Friday afternoon randomness

Been a bit, but I'd thought I'd write a Friday afternoon something or other.  It is Friday after all.

Apparently I become a colossal jerk when I work too much and don't get enough sleep.  As a compromise with my wife, I no longer wake up at 5:45 in the morning.  The studying time was awesome, but I was become a pretty worthless human being.  No point in being a worthless, humorless, human being.  So I quit that.

Tax time is here, but my tax return probably won't be much of anything.  You see, I've figured out pretty close to what I need to set my yearly deductions at so I get to spend my money now as opposed to next year.  See, why do I want to give a government that doesn't handle money well any more money than is absolutely necessary?  Would you give a drunk alcoholic a beer?  No.  Then why would you want to give a government more of your money than is necessary?  It is YOUR money after all.  And they don't even pay you back in interest.

I started testing using the Pearson IT Certification Practice Test for the CCENT yesterday.  There were around 50 questions, and at question 43 I decided to figure out how to use the notes feature.  Then I found out you couldn't copy/paste, so I accidentally closed the entire program.  Made me rather mad.  I won't be using the notes feature any more.

I don't pay near as much attention to politics as I used to no, or news for that matter.  I spent about 5 minutes looking at news.yahoo.com and www.theblaze.com and didn't see anything of interest.  Just lots of fluff and congratulatory pieces.  The kind of thing that distracts the attention like a shiny object but has no real substance.   So I didn't miss anything. 

Programming, day 1

After coming up with the idea of Driven, it's time to start writing the code.  Or is it?  I have an idea, but right now the idea has nothing solid.  Like most great ideas, it's just that: an idea.  I can't write much of a program based off some random idea.  What to do?  I guess it's time to start writing a design document. 

The purpose of a design document is pretty simple: write down what you want and describe how you want the program to work.  I'd love to just start throwing down code, but I'm not that good at Java and the idea behind this program is considerable more complex than anything I've done in a while.  Besides, everything else I've done has turned out to be a colossal kludged mess.  I'd much rather finish this project and it end up being everything I wanted. 

As for an IDE, I've chosen to use NetBeans for this project.  I've tried Eclipse before, and it seemed to work fairly well, but...  Yeah, there's always a but.  I don't like the way auto-complete works in Eclipse.  I find it hard to select the completion I want without using the mouse.  If I wanted to use a mouse, I would be hunting and pecking.  When I want to code, I want to code as quickly as possible.  

The second reason I'm not going to use Eclipse this time is Eclipse seems to have quit working on my computer.  I'm not sure why, but it doesn't.  Won't even open.  Maybe because I've quit updating Java and am going to sit and hold at Java 6 Update 18 because of work requirements.  That's probably it.

I'm not completely conversed in NetBeans, so I'm not terribly sure how to do everything in it.  Rather than have a separate document for the design doc, I used create a new file and simply made it a text file.  So now, attached to the project is a TXT document that will give me the opportunity to work on the documentation from within the project.  Is there a better way to do this?  Beats me.  But it works for me, so that's what I'll do.

The complexity of a design document can go in many different directions.  The document can be just a few lines long or hundreds of pages, describing every single thing about a project.  I'm not sure where this design document is going.  Right now, it's a matter of deciding and describing what needs to be there.  For a complex project, unless there is prior thought and intention, there is no telling how the project with end up.

So the idea is created, and the design document is started.  It will probably take a few weeks to get the design document far enough along to be of any use. 

Discipleship and Mentorship

After my last post, I began thinking about mentorship.  That's one part that I thought was generally missing from my life. 

Let's recap for a bit...  

Four Fishermen Called as Disciples

¹⁸ And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two brothers, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. ¹⁹ Then He said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” ²⁰ They immediately left their nets and followed Him.
²¹ Going on from there, He saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets. He called them, ²² and immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed Him.

Jesus Heals a Great Multitude

²³ And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all kinds of sickness and all kinds of disease among the people. ²⁴ Then His fame went throughout all Syria; and they brought to Him all sick people who were afflicted with various diseases and torments, and those who were demon-possessed, epileptics, and paralytics; and He healed them. 

Now, what we've initially gathered from watching what Jesus teaches here is that we shouldn't take a lot of time learning every single bit of information before becoming active in a subject, or in any undertaking.

All you really need to do is come up with an idea, and start doing it.  Part of the action is "start now even if you don't have all the information".  The second part is mentorship.

Mentorship and discipleship are intrinsically tied together.  A disciple can be defined as "a person who is a pupil or an adherent fo the doctrines of another; follower."  And a mentor then, is the teacher.

Now, back to my main thought.  I've never really had a mentor.  Now I realize I've got several, and I picked them up when I wasn't even looking.  The first is the Bible.  It's probably the single greatest repository of truth there is.  It would be better if someone had come along and indexed everything, but the Bible is a document that speaks to each individual in different places and spaces.  No matter what I flip through, I find something that pertains to my life.  The only real question: am I tough enough to apply it?  Sound easy?

Proverbs 22:7

The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.

So... how easy is it to follow the Bible?  Not very easy.

Formulaic

Been a few days, and I haven't written anything.  I've been busy with other things in my life so I haven't had a chance to update my blog. 

So I've always wanted to be a programmer, but I could never get anybody to hire me to program.  While I haven't been programming, I've been wishing I could get a programming job.  All the while, I've been learning things about systems administration, networking, and Verifone point of sale equipment.

Then I was in church, listening to the pastor talk about discipleship.  They showed this video, describing William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, talking about a vision he had.  And that got me to thinking about Matthew 4:18-25

Four Fishermen Called as Disciples

¹⁸ And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two brothers, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. ¹⁹ Then He said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” ²⁰ They immediately left their nets and followed Him.

²¹ Going on from there, He saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets. He called them, ²² and immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed Him.

Jesus Heals a Great Multitude

²³ And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all kinds of sickness and all kinds of disease among the people. ²⁴ Then His fame went throughout all Syria; and they brought to Him all sick people who were afflicted with various diseases and torments, and those who were demon-possessed, epileptics, and paralytics; and He healed them. ²⁵ Great multitudes followed Him—from Galilee, and from Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond the Jordan.

Now what does this have to do with anything? 

After Jesus recruits Peter, Andrew, James, and John he takes them all about Galilee preaching and teaching.  If these four guys are following Jesus, I'm pretty sure they started doing something then and there.  And that is completely contrary to what I was always taught. 

Traditional management theory tells that we should come up with a long drawn out plan, and learn everything about something before a person ever starts doing anything.  The idea is to come up with every contingent and possibility before ever moving forward or doing anything.   

In English classes, I was frequently taught to create some giant outline about what I was going to talk about.  Then, I was to move from one bullet point to the next as I filled out text to match the outline I had created before.  Once again, there was no spontaneity to it all.  It was a formulaic approach created for people who were taught to be good followers but not good leaders.

But that's not what Jesus was teaching in Matthew 4:18-25.  Jesus taught that you should come up with a general idea, and then start working on that idea and putting ideas into effect.  The idea was to make Peter, Andrew, James, and John into "fishers of men".  Did Jesus come up with a long drawn out power point presentation?  No.  He charged out and started saving and healing.  His disciples learned through mentoring and practice, not through formulaic plans. 

Dreams and Discipline

Woke up this morning after a dream of Dave Ramsey screaming to some person (probably me) about getting out of debt.  I don't know what it means, but I think my brain is finally becoming convinced that I need to get out of debt.  Dave talks about a paradigm shift, and I think I'm going through one right now. 

For example.  Normally, if I sit down to play World of Warcraft and tell myself "only 30 minutes" then it usually turns into an hour or more.  Last night, I sat down and told myself "only 30 minutes" and quit after roughly 30 minutes.  I say close, because I started a timer when I started playing, and got disconnected about 15 minutes in or so.  Probably the horrible wireless firmware on an HP laptops.  After reconnecting, I played for another 12 minutes.  And then I quit. 

No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.   Hebrews 12:11

And the more I think of that, the more I realize the training of discipline has been a life-long process.  I learned a lot of it in the Marines, but after that it's easy to forget.  It's the problem of learning from second hand knowledge.  If Bob goes to the class and learns something, he will know it well.  Bob teaches Jim.  Jim teaches Sue.  Sue teaches Fred.  Fred teaches the rest of the world.  Is what Bob and Fred learned the same thing?  Not really, because Bob learned from the teacher and Fred learned from what someone else decided was important.  What I think is important is not necessarily what others think is important. 

Many of the Marines I learned from were like that.  They learned to do something, but they never learned why they did it.  They performed an action out of repetition.  There was always an important theory behind the teaching, but the theory was never taught, just the action.  I guess I'm now beginning to learn the reasoning and not just the action. 

The Bible spends a lot of time talking about discipline.  Proverbs specifically spends a lot of time telling people to quit being lazy.  Proverbs 5 talks about getting wisdom at any cost.  Proverbs 6:6-8 is another one.

So pay attention, quit being lazy, and change your life.  It's not easy, but it's worth it.