I need to learn to slow down.
Usually when I say that, I mean metaphorically. Like “slow down” in the race of life type thing. But this time, I mean “slow down” like don’t go through doors so fast!
I’ll post more on this later, but our winter retreat, Elevate, was a blast. We had an awesome group of students from our church, and met up with 3 other churches, for a weekend of rock climbing, sphere evasion, tubing, and learning about God. The speaker was incredible, and the music was great.
I ended up spending most of my time running the random and assorted equipment, so I didn’t get to spend a whole lot of “relationship building” time until Saturday night. Nic and I were hanging out with some students in front of a fireplace in the lobby, when James decided to start a wet willy war. Obviously I couldn’t let that stand, and things ended up with him chasing me out the front door — literally.
My right arm connected with the door handle, my left arm smashed through the glass. I was outside before I heard the glass hitting the ground, and knew immediately (even though I couldn’t feel anything yet) that this wasn’t going to be good. I looked down at my arm and saw muscle — and blood pooling and splashing out around it. Most spectators panicked. All I could think about was getting the situation dealt with and my responsibilities covered for the night.
I ended up on a stretcher, getting loaded into an ambulance — I’m told I was still shouting instructions even as they drove me off to the hospital. Fortunately James was along, with a very small cut, to keep me company.
I have one wound on the top of my arm stitched up, and 3 gashes on my under-arm with gel-foam in them to help them heal — they were too wide to be sutured. I lost some blood, because I just grazed an artery, but it obviously could have been worse. I was on morphine for most of the rest of the evening, but the pain is manageable enough now that I just need anti-biotics and a daily wound check for the rest of the week.
Better stuff happened this week, but I’ll blog about that later. Until then, enjoy this picture of my bloodied sneaker!

When I worked at Rockwell there was a manager there who was very bald. He still had the halo of hair, but it surrounded a very shiny dome. The kind of dome that made it look like he polished it before work each day. Then one day he came in and had a full head of wavy dark hair.
Does anyone know what the polite thing to do in that situation is? Do you compliment them on their wig? Do you pretend to go along with the illusion that they managed to grow a full head of hair in less than 24 hours? I don’t know…
I walked out to use the restroom, and there’s a secretary who sits behind a glass door in one of the offices that shares the building with us. Every day I see her as I walk to use the bathroom. She’s a nice looking black lady, with a tight bun of graying brown hair… Except for today. Today she had shoulder length, curly bleach blond hair. I did a double take to make sure it was her. And it was. Her with a wig.
Someone please tell me: what is the right reaction?

This weekend Benjamin is going on his first youth retreat! It’s been a long week, with a lot of good, and a little frustrating, stuff going on, and this weekend could go either way.
It’s becoming more and more clear that Benjamin is his mother’s son: he’s pretty obviously an extrovert. He loves going to youth on Wednesdays. Even though, by the time its over, I feel like finding a quiet corner and rocking back and forth in the fetal position until I pass out, Benjamin is wired. He loves being around all the people, he loves the noise, and he loves to stay awake for a long time after its over.
We have our own room this weekend, so hopefully he’ll be able to stick to a (slightly modified) routine. We also picked up a pair of noise canceling head phones to go over his ears so his hearing doesn’t get damaged by the loud music and cheering. He looks hilarious in them, and he laughs every time we put them on him — we’ll post pictures when we get back.
This weekend also presents some technical challenges. I’m running lights, video and sound by myself — hopefully I can get some students to pitch in. Fortunately my highly versatile MacBook Pro will be able to handle all the video tasks, so I just have to learn how to set-up lights, and how to cover multiple boards at the same time! A huge shout-out to Paul and Caroline for covering some bases back at home to make this weekend possible for me!
Some other cool stuff that’s going on:
– I have my own desk space at church now. It’s another cubicle, but this one’s right next to the music director, so instead of the usual office chatter, I hear him strumming away on his guitar. Save for the occasional waft of Chinese food smell from next door, it’s a much nicer environment.
– If you go to Northway, you don’t want to miss the announcement this weekend! We went High Definition last weekend, running church simultaneously in two locations, and it was awesome. Wait’ll you see what we’ve got planned for Easter!
– My parents are heading to Malaysia next month. Their original plan was to leave in July, but they decided they might as well head out as soon as they could. Dad retired and took a teaching job in Kuala Lumpur. They’ll be there in 1-year terms, and are talking about a 6-7 stay, but I don’t really expect them to move back any time soon. We’ll definitely be going over there to visit! You can follow their adventures at their new website.
We’re out until Sunday, rocking the Camp of the Woods (assuming I can make all the equipment work), so have a great weekend everyone!

I sure hate PHP’s syntax, but its pretty cool that there’s so much stuff out there for WordPress, so I’m forcing myself to learn it a bit so I can customize. Note the new, and manually modified Flickr feed on the right. Also note that things are on the right now — where I wanted them in the first place!
I’m also learning about overlay layers and some cool Filters in Photoshop, so bare with me as I work on our header image. I know the current one is a little bit odd, but I was just playing with what I had on hand. We’ll snap some better shots soon, and make something a little better looking.
Now I gotta learn more about the world of Windows programming. I love C# but I’d much rather use it to write webservices than old school Windows apps.

I found too many sources for this to attribute it to anyone, but I thought it was a brilliant summary of a debate I have many times a month:
A lot of overengineering has been justified in the name of flexibility. But more often than not, excessive layers of abstraction and indirection get in the way. Look at the design of software that really empowers the people who handle it; you will usually see something simple. Simple is not easy.

So after quite a few months of no statistics, I’m back into that game a little bit, due to inheriting yet another website to manage. I hooked up Google Analytics on my site, to test it out before use on the other site, but haven’t really looked at it much since then. You can imagine my surprise when I logged in to find out that our little corner of the web is actually doing quite well!
Seems that weekends are pretty low traffic days, which about corresponds to my own blog reading habits, but that the early part of the week is pretty popular for us. About 63% of you wonderful visitors have us on a bookmark or RSS reader or go directly here. The rest follow a link from another blog or website.

The majority of you are from the States, surprisingly, although there’s obviously a good segment coming from Canada. What I was really delighted to discover, via this very cool Visitor Location Map, is that there’s a good portion of you coming from places all around the world. Our readership is actually quite diverse, and I couldn’t be happier about that!

The birth of our son, and subsequent naming efforts, resulting in his middle name becoming Wyndham, reminded me that I’d been intending for years to locate and re-read some of the best fiction I’ve ever come across, written by one John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris… possibly the longest name ever.
This has actually taken a fair bit of detective work, as only one of his novels is still in print in North America. Apparently people have interpreted it as being a story about biological warfare, and find it to be prescient to current events, so it’s been deemed worthy of keeping around. I think everyone’s missed the point, and totally misinterpreted the value of all of his work, but I’m not complaining too much, because at least it enabled me to find one of this book.
In my opinion, The Day of the Triffids isn’t his best work, but it’s a place to start again. I’ll have to look a little harder to find the rest of his books.

So after starting up, FireFox, Mail.app, NetNewsWire, 3 chat clients, iCal, Address Book, and iTunes — my usual Mac apps for the day — I booted up Windows, started up Outlook and Visual Studio — my usual Windows apps for the day.
When I decided to do a little diagramming in Visio (Windows) it occured to me that I might be pushing my luck. So of course I had to fire up PhotoShop CS3 and Final Cut Pro as well, just to see if I could choke my MacBook Pro. But despite running two operating systems and some of the biggest bloatware for each, at the same time, I can’t seem to slow this thing down…