Ballmer a switcher?

I have to say that this made my day. Just saw this posted on Cult of Mac. Apparently Steve Ballmer was recently giving a presentation at a conference using a MacBook Pro. Did he give up on Vista, too? If you read the comments there, though, apparently several folks used macs for their presentations, doesn't necessarily mean Ballmer used it - but I have to love the picture nonetheless :)

Got Service?

A friend on the Christian Musician Forum posted this vid tonight. I'll add no commentary except to say that I'm that guy. (Well, except for the good looks, the suit, and the Buick....)

Soul Man

I read on article on Premier Guitar about Lincoln Brewster called Soul Man. The article covers a lot of ground about Lincoln's history, the Christian music scene in general, and, of course, his gear.

I think the conclusions in the article about the state of the Christian music scene are very correct - in fact I posted some of my opinions on the subject in a response to Peter on his blog and they closely match what Lincoln had to say. Now it may be that since I share Lincoln's passion for guitar and guitar-driven songs that I identify with him like I do, but I still have to agree that most Christian music is designed to follow or mimic the mainstream. Rap starts to become popular - all of a sudden there are a bunch Christian rappers popping up.

At any rate, the article is a good read.

NMD

It's New Mac Day at the Lowe household. Yay!

We decided to be decadent with our tax refund and upgrade my wife from her 5 year old 1.2Ghz G4 iBook to a shiny new glossy-screened 2.4Ghz Core2Duo MacBook with 2G ram, 160G hard disk, and the SuperDrive. She's tickled.

I was impressed with how easy it was to get it going for her. She's been a faithful user of Time Machine since I bought her an external drive shortly after we upgraded all our machines to Leopard. One of the setup options when powering on the new machine was to transfer information from an existing Mac, with several options as to how to accomplish this task. One of them was from a Time Machine backup - which also happened to be what the lady at the Apple store recommended. So, about 40 minutes after plugging in the backup drive, she was in business. Impressively so. The mac connected right up to our Wi-Fi, all her apps were there and working, all the settings and passwords worked, and all her documents, photos, and other files were ready to go. The only things that she had to do were: authorize the computer on her iTunes account, and reconfigure the printers as those curiously didn't come over.

There are a few things I'm not so impressed about, though. First, the machine did not come with a video adapter, so hooking up her external 19" Samsung monitor and projectors at her work requires that we buy a $20 adapter. The last several macs I've purchased have included this. Also, it didn't come with the Apple remote for use with FrontRow and Keynote. My last Mac purchase included that item as well. Finally, when we bought the iBook for her back in '03, the folks at the Apple store were more than happy to help her copy documents and files from her windows based Dell laptop. This go around, however, they wanted $150 to do the same service, or charge $99 for their ProCare service, which includes one free transfer. That really turned out to be a non-issue for me given how easy it was accomplish.

It's a nice, fast, beautiful machine and we expect good service from it, just as we've had good service from her iBook.

Getting Things Done

Fernando posted recently about concepts from a book called Getting Things Done that have helped him organize his life. Reading through his post, I realize I'm suffering from a couple of key points: First, the capacity to deal with and prioritize many incomplete projects, and secondly, procrastination.

My company always has many projects happening. I'm feeling overwhelmed almost to that point of not knowing what to do next. Couple the massive amounts of project work we have to do with maintaining daily operations and then reacting to problems as they arise, and I don't feel like I'm moving projects along as efficiently as they should be.

It's an eye-opener to me that procrastination can be attributed to not clearly seeing the the very next thing that must be done to keep a project moving. That fits in nicely with one of my current goals as a manager: provide clarity. One of my boss's key tenets of management is that it is management's responsibility to provide clarity so people can do their jobs. This concept pulls that all together for me. I need to learn how to break down tasks into smaller detailed tasks - quickly.

I've ordered the book.

Claiming my blog on Technorati

This post is just to claim my blog on my Technorati Profile

One of those OOOPS moments!

A guy I know on the Heartcall Cafe Forums shared a story about locking his keys in his truck, and it reminded me of an experience I had in the vein, so I thought I'd share it here.

When I was about 17, I wanted to do something nice for my dad for father's day. I asked my mom if I could take his car up to the car wash to wash, vacuum and wax it. She said sure and gave me her set of keys. Now you have to understand, all the time growing up, we NEVER got to drive dad's car. Not that he ever had anything that you'd consider a special or nice car, it was just his thing - his car was HIS car.

Anyway, I get to the car wash near our home, and it was slammed, very busy. So, I decide to drive to the car wash by our church, that was a couple of miles away. I pull up to the vacuums and go to work, vacuuming and dusting the interior of the car, and then moving to the trunk. Just as I finished the trunk, the keys fell out of my shirt pocket onto the floor of trunk. I saw them glistening in the sun just as the trunk lid slammed shut.

D'oh

So, I go a payphone at the Safeway across the street and call home. My mom was annoyed, and said she'd send my dad down in the other car. Well, remember when I said my mom gave me her keyring? Her keyring had her copies of the keys to both their cars on it. My dad always had 2 keyrings, one with the keys to his car, and the other had his copy of the key to mom's car, and all his other keys for house, work and so forth on it. Wanna guess where that second keyring was? Oh, I'll tell ya. It was in his jacket pocket. His jacket was in the trunk of his car. I put it there when I was vacuuming the interior of the car because it was laying on the back seat, in my way.

At this point, I'm at the carwash that's about 5 miles from home, with both of the keys to my mom's car locked in the trunk of my dad's car. On Father's day. Dad did have the keys to his car with him, so he hopped on my bicycle and rode it to where I was. He was mad. MAD, I tell you. He was huffin and puffin from his ride. Got in his car, started it up, and said "you're riding that bike home," as he sped off screeching the tires on the wet pavement at the car wash.

I have never, ever locked keys in a car since that day.

Pain

"Life is pain. Anyone who says different is selling something." That quote from the movie The Princess Bride has always stuck with me as something profound. I think an important life-skill we all must learn is how to suffer. Chip Ingram in his book Effective Parenting in a Defective World says that one of the key things we parents ought to be teaching our kids is to suffer well. To know that our suffering is a process that God uses to teach, discipline and grow His children. M. Scott Peck in his book The Road Less Traveled speaks of looking forward to the painful times in life because those dark times are periods of growth and we exit the other side a more complete, or perhaps more sane person.

Why, then, do we think that down times or periods of depression mean there is something wrong with us? Certainly there bouts of depression that are related to medical problems, and others that are debilitating. I'm not talking about that, I'm referring to the periods in our lives where we experience pain and suffering, and need to work past it.

Experiencing loss is probably the most common. Losing a job or a friend, a divorce, death of a loved one are pretty obvious. Not so obvious is transitioning through the phases of life. Moving from childhood to young adulthood, leaving the home, marriage, adulthood, middle age, senior citizen. Those transitions involve a realization that life is changing for us. Sometimes we cognitively realize this, embrace the change, and move through it. More often, though, we look back years later and only then understand we were going through a life transition.

So does going through a life transition, a time of obvious loss, or another period of change constitute the medical condition of depression? Put another way, are these times of pain intended, or anomalies to be treated?

The Bible is full of examples of people experiencing pain and suffering as part of growth. I think, therefore, that times of struggle are normal, good, and intended. I think Chip Ingram's take that we need to learn to suffer well is the wise approach.

My boss once told me that we always have many choices we can make, most of them good - we have to be careful to choose the best one. I'd modify that somewhat: we have many choices we can make, we need to look for the wisest one.

Cars

I mention in my profile that I'm into cars. I like cars. I like fast cars. I like cars that handle. I love fast cars that handle. Unfortunately, though, I don't even have a car I like let alone fit into any of those descriptions. I suppose if I had my druthers, I'd have something like a BMW 3-series for something pretty fast and handles well, an old muscle car like a '68-'72 Chevelle SS, Olds 442, Pontiac GTO, and something like a Chevy Avalanche for toting the family and gear around - though with gas prices the way they're going, I doubt I'll ever have any of them.

Currently, we have an '05 Chrysler Town and Country minivan. It's our 3rd Chrysler Corp minivan, having had 2 Dodge Grand Caravans prior to this one. We've grown to love the utility, people moving ability, comfort, and ride of a minivan, and have been pleased with the Chrysler products. Both our previous vans were near 200K miles when traded or sold, and we anticipate the same kind of service from this one. We average around 22mpg with it.

We also have a '92 Honda Accord. I bought this one for $1500 off of ebay last year as I wanted a smaller car for better gas mileage than the pickup I drove up until I bought this. It needs a little work, but it's been pretty solid so far. And suprisingly fun to drive. It's got a lot more pep that the last asian car I had, and handles pretty well, too. It gets right around 30mpg.

I still have the pickup I mentioned above, but I'm getting ready to sell it. It's a '99 Chevy K-1500. I love it, but it's just not a practical vehicle for us to keep right now. The van has all the utility we need, and my neighbor his a nice open trailer that our van can pull should we have the need. The truck gets about 17mpg.

Expelled

Most have probably heard of the Ben Stein movie "Expelled - No Intelligence Allowed." I plan to see the movie after it's released on April 18th. My expectations for the film are low, however. I'm expecting a Michael Moore-ish over-dramatization of facts, and a one-sided depiction of events. That said, I'm looking forward to the film and the discussion it will spark.

I found the recent story about Richard Dawkins getting in to see the film in Minnesota pretty funny, and I particularly found this guy's self-described pre-emptive strike against the creationist propaganda that the film is espousing. He says the film contains "Dishonest tactics through and through," and yet in his very next sentence says: "I haven't seen the movie yet because it's not out." Uhm, and you consider yourself qualified to speak on the content of the film? Oh you've heard Ben Stein talk about the film. I see. Who exactly is being dishonest here? The film might be, but you have no real way of knowing it, do ya Skippy. You most definitely are.

At any rate, it'll be interesting to see what happens when it opens. It'll probably fade into oblivion quickly after its release.

Check out the trailer:

Why I run a Mac

I haven't yet posted about work. Currently, I'm Director of Customer Services for a small Software as a Service (SaaS) company. Our services are designed to facilitate fundraising and relationship building for ministries. We support our product on three major platforms: Mac, Linux, and for those unfortunate souls still stuck with it, Windows.

Our company is part of a growing breed of organizations who've realized that walls, bricks, mortar, and especially cubicles, can get in the way of productivity and bringing life and liveliness to their staff. Sometimes this is termed as working in a virtual office, telecommuting, or working from a Small Office/Home Office (SOHO). Whatever you call it, though, I think it's wonderful. Myself or anyone in our company can be productive virtually anywhere there's internet and cell coverage available. That means I can live and be anywhere that brings me life - and still do the work I need to do to contribute to society and tend to my family's material needs and wants.

And with a single Mac computer I can develop, test, demonstrate, and use our products in the environments our clients will.

Why Mac computers? Well, other than the fact that Macs work better for most people than other computers out there, Macs offer one thing that no other computer does. The ability to run Mac OS, Linux, and Windows. Simultaneously. Virtualization products from Parallels and VMWare make this possible. For a company like ours that believes you ought to be able to live and work in ways that suit you, as well as add value to an organization, offering our product in this way only makes sense.

So that in addition to all the other great stuff you've heard about Macs (they just work, they're more secure, they last longer, they're easier to use...) makes it the only computer I'll buy, or recommend.

Diabetes

I'm a Type II Diabetic. I'm mostly in control of things, but sometimes not. I'm also overweight, which is certainly affecting my body's ability to take care of itself - and may well have been the main cause of my contracting the disease.

I don't like to talk about it much, and I try to push it out of my mind usually. It frightens me, and that gets worse if I think about it too much.

I remember when I was diagnosed - the doc explained all the complications, including heart problems, kidney problems, neuropathy... I didn't sleep for 4 days straight. I would wake my wife in the middle of the night and ask her to listen to my chest to see if my heart was still beating. I ended up in the hospital for a couple of days because of the stress - doing all sorts of cardiac tests. Everything came back saying my heart is in fine shape. But I always wonder, still.

Every time my feet tingle, I wonder how long it will be before I'll be facing amputation.


Am I be irrational?

Perhaps.