When I was young, I dreamed I would be married coming out of college, make lots of money, own a house and have nice cars. Basically, I wanted the American dream. Fortunately, real life stepped in.

The reality is I have a loving wife, a son who adores me, a job I love and our basic needs met. We don’t own a house, have the coolest home theater, the latest gadgets but, that’s OK, we’ll get there one day. It is more important to me to be happy and have a happy family.

I’ve found that if you follow someone’s time and money, you find their priorities and in their priorities, you find their purpose. What I mean is this. If I wanted to make a comfortable living, the advice I received from many was to work 60 and 80 hour weeks. That would provide money for the nice stuff I thought I’d like.

I quickly decided the people around me mattered much more than nice stuff. Being a family man is more fulfilling than being married to my job. While I love programming and helping others with a financial plan, I love my wife and son more.

So, what do I do differently? For starters, my family time is protected. If I’m going to need to sacrifice family time, it must be rare and short lived. I love coming home from work and having time to play with Zeke before dinner, eating dinner as a family and being an integral part of Zeke’s bed time routine. To see Zeke’s face light up when I come home brings joy. To me these are more important than climbing the career ladder.

I also think working in your passion is part of the equation. I have a passion to help others and a passion for technology. I’m drawn to work that combines the two. That is why I worked for almost years at Children’s Home Society of Florida. That is why I moved to work at Dave Ramsey’s company. Both of these companies have a mission to positively change the lives of those they serve.

I’ve also worked in a plain old J-O-B job. I hated it. I was unhappy when I wasn’t working and didn’t want to be at work. I was constantly stressed about the progress of my projects and whether or not the customer was happy enough with the work to continue being a client. I quickly found myself not working in that job. I was not living. Sure I was breathing but, I was hardly alive.

What I have found is that true happiness is not something that comes from living the American dream. Happiness is experienced as you live out your calling. What is God calling you to do? Discover what that is and chase it.

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A friend sent me this email:

What a Ron Paul presidency would look like, according to Ron Paul:

http://www.yaliberty.org/yar/plan-for-a-freedom-president

Based on this information, I cannot vote for Ron Paul unless he truly is the lesser of all evils. Why? you may ask. Here’s a quote:

… we should not seek to abolish the social safety net overnight because that would harm those who have grown dependent on government-provided welfare. Instead, we would want to give individuals who have come to rely on the state time to prepare for the day when responsibility for providing aide is returned to those organizations best able to administer compassionate and effective help—churches and private charities.

The above sounds great. Just what a compassionate constitutionalist should say. In fact, the above line had me thinking Ron Paul would be a good candidate. If you continue to read the article, you would see that he understands the political process quite well and he appears very level headed and doesn’t seem to over promise.

Then, I read this:

Now, this need for a transition period does not apply to all types of welfare. For example, I would have no problem defunding corporate welfare programs, such as the Export-Import Bank or the TARP bank bailouts, right away. I find it difficult to muster much sympathy for the CEO’s of Lockheed Martin and Goldman Sachs.

While I too find it difficult to fund failures as has been done in the past, what sticks out to me is his mention of Lockheed Martin. To my knowledge, Lockheed Martin is a major defense contractor. Now, if we are going to transition people, cutting off corporate America is not going to make such a transition very easy. Why? Because when you cut off Lockheed and they decide to lay off the engineers who are working on the contracts that are no longer funded, they will find themselves, for a period, possibly depending on the very individual welfare programs Rep. Paul is suggesting are unconstitutional.

See, either way you look at it, change can potentially have a detrimental affect on the people it is intended to help. Would I like a smaller national government? Would I like to see the national debt eliminated? YES! YES! However, in the process of achieving that goal, lets be honest about the potential side effects. Doing something that causes harm to a big business can potentially cause harm to a lot of Americans. That’s why this process is so hard. That’s why the two parties fight until they can’t extend deadlines any further.

The problem is that the US government has become huge. I can talk about the idea of shutting down an department or de-funding a contract with out thinking about the people that will affect. We talk everyday, somewhat flippantly about “shrinking” the government. We cannot forget the names and faces that are part of the government we want to shrink. Sadly, we as a people have to make those choices. So what do we do?

We must not throw our hands into the air and ignore the situation. I can think of another choice. It’s a choice I don’t want to choose. We can raise taxes. I really don’t like that idea because it does not stop the growth. In fact, I’d argue it encourages the growth of the government. So again, what to do?

I think we all must sacrifice. I think that means a combination of tax increases, government job layoffs and a reduction or elimination of social security and similar programs for my generation. We need to act soon. We cannot continue to push these problems down the road and under the rug.

To fix this problem I decided it was time to open the computer and find a way to rig the connector back to the proper location. I started to take out screws. I thought I had every necessary screw removed but I still couldn’t open up the laptop. So, I searched and found this web page: http://www.irisvista.com/tech/laptops/Toshiba-Satellite-A505/removing-optical-drive-1.htm. The instructions there are fairly accurate. However, I’m going to point out a few key differences. Perhaps Toshiba made some changes between the version torn down there and mine.

1) If you are just removing the optical drive, you need to remove on screw on the bottom cover. Unfortunately, I did this last night and don’t recall which screw it was, the screw is about six inches in from the side of the computer. There’s two screws about an inch and a half from each other, removing one of those screws will allow the optical drive to be removed.

2) To remove the top cover, you will have to remove the optical drive first. With the bottom cover up, you will find 3 holes on the left side of the cover with the optical drive removed you will find 3 screws, remove those screws.

3) After removing the keyboard, there are 3 other cables you need to remove, one of them is the touch pad cable, to remove this cable, flip the black bar up to the right. Then pull the cable by the blue tab.

Once you have everything disconnected you should be able to remove the top cover.

I found that the power connecter was somewhat thought out. They did not solder the connecter directly to a circuit board. This is good because that means you will not need to replace a circuit board and probably don’t need to solder anything. They also left some space directly behind the connecter so when it gets pushed back, it does not damage anything. It was easy for me to put the connecter back where it belongs. Thankfully, none of the plastic that holds it in place was severely damaged.

Finally, I put everything back together and began putting the 20 screws back into the bottom of the laptop. After figuring out how the touch pad connecter works, I was able to fire up the laptop and everything worked as expected.

Elderedge uses the first chapter to setup the premise of the book. What I understand that to be, is: We as men have stopped longing for the desires of our heart and have instead attempted to mold ourselves into what “the world” thinks men should be. “The world” would be the society around us, including the Church.

Elderedege proposes that men need three things: A battle to fight, An adventure to live and A beauty to rescue. He seems to think that the only way one can find their spirit of adventure is to journey into the wilderness. While, I do enjoy vacationing in the mountains, I’m not 100% sure this idea applies to all men. In fact, the undertone of this big adventure in the wilderness gets quite tiring and I haven’t even finished the first chapter.

Skipping back to the battle to fight… Elderedge asks us to think back to our childhood days and remember the games we’d play and how they revolved around themes of war, cops and robbers, Coyboys and Indians and so on. Honestly, as a young boy, I enjoyed the swing set and the sand box. I’m not sure what kind of battle a bulldozer, a dump truck and a cement mixer can have. Sure, we had water guns and water balloons but, we mostly just ran around an squirted each other. Having said all of that, deep down, there is a part of me that wants to “fight for the little man” and I often find myself rooting for the underdog.

The beauty to rescue. Elderege hasn’t really gone into a lot of detail about this topic just yet. He does talk about how every great story has a beauty to rescue (Like a prince rescuing a princess). I can never recall not aspiring to one day have a wife. However, I have never really given much thought to rescuing a woman to be my wife until I read this book. I have since found my beautiful wife and am eager to learn or relearn how to edify her.

Some other thoughts… To truely appreciate this book you have to be familiar with certain movies. So far, this seems to be: The Gladiator and Braveheart.

Much like you don’t just pack your belongings and move out of your house, you don’t just decide to pack up your belongings and move your web site. The first thing I needed to figure out why I was moving. Did I need place with a fancy kitchen and extra bathrooms or was I looking to move to something more affordable in the ‘burbs. The two main things I was looking for was the ability to host more than one domain on the same account and a bit more hard drive space. Like all moves, there’s a budget involved. My goal was to find the above without adding to my annual costs. My former host cost me about $50 per year.

So let the house hunting begin. Unlike the search for real estate, you don’t need a broker. However, much like real estate, there are many options. So, how do you find the right host? I honestly don’t know. What I did was look at a fairly popular dreamy host. Their plan looked good, but many of the sites I have visited seemed a bit slow. So, I started looking for hosting reviews. What I found is that many of the review web sites seemed overly positive but, now I at least had a list of potential hosts. I thought I had narrowed my choice down to a farm animal then, I looked at the terms of service.

So, I have some observations. Anything unlimited is not really unlimited. Sure, you can be offered unlimited storage and transfer, but don’t use too much memory or too many CPU cycles. If a host seems sketchy, it is. If a host has public support forms, take a look at them. Those forums can usually tell you at least three things: how often services malfunction, what the technical support staff are like and what your neighbors are up to. Just like you might not want neighbors who are loud, in realm of shared hosting don’t want to have neighbors running services that are going to demand a lot of resources and slow you web site down.

You know what they say… Good fences make good neighbors. The same applies in shared hosting. I considered two flavors of shared hosting: VPS which stands for virtual private server and traditional shared. Shared hosting is when you share one server with many other users, the provider typically manages the operating system, software and services. A VPS host is still shared, you are renting space and resources on a physical server, but you manage the operating system, software and services. A VPS is more fenced in. You should always have the amount of memory, CPU and storage space specified by your host provider.

I chose to stay with a traditional shared host. My budget for hosting doesn’t allow me to “move up” to a VPS. I found a provider who has been in business for 5 years. That’s probably a little on the short side but, everyone has to start somewhere. So far I have not had any problems with my new hosting provider.

I’m wondering if there is anything I could do to help those who were greatly affected by the storm. I know of a couple of things that could be done, so I’ll see what is possible. In our area, the worst we had to deal with was a series of intersections without power during the morning rush hour. I’m grateful that we were not in the direct path of the severe weather.

I did get an e-mail from someone at church that is organizing a group to go and help clear some of the damaged homes. They are in need of a Bobcat to help clear the debris. If you happen to know of where they could borrow one, I’ll pass the information along.

Where to begin… Perhaps the beginning of this blogging sabbatical is a good place to start. The first weekend of May was a trip to North Carolina for a service project. This was the second trip to Camp Grace. This time a group of six people went. Since there were fewer of us, we took on some smaller projects such as putting the walls on a bike storage structure, tweaking several bikes so they would be safe for the summer campers, teaching some children a Bible lesson on the rolling chapel among other things. Once again Frank was there and he was a huge blessing to our group.

Shortly after returning from North Carolina, I had something new. Something I hadn’t had in quite some time… Yep. I now have a wonderful girl friend. For those of you wondering her name is Colleen.

For some reason June is a little foggy. I finished up my database project at CHS and had applied for the web developer position. I interviewed for the position in July and started the position at the end of July. I’m currently converting our internet site so we can host it “in house.” Once that is complete, I am slated to begin redesigning their intranet web site. I also get to maintain the database that I finished up in June.

After finishing my project at CHS, I took a couple of days off to travel. My friend and former college roommate, Andrew, was getting married in Chicago. I went up to Chicago and met up with the old gang for the wedding and a mini vacation in the Windy City. After the wedding, we celebrated Independence Day with a fireworks show over Lake Michigan accompanied by the symphony in Grant Park. We also toured the Field Museum and went to see the view from the top of the Sears Tower. I can’t forget to mention the authentic Chicago deep dish pizza we had for lunch, I was really hungry and had three whole slices.

More recently, Colleen’s mom and step dad were in town for Labor Day. We went out for pancakes at the DeLeon Springs Sugar Mill as well as an eco tour of the river that the springs feed. The following day, we went to the Canaveral National Seashore’s Apollo Beach. Bret and I attempted to body surf some waves. Afterwards, we all ran from the mosquito swarm and into Colleen’s car, where we swatted mosquitoes the entire trip home. On Labor Day, we went searching for alligators on an air boat ride over Lake Jessup. We found several baby alligators and some birds, but we didn’t get very close to any adult alligators. This adventure was followed up by a small barbeque at the pool. We all had a good time that weekend.

I’d try and post some pictures from Chicago and Labor Day weekend, but I don’t spend a lot of time in front of the computer when I’m at home so, I haven’t implemented the photo album yet. Also it seems I have a lot going on, on the weekends. Most that is not of much interest, but nonetheless, I keep myself pretty busy.

While this isn’t a complete journal of my summer, I’m sure it’s enough to fill you in on my life. I suppose I could say more about Colleen, but I’ll leave our story for another entry since this one is already quite long.

I came up with three different approaches. The first idea was to add a table to the database and the associated screens to allow a data administrator to link the documents to the related information. While this appears to be a feasible solution, there is only one data administrator who has little time to keep track of the revisions and maintain the links in the database. The next solution I considered was to put a link, on one of the screens, to the fileserver and allow the user to find the file manually. While this is a simple solution and could be accomplished in under an hour, it is not very user friendly. This had me scratching my head for another solution.

After some thought and investigation, I realized that all the documents the users will need to retrieve have an identifier in the file name that is associated with an identifier in the database. I did some testing and deducted that I can use the MS Windows built in search capability to reliably supply me with a list if files the user may be interested in opening. I thought to myself, “If only I could do that in my application.” Then I remembered that Microsoft has created a plethora of APIs to allow one to provide similar features as they provide in the common components of their computing platform. I completed a quick Google search and found the following: http://www.freevbcode.com/ShowCode.asp?ID=3510.

Armed with some code, I was ready rock. I imported the code into MS Access and took out some items that where not compatible with VBA. I created a test scenario that supplies the search criteria and, viola! I have a collection of files with attributes that match my criteria. Utilizing the MS Search API that is in the kernal is much more efficient than writing my own search using the VBA Dir() function that recurses through all the sub folders I would need to search.

You may find the Windows API Reference a useful resource.

I’ll start with the most exciting news. My little brother is getting married! This just goes to show, I don’t have to be the first for everything.

Aside from that, my work as a contractor for Children’s Home Society of Florida has occupied most of my time. I think as far as work goes, I’ve grown the most during this project. As always there are things I need to do to improve myself, but up until now, I have not been very confident in myself. I had often doubted that I was offering the best solution. On this project, I have found that my first instinct has generally been correct. In the past I would spend a lot of time looking for a solution to my question on the Internet. Lately, I have found that I am having questions about things for which there is not a well known answer. If I do run across an answer, it has been after I had already solved the problem, and often times, my solution is similar to or better than the one I have found.

If I’m not at work, I may be found at church. We have moved the contemporary service into the larger worship center and have eliminated the second blended service. This change has brought about new challenges for me. My area of service changed from simply being sure the sermon was properly simulcast for the contemporary service to directing and switching the cameras for the contemporary service. I have found directing to be a fun challenge. I’m still getting accustomed to the new order of activities but, I think we are getting all the kinks worked out.

I’m hoping I will make more time to blog here in the future. I can’t promise it will be interesting, in fact, I really want to post about programming things I have discovered or am working on. Topics may include but are not limited to ASP.net, MS Access, PHP and Linux systems.