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National Public Radio had an interview with Weird Al Yankovic this morning. (Info and replay available on NPR’s site.) Made me stop in my morning routine to take a listen. Even better, this evening I got a chance to hear the EXTENDED version of the interview. Beats listening to the BEA webinar that I tried to connect to – luckily for me, their webinar presenter’s site was down, and I got to hear Weird Al instead.

True confessions: Weird Al’s music was the stuff I can first recall singing out loud while listening to my Walkman in the 80’s. I snatched up each cassette as they came out, and had the great luck in college to get to go a Weird Al concert. At one point, an ex-boyfriend gave me the boxed set of Weird Al, knowing that this was the way to win my heart.

I’ve since given away my boxed set to a young friend who’s captivated by Weird Al’s music, and had decided to pass up his latest release (Poodle Hat) because I was too grown up to buy a Weird Al CD. (Note that I do own Running with Scissors, released in 1999, so this a fairly recent “maturity”.) Hearing him on the radio this morning, and checking out the info on Amazon for it, I think I’m going to have to dive back into my childhood spirit and snag Poodle Hat. Maybe even a Weird Al t-shirt… think I like the anime one best…

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Folks who’ve had to live with me know that I’m not a particularly neat person. I attribute it to just always juggling too many things – a clean home ranks among the priorities, but it’s handled in amongst all of the other things that vie for my time and attention. It bothers me when I stop and look around my house and see things that need attention, but my times to stop are few, and the times when I actually have a moment to do something about it seem even fewer. I’ve often been tempted to hire professionals to come in and do it for me, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it. One, I’d be embarassed to have someone else clean my house. Two, it feels like cheating, like I somehow can’t handle the own mess that I make. But, boy, does it seem like a losing battle, this housework stuff. The best I ever seem to do is to keep a reasonably low level of clutter (reasonably low varying depending on my particular time to pick up vs. clutter tolerance level balance), and then rotate through areas of the house, making each one individually at least cleaner than it was. The whole house never seems to be clean at once, and that’s not even counting tackling the basement. It’s not as if we have a large house, either- in fact, I’m fairly well convinced that I never want a large house, just because then the cleaning problem would expand with the increased square footage.

Tomorrow’s task list looms large, even without the household cleaning chores. The lawn needs mowed, and we need to get a new lawn mower because the old one’s decided it’s time to retire. The nursery needs its paint job to be completed. Milk’s mostly gone, so we need to do a grocery run, and heck, might as well do the weekly shopping if you’ve got to wander in the grocery store for something else. And that’s before the vacuuming, dusting, bathroom cleaning, and floor mopping that ought to happen, too. Even if we didn’t aim to keep the Sabbath on Sunday, there’s really no room for chore spillage there, as we have duties at church, and it’ll be Jason’s birthday, so we’ll have cake/ice cream/fancy lunch. Monday it’s back to work, with an hour or so available in the evening after Cora’s gone to bed.

How did folks ever do this before time-saving devices like dishwashers, washing machines, and vacuums??? When women had six or seven children running around, how’d they then have time to tidy up the place and make the dinner? Granted, they didn’t have indoor plumbing, so no bathrooms to scrub, but I’m not ready to retreat to a little shack in the backyard with a half-moon cut out in the door. (Is that where we get the idea of mooning someone, I wonder?)

Just my rant for the evening, I guess… spent a bit of time attacking the kitchen, but feel like someone else walking in would notice what’s _not_ been done, whereas I’m the only one who notices that, gee, it looks a lot better! Pretty depressing…

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Occasionally, I look over my list of recent entries, and the categories to which they’re assigned. Basically, that gives me an idea of what I’ve been thinking/writing about of late, and usually highlights for me any imbalances on where I’m spending my cranial cycles. Looking down over the list, you’d get the impression that my ‘Christianity’ category thinking has been sorely lacking. Truth is, the thinking’s been there, just not the writing.

I’ve been reading a book called “Lifestyle Evangelism” that I checked out of our church’s resource center. Its basic premise is that the idea of evangelism being a spiel you give some stranger about the importance of Christ in their life is completely wrong. Not only is it the wrong approach, in terms of effectiveness (I’m not a big fan of folks cold-calling me for relatively minor decisions like swapping my mortgage – big life decisions like where to put your faith and trust just don’t belong in a cold-call kind of setting), it’s not really the truest form of evangelism. Dr. Aldrich’s position is that evangelism is really an outpouring of our lives as they reflect Christ’s impact on us. Our evangelistic outreach really comes as we reach to folks in their ordinary, world-weary situations, and come to know them and their concerns, and then are able to come alongside of them to show how Christ can impact them, in their day-to-day travails.

In other words, we’re to live with, interact with, and minister to folks in their specific situations – whether that be a homeless person seeking their next meal, or the guy who seems to have it all in the corner office. There’s not a blanket answer or cold-call patter. The cold-call patter approach is actually directly against the vein of “Love one another” – there’s little love for an individual expressed in a rehearsed script repeated ad infinitum to spiritual “targets”.

Examining our first case, our theoretical homeless person has physical needs that Christ has promised to meet; in the second case, our theoretical executive may have a need for meaning in their life, or a sense of peace and balance, or a need for a loving marriage, or… To help our theoretical executive, the answer isn’t as simple as going down to the soup kitchen to make a hot meal. His or her kinds of needs are typically hidden away, seen only by folks who’ve taken the time to form a relationship.

The book’s been very interesting, in showing the qualities necessary in a believer for lifestyle evangelism, and the qualities necessary in a church that’s interested in developing lifestyle evangelistic believers. Both encouraging and challenging, especially as I poke at it for myself personally, and try to figure out how it would apply to, say, kids – both my own and the kids I come into contact with via Sunday school or via Pioneer Girls.

Anyway, culling my thoughts here seems to clarify them a bit for me, although may cause me to muddle them for everyone else… if you have any comments or want to discuss this stuff, bounce me an email or drop something in the comments for this entry.

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Hey, I won a copy of ‘Bitter EJB’ from JavaRanch! They regularly have book giveaways where the authors of a given book answer questions in a forum related to that book. Folks are entered into the contest by posting something in the forum that week. As I’ve been working on learning EJBs, and specifically how to do something with them using BEA’s app server, I answered a guy’s question (my wonderful answer here), just basically to test out how well I was learning my stuff. Turns out my post got randomly selected as someone who was going to get a book! And I’d been drooling over that book, anyway, so this just made my day!

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I had intended to get some work done this evening… writing a document or two explaining the benefits of doing this or that. But I discovered that I can’t get to my email from work, that the system seems to be down. And I imagine I can only thank the Blaster virus we’re hearing so much about of late. So, thank you, Blaster. You’ve allowed me to enjoy a James Bond movie this evening, rather than sneaking in a few hours of work on a Friday evening. Rather than “Die Another Day”, I’ll “Work Another Day”.

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Most kids go to bed holding their teddy bears, or their favorite blankies. My kid went to bed tonight clutching her sandals.

We’ve known she’s got a thing for shoes. While she’s still in her pajamas, it’s not uncommon for her to come to us with one of her pairs of shoes, demanding that they be put on. If we stay in bed too long, she’ll often flop our shoes up on the bed at us. And often the first thing she does at grandma’s house in the morning is to go get grandma’s sandals and bring them back to her. You can even catch her in some of the new pictures in the gallery, walking around in her daddy’s shoes.

We think the shoe thing has to do with being able to go outside. Since she often hears “Wait, Mommy and Daddy need to put their shoes on”, she preempts the delay by bringing shoes to us and making sure that she’s also appropriately shod. I just don’t know where she thinks she’s going sleep-walking tonight…

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One of those not-yet monumental birthdays is approaching within the next two weeks. It’ll be my last birthday before the big 3-0. Folks tend to focus on that one as the big one, the one to tease you for that it’s all downhill from here, that wrinkles and gray hairs are going to jump out of your mirror the minute you peek on your 30th birthday. So, I’m thinking this year is the perfect year to celebrate the youth that I’ll get to enjoy for a full 365 days before the infirmity of a 30 year old sets in. Each day will be enjoyed and savored. I’ll relish the ice cream cones that’ll go straight to my hips post-30, but which are reasonably safe in my twenties. I’ll revel with all of the energy that a late twentier has, as compared to a thirty-aught. I’ll lustfully live the life of today, rather than pine for the retirement of tomorrow. 29 will purposefully be lived as a year of delights, a season of flavor, and a period of joyous discovery. That way, if 30’s as bad as everyone makes it out to be, at least I’ll have had _some_ fun before decrepitude.

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Performance evaluation time has rolled around at my company. Time to take stock of what it is I’ve done well, what it is I’ve done not so well, and how to convince management that the done well was done so well that payroll should hand a little extra money my way. That’s the basic part of the performance evaluation… the harder part is figuring out my goals for next year. They impact both my chances of getting reviewed well next year (and thus keeping my job/getting a chance at another bump up the payscale) and how I actually spend my time in my career. The economy being what it is (lousy for those of us in software development that don’t have some X level of security clearance), the career path weighs more heavily, as it affects marketability both within my company and outside of it. How do my needs/abilities/interests mesh with the market? What can I highlight of my talents that someone will then be willing to hire me for? How do I make myself indispensable to someone, anyone, with signing authority for employment contracts and paychecks? I’m not willing to sell myself out and do something like go back to writing Cobol, but I am interested in at least putting my finger up to the wind to see which way things are blowing.

Dave Thomas (of The Pragmatic Programmer’s and one of the authors of ‘The Pragmatic Programmer’, rather than the deceased founder of Wendy’s) has put together a talk called ‘How to Keep Your Job’. The talk addresses some of the excuses (my word for it, not his) developers give for why they can’t find jobs or get laid off – H1B visas, companies hiring “fresh-outs” and laying off more expensive “graying” developers – and basically says, hey, you need to manage the stuff companies pay you for (your knowledge) in the same way as you would an investment portfolio. Balance risk and reward. Invest regularly. Monitor your investment to determine if you’re still balanced in risk and reward, and if your payback is getting you where you want to go.

All seems to make sense by me. So now I’m weighing what “value” I bring to the market, overall, and I can do to increase my knowledge worth. BEA training? .NET certification? Java Certified Programmer? Begin an MBA (probably not until next fall at the earliest, so not applicable to this eval cycle)? How far am I willing to go geographically within my current company to get exposure to other sides of the biz? How hard am I willing to work?

I’ve got about a week to get those thoughts down, or whatever slice I’m willing to reveal to my employer, on that performance evaluation piece of paper.

Just to give a non-career slant on the whole thing, here’s Po Bronson’s What Should I Do With My Life?. I don’t own a copy of it, but I’ve been drooling over it for a while, based on an interview I heard with him on NPR and a Fast Company article. (There’s apparently an audio segment, as well, but I haven’t listened to it yet.)

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Two experiences, unconnected, within a half hour of each other:
Female co-worker: You’re six and a half months along? Wow, I’d have pegged you for four!
Male co-worker: Say, shouldn’t you have had that kid six months ago??

Ego boost, ego flattening… At least it all evens out. God’s got a sense of humor that way, I think…

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Blogs are taking over the Internet – they’re what we read now to get the spin, to get someone else’s opinion that we respect, and to get a different flavor of news or ideas than those to which we’d otherwise be exposed. That said, most material on blogs is pure drivel. Blog writers generally write for the chance to express themselves, and as folks on the whole have a generally low ratio of interesting things/thoughts to talk about versus mundane filling space things to talk about, thus the ratio of interesting or useful entries is low. Of course, some writers are better than others, and thus we can choose to bookmark them and avoid the rest so that WE don’t wade through the mire looking for the diamonds, but that doesn’t save the rest of the world from US as writers. Hey, I want to be thought of as insightful, as interesting – I don’t want to be one of those folks on the low end of the blogger totem pole. But I’m obviously not the best critic of my own entries…

So, how to solve it? How to protect my online reputation? Hire a ghost blog writer! Authors do it all the time – what famous person who’s written a book lately do you think really wrote all of their book? If they’re famous because they’re important, then generally their time is too well-filled to have the time to write a book! And so they hire a ghost writer to write the story they would have written, had they the time and the talent. The ghost writer shapes the story the person gives them, and crafts something better than would have otherwise emerged.

Blogs now being the source of our reputation on the web, ghost blog writers would solve the same purpose. A ghost blogger would take my snippets of ideas, ask me some pointed questions, and then mold an entry to be enjoyed by my breathless audience.

As the progenitor of this idea, I offer you the chance to apply for my ghost blogger position. Get in on the ground floor – the pay isn’t much (OK, it’s nothing), but you’ll be the first in on what’s sure to be a tidal wave of a trend. Be my online Ari Fleischer… and save me from inane entries such as this one.