How long should a blog post be?
Struggling to blog? Here’s some good info to help decide how long to make your writing:
http://www.internetmarketingjam.com/content-marketing/how-long-does-a-blog-post-need-to-be/
Dreaming and Doing
I love to dream, and I love to do. And my best works come when I do what I dream.
Sometimes I dream without doing. That’s fun, and, sometimes it even serves me well. Undone dreams often lead to bigger and better undone dreams, and eventually one of these really big and best dreams gets done.
Sometimes I do without dreaming. Everyone can do this, though. When I do things devoid of a dream, they are boring and simple and usually not very fun.
One of my dream themes over the years has revolved around the creation of a good “place” to be in my community. Whether that be a coffee shop, a bar, a reading room, or a lounge, or maybe a mix of these, I think it’d be really great to create a place with an atmosphere and a personality of its own. I dream that people might come to this place and rest, relax, and relate to others.
While this place might offer rest for visitors, it would be a place of recovery and rehabilitation for a small group of employees. I want this place to hire workers and train them to serve well and live responsibly.
At times I have thought that this place would be a sort of loft, with a professional place on the street-level, and a living space above or behind it. Some workers may live on-site, and could learn and be grown and changed and challenged as they also serve and work in the public lounge. It may be a halfway house or rehab center of sorts, but it would need to remain small and intentional with the people who come to us for work.
In the past few days, this dream has morphed a bit and it’s taken a turn towards practicality, I think.
See, my current businesses occupy office space already, and we pay rent and utilities and are self sufficient as it stands. We’re steadily growing, and we may be in need of a larger space to work in the near future.
My new dream is to move this office to a storefront in a downtown area (maybe Fullerton, Orange, or Yorba Linda). We’d move to the new space and settle in for a while, but we’d have an area in the front that is cozy, comfy, and creatively decorated. This space could be our own internal coffee shop, break room, conference room, and hangout zone for our own team and friends to use to work and meet and play. Then, eventually, maybe we’d open this space to the public and allow others to come to our place to work or rest or converse or play.
Our traditional office space would be in the back, and we’d still operate our day-to-day business from there, but at any time I or another one of the team may be lounging on a sofa and working in the front area, surrounded by some random collegiates or independents or small business owners.
This front place could employ a handful of people, teaching them how to serve well and be responsible after they’ve maybe slipped up in life, giving them a second chance. These people could learn from us, we could learn from them, and we’d underwrite the whole thing with the business that uses the offices in the back. It’d be fun, unique, challenging, and it would be an opportunity to give back and serve our community well.
So far, it’s just a dream. But maybe it’s a dream that will be done.
Making my MacBook + Windows 7 on Parallels Feel Zippy
A few months back, I replaced my wicked-fast Dell E6500 with a new MacBook Pro. It was a bit of an impulse move, but we were also down a laptop at the office, so I took the opportunity to get a new one for myself and then hand-me-down the Dell (although, it’s far from a hand-me-down machine – 8GB of RAM and a solid-state hard drive).
Anyway, when I moved to the Mac, I imaged my Dell’s hard drive and copied it to my MacBook to use as a virtual machine. It’s kinda funny to have a Windows virtual machine on my Mac with a bunch of Dell crapware installed on it.
The problem is that I kept feeling like the Windows VM was slow. I use Parallels as my VM host, and, especially when I’m running the machine in Coherence, it’s just terribly slow.
It turns out that the speed problems are almost all caused by Windows 7′s cool “Aero” looks. I disabled all the extra fluff interface stuff, an it’s been way faster, now.
Here’s how to do it:
Within the Windows software, visit the Start menu, navigate to Control Panel, and open the Performance Information and Tools panel.
From that panel, choose the Custom option and enable only the features you want (in my screenshot, you can see that I picked just a couple). Click Okay, wait for the effects to be applied, and voila – fast Windows!
Keeping My SSH Connections Alive on Verizon 4G LTE
Today I switched back to Verizon for my personal mobile Internet needs, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to stick with this change. I like my experience so far.
I did come up with a problem, though. It seems that Verizon 4G provides me with an internal (10.x.x.x) IP address instead of a public IP address, and that their NAT router has a pretty short timeout for connections that have no traffic. This means that when I connect to a server via SSH and I don’t touch the connection for about 5 minutes, my connection gets dropped.
My workflow has a lot of 5 minute breaks from SSH, too. After some searching the ‘net, I found a reference to setup SSH so that it transmits a keepalive packet to keep my connection alive. That got me searching for instructions that are specific to Mac OS X, and I found a great writeup here.
Bottom line: I edited my ~/.ssh/config file and added the following two lines:
ServerAliveInterval 120
ServerAliveCountMax 3
This will send a packet to my server every 120 seconds (every 2 minutes), and then disconnect if I don’t hear back from the server for 3 cycles (6 minutes).
My Thoughts on Clear Internet (Clear.com)
Last month, I moved away from the place I’ve called home for the past decade. My new home is a small apartment behind the home of a family from church and my apartment doesn’t have its own postal address.
This causes a problem with Internet providers, it turns out. Since I don’t have my own address, the Internet providers can’t figure out what address to activate the Internet at, and so I’m a bit out of luck. Wire line DSL and cable Internet are both unavailable at the apartment.
I thought about trying to use a wifi router to connect from my apartment to my landlord’s house, but I really don’t want to bother them with my need for Internet.
Enter Clear…
A few days after moving in, it dawned on me that I could activate a 4G connection from Clear Internet. They offer a pretty good connection speed-wise, and they don’t have a bandwidth cap each month.
I stopped by my local Best Buy, grabbed a home wifi router for Clear, and brought it home. Within about 10 minutes, I had a real, live, high-speed Internet connection at my apartment. Woot!
A few days later, I added two portable hotspots to my plan (one for me and one for my parents to use with their iPad). The price was definitely right (about $85/mo for my house and two wireless hotspots).
I’ve found the coverage to be pretty good (although it’s a little spotty when I leave heavily populated metro areas, and it’s totally non-existent for the 6 hour drive I just took from Los Angeles to San Francisco and back). I get about 8MB download speed most of the time, the latency is good, and my connections stay alive very well.
Awesome!
Except for that darned return.
Last week, my parents called me and said their hotspot was flashing red instead of a solid green light. I told them they were probably in an area which Clear had no coverage. They insisted that they checked Clear’s map and it said they should be good, so I stopped by a few nights ago.
Sure enough, their personal hotspot device wasn’t working. I called Clear and got them to send us a new one. It was a pretty painless call, although it did take some time (about 30 minutes) to get through all the steps that the kind outsourced fellow made me go through.
It was good until today, that is.
I sat down at Starbucks to do a few hours of work this afternoon. In my normal routine, I plugged my Clear hotspot in and started to do some work. Except that I couldn’t get online. Instead, I was redirected to a Clear website which told me to call Clear since my account had trouble.
Uh oh.
The number they gave me was a phone tree, and I had to call a few times, trying different options on the menu each time, until I finally got through to a department that was actually open. They told me that my hotspot was marked as defective. Apparently, when I called last week to replace my parents’ hotspot, the customer service guy replaced my working hotspot, not their broken one. The lady today got that all squared away, but by then I was frustrated with the entire experience.
When I got off the phone with Clear, I realized that I was paying for my iPhone tethering plan on top of my Clear hotspot plan just so I could have 3G and 4G coverage. I also realized that I was frustrated with my experience of their technical support, and the fact that I’d get redirected to a Clear.com message page every week or two for no good reason, and it all came to a point today when I decided that I was just tired of them.
I know, they really didn’t do much wrong, and I made an emotional decision that I was over them, but that’s the way it is.
Today I went back to Verizon, re-activated my Mifi plan that I had canceled in order to get Clear, and I’ll be canceling my Clear hotspot plan tomorrow (once their billing department is open).
I’ll be keeping my apartment’s Clear router (since it seems to work pretty well, and I don’t really have any other options). And I’ll be keeping the hotspot for my parents since it’s the only 4G I can get for them and not be vulnerable to them hitting any sort of bandwidth caps.
WordPress Comment Counts are Wrong
I was recently asked by a friend to look at his WordPress blog. His hosting company had a problem which meant they had to do a database restore for his blog, and his comment counts were incorrect after the restore.
After some searching around, I found a few PHP scripts which could be installed server-side to loop through the database rows and recalculate the comment counts, but this seemed very inefficient to me (and I didn’t have quick access to his filesystem, anyway).
Eventually, I came up with this simple MySQL command to rewrite all comment counts correctly. I’m posting it here so I have it if I need it again:
UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_count = (SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE ID = comment_post_id AND comment_approved = 1);
Empowering the Team with Pre-Emptive Questioning
As our business grows, I find myself with more and more opportunities to pass work on to others in my organization. I am constantly training, providing input and feedback, and helping my team be effective, productive, and efficient. It is not uncommon that I notice my team doing tasks or making decisions differently than I would in a similar situation. This difference isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s my job to provide general direction and help to keep things on course. And, ultimately, every decision we make falls on my shoulders.
Of course, I could simply do everything myself. I could run the entire business with no outside help, removing any opportunity for business growth or diversity. If you want something done right, do it yourself, right? But this would just be silly. My entire team knows how much of a bottleneck I can be to our processes since I have so much going on. Thinking that things would better if it were just me is ludicrous. For instance, next week I’ll be in Las Vegas, and the week after I’ll be in Dallas. There’s no way I can do everything myself. And I don’t want to.
So, how do I keep quality high within our organization but also not get roped into doing everything myself? Simply put, I teach my team how I think instead of telling them what to do. It’s something I call “pre-emptive questioning”.
Here’s what I mean by that.
Instead of me making every decision within our organization, my goal is to empower our team by helping them understand how I think so that they can make decisions without requiring constant input from me.
This mindset is most critical early on in any decision-making process.
Many problems arise which ultimately require my approval but most of the research will be done by another member of the team. When these situations arise, it is my job to set the stage for this decision to be made. If I simply ask my teammate to research the situation and then come back with a recommendation, it is very likely that I will have more questions when he comes back the first few times. This creates a long and drawn out period of back and forth questions which can be frustrating to he and me both.
The other option is that I provide my teammate with the questions that I will need answered in order to make a final decision, and then ask him to research the situation and bring back a recommendation. By pre-emptively questioning him about the situation, I am increasing the likelihood that he return with all the information I will need to then make a final decision.
For example…
Just last week we had a problem in our data center which required us to make a purchase. We could decide to fix the issue with a cheap but possibly short-term fix, or we could use this as an opportunity to fix it long-term with an upgrade.
I brought our lead systems engineer up to speed on the issue to get his input and insight (I truly did want his opinion on what to do). He suggested a particular fix, and we disagreed a little on the exact implementation of this fix. As we went back and forth, I came to a realization: I could remain very hands-on to this situation, and allow it to slow down other initiatives in the organization, or I could empower my colleague to handle the situation while I remained focused on my other responsibilities.
I wanted to empower him. But how?
Instead of telling him I wanted it done my way and sending him on his way, I explained what criteria I wanted him to use when making a decision. His instructions were not “go buy a new server”. Instead, I articulated what things I wanted him to look into, what dollar amounts I wanted him to be sure he knew, and what specifications and calculations I wanted to be sure he had uncovered before making a purchase. With this information, I sent him on his way.
Now, the situation is “owned” by him. He hopefully has an understanding of the parameters within which I want a decision to be made, and he’s now been empowered to make the decisions he needs to make within these parameters.
Although he’ll need to check in with me to actually make the final purchase, he now knows what things I’ll want to understand before I’m comfortable giving the go ahead. And he has the information he needs to present me a complete and coherent recommendation, being sure to address all the items that I’ll need addressed.
Hopefully, we’ve reduced the number of times I need to interact with this situation to two: first, to explain how I want the decision made, and then, second, to give a final once-over to the final decision.
Amputation and Re-Attachment? But Why?
I know, I know… two posts in a day. What can I say?
I just finished an excellent discussion over lunch with a great friend. He’s is in a place of transition within his church and his school: since he recently graduated college and is moving on to grad school, he no longer “fits” within the church group he has called home for the past 6 years, and he knows he needs to move on and find another group to be a part of at his church.
But why?
This friend has been an active – I’d argue integral – part of this particular ministry, and he has a lot to offer others who are there. He’s a maturing Follower, loves the Lord, and has an ability to minister to those who are less fortunate in a way I seriously admire. He has led small groups, preached to the larger group, led groups to minister in tangible ways to those who have not.
But he’s too old. He’s up against the ceiling.
The church’s prescription for spiritual growth says he must now tear himself from the appendage of the Body to which he has so intimately entwined his life and his heart. He is being pruned from this part of the tree, and left to graft himself on to a new branch on his own. Many others before him have blown in the wind and landed on new trees, or fallen from the forest altogether.
Although I am confident in my friend’s ability to find a new home for ministry, a new group in which to be a part, and a place he can again call home, I wonder why he is put in this sort of position to begin with.
Why does the Church do such a poor job of helping those in my friend’s position to continue on in the journey? Why this artificial age-based ceiling, anyway? Why doesn’t the church foster age-based relationships and allow them to last and grow, even beyond the artificial delimiters of college graduation or marriage? Does the Church not see the value of diversity within the community, allowing the singles and marrieds, old and young, leaders and followers, servants and thinkers to fellowship, live, and grow together?
I’m praying for this friend of mine, and for myself and the Church as a whole, for that matter. That he and we would work to create a more healthy, dynamic church home for all ages. That he can discern, through prayer, counsel, and trial, his role within this church and The Church, and that Christ would use this opportunity to continue to grow him and teach him.
A Successful Failure?
In today’s entry in His Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers makes a few excellent points. Namely, he reminds us that we are completely unable to learn to follow Christ as our True Savior until we realize that we are incapable of succeeding on our own. Chambers specifically quotes Matthew 5:11, a portion of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus suggests that those who are “poor in spirit” (whatever exactly that means) will inherit the Kingdom of God.
That sounds fine and dandy at first read, and I’d even say that I agree with Chambers in his articulation and interpretation of this scripture. Yes, I understand I must seek Christ, and that He must intervene for me, and that I am completely unable to attain any sort of righteousness at all. I even understand that I must learn that I am, in Jesus’ words, “poor”, and I must learn this through, in Chambers’ words, stumbling over some obstacle that lies in my way.
So far so good. I need to be a poor spirit, which will lead to my sanctification through Christ’s saving me.
So, here’s where I’m confused.
How, exactly, does one live “poorly” in life when they are in a position of needing to be strong, decisive, confident, and willing to walk where there are yet no footsteps?
What I mean is this: I have a life of leadership and trailblazing. I tread where there is no one yet to follow, but in a way which others will hopefully benefit by following my lead. Whether it be in business, or ministry, or even my role within my family, in order to succeed I must make decisions, on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, which require 100% faith in myself and in my ability to pull through. I often look beside or behind me to find friends and relatives who doubt the possibility of achieving the goal I am pursuing, or who think I’m crazy for trying. I find my peers telling me to move on, and find an “easier” way to go. But I simply cannot live life that way, distracted anything short of success.
If I could speak to Jesus face-to-face, I would ask Him how I am supposed t0 go about being a confident and strong leader, while relying on Him and understanding my “poor”ness. How do I have confidence enough in my own human faculties to continue to lead successfully, while understanding that I am incapable, fallen, broken, unworthy, and have (and will perpetually) fallen quite short of God’s intentions for my life.
How do I practically live life knowing that I am an utter failure but still have the confidence to present myself as a success?
What responsibility does one have to their church?
I’ve heard it plenty of times from the pulpit: “church hopping is bad,” or “we live in a McChurch culture, with non-committal church membership and a consumer view of the church,” or even “the church is your family, and you may not always get back what you put in, but God has you (t)here for a reason.”
What do you tell a Christian that feels as though he’s not getting anything out of the church he’s currently a member of, but that he can probably influence it in a positive way? He’s drained, doesn’t look forward to the Sunday services, and sits in the pew praying that the church would learn to experience God in a deeper way. He watches his peers move on to other churches where they feel more connected, challenged, and needed, and he’s not able to do much to stop them. He’s very well connected to this church: he was previously employed by the church; he was an integral part of an age-specific ministry while he was in that age-group; and he is currently the leader of a home fellowship group sponsored by the church.
This Christian has a handful of pretty specific ideas on how the church can be more inviting and captivating for his peers, and he knows the right people to talk to about it. He spent two years lobbying for the church to endorse and help form the home fellowship that he now leads. He fears that the church will again be very slow to move and not easily comprehend the necessity of the problems he sees.
This Christian has recently been attending another church after going to his home church’s services so that he can be challenged and actually experience God’s Word. The way this other church operates is a fulfillment of what he wants to see change at his home church. He has friends at this other church, and they want him to become more involved there.
What do you tell this Christian?
He feels he has a duty to his home church, to help to lead and effect the direction of the church in a positive light. But he also feels that the scope of his task is that of a teenager lobbying Congress to amend the Constitution.
At what point do you tell this Christian to move on and find a place where he feels valued, connected, challenged, and that he will grow? And how involved should he be in the other church in the meantime, if at all?