More Blinks

So let's see, what is in the news today?

For six years now, Forbes magazine has been calculating the top money-earners amongst dead celebrities. In each of the first five years, Elvis ruled the chart with yearly earnings around $45 million. This past year, Kurt Cobain toppled The King as his estate made a total of $50 million. Much of that is attributed to Courtney Love selling off a quarter of Nirvana's library. Bing Crosby must be rolling in his grave.

iTunes and iPod music have copy-protection codes to combat piracy. This protection scheme is actually quite good - or it was until now. This article explains that an infamous hacker named Jon Lech Johansen or "DVD Jon" has cracked the code. Previously, this guy made a name (or a nickname) for himself at the age of fifteen by cracking the copyright codes for DVD movies and giving it away for free. This time, at the age of 22, he's trying to sell the hack and make some money off of it. It actually might be legal because reverse engineering, a la Paycheck, isn't technically stealing, it's just being extra smart.

Speaking of iPods, did you hear the one about Apple shipping a virus with them last month? Their Video iPods included the RavMonE virus. In Apple's official press release on their website, they said, "As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it." That's right, the blamed Microsoft for being allowing viruses. Silly monkeys. That's like blaming your parents for allowing you to break a window.

And finally, here's an odd story about a woman who decided to run for mayor for Oakville because the city allowed her house to become completely inaccessible from the roads. Over the years, new houses were built around her house until they finally closed her in completely. She has been fighting a battle of principle for a few decades now. The Old Lady and The Sea, as it were.

Blinks & Links

Joe Gibbs is the head coach of the Washington Redskins in the NFL. He has won three Superbowls and is in the Hall of Fame. Here's his bio and his Wikipedia log. After retiring in 1992, he came back as head coach of the Redskins in 2004 and unfortunately for him, they're an awful team this year (2 wins, 5 losses).

I was reading this article on a sports blog that I visit. The author was initially writing about Joe Gibbs personal website and wanted to make a few jabs at him. However, Gibbs has an ongoing series of videos (vlogs?) in which he explains his "spiritual game plan." He talks about various principles and messages from the Bible and he tends to relate them directly to his current experiences with the Redskins.

That blog article gives a nice summary of each week so far. If you're into sports or the NFL, it may be worth a gander.

Power of the Holy Spirit

What does the power of God's Holy Spirit look like today in my life?

This is the question that was posed for Open Discussion during the services at my church this past weekend. The sermon notes, and hopefully an MP3 link, are available here. The point is, how is God's power demonstrated in our lives? More than that, how is the power of the Holy Spirit demonstrated in our lives? It's a question of apathy and it's a question of accepting less than what God has for us.

In Acts 1:8, it says that "you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."

So what's my answer to the first question? I would say that I do have boldness in terms of proclaiming my faith in God that does not seem to be very common among other Christians at work or elsewhere, and that's despite the fact that I'm an introvert. That would match the above verse, I think. More concretely, I do pray in tongues fairly often. While that's the most clear demonstration of the Holy Spirit, it's also private since I rarely pray in tongues while praying for other people.

Beyond that, which gifts of the Spirit are in my life, as mentioned in 1 Corinthians 1? I can't say that I see any of those miraculous gifts regularly in my life, though I have had some of them once in a while.

So I don't see much of the Holy Spirit's power demonstrated in my life directly and obviously. That's not an eye opener for me since I am passionate about my faith and I do want more of God's power, so I am aware and I am dissatisfied. Apathy is not such a big factor for me even though that was the main challenge of the sermon this past weekend.

The part that hit me is this: If the power of God is not demonstrated in my life, why would anyone else believe me when I say that we all need it? In the past, I have tried to speak, study and pray with friends about the baptism of the Holy Spirit and about spiritual gifts. I've usually been met with a great degree of skepticism, doubts and criticism. That, or a polite refusal and a preference to live and let live, so to speak. (This point is addressed in the "Struggles" section of those sermon notes: Historically, people will idolize, analyze, criticize or ostracize the power of the Spirit.)

And why wouldn't people respond that way? If I'm the one encouraging people to pursue baptism of the Holy Spirit but I don't seem much different from my other Christian friends, what's the point? What does it matter? It can't be very powerful if it's not evident, right?

Ouch, the question broke me down a bit. I guess it's like telling people about Jesus' love and sacrifice for us and the forgiveness of our sins. Why would non-Christians be attracted to God if our lives seem about the same as theirs? If we're not truly happier, if we're not free from hurts of the past, if we're not filled with passion and purpose?

I need to see more of God's power in my life. I need more of the Holy Spirit to be shown through me. Not for my sake, but for the sake of my friends. For the sake of both my Christian friends and my other friends. It's God that breaks through into people's live, not my nice words and not a merely adequate but well-meaning life.

I need more of you, God. I need more of you, Holy Spirit. More of you in my life.

Exodus Exits

This past Friday night, I took my Little and three other people to the Exodus in Peril concert at my church. It was the second "Metal for Missions" concert that they have held, raising money for our upcoming missions trip to Honduras for the kids there with Compassion Canada. There were five opening bands and then the night was capped up with the headline band, Exodus.

Calvin, the lead singer, came up to me when I first arrived while I was standing alone. He told me that this was Exodus' final show and that they were disbanding. Crazy! I had to keep that minor bit of news to myself until they announced in partway through their set at the end of the night.

When they did make the announcement, the crowd was in disbelief. Up to that point, the crowd seemed somewhat lazy to me. The energy was lacking and the moshpit wasn't nearly as active as past shows. After the announcement, the entire crowd became this spastic monster. Everyone realized that this was their last chance to rock out with Exodus. The mosh pit went into high gear, people started crowd surfing all over the place and towards the end, the crowd almost overran the stage. Some people were jumping on the band members themselves and at one point I saw Calvin walk around with a guy clinging to his back while he kept singing. Much better!

Terribly sad to see them go. They have really developed a young fan base here in London. My Little and his brother both became fans and every kid that I brought to a show walked away amazed to learn how cool Christians can be. Nothing like a little heavy metal to bring out the love, eh?

Exodus' official MySpace site has a ton of comments from fans. Amy, Calvin's girlfriend, has a bunch of photos up from the evening, and even a video. We'll miss you guys!

Superstar

I took my mom to see the musical Jesus Christ Superstar last night. As we did last year, my family bought her a package of theatre tickets for her birthday this year. Each member of my family takes my mom out for a date once a month, going for dinner and then watching the show. Yesterday was the first show of the season and it was my turn.

I vaguely knew that it was a rock opera version of Jesus' life in the Bible and apparently it was pretty faithful. My knowledge of such trivia proved accurate and it was well written, pulling entire sets of lyrics almost directly from the Bible. The lead singer playing Jesus was actually the original actor from the movie, which was cool and somewhat pitiful to see him stuck in the role he originated more than thirty years ago. His crazy rock-falsetto was amazing.

The other lead singer that played Judas was my favourite performer, some grammy-winning guy with a very different style of singing. I once heard that certain instruments, like the old Hamond B3 organ, are ever-so-slightly off key in terms of their supporting tones and this minor distinction gives it much more character than an organ with only perfect pitch in all respects. In the same way, this Judas had some fantastic vocal inflections that he used repeatedly that were like that and it was quite the pleasure to hear. I love listening to black voices.

Overall, this musical was much more tame than I expected. Everything was properly set in the Biblical period, particularly the costumes. There was only one part that really jumped out as modern and it was a playful comedy relief segment in the second half. I was expecting much more contemporary twists, not just modern song styles. (And by modern, I mean mid-70s.) The songs were impressive at times, though the repetition of some tunes got a tad annoying since certain characters only spoke with those tunes. Still, any time you get a chance to see Jesus fly into the sky, I recommend it.

And to follow that up, I'm taking my Little and a group of younger kids to a heavy metal ("screamo") concert by Exodus In Peril tonight at my church. That's my friend Calvin's Christian band and it's always a powerful show with a ton of youth packing the place out. Considering that the musical and this concert are both technically "rock," it will be quite the contrast.

Lessons From The Office: Part I

Lesson #1
Meaningful change is hard, meaningless change is easy.
Meaningful change isn't cheap, it isn't simple and it takes time. Meaningless change, on the other hand, can be accomplished almost immediately. Unfortunately, it can also be undone just as easily.

Great goals are not accomplished by issuing edicts and setting arbitrary deadlines. They're not accomplished by initiating a new weekly meeting or creating a new policy. They're not accomplished by single person with no support. They're not accomplished without defining that goal properly and then planning out how to get there. They're not accomplished by wishful thinking and thinking wishes.

Great goals are accomplished by thoroughly analyzing where we are. They're accomplished as a group, as a group that belives in the final goal. They're accomplished by testing the new ideas, revising them and testing them again. They're accomplished by not giving up on the change, even if it takes a long time.

That's not to say that small changes are always useless, nor that big changes are always useful. Everyone can use a nice haircut once in a while but too much plastic surgery doesn't always create a Picasso. (Or maybe it does?) The point is that slapping a new title on someone at work is probably a meaningless change but splitting one job into two separate roles can be of great benefit.

Real Examples
I've seen a lot of new policies over the years. Hey, I've been the cause of many of these new policies - just last week I trigerred a new one regarding the central thermostat. Heh. I was once introduced to a new policy that was comprised of two documents that came to a total of 6 pages, complete with flow charts. I saw that same policy summarized into one paragraph two weeks later. Meaningless change, though I'm sure that the goal was a nobel one.

On the other hand, I recently created yet another version of the programming standards for our dBase developers. It was about three pages long with a ton of very technical detail. It took us two 2-hour meetings with all of the programming staff to sketch out the contents and provide training. It took us several more hours and several more revisions to create the final document. That document will now provide the training outline for our new programmers and it helped our newest programmers improve immediately. Hey, another giant document can be meaningless but in this case we took the steps beyond just writing the document to make sure it worked. (I hope it worked, anyway.)

Some time ago, we decided to change the name of our software testing phase to "Quality Assurance" instead of "Beta Testing." This change was decided and done within two days, including related changes for our internal support software. This change was reversed within a few weeks, and just as quickly. As a result of this confusion, we started to refer to this phase by both terms interchangeably. If the terms are interchangeable then I'll give you one guess about what type of change this was.

Much later, we started to hire full time staff for the QA roles. Previously, this was accomplished by our Tech Support team also being responsible for beta testing. With the most recent re-organization, we formalized Tech Support and QA departments, the official team leads and we defined the job descriptions and daily responsibilities. In fact, the Tech Support staff still provide plenty of assistance but now they help the QA staff and they can focus on their primary roles when they need to do so. In this case, making a distinction about the QA department required much more work but it was also much more useful.

There are some procedures that we discussed as good ideas back in March or April. Some of these procedures are only being finalized now, and I had to consistantly work my butt off just to make them happen by this time.

As one example, we needed a formalized process for reviewing all incoming development requests and suggestions from clients. Previously, it was somewhat random as to who approved new ideas for coding and many requests became lost in the sands of time, so to speak. At best, I would create an ad-hoc list and steal fifteen minutes of my boss' time to review them quickly.

Early on, we created a new weekly meeting to handle this. It took us a while to finalize who should and should not be in this meeting. We changed the person that was designated to lead this meeting and this process, since it used to be me and then it was the Tech Support Team Lead. We created and revised several report formats for this meeting. We changed the process for submitting client suggestions to this meeting several times. In fact, I did a ton of coding over the past month on the weekends to revamp and simplify this process yet again.

It's not that we didn't know what we wanted to do. Our bosses had a fairly clear idea of that from the beginning. The process and mindset, though, took a lot of time to figure out. As it stands now, we have the benefit of getting expert opinions from our staff without killing ourselves with administration overhead to make it happen. It's worked out very well for everyone and it can probably survive on its own now without any cheerleading.

That's an example of meaningful change. And as it happens, this particular BAM! process (Business Analysis Meeting) would have been awfully useful several years ago during one of my early phases as Project Manager but we didn't figure it out until our recent re-organization. Meaningful change is hard, eh?

Lessons From The Office: Intro

As I mentioned before, this past year my company has undergone a major re-organization. During the six months that Trevor was with us, we gradually reviewed our management structure and internal processes and made improvements across the board. There were a variety of lessons that I learned during this time, lessons that were sometimes learned the hard way.

As a manager with various responsibilities over the years, my principles and my approach have certainly evolved. I compare it to my early days as a professional programmer. I still have a few screens in our flagship software that I designed and I shudder to look at them, knowing the visual flaws and the fact that these screens are almost completely useless.

In the same way, I can look back at my early management style and I can only be grateful to have had so many chances to learn and develop at my company. Heck, I currently handle a lot of the project management duties in my role as Director of Implementations but this is actually the fourth (!) time that I have been in this position.

Just for fun, let me assess the four times that I have been Project Manager.
1) The first time, it was sometime in my second year with the company. We didn't know what we wanted from the role except for a nice Gantt chart, which I never did. There were no goals, no specific responsibilities and no tangible results. I didn't have a clue about what to do. In fact, the only thing that actually happened during this time was that I gained an interest in software project management. I started to read various industry websites and blogs, so I gradually developed a theoretical philosophy about the role and about software designs in general.

2) The second time, we made Project Management into a formal job. This was about a year and a half after I was officially designated as PM, as I vaguely recall. I had to evaluate competing priorities, get input from my bosses, organize work for the programmers and report on our progress. We made a lot of progress during this time regarding this role. After about a year, though, I resigned those duties for two reasons. First, I was given certain responsibilities without the authority to accomplish them. Second, I needed to figure out how to standardize our processes for getting input and for reporting the results and, try as I might, I never did figure that out. In fact, we're still trying to work that out but thanks to Trevor's recent help we've come a long with that recently. When I resigned, those duties were promptly assigned to someone else.

3) I stepped back into the role soon afterwards for a third time for less than a month. That was a silly mistake on my part since it was mostly a response to an urgent need that we had. As I saw it, I still had the problem of not having enough authority so I only requested the right to do one thing, which was review and organize any incident that we assigned to coding. Not that I would decide what went into coding, I just needed to get the related paperwork done to keep things flowing. That sole new process fell apart with the next urgent thing that we had to do and I once again stepped out of the role and went back to full time programming.

In retrospect, I was an idiot in my approach. I framed the problem as a matter of trust and authority, when it could have been framed as a minor procedural aid. I saw greater underlying issues than the superficial problem and I tried to wrestle with those rather than fulfilling the immediate needs. Good times for me, those were. Even if I was justified in my observations, which is questionable, I still had a long way to go in learning how to create healthy change.

4) The fourth time, I stepped back into the role after Steve and Rebecca left our company. The duties for Project Management at that time had grown until it required two full time staff that devoted a majority of their time to these duties. Steve, in particular, worked lengthy hours and even worked from home just to deal with the high volume of incoming development requests and administration work. With their help, we made great strides in the technical requirements of our support software.

Once they left, I simply stepped into their shoes and did the minimum work required to keep the ship moving. While Steve and Rebecca had a very thorough knowledge of everything that was happening, I knew that I could not replace two full time staff by myself so I did what we needed to get by and, not surpisingly, we had plenty of items that went into never-never land.

It was only with the recent re-organization and the new procceses and meetings that we have really made this feasible in a practical way. Our weekly BAM! process now provides the chance to get expert input on all incoming requests. Our versioning system and Product Roadmap meetings provide the means of regular progress updates. We're actually accomplishing more with less work, which is amazing to me. And while I believe that Project Management is a skill just like programming is a skill, and I know that it isn't just a cog in the machine that anyone can fill, we have standardized the role fairly well and it is much easier to accomplish now.

So on that note, I'm going to begin a series of posts that I'll complete gradually, highlighting the principles that I have learned over the years. There are an awful lot of them so rather than try to design an entire essay series, I'll just shoot from the hip a bit more than I usually do. Sometimes they are based on observations of others, more often they're based on my own flawed experiences. And yes, I have given my blog link to all of my co-workers and directly to my bosses so I'm not trying to hide this, as tempting as that might be.

(And ten bucks says that these lessons can be applied equally to churches as well...)

Links & Blinks

This past week, a 68 year old man died in in Florida by the name of Paul Vance. This man had said that he was the author of song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini." A local reporter interviewed his wife and wrote his obituary accordingly, where it got picked up by the Associated Press. Unfortunately, the real Paul Vance read his own obituary last week and was shocked to discover he had already died.

It seems that the former Paul Vance was a musician in his younger days and for the purpose of impressing his future wife, he said that he had written the song because of the shared name. He said that he had foolishly signed away his rights as a young man so he had nothing to show for it. His wife relayed this detail to the reporter et voila. The actual Paul Vance that authored this song has been receiving royalties for decades and has made millions off of that song, and had to prove it to intrepid reporters by showing his recent royalty payments. The wife of the deceased isn't too pleased to discover that her husband had been lying to her about this for all these years.

In other hilarious news, go read this blog by my friend Steve. He relates his recent experience when he was trapped inside a car wash for a full half hour. His car was stuck and he couldn't get out of his car because the car wash was still working away. No one responded to his beeping and he had trouble getting a cell phone connection to call for help. Hijinks ensue!

As for other friends, I would like to mention that Richard has found a new place to live. Whenever he's off from work and he's in town, he'll be sharing a place with Joel Terry. It's a perfect win-win situation for everybody. As for Tara, she recently started working at Giant Tiger with steady shifts so everything has worked out well for her, too.

And finally, I would like to say GO JAYS GO! The MLB season ended yesterday. It came down to the very last day but the Jays placed second in their division! That was well behind the hated Yankees but, more importantly, it was one full game ahead of Boston. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to get into the playoffs. That's funny because everyone assumed at the beginning of the season that the second place team in this division would automatically be good enough to be in the playoffs and it didn't work out that way. In any case, I appreciate that the money we blew this past summer wasn't entirely for nothing.