Still don’t have a better way to do this, but we’ve had some requests for pictures…

This is Nic and her pregnant friend Brooke, having a belly-off. Nic wins!!

This is the final version of the nursery, cleaned, stocked and ready to go!

My crash course in phone networking — it was like that when I got there, honest!

And this is where I’ve been every spare second of this week, but it’s all gonna be worth it real soon!

Well I wasn’t able to find an Internet connection in or near where our baby will be born, and given that the average first labor lasts around 12 hours, I knew a solution would have to be found. Fortunately WordPress has functionality for MoBlogging (blogging from a mobile device) and a nice plugin adds image support. I picked up an old Treo 600 online, and voila! I can blog from anywhere!

In 4 days we hope to open the second campus of Northway Church. Volunteers have pulled out all the stops, working practically around the clock to drywall, paint, wire and clean, transforming a former gym into God’s house. Before this week, I hadn’t been able to spend a lot of time over there — with a gimpy arm, and mostly construction work to be done, I didn’t have much I could do, so I’d been spending most of my time working on network infrastructure to support a second location. This week, however, I finally got a chance to serve at the new campus, and I have been just amazed at what I’ve seen. The scope of the project is overwhelming, to say the least, but the dedication of the people there tops it. Not since Easter at the Pepsi have I been so floored by what God can accomplish through His children when they obey with every ounce of energy they have in them.
The official grand opening isn’t until January, but the goal is to be ready in time to have 4 of our 7 Christmas Eve services in the new campus. To that end I’ve had to be creative in solving some technical problems. We subcontracted a company to run voice and gigabit ethernet cable throughout the building, but they don’t have us on the schedule until well after Christmas. The phone company came in and installed our 3 lines (voice, data, security) but left two of them as raw wires at the breakout box (along with the mess of a hundred other wires that were set up previously). Our church uses a fantastic online database, called FellowshipOne, to handle nursery check-ins (among other things) for the protection of our families and their kids, but obviously we need an Internet connection to make that work. And our media team uses more technology than the starship Enterprise, so trying to pull off a production without a network would be like trying to run a marathon without legs…
I arrived on Monday, thinking that the network and telephone lines were installed. After plugging the modem into every phone jack in the building, and finding out that not a single one of them was hot, I started to realise that I had my work cut out for me. I hit the Dollar General and bought myself a $5 phone, then headed back to the utility room where the raw phone lines were coming in. I found one line with a normal jack in it, and started to set up the DSL modem. I had a dial-tone but I couldn’t get sync, so I called the ISP and found out that my one working line was not the one they were delivering our service to. Enter Jon Bates, Navy Nuclear Engineer and uber geek. We stripped the wire bare on a DSL filter and attached it to my $5 phone to make ourselves a linemans handset, then started jamming the wires into the breakout box until we found a hot connection. Jon held the wires in place while I called my cell phone to find out what number we’d found, and we both sighed in relief when it showed up as the data line. There was an old wallplate in the wall, presumably coming from some old inactive phone line, so we ripped out the wires and used the scrap to connect the breakout box to the jack, then plugged in the modem… only to find out there was no power to the outlets in the room.
I won’t go into details on how we got that working, cause that was a little scarier. Fortunately Scott cleaned that up for us the next day. We connected the modem to a WRT54G which effectively covered half the building in WiFi, and yesterday I ran a 100 foot ethernet cable through the drop ceiling to another WAP to cover most of the rest of the building, getting us online for the weekend.
In a couple weeks we’ll have a real network, which some nice switches and some good fat pipe running into every room. We’ll have proper graphics cards for our media PCs, instead of the hack-job I had to do to make a normal sized card fit into a low-profile computer. We’ll have meeting rooms for the staff (for the first time in months) and a break room for the volunteers who work 4 services in a row without complaint. We’ll have a beautiful new campus, number two of only God knows how many, where people can come and feel at home and feel like God cares about them…
This weekend is gonna be a little rougher than that, but God willing, and with the city’s permission, we’re gonna have an awesome Christmas together in a church built with love and obedience and joy. And I can’t wait to see how God works in that gym.

Our office has two sets of doors at each entrance. The outer doors are open most of the time, while the inner doors require a key card for access. This is true from 7:00am to 6:00pm. Outside of that time frame, however, the outer doors are also locked. My new schedule has me at the office from 6:30am to 4:30pm most days, meaning there’s a half hour window in which the normally unlocked outer doors are locked, requiring either a card swipe from the outside, or a button press from the inside, to open them.
Unfortunately, due to a system-wide incompatibility with being awake before 7:00am, this is the same half hour window in which the requirements of my bladder are the most urgent and unpredictable. Couple that with an only partial consciousness, and you can understand why I might have a large bump on my forehead later today…

Dad (Watters) you would be proud of me. I put the snow tires on the car by myself.
And I’m not sure which parent ingrained this in me, but I figured out a great way to save money/play the system.
See, getting tires installed costs $15 a tire, or $60 total, at a garage. Your quickie oil and lube place will rotate your tires for $12. So I install the tires myself, tighten up the lug-nuts with all my weight, and then go get the oil changed — and while I’m there have my tires rotated/re-installed.
I just saved myself $48, plus I feel really manly fixing the car myself and getting all greasy.

OK, really missing eXpression today. Haven’t quite figured out a good way to post a bunch of pictures to WordPress, so here’s a post full of them. Click the image to see a bigger version…

The Nursery Painting Crew

The Dresser Building Crew

The nearly finished nursery

Christmas Party – Northway Style

And finally, here they are, the Vertical Production Team. Yes, I have a mexican moustache drawn on my face… Don’t you?

This has been a varied and interesting week! I’m finally getting in the groove of my new schedule, which means I don’t feel like barfing all over my alarm clock when it goes off at 5:30am, and have found that it lends itself to a wider range of activities than I usually get just sitting in my cubicle from 9-5.
Tuesday morning was spent with young, passionate church leaders planning the opening of a new campus, designing graphics and building network infrastructure. Tuesday afternoon was spent at work, presenting software to the CEO and various Vice Presidents, and listening to discussions on direction for a big business. Tuesday evening was spent playing video games, eating pizza and praying with a dozen or so students in our living room.
Wednesday I designed software during the day, and worked on video production systems during the evening.
Thursday I worked from a table and a VPN, juggling more tasks through WiFi than anyone should expect to get out of 54Mbps, then directed video and hung out with 150 teens at night.
And best of all, at the end of each week I’m guaranteed a date with a hot babe!
12 months ago, I was alone at a hotel with a rental car, a suit, my resume and two e-mails of encouragement from some good friends who were miles away in either direction. I never imagined then that our life here would be so complete and fulfilling. I never dreamt, as I lay there nervous and excited about the job interview I was getting ready for, that a year later we would be surrounded by so many incredible friends, or challenged by so many awesome opportunities, or blessed with such an amazing church family.
Tonite we go to our last Christmas party of the season — probably the most Christmasy one we’ve ever been to. Next week we shift gears and throw all our spare energy into the new campus. And shortly now, we’ll be facing the totally new challenge of becoming parents. While it’s tough being away from home for that, our child will come into this world in a healthy, happy environment, surrounded by love and joy. They say it takes a community to raise a child, and if that’s true, God has blessed us with a truly amazing community to do that in.

I’m by no means a marketing guru, although I’ve been exposed to the discipline most of my career. Nonetheless, I have a rant on marketing that hopefully makes some sense. See when I was young and idealistic, I actually thought to myself: when I grow up, I’m going to drive a Saturn and use a Mac. The same thing that enticed me to watch Star Wars over and over again as a boy, attracted me to these companies and their products. Like the Rebels fighting the incumbent Galactic Empire, these companies were the underdogs, daring to do something different in a sea of evil sameness.
Apple positioned their computers as being for those who “Think Different” and advertised themselves as the liberators of a workforce stuck with boring, faceless computers by the evil IBM and it’s clone companies. They made unique and elegant products that weren’t necessarily superior to the rest, but were at least different.
Saturn had a similar strategy: “A Different Kind of Car Company. A Different Kind of Car.” In fact, their cars weren’t that different. They were just GM products, but they separated themselves from the pack by making their vehicles a little bit different, by pursuing and employing innovative new manufacturing concepts, and by marketing themselves as unique.
Neither of these companies were “big.” Apple has struggled along with a 5-6% market share since the Apple II became out of date, and Saturn was started as a small prodigal child of GM, getting nearly none of the support the other GM brands get. Both company’s business leaders understood that to survive, they had to find themselves a loyal market niche, and make sure those customers were incredibly happy. My 1996 Saturn SL2, the bottom of the barrel as far as cars go, was the most comfortable vehicle I’ve ever driven. The sales people who sold it to me were kind, patient and helpful. From the day I bought my first car, to the day my cousin wrapped it around a tree, Saturn made sure that I was a believer in their company by treating me like I had bought into something special. And my Macintosh 512k, the second Mac ever built, came with the signatures of the team that designed it engraved inside the case, like a secret personal note to all the people who invested in their shared dream. Every detail of that computing experience, from the Operating System, with it’s cute little trash can and happy Mac icon, to the hardware, with it’s tiny footprint and round edges, was designed to make the user feel like they were using something made especially for them.
In the 90’s, Apple lost their way. It’s a credit to the original marketing strategy that most of their niche remained loyal during that time, despite the stupidity of the direction they took. Believing that to compete in a broader market, Apple had to conform, a series of new CEOs begin to strip from the company everything that made it unique, until all that remained of the original creative computer was an aging OS and a fruit shaped logo. The hardware began, more and more, to resemble the IBM PC Clones that Mac users tried so hard to differentiate themselves from. Instead of creative industrial design, they began to emulate the boring gray boxes that everyone else had on their desk at the time. The operating system, once the peak of technology, began to look dated, and they entertained talks with Microsoft about running Windows on the Mac. The business leaders didn’t realise that no one needed yet another Clone PC manufacturer, and that the loyal 5% that they were abandoning was the only thing that kept them in business.
Then, in 1997, the original CEO was brought back on board through the acquisition of his new computer company. Soon after that the iMac was born, and the company began clawing it’s way back to life — by re-connecting with the people who bought Macs in the first place: the ones who saw themselves as creative and different. The ones who wanted a computer that wasn’t just a PC, but was something different and fun and personal. Something that felt like it was made for them. And once again, Apple began to differentiate itself from the rest of the market. Sure, 5% wasn’t much, but it’s better than 0%. Each successive computer that shipped under this re-born strategy was a hit with the loyal few, and made waves in the sea of sameness that was the rest of the market.
Since then, Apple’s market share hasn’t grown exponentially, but their profitability sure has. They don’t say “We’re Different” in their marketing collateral any more, but they scream it in their products. Each is a work of art, carefully crafted so that when you hold it, you feel like you’ve got something special. And slowly people outside that 5% are starting to pay attention. Without abandoning the loyal, Apple’s managed to start to attract the common PC users.
Then there’s Saturn — the company that incited this rant. For years they made cars that were different. They made cars like Apple makes computers: carefully designed, built and marketed to make the user feel special. And like Apple, they were hardly the biggest player in the game, but they were successful with the customers they had. A couple of years ago they brought in a new CEO who didn’t get it. She saw Saturn as a wayward GM product that didn’t conform to the rest of the brands, and therefore was in need of correcting. Systematically she’s begun changing the product and the image. Instead of original designs and architecture, Saturn vehicles have become re-branded Chevys. Instead of making cars their core customers want, they’re making the cars everyone else is making. Instead of being different, they’re trying to be the same.
Product quality has slipped, and a cheap Saturn car now is just a cheap car. The brand has slipped too, and you see the GM logo more on their commercials than you do the Saturn logo. About the only thing that remains of the original vision is the plastic side panels on some of their models — and those models change every year, in an effort to make them look more like everything else on the market. And the question I’m left with now is, why would I buy a Saturn? If it’s the exact same car as the Chevy and Pontiac equivalent, but from a smaller brand with fewer dealerships, why would I want one?
Big companies can afford to be boring. Organizations that have been around for decades can run on inertia alone. People will buy what they sell simply because they’ve been there forever. Small, young companies looking to make a dent in the market, can’t afford to be the same as every one else. They need to know who they are, and know who their customers are. They need to offer something unique, and failing that, at least package it in a unique way. They need to make people believe in them and in what they have to offer. Show them that even though they’re taking a risk by buying into a smaller company, it’ll be worth it because they, the individual customer, are important.
Big companies don’t need to change very fast. They don’t need to adapt or to grow, they don’t need to innovate. They can sell simply by being there. Small companies can’t sit still for a minute. Like Apple’s OS in the 90s that got stale and eventually nearly useless, a small company that doesn’t constantly listen to their base and find out how to meet them where they’re at, is going to fail.
And if you think I’m only talking about the business world, you’re totally missing the point.