Touching Base

Hello all. Long time no see.

I think it's been more than a year since they instituted the blog-block at work, and it continues to make life tough for me. I used to be able to count on 30 minutes a day, 3-5 days a week, to put things out here that interested me. I think it's been 2 months since I've blogged anything regularly, and I don't see any breaks coming soon. I continue to be quite busy at home, and just seem to be getting busier.

One of my preoccupations these days has been tennis. This year I've played a very full tournament schedule, and I have learned SO MUCH about this game!

I cannot believe I ever thought I knew anything about tennis.

I don't know when I've ever been so profoundly humbled.

It's been very good for me.

Here's what's humbling about it. I used to think I knew as much about tennis as I did about being a Christian. Now that I know how badly I've sucked all these years at tennis, I'm pretty sure I'm right about being just that good a Christian, too. If people with true devotion can be so much better than me at a silly game, I am awed at how deep the waters of true wisdom might truly be.

I think about how far I thought I was in tennis, versus how far I now know I still have to go, all most every day. And almost every day I'm reminded how far I thought I was on the road to being a decent Christian. Well, praise the Lord, it just means I have that much more excitement and hope ahead of me.

The rest of life is really going well. I'm quite happy these days, and really feel the blessing of the Lord in every area of my life. I just figured I'd check in and let those of you keeping score know that things are good.

I do have several half-baked posts mocked up in my inbox. Maybe some day I'll actually write a couple of them. :-)

----

For those of you with too much time on your hands, let me tell you about my year of tennis-ing dangerously.

Here's the score. I've put all sorts of time and effort into learning how to play tennis right, and then teaching my body to do what my brain has absorbed, and what I've learned is that people who have been doing exactly that same thing for years are much better than me. I'm exactly 11 months into my master plan for local tennis domination, and so far I have yet to make it past the quarter finals of a single tournament. My record is something like 4-9, with at least 2 of those losses being 0-6, 0-6 drubbings.

I'm a putzer. :-)

I'm proud of this part of it all, though. I've stepped onto the court and measured myself. 3 years ago, I thought I was pretty good at this game, but I was playing at the 3.5 level when the tourney's are all 5.0+ events. I had no idea what the gap is from 3.5 to 5.0. Now I know. It's the gap between 7th grade algebra (which is way tougher than arithmetic) and college level calculus (which is still way below graduate level experimental math.) Not surprisingly, I've made it up to first or second year high school level algebra, and keep failing at the college-level tests.

I've had to learn to take my game out of the ivory tower, and learn how to make it happen on the hard courts. I now know, not just what an attacking game looks like, but what it felt like both times I did it right. I know what it feels like to decide to flatten out a forehand against someone who's eaten flat forehands for lunch for 2 decades. I've measured myself against the #1 seed in 4 different tournaments now, and come up wanting every time.

My expectations were completely unrealistic (or I probably would not have had the courage to try.) The thing with expectations, though, is that we really expect them to work. Having those expectations dashed really hurt ... every single time ... repeatedly ... publicly. But after a mere 11 months, I think I am beginning to see what I can really expect, and it's rewriting my experience of the game. I look back and see some pretty quick learning, and now I really feel good about what I see.

Here's my grades, as best I can assess them:
[Legend:
Dimension of Tennis
[:]
The way I thought I was playing in 2007.
[-]
The way I was actually probably playing in 2007.
[-]
The way I think I'm playing now.]

Grade card:
Forehand: B - D - C
Backhand: C - F - B
Serve: B - D - C
Approach: C - F - C
Volley: D - F - C
Put-away: C - F - D
Mental toughness: D - C - B

I think my best chance to become a winning tennis player at this level is to turn my volley into an A. You need an A to win, and you need to force other people to play into your A strength. Right now, my best hope is to lull people into playing against my backhand and surprise them, but it's not an A and it never will be. But I think I have the nerve to make my volley an A, and I think it's a rare enough game to upset some otherwise much better players than I am.

We'll see.

With my newly adjusted expectations, I'm actually starting to enjoy tennis. It's been a great ride, and maybe I've got a little glory tucked away somewhere in these tired old bones. I'll tell the story of my latest win some day, if I can get to it while it's still fresh. :-)

Thanks for listening.

Ever Wondered What the Browser Wars Are About?

Joel Spolsky is the world's most readable teaching geek. He is a fantastic manager of programmers, and was a programmer from Microsoft in a previous life, and even the lead on some of the early versions of Excel. If he says it, I pretty much believe it.

In this long article, he teaches why Internet Explorer is so unbelievably complex to build. And along the way he addresses the reasons Vista is so unpopular, and why it really should be unpopular. The article is as simple as it can be made, but it still gets pretty complex. If you can hang through some of the tougher parts, you'll be way ahead of the class when browser discussions get started.

Martian Headsets

Let's do an attitude check. (Mine, that is.)

It's been a little while since I've blogged, and I can't say as I've much missed it. There's a lot of reasons for that. At the top of the list is some rip-roaring email conversations with Eclexia, but there have been plenty of other things going on. I've been playing more tennis than ever (with the same variable levels of success), hanging on at work (I'll be starting a new, more time-consuming, more exciting opportunity there in a week or two), and doing two long weekends away.

At another level, if I were to kick up the blogging again, I think I'd become even less popular than I am now - and how much fun would that be? I tire myself with my own contradictions. I grow more and more convinced as time goes on that:

The churches we have are God's way of working in the world. Changing the church out for something "better" is worse than going forward with what we have.	The churches are falling away from the faith.
Spirituality is on the wane, just when we need it most	Contemplative prayer, centering prayer, silence before the Lord, whatever you want to call it, is a spiritual deception.
We need real teaching of solid doctrine, the blood, and holiness.	NT Wright and his "new perspective on Paul" is spot on.
I'm starting to see things more clearly than ever before in my life.	I've never been more confused.

I've called myself a former "Damentalist" before, but it's really never that far gone from my heart. (That's fundamentalism after you bleed the fun out.) The problem is I always seem to be squarely in two camps, and end up aggravating both. 20 years ago, I was an egalitarian, home churching Calvinist. Ever met one of them? No you haven't. The home churchers were unhappy about the Calvinism, and the Calvinists seem to need high liturgy. Now I'm a doctrine-heavy new perspective guy who doesn't think much of the emergent movement. That's nothing, though. I'm a doctrine-heavy guy who believes you should attend the church closest to you without regard to its doctrine.

What on Earth is wrong with me?

If anyone is itching to discuss the New Perspective on Paul (Pearlie has been running a series, on which I have not commented) or whether the church is falling away, let me know. It might tempt me. Elsewise, if I seem quieter than usual, everything's OK. I'm just staying occupied.

The Road Warrior

What a pair of weeks!

Some of you have wondered what cliff I fell off. I fell off expedia.com.

In August, my daughter instructed me, "You will visit me in college in February for the presentation of the school rings." I, of course, answered, "Yes ma'am."

Well, it's February.

But about 3 weeks ago my mother in the Lord, Fay, asked me to attend a conference with her in Sacramento the very next weekend. This very weekend, as it happens.

In 25 years of faithful love, this woman has never asked me to do anything before. She didn't even ask me to attend her 70th birthday party. How could I even contemplate saying no? Well, contemplate I did. I had to. It was all I could do to even consider laying down money for FOUR flights in a two-week span, and 5 total days of vacation for nothing more than pleasure. With four flights at stake, there'd better be a chance to save a small polynesian island from destruction or some such!

But, there was the chance to make Fay happy, which was almost as good. So I bought the tickets. I didn't quite "shut up" and buy the tickets, but I bought them.

The first weekend, of course, was seeing my daughter. As an exercise in solidarity with her, I did not rent a car when I landed. Instead, I rode the mass transit system to her college, just like she had to when she flies. She was a real sweetheart, though, and met me at the airport to hold my hand through the scary train terminals. It was nice having her confident guidance through the frightening process of putting two of my hard earned dollars into the train-token machine, and eventually we made it. (Go ahead - ask whether I'm kidding.)

The weekend was beautiful. Her college is truly lovely, and the ring presentation ceremony was quite moving. Each of 155 girls stepped across the stage one at a time, was greeted by the school president (whom they each know personally), and received her ring with great dignity.

Evidently the ring is more than just a symbol. It's a sign all over the world to other alums that its wearer is a sister. And so many women having these rings have risen to places of influence that one local business man refers to them as a type of Cosa Nostra. At any rate, each of the girls entered into a deep, meaningful, long-term relationship with that ring that night. It was really cute to watch.

The ceremony ended with a slide presentation showing a picture of each of the girls as a child then another as a lady.

Did they have to make us all cry like that?

It was just a beautiful time.

I took the rapid transit system back to the airport and walked the half-mile from the depot to my ticketing station - only to find out the sales computers could not find my ticketing information. I cried uncle, and asked the drones for their help, and they couldn't find it either. On a hunch, I pulled out my BlackBerry, and checked my expedia.com details.

Yep. :-(

I had scheduled my flight out for Monday, not Sunday.

I was the dweeb.

You should have seen the nice ticketing ladies (suddenly they weren't drones any more) all relax when I smiled and said, "Um. I know what the problem is, and it's me."

They went to work, and were able to get me home on Sunday for only $600. Nope. I spent an extra day in Atlanta. And an extra $150. And an extra day of vacation. And woke up at 1:51 AM, ready to GO.

Oh well. It was a nice extra day off in its own way.

Today finds me in flight toward Sacratomato, CA. Tomorrow I will be at the "Precious Blood of Christ" conference with Fay. I will probably have something to say about this when I return. As the Lord would order things, this very subject has been on my heart for a while.

I was concerned when I was too young to vote that the church had fallen away from Christ. Now that I'm thoroughly into my forties, I've swung the other way, and am ready to seek a permanent home somewhere in the center.

When I started this blog I argued that doctrine does not matter, but only life in Christ. I am ready to correct this in myself, and I think the blood of Christ may be the perfect spot check to use on a church. I don't care whether they're Calvinist or Dispensationalist or Sacramental, but do they hold that the blood of Christ was physical and spiritual and the most precious collection of cells ever to die on this planet? Do they believe the Son entered into heaven as the Father's heir carrying that blood and that He purchased back our lives from death? If so, I'll plant my butt in their pew and worship the Lord.

If they believe the blood is a fundamentalist anachronism that makes it harder for us to evangelize, to connect with Bhuddists, Muslims, and Animists, then I'll run. Ours is a bloody faith, full of suffering and death. God cannot redeem that which is not lost, and the cross is where that redemption happens.

If the Lord is gracious, I will come back from this conference with a vision of the depths and riches of the Life that ran in Christ's veins and was burnt on the altar of the Father's love for us. Either way, I'll let ya'll know.

Love ya. Thanks for dropping in.

(And yes, I loved the movie, The Road Warrior. It was a solid, solid movie if you don't mind violence.)

(And has anyone else found what I experienced? United Airlines kicks butt. American Airlines was consistently disappointing, but United has blown me away with their attention to my wishes. Their automated ticketing system is brilliant. Their waiting areas are well attended. Their in-flight service is spectacular. I think I'm sold. And it really is fun listening to them talk to the tower on channel 9.)

Church Survey

Ummm. Yeah. Still not thinking straight, but it suddenly occurs to me that none of you have contributed to Eclexia's survey, and it might be because you don't know about it. So, as a PSA, here's a link. I think there's still time.

Why Church?.

A Night with Codepoke

Work until the last possible minute.

It's been so boring at work for so long, it's hard to leave with an interesting project finally in my lap. Stay another 15 minutes writing up the bug list for tomorrow and accidentally fixing one.

Decide I can't leave without checking the blogs. I don't get to read deeply and certainly don't/can't comment, but my bloglines are cleared before I power down.

Home in 20 at 5:55.

I know there's no email waiting on me, thanks to the Blackberry. It's hard to check the email that way, and very annoying to answer it, but I'm hoping to hear I have an extra match in the tournament starting tonight so I've checked it four times today. No such luck, so when I get home I resist the urge to check it again.

My neighbor gave me some raviolis, so I start water boiling in case I decide to eat before the night starts.

I plan to look in on the tourney tonight and see how well the young bucks hit. Some day I'll be ready to play them, probably, but for now it's the 35's that I'm trying. The 35's don't start until Saturday, but one guy is playing in the open event tonight also, so I hope to scout him out.

Ah! That's an excuse to get on the computer. I'll see when my possible opponent is playing. That let's me cure that addictive desire to check email even though I know there's nothing there at the same time. A beautiful coincidence.

He plays at 7:00. It's 6:05 now, so do I eat dinner or just snack? The water's already boiling, so I'll go for it. I have some sausage spaghetti sauce from last week, a little quiche from Christmas breakfast, and I can throw together a quick salad.

Eat to The Week magazine. It seems there are still a couple untouched spots on this planet, and the new Daniel Day-Lewis movie gets 4 stars. He plays such an evil bad guy these days, and the Christians in the movie seem to be portrayed like mindless fanatics, so I'm still leaning toward skipping it.

Clear my dishes. Leave the boy's in the sink. He's out all night so I'll probably wash them when I get back.

Receive a call from the ex. She has a migraine. We seem to have that in common, but mine are slowing down and getting weaker. Maybe my new plan is working, or maybe the weather is just steadying out. A couple minutes of logistics with her, and back to the dishes. She's able to tell me where the boy child is. That's nice.

Change into tennis clothes and load 130 pounds of gear into the trunk. 6:50 was my goal, but it's only 6:45. I audibly cheer. It is at this moment that I think it might be funny to blog the whole night. How many people do I know who cheer because they've freed 5 extra minutes on a work night?

The car starts. I'm driving the boy's car because he says it's not starting for him. He's had to jump it twice now. The first time, it was his dome light and I drove it for a day and verified everything was good. The second time, the ex's boyfriend jumped him. I explain the domelight issue to him again. He's in a hurry, because Mr. Boyfriend is waiting on him, and he gets flustered. I quickly figure out that he's hearing "park lights" when I say "dome light.". Anyway, the car starts for me, but I don't cheer that - I knew it would.

Arrive at the tennis club and introduce myself to the tourney director. Maybe I'll have a better chance of being subbed in for doubles or something if he knows my face. I asked him via email why I could not play two events like the guy I'll be scouting. Simple. He knows that guy, and knows he won't flake out on him. Maybe next year, now that he knows me. Fair enough.

Find my scouting mark. His opponent is beating him with big angles. I don't know if I'll be able to hit as hard as this kid, though. The kid hits 2 hands on both sides, and is blasting lasers to both corners. He'd be hard to beat any time by anyone, and it's a close match at 4-3. My guy is only down one break. This guy is the #2 seed in the 35's, and on the other side of the draw. I have to beat a no-name like me and the #1 seed to get to him. The odds are less than 50/50, but it's still fun to be scouting. It's the first time I've ever done it.

If I play him, I need to pressure his backhand to draw the short ball, then play wide and hard to his forehand. I should be able to handle his serve, and if I hit soft balls to him to gain time, he won't be able to hurt me much with them. He hits soft enough he would have killed me three months ago. With any luck, I've learned enough not to fall apart against his no-power game any more, but he's a good player and I don't know how things will end up.

The tourney is not crawling with people. One wants to chat up future opponents, but the crowd is thin.

My scouting target has pulled up even again. We have the classic big hitter verses steady plodder dynamic going on. The big hitter jumped in front with bold winners, but you just can't keep being that bold. Eventually you start missing, and your nerves get rattled. That's why I said earlier I didn't know if I could do it. Guess what? Neither could he. My guy just won the first set. This could be over quick now. Tennis happens that way.

My guy's serve is getting nastier. Yep. I told someone in the stands he'd get better as the night wore on. He is. There's a reason he's a high seed in the 35's draw.

Well, I'll check the final score later. It's 7:50 now, and I need to get to the courts. 12 more minutes of idle chatter, and my guy is serving for 4-1 if I'm interpretting the cussing correctly.

I figured there must be a shortcut to the courts from the club. I was right. I think I shaved 3 minutes.

I work a good drill. Moonball, drive, approach shot, half-volley, putaway. I do alright. My serve is going alright too. Then the machine quits working. I fiddle around for a while before I finally figure out it may be because the battery's dead. How did it get to be 9:42? I wore the machine out again. Wimp.

I shut down the lights at the court, but one doesn't go out. I look a little closer, and the full moon is directly behind that light. I'm seeing it's halo through the clouds without seeing it. It's really a beautiful night, and that's a cool picture to go home on.

When I get home, my little rock statues are still standing. A little over a year ago, I heard about rock stacking. It just so happens I had a rock garden in my front yard based on the whole zen sandtray idea, so I was set. I stack those 7 rocks in in odd little formations that challenge me and seem interesting. It's fun to wake up every morning and come home every night and see whether they're still standing. I stood these two stacks up on Christmas Eve. One is three rocks high, and the other is four. Literally, I could hit them with quarter, and they'd fall. It's so precarious when you do it right, but they'll stand for days if no one throws any quarters at them. I even took some rocks, pea gravel, and a basket in with me to work. Those stacks will stand for a week or two sometimes. Then my neighbor will close his drawer too hard, and I get to do it again.

Whenever someone asks whether I used glue, I always take the tiniest little piece of pea gravel and throw it at the stack. It always falls, and the person who doubted me cringes. It's a great chuckle for me, and I assure them I'd been meaning to rebuild it anyway.

By 10:25, I'm unpacked, freed of ankle and knee braces, had my protein shake to make sure my muscles remember anything good they learned tonight, and typed up to here. I've also been thoroughly mocked by my son for being completely inadequate at his new shareware game (Jardinains, if you're into that.) I scored 200,000 after an hour. He just ripped of 740,000. We won't talk about how long it took him. Whatever. The dishes are done, and he's copasetic with trying his car again tomorrow.

Anyway, we have a fun chat and he heads off to exercise bike for a while at 11:05. (When I can no longer play tennis, I'll bike. My favorite family exercise was when we had the 4-seater bike. It was a true joy until it was stolen. Pretty cheaply manufactured, but I'd spend the money again if the seats would be filled.)

I have three posts in mind right now, but I don't think I can do any of them justice tonight (no, this one doesn't count.) I always want to start getting ready for bed before 11:00. I always end up starting around 11:40. From the moment I start, it's an hour before I'm there unless I rush, and rushing has the opposite effect of what one wants when preparing for bed. Anyway. Tonight will probably be a 12:30 night. Tomorrow I'll think about those 3 posts about this same time, and make the same decision. And Friday, I'll be able to stay up a little bit later and I'll put one of them up. By then, I'll have had 2 more ideas and one or two of tonight's posts will be gone forever.

And since nobody blogs from Friday night to Sunday morning, I'll have put up another post out of synch with the rest of the world, and any comments it gets will be late in coming. I noticed almost a year ago that if you want comments, post Monday through Thursday. Friday and Saturday it's almost like everyone has a life, and only some of the crowd catches up on Sunday. Most people do their catch up on work days.

Ah well.

So, I figure if you've read this, you should be ready for bed, if not asleep already. Sleep well. :-)

UPDATE: I received a callout from work at 12:25 - not very usual for me. Not a bad one, though. I had it resolved in 15 minutes, and I'll go in an hour late tomorrow. I wasn't even asleep yet, so it was pretty smooth.

Survey Help Needed

I meet all the criteria for Barb Orlowski's doctoral thesis, so I am going to participate in her survey. I heard about it through Christians for Biblical Equality, and will make sure any of you who have had similar experiences get the chance to give her some feedback.

Maybe some day I will tell my experience in an authoritarian church.

Codepoke

------------------------------------------------
Hi Everyone, Oct. 2007

My name is Barb Orlowski. I am on the Doctor of Ministry program at A.C.T.S. Seminaries in Langley, B.C., Canada. In order to conduct the research necessary to complete my dissertation, I could use your help. I am conducting a survey among Christians who have experienced emotional and spiritual distress under authoritarian and controlling church leaders and have recovered from this experience.

Here are the criteria that I am looking for in participants:

1. Christians who have experienced emotional and spiritual distress under authoritarian and controlling church leaders and who have ceased to be associated with those congregations;
2. Christians who subsequently have recognized and processed their spiritual grief and pain and have experienced spiritual recovery;
3. Christians who are willing to share how they have processed their negative experience and have recovered spiritual harmony; those who can share what has happened since this painful episode. Christians who can answer this question: What factors have helped you to restore your confidence in God and His people?

If people feel that they fit the criteria for this study, please contact me.
I will give you further details about this study, and then I will send you the questionnaire along with the consent information. The responses given by those participating will be kept confidential. Your responses will be put in anonymous form and may be kept for further use after the completion of this study.

Thank you for your interest and participation in this study. I appreciate the time and effort that it takes to complete a questionnaire.

In Him, Barb

Barb’s contact email: churchexitersq@telus.net

* Comments and questions are welcome.

· When you respond to this request by emailing me--
· please let me know which site you saw this information. Thanks.

Is Laughter a Blessing?

None of you knows me. Not really.

You've not seen me laugh my way through a 2 hour bible study - whether I'm teaching, the pastor's teaching, or no one's teaching. You don't know my reputation as a class clown. I didn't either until a couple nights ago, when the group had a good laugh at me and my bible study stand up routine. So it will seem normal to you that I'm against most laughter, while it might seem odd if you knew me.

The only humor I can ever remember blogging is my Green Pants story, and I'm not sure that caused anyone any side-pain. I tried humor in email years ago, and it never, ever worked predictably. My humor is dry enough without taking away all non-verbal clues. So, to the best of my ability, I'm just not funny out here at all. (Tari knows of once when I flat-out mocked a troll, but I don't know of any other time I risked hurting someone's feelings for a joke.)

I'm hyper-sensitive on the subject anyway. I doubt it will surprise anyone that I was the least popular kid in my class from 2nd to 12th grade. I pretty much deserved it. I was a thin-skinned, self-righteous prick, and I doubt I would have liked myself, but everyone else was quite sure. So, laughter was always what other people had at my expense.

So, when Lingamish posted, Whoa to You Who Laugh, he had my attention. I linked over from Better Bibles Blog, and was pretty much taken in. He is spoofing things I hold dear. Never a lot of fun. I didn't figure out he was poking fun until the last few lines of the post, which is of course how a good spoof should be. Fortunately, he told us to read the obits instead of the comics, and even I could tell he was parodying people like me. Upon finally "getting it" and seeing him confirm his humorous intent in his comments, it left me with that familar old "outside looking in" feeling that the years and my friends have taught me to hate.

Lingamish is a great guy, and his post is excellent and in great taste. I have no complaints for him, the way he's written, the method he employed, or even the indignity of having been "gotten" by his clever work. I didn't enjoy thinking I'd found someone who half agreed with me, only to discover I was pranked, but the victim isn't really supposed to enjoy the prank. They just laugh to show they're good sports. I guess I'm not one.

You can read my comment at his site, and tell me whether you think there's any truth in what I said.

Here's my opinion. I don't think it's funny unless everyone can laugh from the heart. There are mountains of wordplays and insights and victories in which everyone can rejoice and laugh. But those don't get the glory here in America. In America, someone has to be pranked. And all those allegedly funny movies are based upon someone being the fool. If there's a fool, it isn't funny. If there's a fool, you are laughing because you're glad it's happening to him and not you. Of course, it's pretty easy to hold that line when I've spent a lifetime as the fool.

In my family, I'm held in pretty low esteem because I don't think "Something About Mary" was funny. There are parts of the show where I laugh, but it's laughing against my heart not with it. All the laughter of that movie is of the type described by Heinlein in this not-famous-enough quote, "I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts... because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting."

So, if you feel like a challenge today, take a little read of Lingamish's post and see whether you think it should be taken more seriously than he meant it. (And it's OK if you think it's just funny. :-)

Time

There's so very little of it.

Tonight I'm in a bit of a funk. Yesterday I lost my first tennis tourney. It was a very good loss, to the #4 player in all of Central Ohio, so I'm quite proud of it. Still, I poured a lot of emotion in, so today I've got that hung over feeling. My knee feels like it may never heal (it will), I feel like I may never be happy again (I am already) and writing feels like I'm climbing an infinite number of stairs on my fingers.

All that said, it's really a pretty good week and a pretty good night. It's so good there's hardly any other news to report. I was excited because the dentist gave my boy a clean bill of health. If you know any of the details about him, you know that's more than normally exciting.

Anyway, since I typed so much over at Karen's place tonight, I may be done for the week here. I will probably get back to the Lord's Supper posts at some point. I dearly love that whole subject. Tonight, though, I would have to visit the examining ourselves before we partake - and I should probably not write on that in this mood.

Come to think of it, I probably shouldn't have written so much about predestination over at Karen's in this mood. I think I'll worry about that all night. It will help to focus. ;-)

(Is anyone else COMPLETELY INDESCRIBABLY SICK of having to type the stupid word verification twice EVERY time you post?????? If you don't finish within about 30 seconds, it tells you you typed the letters wrong. They're lying! Why don't they just come out and say, "You typed for too long. Now you have to word verify twice. Sometimes, I even submit short comments without typing the letters, because I know it's going to say I'm wrong about what I typed. Grrr.)

(And I had a thought earlier. At my present age (~half way to death) it seems like weeks fly by in an afternoon. Time just keeps speeding up. I was thinking about how my body used to heal completely overnight, but now it takes 3 days. I bet the slowing down of the internal healing process is directly related to how long a week seems to take. I used to play tennis for 4 hours every day, then the next day I was fresh. Now I play 4 hours every day, but I finally heal from day 1's tennis on day 4. So, 7 days now feels like 28. Therefore, whenever 28 days go by, I think of it as just 7.)

(When I get emotionally hung over, I lose the ability to express myself without losing any of the desire to do so. When I finally succumb to alzheimer's nobody is going to know the difference.)

(Yep. Have to retype the stupid letters again. And I typed that fast!)

A Group is its own Worst Enemy

Some day I am going to write a little bit about this. I will be extending this post with more links, I think, and then adding content to it. But, in the meantime I thought I would go ahead and just give the link. It's seriously geeky, not very amusing, long, and spot on accurate about the things that make Internet social groups so hard to run.

A Group is its own Worst Enemy

HT: Joel Spolsky

And a time to pluck up

For the third time, now, I am thinking about ending my blogging run. That's a pretty good sign that it's time to pull the plug. I won't shut 'er down just yet, but I may or may not be back for a while.

I have two posts out there more than half-finished, and I don't want to work on either of them. That's a pretty good sign that it's time to pull the plug.

I can no longer blog from work in any effective way. I can write posts after some annoying hoop jumping, but I cannot get out and comment on any of ya'lls blogs the way I'd like. And once I lost that, I lost the sense of community. So, now my blogging just feels like me expounding on things I think I'm smart about. Only I don't like hearing the sound of my own voice all that much. If I'm not part of a community, I don't want to play at all. Seriously, if I had 100 readers out here, and I didn't feel like we depended on each other, I'd sign off. Rather, I am signing off. When I blog these days, I feel alone. And that's a pretty good sign it's time to pull the plug.

Some people blog for themselves. I don't even know what that means. I blog for people, or I don't blog at all. And I don't blog to educate, but to exchange. And now that I feel so unplugged, I've lost any sense of the profit of putting my weird ideas out here.

Now, this may all be circumstance-based. If it is, then I will explain what happened and show up again. These last two months have been among the most draining I can recall, and none of it is blog material. I have surrounded myself with four or five people I know face-to-face, and the energy I would put into writing posts is now going into those interactions.

This blog has always been the place that I floated my fondest fancies, and found foils to fell my foibles. I learned a LOT from ya'll, and a lot of it hard to welcome at first. I really am a pretty arrogant cuss, and like to think of myself as right pretty much all the time. You always provided a valuable corrective to my hubris. Some day, I may have an original idea again, and need someone to look it over from other angles. When that happens, you can count on me to look ya'll up again.

Today, original thoughts are a million miles away from me, though.

So, this is my last post for at least a week. Probably a little longer.

Thank you for all the support.

Codepoke

Blogging: Well, they forced me

This blog is now on blogger2.

For the time being, you will know me as odepoke, but I will convert it to Codepoke somehow, sometime. Deep in my heart I'm one of those codgers who just has to make everything hard, I guess.

I did not have time for this tonight!

'Night all.