. No matter how hard she worked, how much she sacrificed, she was not both mother and father. She was mother, going above and beyond.

I have limited experience being a single parent (my wife is in graduate school in a separate state, and is gone for sometimes weeks at a time). But I don't look at the time when I am braiding my daughters' hair, helping them with their homework, cooking for them, etc. as being mommy and daddy. I'm just daddy, busting my tail. No matter how hard I work, I can never negate their need for their mother. They need us both. Fortunately, children that have both never realize how desperate this need is. Unfortunately, there are far too many children who are missing one or the other, and it is usually the father.

I fear that this tendency we have to celebrate single parents as both mother and father leads us to false conclusions. To paraphrase Jill Scott, the fact is... we need each other. We need fathers and mothers to sublimate their own needs, wants, desires and aspirations for the sake of the children. One parent is never enough, if we are honest. Can we get by on one, of course, but should we be so nonchalant about it? It needs to be much less commonplace than it is. It needs to be the exception and not the rule.

Wishing mothers a 'Happy Father's Day' subtly minimizes the father's impact on his offspring through their entire lives. It is crucial that we get men to understand how important they are to our families. Rationalizing that women can just "double up" on the responsibilities and everything will be fine is dangerous and foolish. A parent who is not a constant in a child's life is leaving a void that is shaped like that parent, and nothing can totally fill that void as if it never was. Let us recognize this.

Rule Number 1

No matter what the situation, the first rule is DON'T PANIC. Even when it is clearly time to panic, panicking is even more clearly the last thing you should be. This may seem to be a paradox, but it isn't. I'm reminded of some preacher, who when asked how much he prayed said, "I pray for two hours every morning, unless I'm really busy that day. On those days, I pray for four hours." See - the counter-intuitive thing to do is not necessarily paradoxical. Always remain calm, always keep your wits about you. As my man Ron Burgundy would say, keep your head on a swivel.

Today was a shocking day for me, because a member of my software development team announced his resignation. Our team's fate is already uncertain, because of the volatile nature of our business. I have danced on the knife's edge of whether I should cast my nets further afield, but after two years, Chattanooga is still my home. Seeing others depart is inducing a "Taking Stock" mindset. Within the last three months, three members of the team have left the company. The writing is clearly on the wall that the team as we have known it very likely shall not endure. I was joking with my colleague and friend Usha that our fate was to be like that of the musicians of the Titanic:

At last we know more about those brave fellows, the Titanic's musicians,
who in their firm belief in the power of music to avert or allay panic kept at
their appointed task until almost the last moment, if not, indeed, until the
all-engulfing wave swept over the wreck.

Yes, I can see it now... world-weary and stalwart programmers tapping out intricate harmonies of code as the world ends around us. It did not escape our notice that our current project is named TITAN. The universe is not without its sense of humor. Anyway, with all the uncertainty swirling around us, it was impossible for me to remain unpeturbed as yet another leaf fell from the tree. I really am not sure what I am supposed to be doing in this situation. I have many things to consider, many angles to look at this from. And it is incumbent on me to be strong and wise and calm. It was Mos Def who threw out this gem:

I navigate the treacherous and make it seem effortless.

Indeed. Do not panic. Do not be afraid. These are uncertain times for nearly all of us, but recall Psalms 91:7. No matter what, we are going to be alright. DO NOT PANIC.

A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it
shall not come nigh thee.

Powerless

My name is Jahan, and I am powerless.

Actually, I don't believe that for a minute, but I do understand the sentiment. Correction: I might believe it for a few moments out of each day, but all in all, I tend to disagree. I have tremendous power. I have great destructive power. I have the power to tear down my own reputation, my legacy, my self respect. I have the power to make or break my childrens' destinies. I have the power to elevate and uplift my wife or shatter her faith and confidence. I have the power to make you all shudder or disgust or marvel in wonder. So why then would I begin this post with...

My name is Jahan, and I am powerless.

...because I feel like there are things that need to be done that are beyond my control. I am helpless. Surely no one has total control over their fate, but this is ridiculous. My finances are screwed up, my job is a roller coaster, my children are continually challenging me, and you don't really want to hear it, do you? Can't blame you for that. Flavor Flav's got problems of his own, right? Anyway, I recognize that I am powerless in my ways, but I am not accepting it. Like an escape artist in a prison or in shackles, I am probing for a weak point that I can exploit to eventually be free. I am twisting and contorting my body and mind beyond discomfort to what I can only hope is liberation on the other side. Is life just a dream, and you wake up when you die?

I've Been Brought Down to My Knees

I have some kind of sinus/respiratory infection, and my lord it is working me over. It started on Super Bowl Sunday, I think, and has only gotten worse. I have endured severe chills and pounding migraines, aches and pains from head to toe, moving around randomly like I was a pinball machine. Congestion, coughing, shortness of breath, where will it all end. I was thinking that this was the closest I've ever come to dying, but upon reflection, I see this as folly. But it still HOITZ pretty bad. I am so fatigued today. It's 7PM and I could easily go to bed right now... and wake up on Sunday. Goodness.

Optimism

I think that in some ways I am the most successful optimist of all: I always believed I would end up miserable, and lo, it has come to pass!

I Should... But I Don't

I have updated my blog at least 4 times a week for the last two months -except that its only in my head. I don't have the time to get in front of the PC and get loose anymore. I'm a responsible adult now. I have clever titles and provacative content, but it just floats around in my head like chunks of corn in chowder. Hmmm... now THAT'S an analogy!

Everything is good. I am longer in Atlanta. I'm in Chattanooga, working a new job, new career, new everything. I live in an extended stay motel during the week and then drive down to ATL for the weekend, usually to spend more time getting the house ready to sell than playing with my kids, all of whom I miss dearly. During the week I work, then I go house hunting until it gets dark. Then I drive home and read, practice the piano, have a microwavable dinner, and get ready for the next day. I'm learning a lot in this new job, but is it enough? I wonder if I can do this. I'm not used to doubting myself. I've got to believe. I want to. I need to. I have to, whether its realistic or not.

Thanks for Making Me a Fighter

Today was my first day of work at my new job. It was incredible. Incredibly taxing, incredibly humbling, incredibly eye opening, and incredibly prophetic. I struggle to put it all into words. I know I have stepped up to the next level. I've got some work to do, but I know I am capable. I am so worn out I just have to crash. Gotta be fresh for the next daily grind. Gotta get more sleep in 2007.

Destroyer of Little White Balls

I was indulging in a game of golf yesterday, and the most unusual thing happened. I got my first ever Hole in One. I was on a par 3, and after gauge the wind, terrain, blah blah blah I took my swing. I swear, as soon as I connected, I called out, "That's a hole in one." And it actually became a hole in one!!! Un-freaking-believable. My wife was right there, jaw agog. I have been feeling pretty crummy the last few days, but that was just what I needed to lift my spirits. I'm sitting on top of the world! I now have 1 hole in one, 2 eagles, and several birdies. I can see why people love golf. It is a frustrating game, but has moments of being extremely rewarding. Sweeeet!