Some people are idiots and I am convinced that PETA is full of them. Here is just one more example.
For those of you in need of a good insult but too educated to take it from just anyone, visit this site. Let the William Shakespeare insult you himself.
New City Fellowship is beginning the process of looking for a Children's Ministry Director. I am on the search committee that is commissioned to find this person. Please do be praying for us in this search. Children's ministry is an important part of the ministry of New City and as with all church staff positions we need the grace of God in choosing the right people for the job. If any of you are interested or would like to know more, please let me know.
I just need to rant for a minute. I'm really getting pretty tired of what I see as the corporate world. Or maybe it is just my specific situation. There is just too much politics going around. It just seems that every little thing turns into a major fight. I could go into a lot of details about the specific fights that are going on around me and involving me and because of me and all of that. But I won't do that right now. Basically I just want to make a couple of observations that I think are universal. At least they are universal in my universe.
My first comment is this: the motivation to produce a good product (and by that I mean anything that it is your job to produce or do) does not come from the worker having pride in what they do or from thinking it is their duty to do their job well but rather the primary motivation for producing a good product is so that no one else sees you making a mistake. Letting someone else see you make a mistake seems to be the cardinal corporate sin. I guess this attitude is fostered by desire to be promoted and no one thinks that they are going to be promoted if they are the person that makes the mistakes. Because of this pathology the first response to a problem found is to look for a way to pin it on someone else. There is no desire to find the root of the problem and get it fixed. It is all about finding a way to make it look like someone else screwed up and making them fix it. Needless to say this is not the best way to get a job done, especially when you are working with large numbers of people. It might be fine if you were working alone and there was no one there to see your mistake and you could fix it before anyone else noticed, but when lots of people are working together and everyone is looking over the shoulder of everyone else you have a hard time getting anything done.
My second comment is related to my first. It just seems that all that anyone is concerned about it getting to the top of the corporate ladder. I guess it is just the human nature of greed that feeds this but it is really hard to deal with when you are just concerned about getting your job done and those that you are working with are just concerned about getting themselves noticed. I have been working on a web-driven database application that will be used by several different groups, with several different managers that have lots of employees that want to have themselves heard. Every time that I get together with concerned parties I end up having to fight with people that seem to be just offering suggestions because they want their manager to hear their voice and know that they have an opinion. (At least I hope that their suggestions are just that because if they are being serious then they are basically idiots because their suggestions are horrible. Ok, maybe that was a little harsh, but I'm in a bad mood).
I guess overall I'm just growing tired of being in an environment that fosters tension and greed. Or maybe I'm just in a bad mood because it has been a particularly bad day for such things and I have a headache. We'll see what tomorrow brings.
Sorry for the rant.
Kobe Bryant has made the news once again. It seems that this time he is trying to buy his way out of his troubles. No, he isn't buying of the prosecutor or the jury or anything like that. He is doing something even more American, buying off his wife after he has made a mistake. Adultury is a big mistake, the biggest that you can make in a marriage. Kobe paid out a large sum for his adultury, roughly $4 million for a purple diamond ring. I don't think any amount of money can get you out from under the weight of that sin. (Not to say that money could buy you out from under the weight of any sin). I just hope and pray that Kobe doesn't try and buy God's forgiveness but that he finds the only source of peace there is.
Josiah has installed a new Moveabletype plugin at my request. This plugin obfuscates the email address that is attached to the name of the person commenting on my blog. This makes it considerably less likely for an email harvester to pull out email addresses for the purposes of spamming. Hopefully this will make everyone feel safer about posting. However, this may cause problems for those of you using browsers that are not javascript enabled. If this is a problem for too many people, please let me know and I will remove the plugin.
I love Chattanooga. I was born and raised here. I have never been far from home. I just went up the mountain for school and now that I am married I still live here. I'm glad that the rest of the world is now finding out about Chattanooga. (Free registration may be required to view the article).
For anyone that actually reads my blog on a regular basis. (I know that is pretty high hopes for such a sorry blog).
I just wanted to let my loyal fans know that I will be out of town for the next several days. Therefore, don't worry about me if you don't see anything new appear from me on this blog. I will probably get around to posting again no sooner than Monday.
In other news... We got our living room painted. I should have posted this a couple of days ago, but I didn't. Get over it. We actually finished painting around 5:00am Saturday morning. At about 10:00am there was a knock on our door and our furniture arrived. So we now have one room in our house that is complete, for the most part. The color of the paint didn't turn out exactly as we had wished, or as it had appeared on the little color cards that you find at Home Depot. The bottom half of the room is a blue, which turned out a little brighter than we had wished, and the top half of the room is yellow, which turned out a little more pastel than we had wished. The two colors are seperated by a molded chair rail, which is white, like the rest of the trim. Our furniture is blue, but doesn't exactly match the color of the wall. (So I am told, I have no sense for things matching. My wife picks out my clothes every day). I am very happy with the furniture. It is very comfortable.
This is sick. Some stupid radio talk show host thinks that it is his duty to inform the world of the name of the alleged victim in the Kobe Bryant scandal. Any rape counselor type person will tell you that bringing media exposure to the victim is like raping them again. What is it about radio talk show hosts that makes them think that they are smarter than everyone else. Someone needs to slap this guy.
Even if Kobe is innocent, there is no reason to bring this girl into the spotlight. If she is just trying to get Kobe's money then publicity is what she wants, and we shouldn't give it to her. If the allegations are true, and she was indeed raped, then this guy is subjecting her to even more misery. Either way he is a jerk.
Kobe Bryant will soon be on trial for rape in Eagle County, Colorado, unless the defense can get the trial moved. There will be several factors in this case outside of the simple facts of whether or not the sexual intercourse was consensual. I don’t think that there will be any debate as to whether or not the sex happened, seeing as Kobe already admitted to committing adultery with the alleged victim.
This case will also hinge on whether or not a “fair” trial can be had in Eagle County, Colorado, or anywhere else for that matter. Kobe Bryant is one of the most recognized people in the U.S. because of the celebrity he has gained as a basketball player. Celebrity carries with it preconceived notions about the character of the accused. The alleged victim does not have this kind of celebrity and therefore does not have the advantage, or disadvantage, of preconcieved notions following her around. Of course by the time that this case comes to trial we will know more about her than we need to know. Does this constitute bias one way or another? I let the lawyers debate that one.
Also interesting in this case will be the demographics of Eagle County, and by extension the jury. Now I know nothing about Eagle County other than what I read or heard but I do know that there is a very small population of African-Americans (.2%). Now we are not talking about the Jim Crow era but racism still exists. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the course of the trial.
Just some things to keep in mind as this develops.
I don't really know how to respond to this. A 15 year old, 308 pound sumo wrestler died in Japan. It is sad that someone would be that big at all, especially at that age. It is awful that he would die as a direct result of the stress that his weight put on his heart.
I have a few half-complete thoughts that I have wanted to post to this blog for some discussion but I haven't had the time to do it. They are thoughts that need some exploration and deserve to be fully explored in my mind before they are thrown out to the realm of cyberspace for the world to consume. So perhaps they will come soon. However, just to avoid leaving this sitting here with no posts for several days in a row, I must explain why I have been too busy to post.
Generally speaking I do most of my posting while at work, where I have a fast internet connection and good amounts of downtime between actually doing any work. Over the last few days I have still had the fast internet connection but I have not had nearly the amount of downtime that I am accustomed to. I have been working to convert a web/database project from VB.NET to C#.NET. For those of you who are not programmers, those are two separate programming languages that have different syntaxes. It is not exactly like translating from English to French, more like translating from English to Ebonics or something like that. Still, it is tedious work and takes a long time to translate about 40 webforms from one language to another. So that has been eating up every bit of my time at work.
When I get home I don’t have much time either. We just recently purchased a house and as always there is plenty of work to be done to make the house just the way that we want it. For us this work included buying furniture to fill the empty rooms as well as the need to paint and otherwise redecorate a couple of rooms. Well this week we purchased our living room furniture, which will be delivered on Saturday, and now we have to get the living room painted before it arrives.
So last night we started scraping the existing wallpaper so that we can paint the previously pink walls. For those of you who have scraped wallpaper before you know that it is a real pain. For those who have not, count yourself blessed. Wallpaper is not designed to be removed. The intention is that it will stay on the wall forever. There are four walls in our living room, as there are in most rooms, two long walls and two short walls. (For those of you who are slow, image a big rectangle). In about 3 hours of scraping last night we removed most of the paper from one of the short walls, which is about a third of the size of one of the long walls. You can do the math. It is going to take a long time to get this done. And then we have to paint. Needless to say, I don’t have much time to post when I am home. So here I am posting about why I can’t post. Until next time…
I always worry about the theological soundness of anyone that shows up on TBN on a regular basis and the athletes that show up on that station worry me even more. Deion Sanders has now given me even more reason to worry. It seems that Sanders did not want to pay all of his bill for the repairs on his car so he told the repair shop that he was only going to pay $1500 of the $4265.57 bill because "Jesus had informed him that was all he needed to pay." What's sad is that his reason for not paying doesn't surprise me as much as the fact that the car was a 1961 Lincoln Continental. This guy made millions of dollars and he is driving a 1961 Lincoln Continental. It's as big as a Hummer and probably gets fewer miles to the gallon but doesn't have quite the same status that a Hummer has. I guess I expect regular TBN guests to think in this way but I don't expect them to drive my grandmother's car.
I'm glad we finally know why Stonehenge was built. I've always wanted to visit Stonehenge, but with this description I'm not quite sure I want to visit any more.
This is ridiculous. I am trying to do some VB/ASP.NET/SQL Server 2000 programming on a project that was 3 months overdue before it was turned over to me but I can never get it done. It is usually insane the number of meetings that take place in this corporate setting, but today is particularly insane. Today I will literally spend more time in meetings than I will spend doing any actual work. (Of course there are some days that I have only one meeting but am not particularly productive that the same thing could be said). I came in today and worked from 8:00am until 10:00 and then went to a meeting. The meeting lasted an hour and a half and then I went to lunch. I got back from lunch at 12:30pm and I have another meeting at 1:30 that is supossed to last until 3:00. At that time I will come back to my desk and prepare for the video conference meeting that I am supposed to be leading from 3:30 until 4:30ish (chances are it will last longer). After that last meeting I will try and kill a few minutes and then head home. Today is really going to be an unproductive day. I guess I shouldn't waste any more moments typing this.
This is very cool. I told you that 1984 is getting closer every minute. Something about this really fascinates me.
For all you conspiracy theorists/personal privacy nuts out there, it looks like you have one more thing to worry about. It seems that 100 retailers have joined together to research and develop a system to replace the familiar UPC barcodes that are so ubiquitous. The catch is that this new system will use tiny computer chips and antennae to broadcast information about the product to whoever wants to know. The stated purpose of this is to alert the retailer to important information about the product and make checkout easier. However there are a plethora of privacy issues to consider as well. Chief among these is what is to stop someone from using the merchandise that you purchased to spy on you?
I think that privacy issues are really going to be coming to the forefront even more in the next several years. These issues have been in the forefront for techie types for a while, but I have a feeling that it is really going to come to the attention of the average person in the next couple of years. It feels like 1984 is getting closer every day.
I’m interested to know what everyone thinks about Dusty Baker’s comments. For those that don’t follow sports or don’t now what is going on you can read this, and this. Also, just to summarize, Baker, the current and first ever black manager of the Chicago Cubs, made a comment about players with darker skin being able to handle the heat of the summer better than those with fairer complexions. Baker’s comments outraged some as “reverse racism” and many people just want to point out that his facts are wrong. Some want to argue that if a white manager had made the comment he would have been fired on the spot.
Since I am white and my wife is black I have to deal with race relations every day. It is always interesting to me how different my take on an issue can be than hers simply because of the different way that we look at the world based upon our race.
I would like to know if you think that Baker should be fired for his comments or if it is alright for him to say the things that he did because he is black. Is Baker just guilty of ignorance in his take on darker skin and the ability to handle the heat or is he just propagating a stereotype? What's your take?
I am a huge sports fan.
The first thing I do every morning when I come to work is log in to my computer and go to ESPN.com. I am also an incredibly loyal Atlanta Braves fan as well as a University of Tennessee fan. (Hey, I grew up in the south, sue me). At the same time, and perhaps because I am so loyal to a couple of teams, there are certain teams that I cannot stand, most notably the New York Yankees and Florida Gators but also including the L.A. Lakers, Dallas Cowboys, and whatever team happens to be playing the Braves or Vols.
My hatred for these teams can get so strong that at times I have uttered things like, “I would cheer for a team comprised of Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin before I would cheer for the Yankees.” I think there is something seriously wrong with me because when I first heard about Kobe Bryant being arrested for sexual misconduct my first thought was, “I knew he was a jerk.”
I think I need some therapy.
I always thought that depression was kind of silly. I have never really been an overly emotional person and I have never really had much sympathy for people who were struggling with depression. I always just thought that they should get over it. I always assumed that they were depressed over something silly, something that didn’t really make any difference.
My thoughts on this matter have changed since I have been married. No, it is not being married or dealing with my wife that makes me depressed. What depresses me is when my wife is gone.
My wife is in Miami for a mission’s trip this week and I am home all alone. It is amazing the difference it makes having just that one person around. Somehow I get bored so much quicker when I am by myself than I do when she is here. I find myself moping around wishing that she were just in another room, or something.
It is not like our lives are full of excitement when she is around; she just somehow completes the picture. Without her there is something noticeable missing. Anyone who knows me well knows that I have no problem being alone. Before I met my wife I was perfectly content to spend a Friday night sitting in my room at school, reading a book or playing a computer game. I didn’t think that I needed anyone else around. I can no longer do that. I am now perfectly content to do the same things on a Friday night, as long as my wife is somewhere near. Knowing that I will not see her for a week makes me physically sick. I don’t know how to explain it, maybe it is just me.