Although I'm in love with the church, I've never been very comfortable in it. It's probably largely because the culture of the western church is so far removed from the Jesus that I read about in the bible. It's a struggle that I don't think I'll resolve any time soon.
On a lighter note, one of my favorite songs is Green Day's "Church on Sunday" from their album Warning, here's the chorus:
If I promise to go to church on Sunday Will you go with me on Friday night? If you live with me, I'll die for you (And this compromise)
At the bottom of Gmail there is a spot for rotating feature announcements and suggestions. One out of four or so times, it says this:
Get Gmail on your phone. It's super-fast. Visit http://mobile.google.com/ on your phone's web browser.
The super-fast bit always makes me smile.
I work for this really interesting company that helps make the free and open source operating system Ubuntu. I actually work on a slightly separate project that provides online services for our users and customers.
We work on a six month cadence, so every six months a new version comes out making Ubuntu better. These versions have codenamed while they're in development. The current version is codenamed Maverick Meerkat. Our fearless leader, founder and all around head dude Mark Shuttleworth comes up with these names, but he only announces them a few weeks before that version goes into development.
What I really like about this is that whenever my team is talking about a piece of work, it's almost always prefaced by the version. For instance we've going to be doing some really neat stuff with your music in the next version, but we'll only have time to do part of the work, so I might say, "We'll have feature A for Maverick, but we'll need to wait until Maverick +1 for feature B".
Maverick +1 refers to the release that will come after the currently in development version. Maverick is what we're working on now and since we don't know the name of the next release, we specify the next release simply by saying, "after Maverick + 1".
If you are tracking, we basically know what we're working on right now, we have a vague idea of what we'll work on for the next cycle, and anything further than a year away goes into the fuzzy idea of what might be the future.
What this does is keep me focused on what we're creating right now, while still giving me small glimpses into our future. It's a great way to let the future sort of take care of itself, and remove most of the guess work from our planning. As 37 Signals so often says, plans are really guesses anyway, right?
Here are a few identifiers that I am not feeling well:
- Haven't updated twitter in 24 hours
- Haven't hit the 'refresh all' button on my podcasts in 48 hours.
- Slept more than 10 hours for more than one day in a row.
- Gather 4 or 5 people around me. Am I being funny, interesting, or at least loud? BINGO. Somethings wrong.
For the past few days I've been what friends and coworkers have heard me call, "crazy". I've been quiet, needed incredible amounts of sleep, and am constantly confused about where exactly I am (and possibly what has happened recently). Here's a bit of explanation.
While I understand that self-diagnosis can be dangerous, Melissa and I have come to the conclusion that what I may have is Depersonalization Disorder. It's usually brought on by large amounts of stress, or by switching up my social surroundings drastically.
If you see me like this, there isn't much to worry about. Other than a bit of social awkwardness there hasn't been anything detrimental caused by my bouts with DPD. I've successfully navigated trans-atlantic flights, performed various work tasks (although with admitted lack of focus) while going through these semi-irregular periods. Asking me if I'm OK isn't super helpful here either, because I'm not, but there isn't a constructive way to tell you that.
What I would appreciate is a little extra understanding. My teammates are incredible examples of this: taxi-ing me around London, responding to my wife's frantic messages wondering if I'm still alive, letting me sleep for 24 hours straight through the weekend so that I can recover for next weeks work, etc.
I might ask you about things that happened in the past 1 to 48 hours, or I might just ask for confirmation of our current location. Think of it like re-checking your phone for the time every few seconds when you are late for a meeting. It's not that I don't know, I just want to be sure.
I'm posting this from my laptop while hurtling through space at 500 or so miles per hour. It really feels both like the future and like something that should have been available before (although I'm completely unaware of the technical problems with providing internet service on a airplane).
Blaix.com is the website of Justin and Kari Blake. Justin seems like a nice guy and lives nearby, although I don't think I've ever met him.
Unlike lots of the blogs in my feed reader, Justin talks about his family quite a bit. Most of the nerds that I read talk about programming languages and interesting things to buy, and lots of other things, but rarely their family. Justin is a unique dude.
For relatives birthdays he posts something about them. It's usually at least a little funny. Here's something from today:
Today is Kati Cooley’s birthday! Kati is my wife’s sister which means SHE IS ALSO MY SISTER. I bet I have more sisters than you.
Kati is 25. Lady Gaga is 24. That seems very weird to me.
From Happy Holidays
- Taking advantage of the sun being down to work (our AC is wonky right now, so it's tough to concentrate)
- Drake's new album Thank me later
- Tackling our families budget with a hackers mindset. Fiscal responsibility, you are my new master.
In a few weeks, Melissa and I will be headed to Portland, OR for a pre-baby vacation as well as to celebrate being married for 5 years.
We choose Portland because we have foggy plans to move there sometime in the future and we wanted to do a first run on the city to see if we like it.
We're staying at Hotel deLuxe which is mapped out below along with a list of things we've already identified we might want to check out. We have about 3 days and will be on foot or public transportation so if you have any suggestions of nearby things to check out, or worthwhile things that are worth the trip, let me know.
View PDX on Foot! in a larger map
Current ideas:
- International Rose Test Garden
- Go on some micro-brewery tours
- Hoyt Arboretum
- Oregon Zoo
- Powell's Books
- Portland Art Museum
What say you?
Update
So far you have said:
From @chadmiller
From @iamseanmurphy
Update
I updated the above map to include the various spots that we were likely to check out.
On the subject of self improvement (not the section in the book store, the act) the article on Wikipedia for Gentleman is wonderful, here's a piece of the current version:
However, although only a gentleman could have a coat of arms (so that possession of a coat of arms was proof of gentility), the coat of arms recognised rather than created the status
I see too many dudes every day who have no idea what they’re doing: guys who have no idea how to dress, how to drive, how to lift weights, how to eat/drink, how to sit, how to listen, how to speak, how to spell, how to write, how to think for themselves, or how to even live their lives.
Gold, pure gold (Seen on SUITS+BOOTS via Tyler Hunt's Delicious Account)
My house has pretty thin walls.
It's probably the quality of construction or the materials used when the house was originally built. I'm frequently frustrated with the way sound travels in the house, particularly because my wife goes to sleep a lot earlier than I do, which means that I have to be pretty careful about how loud I am after ten o’clock or so.
Just now Melissa was singing in the shower. She rarely sings without me prompting her to, but she's performing for a friends piano recital later today and I think she's still a touch nervous. Her voice, the mood of the song and the tone of her vibrato lept right through the walls of our home to where I was sitting in the living room.
It was remarkable. Thank goodness these walls are so thin.
I'm really enjoying The A.V. Club's Gateways to Geekery. They have more than 50 concise explanations of how to investigate topics that seem impenetrable.
The guides are both insightful and written well, here is a quote from their intro to emo:
More confusingly, virtually every good band associated with emo never identified with the label, not only because few artists like to identify with subgenres (especially ones with silly names—see also: chillwave), but also because emo’s sonic attributes have changed since the mid-’80s. What began closely aligned with melodic hardcore and punk morphed into more removed and moody sounds, then gradually grew poppier to the point that its only association with punk was power chords.
As a worship leader, one of my self-imposed responsibilities is to keep up with what other churches are doing with music so that I can better lead our churches music production and song choice.
To that end for the last year or two I've been watching other churches music.
Here are a few churches that post their services, including music, every week:
- NewSpring - Anderson, SC
- Granger Community Church - Granger, IN
- Quest Community Church - Lexington, KY
If you know of other churches that post video of their music weekly, please email me!
Disclaimer: While I watch these church's music week to week, they aren't necessarily my style and you probably won't see us doing many things similarly at Engaging Life, these are just the churches I've found that post video and audio so that I can learn from what they are doing.
Update
Here are other churches I've found that post their music every week:
Here is a quote describing how I am starting to think about things in relation to work / life balance and email:
My attempts at compartmentalization have failed. There is only one inbox.
On the down side (that was the up side), there is no “off the clock.” There is no “not on company time.” There is no “not speaking on behalf of…” Disclaimers to the contrary are commonplace, well-rehearsed, and futile. Technologies that “help” us to link our disparate personas will inevitably intertwine them with our impersonas too. There are no “strictly personal venues.” And when nothing can be said without being misconstrued, there is nothing left to be said.
Thanks Mark, I think you are right.