23. June 2010 by admin.

Life happens, people move in, move out, move up, move along. It seems like over the past several years, some very wonderful people have moved in and then moved along. My life was touched in some important way that was evidently intended for the moment. The internet has made the world a much smaller place, but even so, we can lose touch very easily.

Quite some time ago I was the one that moved along, when I left Birmingham to move to the Gulf Coast. It was a good move for me, but it carried a cost. Vowing to keep in touch, of course that reserve faded with time. Even the annual Christmas cards were eventually abandoned.

Many years before that, I left my home town for military service, again, a good move but with its own cost. Throughout the years that have intervened between then and now, many, many very good friends have passed through my life.

I thank God for Facebook, really I do. I’m reconnecting with some of those old friends and connecting for the first time with some of my family.

But not all.

There are still some significant friendships that I’d like to renew, that I haven’t found on Facebook yet. I haven’t given up hope, I keep searching every couple of months for those names; roommates out in California, study buddies at UAB and TSU, fellow torture victims at Defense Language Institute.

Even now, having set down my own set of roots, I know that any day now I could receive notice of another friendshift. It happens.

Let’s not lose touch!

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22. June 2010 by admin.

It’s no secret that I’m not a blind follower of Steve Jobs and all things Apple. But the more I use Apple products, the more I find about them to like.  Not love, but like.

I seriously enjoy my iPhone, and my macbook and I get along remarkably well. I also enjoy my Windows and Linux machines, and I have several other non-Apple branded devices that are great. I don’t own any singular stock in any technology companies, so I don’t have any interest in how well any company does in sales, beyond the fact that a healthy company will be able to service its products in the future. I can be completely honest in my impressions of the latest operating system installed on my iPhone, and I will.

The first thing I noticed was that my wallpaper is showing behind my icons–an immediate plus for me, because my wallpaper is a picture of my Savior, it’s a picture I really like, and even though the icons obscure parts of the picture, I can still see it, and it still serves the purpose of reminding me to keep my eyes on Him.

Creating folders for my icons was very easy–just dragging one icon on top of another. Fortunately I did think to choose two in the same general category, and I ended up with a same-sized icon-looking thing that said Productivity with two mini-icons in it, one for Evernote and one for DropBox.  I followed the same procedure for six other folders and got five pages of icons down to two. Not sure yet how I’m going to like that ultimately, but right now it’s pretty cool.

Email has some cool changes. I can see the contents of all my inboxes in one list, each inbox separately, and each account with its own other folders separately. Additionally, this update corrected a condition that I alone may have experienced. We use a system called JIRA for our project management activities. When a change is made or ticket is created, an email is sent to each of the relevant parties. Previous to this update, I could see, in the email, only the header information for the ticket, and I would have to go to the JIRA program to see the ticket itself. Now the email itself is bringing in all of the information. My boss said his has always done this, and I didn’t know that, and I hadn’t thought anything about it, because there were several issues I had with stuff "working" on the iPhone,  like any Java-based websites.

The camera zooms now! It’s not a huge distance that it zooms, and it’s not a physical zoom. It’s a decent zoom for a phone camera, though, more than it had before. Let’s face it, it’s still a phone camera. If I need a high-quality shot, I need to use a real camera.

Now for the hot topic: Multi-Tasking! I saved this for last because it was the thing I was most looking forward to, and if anything spells anticlimactic in this update, Multitasking is it. I’m lukewarm toward it because the performance of the concept is lukewarm. The applications seem to be put into a state of suspension, not much more "live" than they are when you close them out. Bring an inactive app back to the front still requires it to come up out of that state of suspension. I haven’t noticed any real difference in opening the app from scratch and bringing it back up from a different app. I’m also so used to having to open it fresh that I’m not pulling it up out of the "tray," but I suppose if this were my first iPhone, I would go to the "tray" first for my open apps, sort of like doing the "alt+tab" or "command+tab" to cycle through the open apps on your computer. It remains to be seen if keeping apps "open" in the "tray" will suck up performance or battery life.

Overall, I like this update. Previous updates have messed with the order the podcasts were listed in, and since I listen chronologically to them and do so as I drive, having them listed chronologically is something I appreciate. A couple of times I nearly put my podcast listening on hold while I waited for Apple to fix it. But given the amount of stuff that gets tweaked and played around with in an update or upgrade, once they fix it I’m a happy camper.

If you’re on the fence about this upgrade, find someone who’s got it and play around with it. I think you’ll find enough to like in it to justify going for it.

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10. June 2010 by admin.

My garden is a teacher. I have become convinced that all of life’s lessons can be learned or understood in a garden.

Most recently, we have been harvesting corn. God blessed our corn crop this year beyond our expectations.  We pull it from the stalk, chop off both ends, pull the husks, remove the silks, cut the kernels from the cob, blanch it in water to kill the enzymes, cool it, and bag it up for the freezer. It’s time-consuming and labor-intensive. We don’t particularly love the effort but we definitely enjoy having the corn all year long. The process hasn’t changed much over a very long time.

We had heard that allowing the huskless ears to stand in cold water would make removing the silks easier. Like everything else "they say," we cast a skeptical eye on it.

Then came the evening that we knew we would not be able to complete a whole cycle of the process with the ears we had picked. So we packed them in an ice chest and buried them under the contents of two bags of ice.

Wonder of wonders, the next afternoon as I began to remove the silks from the ice-cold ears, I found them decidedly more cooperative. All of a sudden, I became a believer in something we’ve always heard "they say" to be true.

Something else happened that afternoon, though. My tolerance for remaining silks left on the ears dropped to near zero. I now had a process that made better results easier to achieve.

I work with some amazing people. Some are very creative; some are detail-oriented; some have incredible technical skills; some are visionaries. Every one of them would look at yesterday’s great results as mere mediocrity if a new tool enabled them to raise the bar on themselves.

Read that last phrase again, I promise you it’s true. We will raise the bar on ourselves as skills improve, as tools improve, as processes improve.

It’s what we do.

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9. June 2010 by admin.

I just downloaded Qumana. I think it has a learning curve. It doesn’t seem to have "installed," and it takes FOREVER to load. That may not be its fault, I’ll restart and see what happens.

edit:  Okay, got it. 

The reason for wanting this piece of software was that I almost never get to play on a windows machine at my house, until my new laptop gets here, in maybe a couple of weeks.

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