Most New Year’s Resolutions fail.

If you doubt this, look at your waistline, your bank account, and the amount you spend on your particular vice(s).

So, how are mine going

Status at the moment:

1. Small Group leadership.  I’ve sucked at this one, at least in the short term.  I did ask my co-leader to take over, and he did a wonderful job.  I’m back at the helm through the end of this term, but I remain undeterred that I’m going to step out of small group leadership (and small groups) next fall.  Rating: Fail.
2. Facebook.  I’m out, and I’ve stayed out.  The app is not on my phone, and I have no desire to go back.  Rating: Winning.
3. Kindle Bible study.  This one was classic:  I did it like gangbusters for 2 weeks, then…uh.  Basically, I was on day 12 of my study in January,  then I loaded it this morning and I was on Day 12.  Rating: Fail.
4. Writing code every day.  At this point, I’m writing code at least every week….Rating: Fail.
5. Stop watching TV.  I have stopped watching TV, other than watching things with Whitney or the occasional UK game.  Rating: MEH
6. Take walks every day.  FAIL
7. Give gifts without expectations.  WIN.  I think this has actually been the most important change in my attitude.
8. Sufficient clothes + take care of them.  FAIL.  And I’m fatter than I was last year, so even that meager amount I had don’t fit.  EPIC Fail.
9. Visiting Parents once per month.  Win.  I’ve visited with them each month through March.

Final Tally:

“Are these your kids?!” the 50-ish man leaned over and asked me.  Despite the din of 100+ decibel music, he seemed calm and his voice was clear.  We were second row back on the center stage, and Jamie Grace just got done strumming her guitar in a duet with Toby Mac.  My son Joey was star struck, and Caleb looked like he’d just wet his pants when TobyMac strolled casually in on his part of the song, Hold Me.

I hear this today as a planted sales question:

“Why shouldn’t I just use an Open Source solution instead of [my company’s dooflotchy]?”

So help me, this is what I recall as being what the speaker wanted the salesperson to respond.

Well, first of all, you get what you pay for.  Would you really want to trust your sensitive data to a piece of Open Source?  We will support and stand behind our solution, and you have every opportunity to influence the product roadmap if you go with us.

I remember distinctly being in Don Napier’s 6th grade Language Arts class in Sebastian Middle School in Jackson, KY and getting one of those writing assignments everyone hates.  

Write an essay arguing a position.

It was the early days of the Kentucky Education Reform Act in Kentucky.  The Supreme Court of Kentucky (SCOK) had decided that the education system in Kentucky was unconstitutional, that our perennial position just above Mississippi on every aptitude test was not good enough, so out with the old, in with the new.

The other day, I found myself wallowing a tad, and I cried out to God, simply: “God, please help me.”

At the time, I was writing in my journal, some pretty negative, emotionally-charged stuff, like:

1. I feel like a failure as a husband.
2. I feel like a failure as a father.
3. My career isn’t working out the way I really would like.  I’m certainly duller than I was in 2010, and I feel overwhelmed all the time.
4. I’m not coding regularly anymore.

Writing the above, I literally stopped in mid sentence and immediately wrote these words:

Few things in this world make me fighting mad.  But then, there’s this.

http://www.kentucky.com/2012/12/07/2435663/rare-state-takeover-of-school.html

This is my hometown.  This where my formative years were spent.   And, because of idiotic graft, nepotism, and malfeasance, this is where my blood relations remain trapped in a cycle of hopelessness compounded by cronyism, intent on keeping power (what pathetic excuse for power it is!) for themselves.

Were I Dante, there’d be some Terza Rima regarding Arch Turner and his ilk’s future in Hell, but words fail me.

I’m afraid quite a bit.  It’s getting on my nerves.

I understand I shouldn’t be afraid, both from a Biblical and a rational perspective.  I have been redeemed, and life’s never been better.  Nevertheless, that’s not really helping me at the moment.

I’m going to try and apply something I learned about grief:  You have to grieve.  You can’t avoid or deny it, or you will grieve at the most inconvenient time possible.  Likewise, fear seems something you must face and give name to, then you can move past it.  So, here goes.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/

Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things:  Businesses do things for irrational and political reasons all the time (see below), but in the main they converge on doing things which increase revenue or reduce costs.  Status in well-run businesses generally is awarded to people who successfully take credit for doing one of these things.  (That can, but does not necessarily, entail actually doing them.)  The person who has decided to bring on one more engineer is not doing it because they love having a geek around the room, they are doing it because adding the geek allows them to complete a project (or projects) which will add revenue or decrease costs.  Producing beautiful software is not a goal.  Solving complex technical problems is not a goal.  Writing bug-free code is not a goal.  Using sexy programming languages is not a goal.  Add revenue.  Reduce costs.  Those are your only goals.

“For seven years….”

“For SEVEN years….”

“FOR SEVEN years, Harold….”

Just as a child knows when his full given name comes from his flustered parent’s mouth, a husband knows when his wife starts naming the time they’ve been married, he’s in trouble.

Well, honey, for SEVEN YEARS tomorrow…

…you’ve stood by me.

…you’ve watched me break, and grow, and break again.

…you’ve watched me struggle, and doubt, and blame, and generally resist any form of responsibility or accountability.

My last 36 hours.

• In 4-5pm daily meeting on Monday (that’s a #win by itself), the manager in charge ejaculates a “well, shit!” in the middle of the meeting.  Turns out a 7am all-managers meeting was scheduled the next day by the CEO.  “That’s never good,” he noted.  #obviouslynot
• Tuesday, 6am, I saw this tweet.  It was real, and it was not spectactular; seventeen hundred worldwide jobs evaporated, including 350 in Lexington.  Gory details here.
• I came into work to a morgue.  First and second line managers were going around talking to individuals and my “talking to” seemed ambiguously in the future.  I checked on a couple guys from church and both seemed safe, and my small group was praying for my job.  There was the appropriate level of gallows humor, but it just felt different than times we’ve done this in the past.
• By ~11am we had an “all building” meeting scheduled in our main conference room downstairs, lead by my boss.  The meeting was to be at 2.
• Throughout the rest of the day, people and contractors were told what their futures held.
• At the meeting it was announced that we’re undergoing a reorganization in our area, but we were not offered the names of people who would be departing.  We were told that our deliverables for the Fall were not rescheduled or delayed in any way, despite losing a significant percentage of the people responsible for final delivery checklists.
• The remainder of the day was weird discussions with others, hallway talk, and a poignant departure note sent to a department-wide distribution list.

I went home and felt empty.  Just utterly empty. . .and I don’t do well with that typically.  In lieu of going in for dinner–and probably spewing my pent up emotions at my wife and kids–I grabbed a pickaxe and shovel and dug up some more posts in my back yard  Per my Dad’s sage advice, physical activity is often the best stress relief, and it truly helped.  

I sat in this very seat a month ago a broken man, a failure.

I intended to send my pastor a quick note asking him to pray for me.  What actually happened was time disappeared, and what’d been pent up for months spewed out of my heart, down my touch-typing to an email that Scott said was too long to even attempt reading on his smartphone.

The subject line:  “I’m broken…”

“This is definitely the kind of seizure you want your kid to have.”

What?!
She was an ER resident with an icy, direct gaze and a no-frills haircut.  At that moment, I couldn’t remember her name because I was busy trying to get my wife to drink something as she held our daughter, who, an hour before, had just had a grand mal seizure in our downstairs bathtub.  An hour or so later, our other two kids were at a friend’s house, my car had a Check Engine Light because I flogged it so hard getting to UK Hospital, and we were both trying to process what happened.

http://www.wired.com/business/2012/07/ff_stevejobs

I work in technology.  I’m writing this on a second generation Macbook Air.  My family owns or has owned: 2 ipod classics, 3 ipod nano’s, 1 Intel iMac, 3 iPhones (1 3G, 1 iphone 4, 1 4s).  I’m not a fanboi, but I’m in the neighborhood.

That disclosed, let me be very clear in my position:  Fuck Steve Jobs.

Not because of what he did–he did great things (Apple, NeXT, Pixar, Apple…again), nor for his tyrannical management.  I raise the cyber middle finger to Jobs because people conflate the two.  They conclude that to do great things, you must be a tyrant, and that’s just wrong.  In fact, the collateral damage of Jobs may take more than a decade to undo, just because people misunderstand who he was.

After a great date night last night–long, in-depth conversations and understanding–I awoke this morning feeling like crap.

I’ll spare you the details, but the quote of the morning was, “Great.  You apparently have Cholera.”  Given the symptoms, I couldn’t disagree.

So, I slept ’til about noon, with Whitney insisting I stay hydrated, then I watched a few episodes of ‘Glee’ on Amazon Prime (okay, the first 6 eps of the first season).

Just wanted to jot down a few notes so I’d remember this week:

• Sunday I heard a great sermon at church, then took Maria and Grace down to see Mom & Dad.  We had a nice little visit, then drove back through 1 hour of solid downpour.  It didn’t rain at all in Georgetown, though.
• Monday I had a quasi-regular day at work and then spent 2.5 hours with my pastor thereafter.
• Tuesday I had a somewhat regular day at work, though my “Driving Change” group–Dave Ellison and Patricia Ritchie–were back in town so we had some practice and preliminary work to do.
• Wednesday was Driving Change, all day, and a webchat with Cebu from 7->7:30 am.  I was late showing up for the first presentation and was behind most of the day.  At lunchtime, we got to sit with our CEO Paul Rooke and my Division Vice President, Marty Canning, to discuss how to move change through Lexmark.
• Thursday was the big presentation day.  I woke up nauseated and threw up twice…couldn’t tell if it was nerves or if I was just sick.  (In general, I don’t get nauseated by nerves)  I made it through my presentation, but felt progressively sicker as the day wore on.  
• Friday I didn’t really feel like going in–stomach hurt like hell and I couldn’t stray too far from a bathroom.  I went in anyway, though, as I had a sizing for a future project due by 5:01pm.  I submitted it by 5:01pm.  A treat though: I got to hang with Gracie while Maria and Whitney went out to dinner and watched “Brave.”  Also, the LXK stock managed to drop by ~20% yesterday, and Jim Cramer slapped us with a SELL SELL SELL on his charts, because we’re “Just an awful business. Awful.”  ::sigh::

It was a tough week and I’m still not fully recovered.  I beginning to wonder if all the stress of things I know and don’t know is giving me some serious physical effects.

In Ecclesiastes 6:3-7, we read:

3If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, however many they be, but his soul is not satisfied with good things and he does not even have a proper burial, then I say, “Better the miscarriage than he, 4 for it comes in futility and goes into obscurity ; and its name is covered in obscurity. 5 “It never sees the sun and it never knows anything; it is better off than he. 6 “Even if the other man lives a thousand years twice and does not enjoy good things -do not all go to one place ?” 7All a man’s labor is for his mouth and yet the appetite is not satisfied.  

Two months into our new house, amid the Drought of 1988 (redux).

What’s gone wrong:

• Mold.  Pervasive mold on every floor, especially in the basement.  At the moment, my wife refuses to go down there for any length of time.
• HVAC.  Turns out the mold on the top floor was caused by the 23-year-old HVAC unit that was listed as ‘7 years old’ on the disclosure form.  In reality, the AC coil was leaking, and the drip pan was rusted out, so whenever it ran, it ran moisture down into the drywall in my girls’ room.  New HVAC system installed upstairs, on credit. #facepalm
• TV reception.  Despite my current efforts (the booster we had on our old house) the Jerry-rigged (asshole was named ‘Jerry’) coax from the attic VHF/UHF antenna won’t pull in our local PBS affiliate after 8am.
• Dishwasher leaks on the lower left front corner.
• Plumbing fun: Slow drain in the downstairs bath, indifferent water pressure (cold or hot) in downstairs bath, leaky trap O-ring under the kitchen sink.
• Our garage door spring snapped ~2 weeks in, cost ~$400 to fix.

Still yet, the house is utterly solid, and build to a “they don’t build them like this anymore” level that has Whitney and myself thrilled.  The hardwood in the foyer, stairs, and Den is holding up great, and the garage has plenty of possibilities.

As of June 23rd last year, I was “promoted” to the title of Architect within my organization, reporting directly to a Third line manager.  I was taken off of regular, day-to-day delivery activities and basically given freedom to involve myself wherever I thought best, or wherever my boss needed me.

At the time, I was given the following commentary and advice:

• “Welcome to being the bitch.”
• “So, are they going to let you code anymore?”
• “You’re going to have to get used to being very broad, and very shallow.  You have to know alot and have a high-level understanding of almost everything, but not get mired in the day-to-day.”
• “You’re more of an advisor than an architect.  Your job is to advise those making decisions and help do technical mediation for those teams.”

Those quotes came from the first week.  At some time or another in the past year, they’ve all been true.

Ah yes, John Carter, aka “John Carter of Mars,” aka “A Princess of Mars.”  You single handedly assured that Andrew Stanton of Pixar will never, ever be granted final cut again.  You lost something like a quarter of a billion dollars for your parent company, Disney.

You know I’ve seen many bad films in my life (current nadir being “Tristan and Isolde”), and John Carter isn’t one of them.

It isn’t a great film.  Comparison to other alien epics like Cameron’s Avatar inevitably come, and Carter does poorly.  We don’t truly care about our hero until well into the second act.  Worse, the framework of the story–that John Carter has died suddenly on earth and his nephew Edgar Rice Burroughs (get it?) is reading his fantastic account of his Barsoon Exploits–just feels like faux epic claptrap right up to the end.

So, we moved.

We sold our old house on the east side of Georgetown, KY and moved to a house on the west side. I’m currently so tired and overwrought I can’t even remember if one capitalizes ’east’ in a sentence.  I think you do, but capital letters just hurt my eyes right now.

We couldn’t have done it without lots of help from folks at church, especially folks from our small group.  We got T’s Chevy Colorado truck (2.8L 4-cylinder, AT for those scoring at home) for almost a week, and schlepped stuff to T’s garage, B&D’s basement, our storage building, my office at work, and a Mobile Attic.  Most of the stuff (at least the things not in the mobile attic, actually got moved *twice*.