Echoes of Life

Echoes of Life

If I myself sometimes to see

little echoes of life in the heart of me,

which stir sweet memories of love

falling, spinning from above.

I fain the world would travel far

beyond azure seas upon ship and spar

and find Thee on a mountain top

then to think I finally might stop

all my striving borne of conniving heart

from looking long from Thee to part.

Working Gratis

Spending some time helping beef up documentation on a open-source project known as Thinkup. And am also trying to work my way through the code. MVC is an anagram for migraine very cold. I need a map of this stuff so I can chart my way through it. Guess I will have to write it myself. Oh fun! ;)

Back to the Tech (and my dark corner of IT)

So I spent the last couple of weeks doing both my normal IT job and filling in at meetings for my manager who was on vacation. Hectic - understatement. The press came from the folks who showed up at my cubicle doorway and proceeded to lay their needs, desires and aspirations about....about what I could do for them.
I learned alot about delegation this time around. I learned that I can't, but others can. So I passed some of the work on to my teammates, not as a manager, just as someone who needed some help. People respond to cries for help faster than they do demands for action.
What does that mean for the future? Nothing, I hope. I like doing the technical and solving the knotty problems which come up. Anonymity is the best place to be, for to be known is to be scrutinized. And, like most folks, I don't like the light, lime or not.
Cheers from my dark corner.

The Measure of Famous People

When you have over a million followers on Twitter, why would you even care if you lost 200 followers in a day? How would that matter in the great scheme of things? How is that a measure of ?

It gets me thinking about how I measure things. What is the measure of my life? Is it:

1) how much I get done at work
2) how much I get done at home
3) how much...
4) how much...

Numbers...thinking that's not a good measure. What are my goals? my objectives?

Do I even know where I am going and why? Not introspection but possibly retrospection.

This is kind of a take stock day. hmmmm......

Reunion Station

     I attended two reunions in the month of June in the space of 7 days or so. One was my wife's 35th High School reunion from the city of Shawnee, Oklahoma. My wife was the instigator, organizer and motivator for this reunion. It was a rousing success, due in a large part to that ubiquitous tool, Facebook. Yes, you can reach out and touch and find high school friends with this wunderkind phenomenon.

     But what is so neat is that I had a great time at her reunion. Though it was a lot of physical work in setting up the three events, I enjoyed meeting and making friends with my wife's old friends. And I use the word, old, in all of it's meaning, as 35 years makes the high school pictures look like folks other than those who showed up. Yet it is who we have become that makes old friends like new friends, and new friends like old. My wife commented on how people have changed but not as much as you would think, and so we all become older versions of our younger selves. I found that I liked the same ones my wife does, or did.

     The other reunion was my Ehlinger family reunion. There was the larger reunion of all of my dad's brothers and sister, and also a smaller reunion of my brothers and sisters. I enjoyed both, but more the smaller family event at my sister's. We spent four hours wandering from room to room, inside and outside, upstairs and downstairs, talking, joking, laughing, hugging those we knew, those we had just met. This was how I grew up, a large family with many relationships that were always in flux. You had to know how to find a quiet place in the middle of many.
     What was common to both is that we wanted to have more of them. To not wait 5, 10 or 20 years, but to meet more often, because life is precious and those we know and love are not around very long, and we need those relationships more than we ever know. Growing older, for me, is coming to know that.

A Trip Unintended

I found out the hard way that nothing is really safe in these days of internet travel. My ATM card was ripped off and used to order "items" from iTunes yesterday. My wife being the vigilant person that she is, she logged onto our bank site yesterday and saw our account accumulating multiple charges with iTunes from Luxembourg in Europe. Waking our daughter up, she questioned her, but she denied downloading the latest music. She hurriedly called the bank who immediately shutdown my bank card number. I was glad I did not go out to eat lunch anywhere yesterday, as I might have been washing dishes for a few hours in payment.

I have always wanted to travel to Europe, just not from a virtual point of view. My dad always claimed that our ancestors were from Luxembourg. The reason he did this was the negative reaction of people to anything German during WWII. One of the results of searching is that the name Ehlinger is traditionaly German and means: habitational name for someone from Ehlingen in the Palatinate. Looks like we have more in common with the Fatherland than we thought. Sorry, Dad.

So our little brush with internet outlaws has taught us some important lessons. 1) Use Paypal. It's safer. 2) Change all of your passwords, since the harvesting of the bank card number may have happened in several different ways. 3) Take your computers, all of them, to the cleaners(various programs to rid one of malware). 4) Lastly, check thy bank statement online every day, for the thieves are thick out there in the Cloud.

The Right Passages of Life

We mark our lives by rites of passage. Those rites are different for the different age groups that make up Americana. The young mark their passage by what they gain, the middle age make it about what they still have, and the older set by what they missed or are losing. What marks our passages through the various stages of life shows what is important to us. What object(s) we desire mark the course of our life. At one end it's all ahead of us and we brim with confidence and hope in what lies ahead. At the other end we wistfully or regretfully wonder what kept us from those objects of desire, or we are thankful for what we have gained in the many years, though we did not foresee what we now enjoy.

What we wanted may not be what we have, and maybe, in a wonderful way, it is good that God has given us what need and not what we thought we wanted.