Pastor Tom's Blog

Yuck

2009-07-10T07:21:00.001-06:00

Woke up at midnight struggling to breathe. At 0230 I began coughing up blood and shaking violently. My wife took me to the hospital and it turns out i have a "huge" pneumonia in my lung caused by strep. So I was admitted to the hospital for IV antibiotics and they won't let me go until tomorrow.

Friendly lunch with friends

2009-07-07T14:47:00.001-06:00

Sometimes you go to lunch with friends but the topics of conversation aren't really all that friendly. At other times you go to lunch with folk you don't know very well but it's a friendly lunch. Well, today I had the best of both worlds. I had the opportunity to eat lunch with a couple friends of mine I haven't seen in about a year and it was a friendly lunch as we caught up on the happenings in our lives and where we were and what our plans for the future were. I really enjoyed myself and would recommend a friendly lunch with friends to everyone! :-)

A Different View

2009-07-05T08:24:00.002-06:00

I was blown away this morning when it was asserted that I abuse volunteers at Rock Canyon Church. Abuse?! Quickly I reflected on how I had been working that morning and I couldn't think of anything overt I had done so I asked them to expand on it. My abuse is asking people to come in an hour earlier than before. Well, not really an hour early, but at the same time as before even though the service has moved back an hour. That gives people an extra hour to setup. My hope from that was that people would have time to solve problems on their own. I think when it comes down to crunch time, the easy way out for everybody is to go tell Tom and he fixes it. The downside is that I'm trying to prepare my own work and myself to do the work. Then it was asserted that I was being selfish...and that may be true. I'll have to give this some thought. I know it doesn't feel like a privation getting up an hour early to be able to work for God but I certainly haven't been successful in passing that on to the volunteers!

What's the point?

2009-07-01T14:40:00.001-06:00

I don't get it. This is a hack to a wireless Guitar Hero controller that plays the songs perfectly for you. Why? Isn't that the fun of the game?
http://gizmodo.com/5304753/buy-a-modded-guitar-hero-controller-to-cheat-at-fake-rocking

Blown up again

2009-06-29T15:53:00.001-06:00

I once again have blown up my bike. It feels the same as last time where I broke the piston. It would just spin and not develop any compression. I'm really frustrated that after all the effort to rebuild it, I lost it again. I wonder if the problem is the Indian-cast piston I used. sigh

End of an era

2009-06-26T20:34:00.001-06:00

Today was both exciting and sad for. I began working at Novell on October 30, 1992. I worked there without stopping until today. Today, nearly 17 years after starting there, Novell terminated me as part of the partnership with ACS. On Monday I will return to thesame office buy with a contingent badge and knowing that I will be moving to a different building soon.

iPhone

2009-06-25T09:50:00.001-06:00

I didn't upgrade to the iPhone 3G when it came out so when the 3Gs was announced this year I was eligible for the upgrade pricing. My AT&T rep called me to tell me about it and put me on the list for the first ones. My new iPhone arrived and it was simple to restore my old information to my new phone and it just worked right away...perfect! Today it was nearly out of battery power so I plugged it into my USB hub and found something disconcerting...it doesn't support being charged through the USB hub. I had to attach it directly to my computer. When connected to the hub, it told me it could sync but that charging was not supported. Maybe I need 3.01 of the software?

Guitar Hero

2009-06-21T11:10:00.001-06:00

I've seen folk playing the fame before but I never understood how to play and all. But then my kids borrowed the game from a friend and started flipping me attitude about how they will crush dad. That forced me to practice and figure the game out and now I'm completely addicted! I crank up the volume and start playing la Grange by Zz Top. Cool!

TV Show Theme Song Quiz

2009-06-19T14:08:00.001-06:00

They changed the FILESYSTEM!!!

2009-06-17T21:37:00.001-06:00

I have had recent problems with Globat, the host where rockcanyon.org resides. They changed email and rather than warning us beforehand, they sent an email the day they did it. That caused 5 days of no email for some people yet they refused to figure out who was broken, I just had to wait for calls. Then, the SMTP server we use to send emails went down for a couple days and follow that up with they moved rockcanyon.org to another server, once again without asking or notice, and changed the filesystem. That means something that used to be in a folder named httpdocs is no longer in that folder. So all the work that went in to setting up the various automatic things involved in rockcanyon.org working are broken. And nobody at Globat told me a thing or helped me when I put in issues. I have to say, as a web host Globat is horrible. I would highly recommend GoDaddy.com or even Google if you can work within their restrictions. I'm just disgusted!

I love my wife

2009-06-17T17:44:00.001-06:00

Happy anniversary, honey! 19 years and going strong!

Searching

2009-06-12T15:26:00.001-06:00

I search the web maybe a dozen times daily and I have become really happy with what Google returns. My wife then told me about SwagBucks. They use Google's search engine behind their returns, but they give me their arbitrary reward called a swag buck at some times. The neat thing for me is as often as I search, I'm adding 5-10 bucks a day to my account. Which means I can purchase an iTunes gift card to purchase another season of TV from iTunes just for doing what I normally do through their portal. So I added their widget to the right there. Please, use it, search a lot and we will point earn swag bucks for it!

Official

2009-06-08T16:29:00.001-06:00

Well, it is official now. I signed the papers and sent them to the HR people. I am an employee of ACS and I am no longer employed by Novell. That will officially take place on 29 June but we had to either accept or not the offer letter they sent to us by today. The strange thing is after our team meeting there was another meeting with Novell's HR group to discuss how to change our status from Novell employees to Novell contingent workers. HR is all for just treating us as layoffs and then adding us back to the system as new employees but the downside to that is it would lock us out of the systems so that if there were to be a problem, we would be unable to login and fix it! Sorta weird.

Nerd lunch

2009-06-05T13:08:00.001-06:00

Some people still don't believe me that nerds are different than humans. Here I sit in a room with 225 tables and 10 chairs at each table. The first 250 or so (some have friends) are happy because they never sit with anybody else. After that we are forced to interact with other nerds and at least ask if we can sit. It just looks strange to see so few people taking so many tables! But then I remember... These aren't people; they're nerds.

I don't get it

2009-06-04T17:46:00.001-06:00

I'm at a nerd conference. Various presentations each about an hour long. I'm in this one that has been going now for 35 minutes and these people continue to walk in! This is so distracting! Why even bother when the presentation is over half done?

"I come in peace"

2009-06-04T13:48:00.001-06:00

Those were the words the guy from Microsoft used to start off his keynote address at the JavaOne conference today. Of course, he then went into his demo running C# rather than Java and the thousands of folk in the audience probably couldn't help but wonder how sincere Microsoft really was about coming in peace.

A ton of meetings...a ton of questions

2009-06-03T22:32:00.001-06:00

Well, the transfer of me from Novell to ACS continues...with a whole lot of questions and very few answers. We seem to be daily having hours of meetings discussing things and what it means and how it'll work and all and when we walk away there are just a ton of meetings. Today I spent over two hours going through the differences in the benefits from Novell to ACS and how ACS will handle it. Guh. ACS seems to be bending over backwards to treat us ex-Novell employees correctly but I really hate having to go through benefits again and again and again. Now we need to decide which ones to go for and which to not use and our vacation and sick leave and FTO and 401k rollover and matching funds...I hope I will understand this better by next week.

Changing jobs

2009-06-01T11:44:00.001-06:00

Well, it's official today. My new company, ACS, will be making an offer to me today for me to move over and work for them as an outsource of Novell's own IS&T infrastructure. It's a bit scary because I've been at Novell for so long, but I am really looking forward to this! We are still going to be working with Novell to make Novell products better and we get to work to integrate Novell products with ACS products and make them work well together. I think my job just got a whole lot bigger! ACS has customers around the world and is about six times bigger than Novell in revenue and much larger in people. I am looking forward to the new focus!

JavaOne

2009-06-01T09:57:00.001-06:00

Today I'm at the first day of the nerd conference in San Francisco. In addition, back in Utah things are happening at work with the ACS outsourcing stuff. Really exciting day...we'll see how it ends up!

Lunch after

2009-05-31T13:17:00.001-06:00

After church today we all took off for lunch. Following the ongoing tradition if telling something new about ourselves we were asked what our dream vacation would be. There were quite a number wanting a beach or a cruise. Not me. I would love to go to South Dakota and hunt prarie dogs.

Livestream

2009-05-31T08:07:00.001-06:00

Mogulus the company we used to use for our live streaming has just recently changed to livestream. Today will be our first day using it so we'll see how it works.

Information trickles in...

2009-05-28T17:41:00.001-06:00

They shared more information with us about the aborted meeting. It seems my company is going to outsource most of my department. We are quite shaken up about it. It seems that the decision-making process has been taken away from us as individuals and we will be told on Monday whether we work here or if we will be offered a position with the outsourcing company. It will certainly make for a loooong weekend!

Fear

2009-05-28T15:20:00.001-06:00

Today at 1340 my company called an all-hands meeting for my entire worldwide department for 1400. We all were encouraged to move to the training rooms where we all filtered in. We waiting in there for an hour to only have our CxOs get on the call to say they can't tell us what is going on. That is just scary when I work for a company that lays people off quite often!

Kindergarden Graduation 2009

2009-05-23T06:50:00.001-06:00

My youngest just graduated from Kindergarden. I was there shooting a ton of photos but the lights were weird and they didn't turn out all that good but I've adjusted some of them and put them online for friends and family to check out. You can find them here.

The Bike Ride

2009-05-23T06:36:00.000-06:00

Last weekend was our bike blessing and the first inaugural freedom ride sponsored by Biker's World in Orem. I have been meaning to post about it and get some photos up but I haven't seen many of them yet! I was sent 3-4 photos from the parking lot but nothing along the ride so I haven't posted them yet. If you have photos from the ride, please send them to me!