Category Archives: Topics

A full week

Posted on May 9, 2008 by Andy

This week has been rather busy!

Last weekend we finally switched to our new server at work. We got Exchange running and copied all our files over to the new machine, and I stayed up very late Sunday night finishing it. Since then I’ve been fixing things that got broken in the move.

On another front, one of our project managers has left, so now I am mostly managing one of his projects because I was pretty involved in it anyway, preparing the manuscripts for typesetting. So that is challenging, but it’s also kind of fun, coordinating all those pieces, keeping people informed. 🙂 But don’t tell my bosses that; they’ll give me more. o.o;;

The guy they’re bringing in to replace him is interesting. He’s a marketing consultant and also a pastor, and he has many ideas for helping us brand our company and take ourselves in new directions. I was a little nervous at first because I didn’t know how it would all affect my job, and more specifically my pet projects, but I’ve relaxed since then. I’m glad he’s here.

At home I’ve been defining my next project (yes, another one)—going to various libraries, checking out books, reading bits of them, writing. I thought I had the topic down and was going to blog about it, but then my ideas for it expanded. But now they’ve narrowed again, so I will write about it soon. Continue reading →

Posted in IT, Life updates, Project management, Projects | Leave a comment

Instructions to myself on productivity

Posted on April 30, 2008 by Andy

After my thoughts on Saturday, I gathered the ideas my mind had been quietly collecting about what my productivity problems were and what I thought I could do about them. I wrote them in my offline journal and present them to you here, revised a little for public presentation:

Okay, so I need to get more focused.

So how do I do it?

Unsubscribe from all my RSS feeds except my friends, podcasts, and webcomics. Reading all those little things takes a lot of time that I could be spending working. Everything that is spent on one thing is time taken from something else! When I subscribe to feeds, my purpose is to keep up with what’s going on in those subject areas. The purpose of that is mostly to have things to talk about with people. I think the real purpose ends up being simply to fill my mind with more and more interesting things.

Those are decent goals, but they’re really unnecessary. If I need to find out about a subject, I can just research it. I don’t need to keep up with it all the time through a regularly updating source. And the benefits aren’t worth the cost of not getting projects done that I care about more.

So unsubscribing from everything feels somewhat uncomfortable, like I’m giving up too much, but I was living just fine without them before I subscribed.
Multitask less. I think that when I’m doing more than one thing at once, it increases the time it takes to do the main task by three. This is not good. I need to toughen up my mind so that I can endure the boredom and difficulty of work. I need to turn off IM, close Google, and work. I need to say no to my whims and write them down to return to them later.
Give myself permission to do half a task. Otherwise, I’ll wait till an unknown time in the future when I have enough time to do the whole task. So think of my work as happening in 5 or 15 minute chunks when I feel busy. This has been working well for blogging this week. Amazingly well.
Do my work in large chunks when possible. I get bogged down looking at how much farther I have to go on a task, but I sometimes can make a lot of progress in a short amount of time. I need to observe how this happens. It happened tonight [Saturday] with An Ordinary Day with Jesus. I finished the last three lessons, one of which was rather long, plus some of the back matter. Maybe it was because it was the final stretch, or it might have been the time of day (specifically, night—sorry, people who think morning is the only time of day God declared good, night is just the best time for my mind; deal with it).
Avoid delays. I often crave large chunks of time for my projects. This would happen if I would leave work on time, get home quickly, and get to work right when I finish dinner, or perhaps work during dinner. I should do this rather than having to work late because my schedule got thrown off earlier in the day, dawdling on the computer after work, doing errands after work that I could put off till the weekend, and leaping onto IM and the web after dinner. Everything I say yes to is a no to something else! Similarly, a no to what is immediate may be a yes to what is more important.
Write before reading. My first impulse is usually to research, but often (a) I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for, and sharpening my question would focus my research; or (b) I already know what I’m trying to find out, but I needlessly feel dependent on other people’s input or I feel too lazy to write. Before I wrote this I began looking for information on productivity, but I realized that I already had a lot of ideas in my mind for what my problems were and what I needed to do differently.
Plan before implementing. This is especially important in programming, and I am already trying to put it into practice there. I still need more practice. Planning is also important for other tasks, though I tend to discount it for research. At some point I want to learn (or create first!) tools for planning.
While researching or writing, eliminate excess. I would like to be able to work on autopilot, but really my mind has to always be working while I’m reading or writing. In order to take effective notes, for example, I have to know exactly what kind of information I’m looking for and actively ignore everything else, as in, acknowledge it and pass it over on purpose. And if the author is too wordy, I have to rewrite his points so my notes don’t sprawl and I don’t quote the whole work. I just have to make sure my rewriting is reworded enough so that it isn’t a quote, or I have to make it clear that it’s almost a quote so I can further rewrite it later. I need to come up with my semi-mechanical paraphrasing method.

The same may go for writing. I tend to write somewhat stream of consciousness, but I think there’s something to be said for boiling my thoughts down to their unnuanced essence and just recording that for time’s sake. I’m not sure though. I might reserve that technique for only certain occasions, since I think recording the whole thought process and all the nuances is so valuable. What brought this paragraph on was mostly that I was thinking today about how reading takes so long because authors are often so wordy when it really isn’t necessary.
Don’t research aimlessly. This is sort of the flip side of 6 and a corollary to 7, 8, and maybe 5. I research a topic looking for more information that will be useful. But I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly, and in my present-immersed mind, anything that seems interesting feels important, so my searching could go on forever. I need ways to limit this, and maybe simply not searching is the best way to start. But also I need to cultivate the habit and skill of evaluating my searches as I go. I need to be present to what I’m doing and not simply do it.

Continue reading →

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Too much to think about

Posted on April 27, 2008 by Andy

This morning I was catching up on my RSS feeds, and it led me to a thread on TheologyWeb about whether Catholicism or Orthodoxy was the way to go. I skimmed the first page or so, partly because the responses weren’t very serious, partly because I was just trying to get through everything, and partly because I was only vaguely interested in the topic, but it got me thinking about epistemology. I asked myself what I would need to assume in order to believe that Catholicism or Orthodoxy was the truth. I have no idea, of course, but the important thing is that it defined a research question for me. I do this constantly. It also led me to think about how I go about thinking in general. It’s something I want to write about at some point—introspection, defining research questions, backing up from one question to ask others that lie behind it, et cetera.

Later in my feed reading I ran across some discussion of the upcoming ESV Study Bible. Often when I read about the ESV, I like to look for its critics, because I find the breathless gushing of its fans to be silly. This time I found something from Iyov, a blog I hadn’t seen before. And whenever I read debates about the ESV, I usually see comments by Suzanne McCarthy, who posts at the Better Bibles blog. And she is usually talking about inclusive language and gender roles. She sometimes seems rather passionate about it. Today I learned that the reason this is such an important issue to her is that she grew up in a complementarian church that took the idea of submission to extremes.

The question of gender roles in the Bible is one of those issues on my long list that I plan to study one day when I have time, but I’m not emotionally invested in it because it hasn’t touched my life in a personal way. Today as usual I only glanced at Suzanne’s posts and the responses to her because they usually deal with technical details that I won’t feel like deciphering until I seriously study the topic.

Instead I thought about the fact that people devote so much time to such specific issues. Given the fact that I had just been pondering how to decide between two of the major Christian traditions, asking whether women should be allowed to speak in church seems like getting ahead of ourselves. Now, specialization is important. Research in any field involves gathering information from many different sources on many different issues, so we need scholars to follow their interests and ask all the obscure little questions that no one else cares about … until those questions happen to relate to their own. So Suzanne should continue to investigate the questions that drive her.

But there are soooo many of these issues, and everything requires a debate. Nothing worth knowing is cut and dried. And everything takes so much time to learn and deliberate about. If this is true for fundamental topics like God’s existence that are needed for deciding on other issues, like (in my opinion) whether personhood begins at conception, how can anyone hope to get anywhere? I concluded that everyone has to choose their battles and make a lot of big assumptions to cover the rest.

The battles I prefer mostly have to do with those fundamental questions, which leaves me less time to deal with the everyday life questions that those answers are meant to make possible, but maybe my answers, if I find any, can help other people with those other questions. Of course, no one has universally settled any of those fundamental questions so far, so I don’t expect to, but maybe I can at least hope to gather better information and arguments for grounding the conclusions that I and those who agree with me decide to adopt.

What this tells me is that I have a lot of work to do, and I am wasting time in many ways, most immediately by reading all these RSS feeds, which give me interesting things to think about but which spread out my attention and take it away from my own core questions, when I should be spending time sharpening those questions and carrying out specific and diligent investigations of them.

I don’t know how I will do it, with my scattered and work-intolerant mind, but I must find a way. Continue reading →

Posted in Epistemology, Productivity | 2 Comments

And now for a normal entry

Posted on April 24, 2008 by Andy

Well, yesterday was rather interesting. I overslept again and didn’t go to the gym like I had planned. But I did finally go get a blood test, which I’d been putting off. The nurse definitely had a procedure down for doing this kind of thing, with words and phrases to give instructions and little warnings (like, “This will be tight,” for the rubber band around my arm and, “Stick,” when she stuck the needle in). She obviously prioritized efficiency over personableness, though she wasn’t unfriendly. In a way I admired her method. It did get the job done, and I was happy to have done a blood test there the year before so I would know how to cooperate and make the whole operation go smoothly. The blood test took less time than I expected, so I was a little earlier to work than usual.

At two we had a birthday party for one of our coworkers, as we usually do, and the theme was chocolate, which is pretty much the theme every day in our office, but especially today. I decided I would gorge myself, so I had both a chocolate icing covered brownie and chocolate ice cream with chocolate syrup. I could have done with just the brownie, which was extremely good, and I felt a bit overloaded and had to eat kind of slowly toward the end to avoid feeling sick. Unfortunately I had gotten myself a frosty from Wendy’s earlier and had just been drinking a root beer, so after the party I felt the need to drink lots of water to dilute all the sugar.

I didn’t feel much like working that day, probably because I’ve been getting too little sleep lately, and finally at around 3:30 I decided to take a nap in my car, which I’ve been doing more than I’m comfortable with this week, but it’s hard to work when you’re falling asleep at your desk. So I slept for a while and then just sat there for a few minutes, enjoying the warm but somewhat breezy day and the intense green of the grass and bushes in front of me.

After work I went to the bank and then to get a haircut, where I listened to the hair stylist tell another customer about being hit on on her way to work that day by a guy in his car. He said, “How are you?” while they were stopped at a traffic light and asked for her phone number. The light changed and she turned the corner, but he actually followed her and flashed her lights so she would pull over, which she did, cautiously, and he got out and asked for her number. She decided to give it to him, and when she got to work he had texted her. Her first question was, “Are you married?” because she had intuited that he was, and she was right. Well, that wouldn’t work for her because as she put it, she doesn’t share. She seemed to be very pragmatic about it. Her only objection to having an affair was apparently that she didn’t want to deal with a jealous wife. I hoped there was some moral commitment to the sanctity of marriage that she wasn’t stating for social reasons, but I can only guess. In any case, it was an interesting story and certainly not something that happened to her every day!

After my haircut my next goal was to buy some new dress shoes because my current ones are coming apart. I knew exactly which ones I was going to buy—Berry by Nunn Bush, the exact kind I have now—and exactly where I would buy them, Famous Footwear, because it’s the same store I bought them in last time, and I happened to know that they still carried them. Usually I have to find shoes that are almost like the shoes I have at the time because I buy cheap brands that I guess change models every year or maybe go out of business. But last time I was annoyed at having my shoes fall apart so quickly, so I bought something a little more permanent but still not expensive.

They had the shoe I wanted but not the size, so the girl at the register ordered it for me to be home delivered (well, work delivered in my case), with no shipping charge, which was nice. The card reader wouldn’t read my debit card, and she said that the reader had been having trouble ever since the earthquake last week. Mysteeerious. I like it when odd little things like that happen.

When I got home, I cooked some noodles, and while my water was heating up, I did some dishes. One of them was a large plate that had sat on the stove next to the pot of water for too long, and when I picked it up, I burned my right thumb and index finger pretty badly. They look fine, but for hours afterward, I had to keep them cool or they would start burning after less than a minute. At first I ran water over them or kept them in a glass of water, but then I froze a large bag of water and kept another bag in the freezer to switch them when the first bag melted. That worked out well. And when I woke up in the middle of the night, my fingers had recovered.

The last time I had to do that was when I was again cooking and had gotten some jalapeño juice on my thumb, and I suppose it crept into some cracks in my skin. It burned. I don’t recommend using jalapeño juice as, for instance, a hand lotion. Continue reading →

Posted in Birthdays, Blood tests, Burns, Chocolate, Cooking, Earthquakes, Haircuts, Naps, Shoes, Slice of life | 2 Comments

What I’ve been up to this time, part 2

Posted on March 15, 2008 by Andy

Okay, what next?

I’ve been a bit more social lately. In January I started going to Joel’s weekly prayer group at his house, made up of some of his friends from college. It’s been nice to get back into a group of my peers. Usually I socialize with one person at a time, which is good and which I prefer in some ways, but a group can be enlivening in a way that an individual can’t.

And while I like the older people I’ve spent time with while living here, it does leave me feeling like I don’t quite belong. It’s especially true when everyone else there has children. When you have children, you enter a whole other world full of school and doctor visits and other people’s children and children’s programs at church and so on, and it’s not a world I can really identify with. I’m only a somewhat interested outsider.

Now, Joel’s friends are mainly gamer geeks, and although I’ve always gotten along with the gaming crowd and I feel a certain affection for them, I’m not really a gamer, so I feel a little on the outside there too at times. But I don’t mind too much. I already know that I take a while to warm up to people, especially in groups. And gaming is an area I could potentially move into, if thought it would help. And of course their friendships are based on more than that. It is a prayer group, after all. And they are very welcoming. Continue reading →

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What I’ve been up to this time, part 1

Posted on February 21, 2008 by Andy

Well, time for another catch-up post, or series of them, more likely.

The biggest change in my life recently is that I started going to the gym with my friend Tim about three weeks ago. We go at 6 in the morning four days a week, and I have been trying to take up his practice of getting up at 4 to have devotions. I’ve had mixed success with getting up that early, but I’ve managed to fit in a devotion most days sometime before work. That is a dramatic improvement from the past several years!

That brings me to a point I’ve been meaning to make. Sometimes when people read my “Agnostic Christian” essay, they note that I wrote it in 2005 and ask me how I’m doing with all that now. I tell them that right now I’m more interested in being a Christian than in being a skeptic. Last year I decided that it would be a year for self-improvement in various ways, and some of that was in the area of character. And to me, Christianity offers a much richer set of resources for building one’s character than secularism does. Plus, when I think becoming a better person, that just means becoming more Christian. So my faith is what I turned to, and since that time I’ve been trying to reenter the Christian spiritual life I had been progressively ignoring for the last 7 or so years.

And it’s been good. I began an accountability partnership with a friend who is very intent on seeing me grow. The few times I managed to have devotions, I got more out of them than I had since probably high school, and that has continued since I started having them more regularly this month. I can see myself becoming more sensitized to spiritual issues, and I believe these times with God have a real potential to change me. I think he is welcoming and blessing my effort to get back in touch with him.

And as one example, last year for the first time in my entire life, communion and baptism acquired real meaning for me. They were always just bare symbols for me before, and though I tried over and over to see them, mostly communion, from new angles and to get some kind of significance from the experience, I always failed, or at least nothing stuck. But last year finally something clicked. I’ll write more about that some other time.

So while those doubts are still there in the back of my mind and I still think it’s important to evaluate the Christian worldview as a whole, I’ve put all that on hold and I don’t really think about it these days. I’ll get to it later.

That’s all for now. I will try to get to the rest of my update in the next couple of days. Continue reading →

Posted in Exercise, OBAC | Leave a comment

A thought on leaky abstractions and theology

Posted on February 20, 2008 by Andy

I wonder if the “simple” truths of Scripture are really just abstractions and they sometimes leak (see this), which is why we need people who study and sometimes explain the complexities of theology, for the times when people’s lives don’t fit neatly into the abstractions. Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, Theology, Thought, Transferrable concepts | 1 Comment

Happy 2008!

Posted on January 22, 2008 by Andy

Happy New Year! Yeah, I’m late for everything.

So I bet you’ve been wondering what’s been going on. Well, just pretend. I’ve been busily procrastinating on blogging, emailing, and doing writing of any kind, as usual. But also as usual, I have been working on my projects and thinking about others. I will get back to that in a later entry.

I went home to Texas for Christmas. My brother and sister also came, as usual, and my sister’s high school friend Kimberly, whom my family kind of adopted after graduation. It’s like an annual tradition. We all gather once a year. It was good. Each year I try to get a little better at balancing the time that I spend with my family and the time I spend doing my own stuff, and I think this year’s trip was a success (I consider it this year, even though it was last year). We watched movies, went shopping, decorated, and just hung around the house and talked. It was all pretty laid back.

Now I am back, and it is cold. We had a few warm days a while back, but now it is hovering around bitterly cold. My threshhold for bonechillingness is -8 degrees Celsius, which is between 18 and 17 Fahrenheit. On Saturday it was 7. I stayed indoors. Unfortunately our boilers decided to freeze on Sunday, so my apartment building has no heat. But with my space heater and extra clothes and blankets, I’ve managed to stay decently warm. They hope to have it fixed by the middle of the week.

I had a dream last night that I accidentally took our cat with me on a plane trip, and I had to figure out some way to get her back home. When I woke up I did some research, and it turns out you actually can ship cats. Continue reading →

Posted in General | 1 Comment

New list–Recommended Preachers Online

Posted on October 1, 2007 by Andy

Until I come up with a good way to post my site updates automatically on the front page, I’ll write a brief entry to let the blog subscribers know what’s new. I’ve just posted the start of a new, ongoing list (and accompanying Google map!) of preachers online that I think are worth listening to. Take a look! Continue reading →

Posted in Audio sermons, Christianity, Site updates | 3 Comments

Recommended Preachers Online: The List

Posted on October 1, 2007 by Andy

The List

Church	Pastor(s)	City	State	Notes
Emmanuel Baptist Church	David Carpenter	Athens	AL
Shades Mountain Bible Church	Ron Gannett	Birmingham	AL
St. Peter’s Anglican Church	John D. Richardson	Birmingham	AL	I really placemarked this because Lyle Dorsett sometimes preaches.
Twickenham Church of Christ	Brad Cox	Huntsville	AL
Trinity Free Presbyterian Church	Myron Mooney	Trinity	AL
Trinity Church	Ian Cron	Greenwich	CT
St. Peter’s Anglican Church	Eric Dudley	Tallahassee	FL
Christ the King Church	Ken Carr	Batavia	IL
All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church (Audio)	Patrick Henry Reardon	Chicago	IL
Chicago Church of Christ – Chicago Ministry Center	Jeff Balsom, Todd Fink, Randy Harris, Jim Lefler	Chicago	IL
Covenant Presbyterian Church of Chicago	Aaron Baker	Chicago	IL
Edgewater Baptist Church	Jim Shedd	Chicago	IL
First Baptist Church of Chicago (Audio)	Jesse M. Brown	Chicago	IL
The Moody Church	Erwin Lutzer	Chicago	IL
Church of the Resurrection	Stewart E. Ruch, III	Glen Ellyn	IL
Grace Church of the Valley	Clark Richardson, Mike Hill, Jerry Kennell	North Aurora	IL
Kishwaukee Bible Church	Frank Yonke, Steve Leston, Ron Spiotta	Sycamore	IL
Church of the Savior	Bill Richardson	West Chicago	IL
Blanchard Alliance Church – Wheaton	John Casey	Wheaton	IL
Bethlehem Baptist Church	John Piper	Minneapolis	MN
Woodland Hills Church	Greg Boyd	St. Paul	MN	Okay, yes, he’s an Open View theologian. But other than that he’s really good!
Parkside Church	Alistair Begg	Chagrin Falls	OH
Salem Alliance Church	John Stumbo	Salem	OR
Park Cities Presbyterian Church	Joseph “Skip” Ryan (formerly)	Dallas	TX
Stonebriar Community Church (Audio)	Chuck Swindoll	Frisco	TX
Christ Church Plano	David H. Roseberry	Plano	TX
Bethany Community Church	Richard Dahlstrom	Seattle	WA
Jesus Fellowship of Believers	Tim Dodson	Menomonie	WI
Immanuel Church	Rich Vincent	West Bend	WI