Well, CA World is undeway. The name has changed from Computer Associates to CA, and I'm wondering if the simplification process will truly percolate down through the packages. I'm a CA fan, mostly, so this is exciting to be able to see a company take it to the next level. I just hope that their partnership with Microsoft won't result in MS's development methodologies and ship it first, fix it later mentality slipping over to CA.

Maybe it will be a good thing to have so much of the strategy intermingled. Time will truly tell. I'll post again as access and time allow.

Stay tuned... I'm heading to CA World, and I'm sure there will be many things of note there. Until then...

A Biologist, a Statistician and a Mathematician were watching a building. One person went in, and a little while later two people came out.

The Biologist said, "Look! They reproduced!"

The Statistician said, "Ah! There is an average of 1.5 people on each side of the door in that building!"

The Mathematician said, "Hey! If one more person goes inside, there will be nobody there!"




What was the rapper's favorite software? Word

Which browser would Marco Polo choose? Explorer

What happened to the data center when the main trunkline to the database exploded? There was SAP all over the place

What does Computer do when Computer goes to the club meeting? Computer Associates

What do you call an icepick hooked up to an electric line? PowerPoint

Where does malware hang out? A lot of CD places.

Arrivederci!

TMI!!!! Anyone who is remotely involved with the on-line world, with kids between the ages of 5 and 30, or both, understands these initials to stand for Too Much Information. The TMI moniker is normally attached to pieces of information that, though most likely truth-based, bring the recipient close to and then through the personal barriers that stand between polite acquaintances and deposit the conversation/data sharing squarely into the realm of the close friend and confidant.

For the purposes of the next few minutes, though, I'd like to borrow the label for another purpose. Today we find that our systems are overloaded with information of all kinds, and we then have to adjust the systems that we deal with accordingly to handle all the information in a way that can be managed.

One of the functions I'm involved in is the optical mark scanning of examinations, which is a good, data-intensive place to be. It's also a spot for me to illustrate the TMI concept. In order to be a comprehensive solution, all the data is collected from each sheet. So, even information for things on each sheet that no one ever uses is collected and stored. In our testing system, there is no call to use the Special Codes section of each sheet, yet we must allow for it to be safe. The same goes for other demographic information that we don't (and shouldn't, for FERPA reasons) use.

Thus, for each of the nearly million sheets scanned each year, there are two digits (actually sixteen bytes of information in binary format) for the special code as well as more than 100 other empty pieces of information. The underlying system treats a blank as a blank, but must use placeholders for blanks instead of ignoring them due to the occasinoal need to omit a question. It's not a lot of space that is wasted, from an overall standpoint, but it is too much. TMI applies to data collection.

On the processing end, there is also too much information to allow for proper processing. An example of which is the truthful answer to a question meant for an entirely different purpose. When supplying the information needed to process the exams, one question asked on the informational card is for the section number of the course. If someone brings in exams for two different sections, and fills that information in but doesn't differentiate between the two sections (most commonly done when both use the same answer key), then the question is meaningless, because the entire intent of the question is to provide accurate labelling of results. TMI applies to data accuracy.

On the user's end, there is the problem of TMI as it applies to what is done on a reporting basis. It is a known statistical fact that you cannot assume anything drawn as a conclusion if you don't have enough samples. While the 'magic number' varies slightly depending on the expert, there is unison of opinion when saying that a distribution drawn on a sample size of 15 is useless. Despite that, several users request and are given statistical distributions on classes of that, or smaller size. TMI applies to data relevance.

I enjoy coming up with solutions so that I offer them up with the issues I point out, but on this occasion, I'm struck by the astounding task, and can suggest only surprisingly non-technical ways to improve this. Here, then, is the naiive approach to the TMdataI problem:

NO - say this when there is marginal or no residual value to the data being collected. If it was needed in the past, then you need to consider if it is needed in the future, but in most cases, when data stops being relevant (the number of 8-track players sold in a year, for example), then it needs to stop being part of a data schema. This is, after all, how the cent symbol disappeared from ASCII when it first came out. They were trying to economize on which letters and symbols made the cut, and they realized that so many places were marking prices with a dollar sign and decimal notation that the symbol wasn't needed. They did bring it back as the library expanded, but it is an anachronism that is fading still further from the consciousness.

SHOW - use this when someone wishes to provide data but not the specificity for you to accurately know when, where and how to handle it. If they can show the need and the level of accuracy that will support the data manipulation and storage, then it is a viable effort. If they know what they want but can't really specify what they want, then there is justification to refuse the data. This is what gets so many systems into trouble as they proceed through the design process, dumbing themselves down to a bloated and inefficient form.

JUST GO! - use this when a user or other individual is requesting data manipulation that is either worthless or dangerous. The availability of computing power to handle mathematics does not do away with the fundamental requirement that those attempting to use is understand what they are trying to do. I would be interested to know how many terrible decisions have been made as the result of faulty assumptions based on faulty information based on faulty use of data, and I can only speculate at the number of zeroes that you'd have to write in the accurate estimate of the overall cost.

In closing, I have to say that we can only understand and properly deal with data when we stop thinking of it as ones and zeroes and begin to commoditize it as we do other things that are helpful and powerful at the same time. We need to think of ourselves as virtual bartenders. In the real world, that position is charged with properly monitoring the alcohol consumed, and what is done with it. Too much and there is a bar full of drunken customers who may then be dangers to themselves or others, and the bartender may be liable if they are, so s/he is courteous, comradely, and cautious at the same time. Some people require more scrutiny than others when faced with large supplies of an intoxicant - what, after all, is more intoxicating than data - and that's well advised to those of us monitoring, collecting and processing data.

Time flies... but can flies tell time? In other words, tempus fugit...cogit tempus musca?

This past week I have spent quite a bit of time trying to transition to another PC. I have copied, deleted, installed, re-installed and generally done everything possible to make things happen on a different box of wires in exactly the same way as they did on my (well-worn) box. Despite my experience and knowledge, this operation is never as simple as it should be.

If I were to move offices, I would take my files, and the contents of my credenza and other cubbyholes, place them into boxes, and then move them to the new office. They would be quickly unpacked and stowed, and I'd get on with it.

With the PC change, however, there are several problems that complicate things. 1) You can't just pack things into a box - you can put relevant files on thumb-drives, but you might miss some of them, due to the vagaries of the Windows file-system-collapse-waiting-to-happen that is XP data handling; 2) you may or may not have the installation code for those useful tools you've downloaded along the way, and with the speed withi which freeware and shareware are produced and passed around, the hunt for your tools will take a while; 3) the new box bust be updated and spywared and virus-protected and all that jazz; 4) swollen and inefficient e-mail that nevertheless saves your bacon must be somehow transferred, though for self-confessed pack-rats like me who save sent mail and received mail with attachments, try fitting all that on a shared drive; 5) security structures shift over time, and some of the changes that are made to your PC are invisible to you, yet cause your connections to be hard to re-establish.

I dream of the day when technology really does become a pathway to labor savings. In the quest to dumb-down systems instead of smartening up the users to allow them to use the systems in a better way, we have just complicated the life of the tech worker by a factor of five. Maybe I'm just sour because of how much of my time this has eaten away, but it's painful nonetheless, and is enough to cause me to not want to get the latest and greatest. If makers could somehow develop a truly seamless way to do this, imagine how much more they'd sell. I am not opposed to paying for performance, but if there's a major pain point, then the performance has to be all the more spectacular for me to be willing to buy it.

Note to Gateway, Dell, HP, etc. - If you could deliver true usability and ease of technology flow, you'd have gotten a few thou from me in the past decade, instead of having me buy a $300 e-machine in '99 and making do where I can. And that's just at home...

It's like my cell phone 'rant' earlier in this blog - I don't want features until I get usability, period.

'Til next time...

I was just asked a question by a friend, and I really can't answer it. The question? Why it is that I don't work at home.

Looking at the things I do, there's not a whole lot that I COULDN'T do from the friendly confines of my house, but there are two barriers to doing this type of thing, and the technology is the smaller of the two. There are softwares out there right now that make it a possibility.

The part that is really difficult to do is to overcome the perceptions of working at home. It is generally seen as being a way of being paid to goof off, and there is a certain stigma attached to it. Will it happen for me? Quite possibly. The university is a pretty innovative place, and I can see it happening, someday. Until then, here's a tongue-in-cheek listing of the top 10 reasons to work at home.

10) You know beyond the shadow of a doubt which clown burnt popcorn in the microwave

9) Warm bunny slippers can soften the effects of even the gruffest client

8) Singing show tunes on breaks without fear of the effects of... uh, never mind, uh, that's not one of mine I just heard - yeah, heard - this was something...

7) Every day is casual day

6) Mooning the phone isn't as risky there

5) If you insist on dial-up, it's impossible to take calls AND work on the web, so take your pick

4) Nobody HAS to know how many doughnuts you ate for breakfast

3) Committee meetings go a LOT quicker

2) You can work your mouse with your toes and no one is the wiser

and, the number 1 reason to work at home:

Commuting consists of rolling out of bed and getting dressed (maybe)

Here is this week's little devotional. The concepts are applicable for even the relatively unimportant (when compared with the spiritual) realm of work as well.

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This week, I just want to focus on the power of persistence. The return of Fall Semester hours has meant that I now am required by university policy to take a 65-minute lunch, and I try to use as many of those as I can to work out and otherwise forestall the creep of the frost of physical, maturity, shall we say. Well, yesterday it was time to do some lifting, and instead of just counting what I did, I did a little bit of math as well. I added up all the pounds that I moved during the session (180 pounds times 30 total reps... you get the idea). Anyway, I found out that in less than an hour, I had single-handedly moved 28,380 pounds around. That's over 14 TONS, and it wasn't even that hard of a workout.

The point of this is that our days are filled with activities that we just do and don't even consider. Try it sometime - wear a pedometer and see how many steps you take in a given day, or week, then do the math and see how far you've traveled without really going anywhere. It will surprise you about as much as it surprised me how much I'd moved without creating or destroying anything.

We are surrounded by challenges, dangers, temptations and opportunities. We have mounds of issues and tasks to deal with, and we have many miles to go before we sleep, as Frost says. We can look at them as one insurmountable obstacle, or we can patiently and steadily keep our eyes on them, like Paul wrote about keeping our eyes on the prize. When I looked at the car in the afternoon, I said to myself that there is no way that I could lift it, yet I found that my gradual efforts lifted at least 6 times as much as what I thought I couldn't lift at all.

This week, and every week, let's keep our eyes focused on the prize of a successful, God-approved life. We will continually be there if we work steadily onward. We're told that if we have faith the size of a mustard seed and we say to the mountain that it should move, then it would move. I submit that to be absolutely true, but that it is also likely that when we do have that faith, and do say to the mountain, "Move," God may well hand us a teaspoon and say, "Yes, let's get this done...together, my child. We will learn to overcome together, with great effort and unbelievable rewards."

Peace!

Have you ever wondered what we did before we had e-mail? Having recently returned from a one-week vacation to 994 e-mail messages, not counting those that were immediately recognized as junk or a couple other special sub-headings, I found myself working up a blister on my mousing finger while weeding the CIALIS ads out from the important communications about my projects.

Here's the rub - anymore, when a tech worker goes on vacation, they have to work all the harder when they return. As our understanding of appropriate response time keeps shrinking, the pressure of taking time off grows, until a vacation is really just an independently-hosted work event.

For a change it was my wife who had to be on the receiving end of about a dozen cell phone calls, none of which lasted shorter than 10 minutes (that was just the calls that made it through, since our cabin didn't have cellular coverage and thus only during our vacation events was it possible to call), and for the first time I developed an understanding of how aggravating my on-calledness has been in the past. Held prisoner in the car right outside the restaurant, vacation ease was interrupted by the gnashing of the underfunded university machine, and instead of being able to enjoy the time with the kids, my wife was there, laboring mightily with her virtual wrench to get the teeth on the gears to mesh together again and thus keep the place going.

Is it modern hubris to be so connected to our workplace that it casts a shadow over what you do even so far away? I don't think so. I think that we have a displaced notion of what is truly important, and where our work ethic needs to be applied. So many times in the past, when I have been on call and have answered and fixed and co-stressed about issues, it has been my devotion to the work ethic of my upbringing that has kept me there, patiently working until something was fixed. As appreciated as that has been, and I truly work with some good people who do appreciate those efforts, something has been remiss.

I have confused my job with my life. My job is where I put in hours each day so that my family might eat well, have the things that they need, and have many things that they want. I have been guilty in the past of treating my job with devotion and fervor and my family and relationships with dismissal and ignoring. Clearly that is a wrong priority, because my real job - that job that I was singularly given responsibility to do, that no one else in the world can do quite like I can, that God has shaped me and forged me for as part of His plan for me, is to be a husband, father, son, brother, friend and mentor. To work at those things is the true job that lays before me.

Since that revelation and the subsequent considerations that I've made, it has become easier to walk out on time, and to leave things undone sometimes. To that end, I submit this passage:

Today is composed of three parts...
There are ten hours which are tied up with bringing material blessings into the household - an hour to prepare, arrive, and return home, and 9 hours of tasks to complete.

There are 7 hours which are tied up with sleep, where my ever-aging body repairs itself, and my thoughts and musings try diligently to settle down so that my sleep is as restful as it can be.

There are then 7 hours remaining during which I must do my real job. I must provide contact with my children so that when they are older they do not feel cheated by me, I must provide soulship with my wife so that she does not become heartsick with loneliness and so I do not develop an attitude of dispassionate brokenness of connection, I must provide service to God so I do not become selfish and withdrawn into my own little corner of the world, I must provide friendship so that I am not seen as disinterested or cold. I must provide contact with my family and with my friends so that they do not grow cold at heart.

From which period should I then steal time with which I can do additional work? Will anyone at work remember me clearly when I have been gone from there a decade? If what I call loyalty causes me to steal from my health, or from my family and friends, then isn't that a conflict of morality, where I give and tax in the same step?

We can never forget that the process of technology growth was originally meant to simplify life. The good news is that it can once again be used for that purpose. We just need to have enough people realize that and act on it, facing the future unafraid as we turn off our phones and refuse to answer e-mails after hours. It is the fear of that corporate weasel down the hall who will take our leads, or work overtime to impress the boss, or who will insulate himself against layoff at your detriment that causes this problem. Fear not! If we invest in our health and in our family and friends, then the rest doesn't matter.

We need to join together and refuse to participate any longer in the increasing pressurization of life at the hands of a bunch of wires and worries. If we are bold, and if we have our heads screwed on straight, then we will be healthy, wealthy, wise, and possessors of a weaselskin rug, from a certain weasel who thought that work was all there was to do. Let's all do our jobs with intelligence, efficiency and restraint.

This week I must be thinking about numbers an awful lot...

The top ten reasons for living in Indiana:

10) It's refreshing to be around a group of people who'd rather raise a billiion dollars for a pro football team's new stadium (actually, IHMO, bring the [SuperBowl] ring, we'll build you a thing, but until then, make do with your house) than dilute all that usable currency for education

9) You can go to a hog roast and buy apple butter, cracklins, salsa and roasted corn from the same vendor

8) A two-wheel drive pickup with 16" rims qualifies as a low rider

7) Potholes and hacked-up pavement keep the aftermarket automotive plants in business, (mostly, well, at least wherever it is they actually operate from nowadays, not the rusting remnants of plants that dot our scenic landscape like massive starships that crashed to the grond when the occupants discovered that the enemy was using the deadly secret weapon - Administratium-tipped dum dum bullets)

6) Your high school has a practice gym so that the basketball team doesn't have to wear out their 'game day' hoops (practice gyms really do exist, though it's probably because they don't want to harm the teams' hearing with the echoes that result from practicing in a gym that's only halfway filled to its 25,000 seat capacity...)

5) Indianapolis gives you a taste of Detroit and Saint Louis, all in one, without a losing football team or tourism interests, respectively

4) We have a place where, inside, they drive faster than you can believe and turn left, and outside, nobody moves at all, turning right only for elections.

3) Our state has just enough of Kentucky to be countrified, just enough of Ohio to be fiercely loyal to universities we never attended, just enough of Illinois to love cheesy fries and just enough of Michigan to never use a turn signal (it's true - I went to college for a time up there, and y'all don't use them!)

2) We like to control our population growth - we geld our stallions, steer up our bulls, neuter our dogs - shoot, we even detassel our corn!

1) We give parents a powerful deterrent to bad behavior by supplying a place for the threat, "Cut it out or we'll move there!"

All kidding aside, this is a pretty good place to live. I love sports, but I satirize them a lot to try to draw attention to the very real need to live in the now with regard to sports. Our state has a tremendous brain drain because of such powerful emphasis within the school systems on athletes, and they don't prepare the kids for that fateful day when the knee blows out, or when they find out that a 5'-11" guard really isn't that spectacular of a find in the NCAA. We need to maintain our technological base, and the only way to do that is to get folks out of the long-term paradigm that worked well in the 70's when the auto plants and a high-school education were all you needed to be fat, dumb and happy and to realize that our best resource is our people themselves, motivated properly, not the activities that only a select few participate in (in case you're wondering if this is a case of sour grapes, I was a three-sport varsity athlete, where I got to see how both sides of the field work, and also got to get A's on tests given in a coach's class because I and the other players sat in the back row and studied our playbooks - true story!).

Today as my cell phone coverage wavered in and out while trying to discuss some important business with my wife, who was in the same town about five miles away, thus meaning we were most likely uing the same cell phone tower, I came up with my 5 Theses on cell phones (with apologies to Luther) which I will endeavor this afternoon to attach to the front door of the third-party pyramid scheme-style reseller's genuine particle-board booth down at the local Wal Mart.

Thesis #1 - Minutes are meaningless. Obvious are the reasons for the plans you entice us to buy into. Each time I call, the time is measured in units of a minute, so that if I speak for one second or 59 seconds, the cost is the same. If the telephone company can bill in 6-second increments, you can, too, unless you really can't be sure when connections are established or not, and thus would flirt with fraud if you tried to do so.

Thesis #2 - Form is not function. The shrinking of the cell phone has not reduced the troubles with them. At a certain point, the ability to send and receive signals will inherently become lost when the form factor shrinks below the physical charasteristics of the materials used, and this is bad. You will, of course, overcome this minor annoyance with a wide range of customizable covers and an advertising campaign featuring a duet by Trent Reznor and Anne Murray, which will so overwhelm the sense of good taste that we will buy them in droves.

Thesis #3 - Features are foofah. We do not need low-resolution digital cameras, nor do we need to watch TV on a screen smaller than our watch bezel, when we cannot be assured that the call we place at 10:00 will still be connected and audible to the recipient at 10:01. When the phone works as a phone should work, then additional features will help us. All these do is extort cash from either those with more gadget lust than common sense or our teenagers. The fact that they call incessantly to me from the Dark Side scares me, but not as much as the thought of the lead singer from Nine Inch Nails and the singer of Snowbird having anything musically in common enough to have a duet!

Thesis #4 - Kiosks are kitsch. When we see the same person manning a booth to try to sell us a phone that we saw last month trying to sell us a Kirby sweeper and the month before trying to sell us Cutco knives, it reinforces the thought that there is a sucker born every minute, so we need a booth opened every minute to keep up. The folks who work there mean well, but they often get the guarantees for the respective marketing companies confused. I have a Kirby sweeper, and it does work; I have a Cutco knife, and it cuts well. I have a cell phone, and the salesman was confused by the earlier products and seemed convinced that it would work as well. Maybe if attention was turned from marketing drives and funds were siphoned from research and development of new cases, those things could be applied toward thorough training and retention of personnel. Just a thought...

Thesis #5 - Addiction comes anyway. You supply us with the drug of choice - a portable electronic world where we can exist without regard to space, time or the human circadian rhythm. You provide us a way to feel important, because there is at least one person - often standing within 50 feet of us at the mall and just calling because of laziness or love of gadgetry - who wishes to come into contact with us without making an appointment or asking permission. You also allow us to be stalkers, but we won't go there. We can be as lewd, crude and ill-mannered as we wish when we use your products, because we can consider ourselves stepping into our own private offices even when we are discussing Aunt Martha's gall bladder operation in the middle of a crowded elevator.

May the spam of a thousand free e-mail systems infest your switches (actually, this may actually already have happened, so never mind)! May the sheer size of a complicated customized downloadable ring tone clog your bandwidth! May we not fall into the trap of thinking that newer has to automatically work better until we find out that it is true. And, in closing, may we all refuse to purchase another minute or phone from you until you give us detailed maps of the local area with reliable mapping information that shows where the signal goes away as you pass the fire station, where you hear that odd buzz because the radio tower and the cell phone tower have some odd harmonic effect happening, and where your pre-planned rolling servicxe outages are expected to strike next. Maybe then we can truly be a T-Mobile society with a Cingular purpose on the Verizon.

This morning I drew the summer school chauffeur duties, so my son came in to work with me to hang out for a bit until I took him over. On the walk in through the construction zone, he noticed the construction workers' Port-O-Let laying on its side. I didn't even give it a notice, being so immune to the various messes associated with construction going on, but he looked up at me and said, "Dad?"

"What?"

"I sure hope nobody was in there!"

"Me too, Dustin, me too."

So, when you're walking along, minding your own business and you see a big mess, keep in mind 2 things:

1) If you're watching instead of dealing, then you ducked one, so smile already; and

2) it IS possible to have a worse day than whatever it was that you just had!


Happy Monday to all, and to all a good fight!

Welcome to the re-tooling...

Windows has a new name, and Dell has a new box... do YOU have a new, fitter self, and do YOU know your name (deferential reference to an important concept from Wild at Heart).

I'll still write about technology when I can , but this could be so much more than just another technical grind, so I am doing that. I re-thought the separation of the discussion of technology from the living of my life, and I decided that since technology is such an integral part of life, why can't life be an integral part of technology. That said, here are some ramblings...

[I put out a little weekly devotional, just as something to keep the writing fresh - here are the past couple of entries, chosen because they speak so much about food, which is part of life, nicht wahr? I'm not some 'thumper', so I'm not here to judge anyone (remembering, of course, that there is a difference between discernment and judging). I have spent a lot of time being so PC as to water down the messages in my heart, and to go so far not to offend as to be thoroughly ineffective and a terrible spiritual warrior. That's over, the lamb is roaring, and the heart is wild...]

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Church is like a restaurant - there are only two menus, the kids' and the adults'. The kids have to spend a twelve year period of time with the same five menu items - hot dog, pizza, mac and cheese, chicken nuggets, spaghetti, and then are turned loose into a menu they have no idea about. A really successful restaurant would be one where the kids' entrees would gradually add to their developing tastes, so that hot dogs would just be there for the under five set. At 5, they could start a little spaghetti, to get them introduced to other foods, then it could progress so that the kids were soon able to eat the same menu items as the adults, only with smaller portions.

It's been stated that the generation between 18 and 30 is the 'lost generation'. I'm left wondering if they are lost because they chose to be lost, or if they are lost because their attention spans for the excitement there is to be had in the Bible was dulled through repetition, kind of like the reaction you get from kids when you go to the restaurants and they all have the same old things to offer. This is why my son puts ketchup on parmesan-crusted chicken - when you're used to ordering hot dogs and such, you finally get a chance to eat something more substantial, but no one has let you discover HOW to eat it. We joke in the youth a lot about the holy trinity of answers to give when you're caught not paying attention - pray, read your Bible, go to church - but this thought makes me wonder if there's truth in the laughter.

What challenges do we give out? If a five-year-old knows the books of the O.T., do we make them wait a year or two to teach them the N.T.? It's easy to make learning as a church the same as the public educational system. The problem with a cookie-cutter approach can be seen at the edges. Whenever you use a cookie-cutter, you leave part of the cookie out, scrapping it on the flour board. In the process of teaching our kids about God, let's make sure we do that. Who knows, the beanie-weenie set might come to realize the qualities and desirability of a steak, and what impact would THAT have on our world?

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HI! Hope all is well. Not every week is about food, but this past week, the Atkins company - founded by the diet guru Dr. Atkins himself - filed for bankruptcy protection. Apparently, the demand for their products has hit a low point. Duh! Have you ever tasted the stuff? The things they have to do to the products to make them Atkins-approved takes the taste and the health out of them, and we're left with a gritty pseudo-food that makes a significant number of people experience some unpleasant and momentarily urgent side effects, sort of what I imagine a Metamucil-based snack bar would do. Even the diet itself has an incredibly high failure rate. For so many people, they lost 50 pounds in a few weeks, and GAINED 60 back within 6 months. How long did they expect to sell expensive mud pies to the unwitting, fad-loving public when Twinkies are on sale every week?

What has led us to this place is the same thing that can paralyze the church in our modern society - a lack of internal work. A diet plan that just addresses food is like a program that has a limited scope and duration - its effectiveness is limited by the entropy of doing the same thing all the time. The problem with the Atkins plan was that it cut out the bread without getting the blood moving. It filled the body up with a certain combination of foods that made it not be hungry for a time, but then the lack of activity and personal work made it so that it came to an end, and a disastrous end at that. Most people I've known who tried the Atkins thing ended it in one spectacular blow-out of a binge, where they ate more carbs in one day than a rational person does in a couple of weeks, and that was the end of that. As soon as they binged, they left the diet plan.

If the adherents to that plan had just taken the advice of doctors and increased their physical activity, they would have seen results that would have been encouraging and allowed them to stay on track, and they would have found that the key to changing the way you are is not changing what comes your way, but changing what you do with it, and with yourself. Of course it's not quick and easy if you go the way of exercise, and there's some pain involved (my favorite slogan currently comes from the Marines - pain is weakness leaving the body), but by building up and effort, you succeed.

As we do our work in the church, we need to also commit ourselves to exercising. We need to continually work on ourselves (as a body of believers) through the exercise of our faith. We have diligently been seeking out opportunities to reach out to others, and to involve others, and to that we need to add our diligence. As we work hard, we change ourselves for the better, and we also bring hope to other people. When someone loses a lot of weight in a seemingly short period of time, people are curious and ask, "How DID you do it?" When someone successfully keeps the weight off and continually grows healthier, people are curious and ask, "How DO you do it?" We go from 'happened, as in one time deal' to 'happening, as in I want to participate', all depending on the intent and execution. They then seek out actively to have part of that, because it works for a long term.

From here on out, let's work diligently on improving our church and community through the efforts of our hearts. We need to light the fires and then spread them throughout. If we are active and fierce, we will never be irrelevant and obsolete.

Ah! Even less change in a quarter!

Actually, there are quite a few things that change in a quarter. There are also a lot of things that change forever. That's what this thought is about.

We used to be in an ecomony where manufacturing was the determining factor for our status. If the factories did well, so did we, and we were fat, dumb and happy as long as there were a lot of jobs that paid well for doing what can only be considered mundane tasks.

Fast-forward to today. Manufacturing is a blip on the screen when compared to IT. Now, the hope is that IT jobs will pay enough to be considered good and to keep the economy going. They do, but there are some fundamental things that we need to look at in order to have fulfilling lives.

The old wisdom was that a sign of your steady job was that yo uhad a house, a couple of cars, a bass boat, a cabin, etc. The longer you worked, the closer you got to your 35 and out (for those of you who came up in non-GM or, I assume, non-Ford and non-Chrysler, households, after 35 years of working in the factory, you could retire with full benefits), the better off you were.

There was also a particular work pattern that you fell into, and you defined your activities by that pattern. You went to work at 6:00 a.m., 2:00 p.m.l or 10:00 p.m., and then you put in 8 hours. Period. If there was overtime available, you worked it as you either had to or volunteered to, but were well-compensated for the hassle. When your day was done, then so was your thinking about it (if you wanted to think about it off of the clock, that was fine, but there were no dollars attached to it). When you were working, you went at a set rate, and there were even some rewarding experiments where, if you met a quota, you were able to knock off early and receive a fully day's pay.

Viewing the new economy and its drivers, we are again confronted with a situation where a large number of workers are doing what amounts to piece work within the industry, yet the fundamental underlayment of work has been altered. We no longer work 8 hours a day, then leave our concerns, etc. at work. We bring it with us, especially those of us who are on call and are slaves to the devices that middle-schoolers find 'cool'. We still try to retain the trappings of what our parents called success.

What I propose is a different situation. What if we just took a step backwards and focused on what is important. Instead of having to have the newest car, what if we just found one that runs well, and leave it at that? What if we, instead of trying to keep up with the jonses, were our own people and simply relaxed? I see so many people get stressed out, and I am one at times, by all that we keep on our plate. We can't spend any time with our kids because of all that's going on, and then we wonder why they have discipline problems. In our misguided efforts to provide materially for our children and our families, we have neglected them emotionally.

This is why life is changing. This is why there is a new movement from the fast to the realistic, from the hyperefficient to the sanely-paced. It is why we are going to see a resurgence in the arts and an actual waning in the technology. It is time for us to take a stand, and for us to re-invent who and how we are. All it takes is a fair percentage of us to do that, and it will happen.

Instead of pawning my kids off this coming President's Day on either their grandparents or some daycare situation, I'm going to spend the day with them. Maybe this way, when I am old and feeble, they will find a day every once in a while to spend with me. I will eventually be unable to drive, and will probably be so glaucomic that I can't really use a screen (a hazard of this job), but I will be able to feel warm, unhurried, care and concern. When we're at the end of our life, the end of our rope, fat, naked and alone, the newest Blackberry and the jet ski that touched the water exactly once will abandon you.

This is the same reason a vast number of the last generation of blue collar workers died within a few years of their retirement, because in the quest to make life grand, the jobs made life secondary with the materialism. If those problems awaited our forebears, who were able to work 8 hours a day and who didn't have to be stressed out about carrying a pager around, what new kinds of problems await us? Sobering, isn't it.