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  • WOW

    Funny thing how a simple word like wow can mean so many things.  Depending on the use of said word, it can convey different things to different people.  At our church, WOW means Women Opening the Word.  To my youngest son WOW means World of Warcraft.  These are examples of acronyms that are WOW and there are many more for different age groups and cultures.

     

    I took the youngest J to Game Stop last Saturday and observed something really cool.  There was a middle aged guy that was probably 10 years younger than me standing at the counter talking to the clerk.  It was obvious that they were speaking different languages although they were both speaking English.  The middle aged guy was asking about a game and the clerk was informing him that the one he was inquiring about was “LAME”.  You could see the tension radiating from the clerk as he wasted his time with this lame guy. 

     

    When the guy finally gave up and exited the building, the clerk focused his attention on J.  They started speaking the same language.  It was like listening to modems communicating in digital language.  J was wanting a prepaid card for WOW and this provoked questions from the clerk in game slang which was immediately interpreted by J and answered with lightning quickness.

     

     One of the questions he was asked by the clerk was which server do you play on.  J answered back and was answered with a blank face.  J then mentioned the name of some gamer that is well known and the clerk’s face lit up and he responded with the question “before or after the event?” to which J said before.  The dialogue led to a question from the clerk which led to J spending an additional $40 to prepay for an upgrade that will be released sometime soon.

     

    I learned quite a bit about gaming on the way home as I discussed WOW with J.  Gamers are serious about their playtime.  I have known that for sometime because of the way we are answered when telling him to get out of the games.

     

    What this brought to my attention is how important it is to Gaming companies that their servers are up and working all the time.  The new position I have taken at my company has taken on a whole new realm of importance since this random experience with my youngest son.

     

    Speaking of the work front, the roller coaster has sped up and the ups and downs have been radical for the last 2 weeks.  Some things have escalated somewhat out of control just to throw some people out of the car they were occupying.  They were holding their hands up in the air all the time and had gotten to the point to where they were puking all over everyone else on the roller coaster most of the time.  They were eating hotdogs with greasy chili before getting onto the roller coaster at first but had gotten to the point to where they did not get off ever and were having the greasy chili dogs delivered to them between rides.

     

    Bottom line is that this employee works virtually from their apartment and would not disengage from email or the phone 24 hours a day 7 days a week.  This coupled with the inability to manage customer expectations or understand how anyone else in the company could consider having a life led to their need to completely unplug from the company for the next week.  Since this decision was made, life has been so much easier although the workload has not changed one bit.  My days go by like lightning and I sleep like a baby every night.

     

    I am getting baptism by fire into the server business.  Understanding every aspect of networking and customer applications is coming like wildfire.  It feels so good to drink from a fire hose again.  What a wild ride it is and it is so much fun when the ground disappears as we go over a hill that is hundreds of feet in the air.

     

    Meanwhile, the better half had another birthday yesterday.  She just gets more beautiful each year that goes by.  We are going out to the Aquarium downtown tomorrow night with a couple that we really enjoy being with.

  • Primo

    What a week.  My brother called last week to tell me that he was finished working in Iraq.  He was having nightmares and not being able to sleep.  They cut off his Xanga access a couple of weeks ago and his social interaction with the outside world came to an end.  I really think this added to his change in thinking.  He had actually been talking about staying another year but now he is home.  Everything over there just seemed to be coming down around him.  His lack of sleep was because of nightmares.  He told me that he was worried that they would be overrun by Iran.

     

    His plane arrived Monday afternoon.  He is doing fine.

     

    Work has been a wild ride.  That is all I have to say about that.

     

    We are going to watch the youngest J sing with his High School Choir at a church downtown.

     

    My last session with the blessing bomb did not come to fruition until December.  Something else really great is brewing.  Who knows what it might be.

     

     

  • Ok, the picture is of me first thing in the morning.  I chose dare rather than truth thinking it was risky.  I was treated gently by the challenger with what for some would be a revealing task.  My hair looks the same every hour of the day and the bags under my eyes are actually getting smaller since my allergies have given it a rest.
     
    Things are coming together on the work front.  We are at the point of creating the training for the folks that will be taking on the account management jobs we are creating.  I am having some fierce resistance from someone in the company.  They want everything done yesterday and I am creating a department that will be taking our company into the next level of service and profits.  That is not something you want to try to create overnight.
     
    My brother John is home for Iraq for good.  He was there for 20 months and decided he had had enough.  They put him on a plane within 48 hours and then he was here.  Now he gets to figure out what to do with his life.  In the short term he will be riding his motorcycle and visiting friends.
     
    I am still recovering from my illness.  I am starting to feel human again.  Hooray!!!

  • Good Meetings – (Not an oxymoron)




    Most people associate meetings with long winded informational sleep inducers.  I have spent many an hour in meetings that were just this.  When people enjoy the sound of their own voices and have an agenda that is contrary to that of everyone else, nothing productive gets done.


     


    I just recently completed a year’s worth of leader meetings at my church and attended at least 48 of the 52 held weekly.  There were others that we had toward the end of the year that lasted much longer than the scheduled 3 hours each Tuesday night.


     


    And then comes 2006.  Each meeting we have had this year has been energized in a way unimaginable in the past.  The chemistry among everyone in attendance is like unto a band of brothers that have been through the most deadly battles and emerged alive and victorious.


     


    Our meeting last night started out with some members praying for us.  That is the entire purpose of their presence.  They wanted to pray for us.  No agenda other than that.  What a way to start!!


     


    Second thing on the agenda was for a woman and her adult son presenting us with a letter of thanks for the donations we provided for churches in New Orleans that were ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.


     


    The third item was a college student that has grown up in our church.  He was volunteering to fill a huge hole we have had in our ministries with young people that are transitioning from the Youth Ministry after graduating from High School and entering college.  We have an adult that teaches a college age class but have not had anyone that has been addressing the needs of those who no longer fit in the “Youth Group”.  He went through that transition last year as did our middle son two years ago and countless others for many many years.


     


    After we dealt with a few more items we closed by dividing up the prayer requests collected last Sunday and going around the group and praying for each specific need listed.  We started doing this at the end of December and have kept the course for a number of weeks.  What better way to finish a productive meeting than to place our needs at the feet of God and petitioning him to fill our requests.

  • First Entry For 2006


    A new year this is.  So much has passed since my December 28th post.


     


    The New Year celebration was calm and collected.  We had 2 close couples over to our house for games.  Both of the couples had 3 rug rats in tow so the house was full of fun stuff going on at all times.  Everyone bailed before midnight and I was falling asleep when the fireworks started popping to celebrate the New Year.


     


    We had an all together worship service at church.  We have had 3 services for almost 15 years but the attendance has waned over the last 2 years so we had close to 600 people in attendance for the one service on January 1st.  Our new interim preacher taught a lesson on new beginnings which was well received.  All 7 elders of whom I am one stood up in front of the entire congregation at the end and asked for forgiveness for the sins we had committed.  We were specific about them.  We had let private conversations from our group leak out which had caused gossip.  We had failed to act quickly to alleviate sin we had witnessed in members.  And we made comments outside our group that should have not been made.  The response from the membership was overwhelming.  I was not the only one crying when it was all said and done.


     


    Since then where church is concerned, the attendance has jumped back over 1000 and the contribution has jumped an additional 10K per week.  There is something to be said when God gets a hold of people and has them do what he wants.


     


    On the work front with the new responsibilities I have taken things are going awesome.  I took a group of directors, managers and supervisors to a hotel in Galveston for a workshop.  We all sat in a room for 8 hours and mapped some critical processes.  The entire purpose of the day long session was simply to map current processes without trying to fix them.  That is a hard thing for most people to do.  I facilitated the meeting.  It was a blast.


     


    This group of people are driven individuals that have worked in an environment that has been entirely solution oriented from day one.  That is how entrepreneurial companies typically begin, operate and then die.  Solution orientation works for a while but that type of management is not scalable.  If all you ever do is put patches or Band-Aid solutions on problems, there is no way to scale any processes because no one is conscious that there is even a process going on.


     


    Everyone was fully on board with mapping things as they were even when it got ugly.  No one in the room knew any process from start to finish and definitely did not know how their workflow affected anyone else’s.  My main goal was to get everyone thinking in terms of process rather than just solving a problem as it appeared.  Much more work will occur before we can begin to improve and implement processes to replace those that have just organically grown.


     


    Now the good stuff.  I was called into a meeting on Tuesday by the President of our company.  He wants us to grow the monthly recurring revenue for our business by a sizeable amount over our projected numbers.  Our company has never operated in this fashion.  No one is oriented around sales numbers much less has any experience in actually running an organization that is.  Oh, wait a minute, I am.  I was so pumped when the numbers rolled out of the HeadSurfer’s mouth.  My blood started flowing and I began thinking how we could tackle this “new” idea of outbound sales for our company.


     


    I called a meeting Wednesday morning of the key people for this endeavor.  I actually felt like a sales manager during the meeting.  I gave out assignments and rallied the troops and then went home sick.  Even though I had a flu shot, my body told me I had to sleep.  After making a Dr. appointment for Thursday, I slept as best I could between sneezing and blowing unmentionable substances out of my nose.  This was a first for me, making a Dr. appointment at the first sign of yellow substances in the Kleenex.  I usually wait until I cannot walk or breathe before asking for help from the medical profession.  I even told the Dr. that I didn’t think I needed a steroid pack which has been a standard issue for me when I have a sinus infection.


     


    After 2 1/2 days home, I am starting to feel better.  The troops have been reporting in via email and everything is ready for us to begin outbound calls to our existing customers on Monday.  Did I mention that I am pumped about this new era at work.  Well, I am.


     


    We are off to the in-laws house tomorrow for the weekend.  We will spend the night tomorrow and go to their church on Sunday morning.  Our niece is getting married in March and she has a shower Sunday night that Cyndie wants to attend.  I am looking forward to the slow paced napping and game playing that will occur over the next couple of days.

  • And The Fun Begins

    Who said that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks?  I am pretty sure it was an old dog.  When I was in my teens, my grandfather Butch was the person that I looked up to that could fix anything electronic.  He started building radios during WWII when my grandmother was working in the ship yard down in the valley.  He was crippled in his leg at the time and made a good living by building radios out of whatever he could get his hands on.  He eventually owned the only radio and TV shop in Lufkin in the late 40s and 50s.  He eventually took a job with a large corporation that provided all of the TVs for the hospitals in Houston.  I would work with him during the summer and loved every minute spent in their shop as well as helping him pull the TVs off the wall in the hospital rooms for repair.  I repaired the wired remote controls while he fixed the TVs.

     

    I could not understand when Butch just seemed to give up when integrated circuits started to take over the TV scene.  He knew everything there was to know about tube type TVs but when it came to the integrated circuit stuff, he just decided to retire instead of learn the new technology.

     

    After paying my dues in the service industry in the telecom business for 15 years, I now find myself smack dab in the middle of the server business and the age of the Internet.  I have been given the opportunity to learn everything there is to know about this business so I can be the go to guy for our company in the service and delivery processes.  My head is swimming in what will soon be old hat for this old dog.  I can understand the resistance that my grandfather had about learning a new technology yet I am excited about the possibilities for myself as well as those I will eventually train to provide the best possible delivery of servers and post delivery service in the industry.  We do a pretty good job for our current customers but to scale the business so that we can grow ten fold and one hundred fold really gets my blood flowing.

     

    So much for that front.  On the home front, it has been good to have the middle J home for the holidays.  Even though he has spent 95% of his time glued to games on the computer, it is good to have him in the house.

     

    Since the better half received her “baby” last week, I have enjoyed a new car.  It is new to me but she had been driving it for the last two years.  Twenty seven miles to the gallon is much better than the thirteen I was getting in my truck.  It is quite a change from an F250 Super Duty Crew Cab to a Toyota Matrix but I am surprised how much I am enjoying driving a car after thirty consecutive years of driving trucks.  My first vehicle was a brand new 1976 F150 truck.  The second was a brand new 1978 F150, the third was a 1979 International Harvester 4 wheel drive Scout Terra pickup.  The fourth was a used 1979 Chevrolet short bed stripped down 1/2 ton short wheel base step side pickup.  The fifth was a 1982 3/4 ton Chevrolet truck, the sixth was a 1990 Ford F-150 Super Cab truck and the most recent is the Super Duty Crew Cab.  The last three that I owned had over 250,000 miles on them before I sold them.  The 1990 model had 278,000 miles and the clutch on it lasted 238,000 miles.  I have loved my trucks and treated them right and they all treated me right as well.  My plans are to drive the F 250 at least once a week.

     

    I made a trip over to my brother’s daughter’s house tonight.  We had some more presents to give them and I showed his X how to download pictures from her camera to the computer.  I also showed her how to email pictures to my brother in Iraq.  The girls were really happy to see Uncle David.  I hung around for around an hour.

  • Endings and Beginnings


    I love beginnings.  There is so much potential when starting or getting something new.  I started a new job in my existing company last week and it is so much easier to get up and go to work each morning.  The department has existed for over 3 years but everything they do is new to me.  I am getting to look at everything with a new perspective.  We are planning a day long session on a weekend in January at a hotel in Galveston to flow chart some of the processes that are used on a daily basis.  This has never been done and I have convinced everyone that they will in fact be able to look at these with new eyes once they exist on paper across the wall of a conference room.  Hence we will be able to see new ways of doing things that are flawed with many hand offs and multiple opportunities for the ball to be dropped.


     


    The department revenue grew by 25% last year and we have a goal of 50% growth this year.  From talking to the employees who work with the customers on a day to day basis this is very achievable by simply closing some of the cracks that are inherent in processes that have not been defined much less refined.  My new blood in the department has already led to new ideas that have been implemented and decreased the amount of time needed to perform some of the simpler tasks.  It was not me that came up with the ideas, I simply applied new blood questioning that provoked ideas from the existing employees.


     


    I am glad I know nothing about the department I have entered because everything is new to me and I have no ownership of how things are done.  Therefore I can ask questions of each and every process without already knowing the pat answer.  What is cool is that most of the processes were not thought through but simply thrown together out of necessity and have much potential for improvement.


     


    I have a cartoon on my monitor at work from “Family Circus” that is of the youngest boy PJ who has just started walking and his brother who is probably a year older.  The older brother is saying “PJ’s lucky.  Almost everything is new to him.”  I like that.  Seeing the world through the eyes of a child brings a new glow to everything.


     


    We bought a VHS to DVD recorder for our gift from Santa.  I have been transferring our old VHS home movies over to DVDs this week.  Each tape has to be transferred in real time so that means if the tape is 6 hours, it takes 6 hours to copy it over to a DVD.  The cool thing about the recorder is that you can just set it and come back later to complete the process.  The better half and I have been sitting up watching the tapes as they are playing and have the memories been flowing.  The first one we watched was from 10 years ago when we took a trip to California with the boys to Disney Land, Knotts Berry Farms and then up to San Francisco.  Ten years makes a difference in children.  The boys were still full of wonder at everything they saw and we were a bit younger ourselves.


     


    The most recent one we watched was from 19 years ago when we first moved into the house we still live in.  I was amazed at the amount of time we recorded each other just playing on the floor with our 3 year old and 1 year old boys.  We played and played and played and laughed and laughed and laughed and time seemed to stand still.  The rush of emotions was awesome.  The woman I am married to was as beautiful back then as she is today.


     


    This is the first time I have reviewed some of these tapes and I look forward to having them on DVD so they will not be lost with age.  Watching them on DVD is so much easier since you can pause and see the picture much clearer as well as being able to jump to an event on the chapter screen in the menu.


     


    Looking back on the beginning of my life as I know it, I can see how everything we were doing was new.  The same can be said for each day we have above ground.  Someday the breath will be gone from our bodies just as it is from some of those in our videos but our spirit will live on new in the lives of those we have touched.


     


    As Christmas approaches, I am reminded of my Mom who was born on Christmas day.  She died 3 years ago.  She lived each day as if it was new and always had time to spend with children.  It occurs to me now that she had discovered the secret of seeing everything new through their eyes.

  • Life after Nineva

    Since I was spit out of the belly of the fish a couple of weeks ago, the world has seemed much kinder and brighter each and every day.  When I was spit up on the shore, I picked myself up an went to have my proverbial talk with Nineva (metaphorically of course).  Nineva was somewhat receptive to what I had to say but why was I surprised?, God had told me to do it and therefore Nineva was ready for what I had to say.

     

    Once this story has played out completely, I will be making a protected post for those who are curious about this drama that has been playing itself out in my life over the last year.

     

    I called some friends in Odessa Texas this afternoon and had a long talk with both of them.  They are long lost friends who were fired from our church almost 18 months ago.  They are doing great.  They are exactly where God wants them and testified that each second of the day they know they are doing just that.

     

    We have not talked for almost a year now and I had some things I needed to say to them and they had some things they needed to say to me as well.  The coolest thing is that while I was talking to the wife, the husband was on the phone talking to one of the people that was fired at the same time they were.  The husband did not know that his wife was talking to me while he was talking to the other party.  The husband relayed to me that he had told the other person that had been fired that he looked forward to the day when he could talk to me about the things that had happened.  If that does not put goose pimples on your body, NOTHING ever will.

     

    I was talking to his wife while he was in another room talking to someone saying that he looked forward to the day when he could talk to me about some stuff.  I know I am repeating myself but I really had to make the point.

     

    Needless to say, some healing occurred in our relationship during the call.  Whether things can ever be the same between me and those who were hurt when they were fired by other people, only God knows.  My only hope is that I will continue to do what God wants me to do when he wants me to do it.  Cool thing is that this is becoming easier as the days go by. 

  • As requested by my brother over in Iraq, here is our decorated Christmas Tree.  No presents under it yet but most have been purchased.


    And just for fun, I took some pictures of the lights in the yard.

    We went to the High School Choir Christmas concert
    tonight.  Over an hour and a half of awesome music.  I only had to
    ask one couple to stop talking during the concert.  I have gotten much
    better at this over time.  The better half cringes each time I do it. 
    I can remember a concert around 6 years ago in the same auditorium where I got
    up and walked down front to sit next to a couple of teenagers that insisted on
    talking while the choir sang.  They did not move and sat quietly through
    the rest of the concert.  I was commended by many parents when the concert
    was over because the kids were disrupting the entire event.

    It occurred to me that I need to write or find some text on the proper etiquette
    for attending concerts and such.  People think it is ok to talk as long as
    you whisper.  There is nothing more irritating than whisssss whissss
    whissss whissss!!whisssss whissss!!!! other than a cell phone going off. 
    I can even stand babies talking but grown people must be told that it is RUDE
    to talk during a concert that their children have worked so hard on.  I am
    going to either write this or find it and post it on our Choir website.

    Enough ranting for now.  I did make myself focus on the singing and block
    out the whissss that was coming from a few rows over.