Starbucks
4 hours of sleep yesterday. Went to bed a little after 10, up at a little after 11... laid in bed for almost an hour, on the computer at 12:30 and worked till 2:30. (Good thing, the build was broke and this let me fix it so that when everyone got in we had a working build). Back to bed, reset the alarm for 6:30 so I could get 4 hours of sleep... and then work up at 6 anyway.

So... stop at Starbucks on the way to work:

G: What did you order? I'm sure our very efficient staff already has it going for you!
M, barely speaking: Triple Venti Sugar-Free Vanillia Carmel Machiatto
G: Great! Isn't it a great day today! Beautiful!
M: Sure
G: And here is your change!
M: Boy, you are awful perky for so early in the morning
G: Yeah! Oh... does it bother you, you know it does bother some people. Seems they just can't handle someone being so happy first thing in the morning!
M: No... its fine

LOL. :-) She just cracked me up. Here are all these people, stumbling in, ordering their caffine, and trying to get their bodies go. She is just bubbling away. Most of them missing half of what she is saying and responding with comments like, "Oh... were you talking to me?"

Different neurosis
Tina and I are sitting in a restaruant watching the waitress package up the rest of our food. I'm watching in disbelief as she puts the vegtable mix (which has liquid in it), into a divided go box and piles the shrimp crackers on top of them. What is the chance that they aren't going to get all soggy... Zero. She then puts this into a bag, puts a container of soup on top of it, and then sets a container of vegtables into the bag on its side. The chance that this isn't going to leak all over, be a disaster and edible by the time we get home is nil.

As we are walking we have the following conversation:

M: As soon as we get to the car I'm opening the bag and rearrange all of this.
T: Yeah, I figured. I was watching the look on your face as your eyes were following what she was doing.
M: Yeah, can you believe she mixed the shrimp crackers with the vegtables?
T: I figured that would bother you... but none of it bothered me until she picked up a dirty fork to put the food into the containers.
M: Oh, that didn't bother me at all. It was our fork.
T: Yeah, but still!

Computerworld: Microsoft automates Wi-Fi network setup.
I guess its just pop open your laptop at DIA or Starbucks and start surfing. Might be cool... as long as there aren't big security holes. Microsoft claims this enhances Wi-Fi security. Coming from a company known for security holes... we'll see.

CBSNews.com: Dubious Letters From GIs in Iraq
Drag.

Variety
Variety at work is a cool thing. It is what keeps me interested, I think. Early last week I was doing performance analysis on the system. Trying to find new ways to make the system faster. Either by configuration or writting new code. Towards the end of the week I was debugging code, trying to figure out why major parts of the system were no longer working when we went to a new third party product. I was also involved in some architecture meetings to discuss how we are going to design some new portions of the system. And in consulting with some implementations on ways to improve their system performance and to discuss what new features might help them.
This moring I'm writting up lessons that we learned while doing performance tuning, so I can share the ideas and things that worked with other teams, so they can do it on their team.
Architecting, designing, analysis, trouble-shooting, mentor, etc. Although it all deals with the same application, and the same domain of computer science, each is different in their own ways. It keeps things interesting and fun.
I'm blessed by my job!

Fleetwood Mac
Fleetword Mac was awesome. It was a great concert. I have been a hugh Stevie Nicks fan ever since I saw Fleetwood Mac in Billings MT when I was probably 19 or so. She was awesome. Lindsey Buckingham was as big a freak as ever... but he is what makes part of the band. And I just love Mick Fleetwood. Man, what a drummer and showman. And then there was John McVie... just standing in the back, playing his bass like always. IMO there aren't a lot of bands that can still rock like they used to, 30 years later, but they guys certainly can. It was an awesome show and so much fun. I have the T-Shirt and Program to prove it. :-)

Christy McVie was missed. The show was awesome, but Don't Stop just isn't the same w/o Christy.

Thanks Steve so much. What an awesome birthday present!

What is it that a worship team is supposed to do
There have been some questions lately about how the youth worship team should "get the congreation to worship." I had some thoughts about that and posted them on FusionWorship.

Just messing around
Home alone blogging. Leaving for Larkspur around 5:15 so I can hook up with Steve and we can head up to Denver. Fleetwood Mac tonight. How cool!

My first Saturday as "no longer a youth worship director." Home alone cause Tina and the girls had to drop a CD off for Bobby and then go to the movies. Tonight is Homecoming and neither girl are going. Youth ministry rules are you can't "date" and going to a dance, etc. is frowned upon if you "like" somebody. Since Jaime does like someone, she isn't going. And although she could have gone to youth, it would just be too hard to go there tonight and hang out with all the girls that are getting made-up, talking dresses, maybe going for dinner and limo rides. The other girls are going because they are going with guys that are just "friends", so it is ok. Being a teen can be really hard some times.

But both my girls (Jaime and Erika) are really great and make it through. And they'll have fun with Tina going to a movie, then maybe out to dinner, and up all night watching movies and snacking. And my other girls are so awesome too. Tif who will be home next weekend with Brian for a week. (Woo hoo!) And Tina - who is my soul-mate and who I'd be so lost without.

Kind of melancholy, sitting home alone I guess! :-)

Productivity, Long build cycles and working 24x7
Just kind of weird to think about how some of us work. Maybe it is a computer thing, maybe not. Dan and I both work pretty much 7 days a week. Well I work 6, and Dan usually 7. He works late at night and I work early in the morning... plus our normal "you have to be at work from 9 - 4, even if you put in overtime and work other times".

Why do we do it? First because it is "fun". Hey, good thing I love what I do. Second because it is just way more productive. The Infrastructure now takes about 4 hours to build under normal system loads. That means if we get a compile error in the build and then kick off another full build, we'll get maybe 2 of those in, in a day. Well if Dan is kicking them off late, and I'm kicking them off early, we can get a few extra builds in. Add the weekend in, when nothing would "normally" happen, and you just end up with many more cycles.

This AM I got on around 6 and saw a problem with the build. Just a couple of minor things. Put in the fix in about 20 minutes and kicked another build off. About 2.5 hours later it was done (since the system wasn't under much stress being as no one was on it). If we worked "normally", then it probably would have gotten fixed and rebuilt on Monday morning, finishing up around noon or so. Pretty much 1/2 a day wasted.

Yeah... we don't have to work overtime, and yeah, we don't have to work weekends... but if we didn't, much less would get done. It isn't that working for 30 minutes on Saturday morning buys you 30 more minutes... it can buy you 4 hours. And not just for you, but for the entire team. This kind of thing happens all the time, and it happens in cycles. Some times on a weekend we'll get several builds in. I may do something early, Dan will do something mid day and maybe that night, etc.

Working 5x8 just gives you so many less cycles than working out-of-normal hours. Not that we are working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.... but checking things here and there "constantly" can really improve the productivity.

In case anyone was in doubt
On the plane flight (to/from - don't remember) Cancun a few months back, Heather had a book on intraverts. There is a test you can take to see where you fall on the scale. 0 is the most extraverted, 30 is the most intraverted. I got 27 out of the 30. Like I had any doubt...

And in light of that, Tina tells me at 5:00 AM yesterday that she has a part for me in one of the leadership training skits. Yeah... that's good for an intravert, put them on stage in front of 50 people. :-S Hey... but I love her. Whatever she wants.

Fleetwood Mac
Steve got him and I tickets to see Fleetwood Mac for my birthday. They play at the Pepsi Center in Denver tonight. How very cool! The last time I saw them live was in Billings MT. I was probably 19 or so. I still love Stevie just as much. :-)

Crackers
I was down in the cafe getting some soup (split-pea - I almost always get it when they have it, because it is one of my favorites), and I was picking through the packs of crackers, making sure I got ones that weren't crumbled at all.

This later struck me as rather odd, as I sat at my desk and crumbled them into little pieces before dropping them in my soup.

Girls, turning into women
After practice Saturday, Jaime, Erika and I went and grabbed food at Subway before youth started. I'm for the most part not a very observant guy. But as I was waiting for them I noticed that Erika looked different. (That's the way changes in hair, makeup, whatever hit me... Just a general - hmm... something is different.)

So, we are sitting at subway and I said, "You look very nice" or something to that extent. She had dyed her hair "red" (Ok... probably not red, but I have a very limited color vocabulary), it was straigthend some as well. And she was wearing this black turtleneck with a light suede coat. "Very eurpopean looking", to which she struck one of her "Erika the model" poses. Very elegant... at which point she took a bite of her sandwhich and dropped a black olive covered in oil and vinegar onto her coat.

Some times they (her and Jaime) look so grown up that it breaks my father's heart... but they they usually do something that they would have done when they were 2, and it reminds me that as grown up as they are... they are still "girls"... at least for a little while longer.

Thanks!
And here is a beautiful note from Erika on worship and me stepping down. I love you girl. You are my third daughter. Thanks. It really touched me. (and now I'll wipe the tears from my eyes and get back to work...)

Oh... and I'll still be around to encourage and lift you guys up. I just won't be there all the time, or "in charge". But you guys rock so much. God is just taking you to a new level and letting you have a little more control over your team. And as in everything you do, you'll excell.

The end of an era...
Well for me anyway.

I stepped down as the FusionWorship director. Stepped down is Christian slang for "quit"... but not because of any troubles or anything. There are quite a few entries (starting with this one) about it on the FusionWorship blog. Basically I've been working 7 days a week for close to 2 years and I just couldn't do it any longer. Plus the team is well able to lead themselves, which is an extremely cool fullfillment of the whole "student led" idea.

CNN.com: And that's how the cookie crumbles
Scientists have discovered why some cookies crumble in the box.

Jim Richards
Pastor/Dr. Jim Richards from Impact Ministries is here at church this week. He is an awesome Pastor, person, speaker. He always has an awesome message. We would be there tonight if it wasn't for getting the Cher tickets before we knew when he was coming. But we'll definately be there tomorrow.

When is it fast enough?
Still trying to handle 100 million events a day. First we backed up the data source, then we handled the data in the initial stages, but would eventually drop some of the day.

(Part of the system is a queue that holds data until other parts are ready for it. For the non-geeks that care... think of it as a clothes basket. Someone is throwing stuff into it and another person it taking stuff out. If you take it out fast enough, then it is almost always empty. Thats a good thing. You are "processing" the stuff right away. If you start falling behind (it takes you longer to take it out and do something with it than it takes the person to put stuff into it), then you start falling behind. The basket starts filling up. If the person putting clothes in stops, then eventually you'll catch up.)

Tweaked the system some more and got it to where it never dropped data (the basket was never full), but we still weren't keeping up. Looked at what was going on in the code, and for about 150 thousand processed object, we would do 6 BILLION operations. The operations were very fast, but still... you do 6 billion and it adds up.

We figured out a way to perhaps significanly reduce that. I put in the code, we tested it out, and now the system is purring along. Running at about 50%. (In other words, 1/2 the time it is working and the other 1/2 it is just wating). And now we are never getting behind.

It was a cool think. Like I said last month, I love this kind of stuff. So now are system is up and running and we are ready to handle even larger amounts of data. And there are still other ways we could have tweaked the system. But at 50%, we are probably good enough for now... so on to other things.

Cher
Going to see Cher's "Farewell Tour" tonight. I've liked Cher at certain points in my life... Haven't really listened to her much lately. I think the best was when she was with Black Rose... However, Tina loves her. When Tina's hair was long (back in the day), people were always telling her she looked like Cher. And she can do a really good Cher impersonation. She was coming to town, so I figured, "What the heck" and got tickets. Should be cool.

A new toy for Jaime
Just because she wanted it so much, and because she is sooo cute, and because she is my baby... We got Jaime a Korg SP500. It is set up in her room and she has been playing it. Quite the cool keyboard.

Love ya kid!