Safe from the Losing Fight

In the quagmire that is my brain, I recently went down a couple of paths of thought that led me to one conclusion about what else I should be writing in this blog.

The first train of thought was actually pretty short. I was simply noticing the categories that I have in this blog, and how many posts of each kind I have. (Yes, I know I have a lot of spare time.) Even though I have several in the Christianity category, they’re all about the recent missions trip I was on. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it sent me down the path of “is that all God has done in my life recently?” I don’t think those few posts are very representative of what God has done for me. I began musing about what I could possibly write about. The problem is: I’m not a teacher, I’m not a pastor or even a deacon, I’ve never been to seminary or been ordained. I definitely don’t feel comfortable or qualified for writing essays about theology or philosophy. Not being a teacher or inspirational speaker, I don’t think I could write posts about uplifting stories or Bible studies or devotions. So what is it that I could do?

The second train of thought got started during one of my quiet times. I was thinking about evangelism, and how I could grow in that area. The missions trip was the only conscious effort I’ve had recently towards evangelism, and I wanted to change that. But being an introverted self-employed software engineer, I spend most of my time at home. Regular social activities usually involve Christian friends or people from church. I don’t meet that many non-Christian people because of this, so who am I to be a witness to?

That’s where these two trains bumped into each other. The easiest way to evangelize to people is to tell them what God has done for you. All I need to do is tell about how I’ve seen God working in my life. I can leave the teaching up to the experts. As far as to whom do I be a witness to, I can be witness to whomever reads this blog. I honestly don’t think there’s all that many people that ready this blog, but it is an audience, and its still probably larger than the number of people I talk to daily.

So from time to time I’m going to post about what God has done in my life. The first step is to post my testimony, which I’ve already done. I’m not sure how frequently I’ll end up posting, but I’m hoping with a certain regularity. If I’m feeling frisky, I’ll not only post what God has done for me, but what I learned from the experience and how I think it applies to my life. I’m hoping this forces me to be more aware and conscious of how God is moving in my life.

I’m trying out Wordpress on a hosted server for the first time, after creating a couple of blogs over at Blogger. While Blogger is a great place to start, I’m starting to want some more features than what they provide.

Or maybe its my engineering side wanting more toys.

I’ve also found that my “professional blog” isn’t being updated regularly. That’s why I started the second blog. The idea was I would keep “professional” ideas separate from my personal ones. But the more I’ve thought about it, the less sense that really makes. “Professional” posts will probably continue to be scarce, but that’s no reason to continue to isolate them in their own blog.

Whatever the reason, I’m going to playing around with this blog to see if it lives up to my expectations. I’ll probably start migrating the old entries over to this blog to see how they look.

Well, that didn’t take long.

The iWeb experiment is officially a failure.

It has a nice GUI and all, but it won’t let you do comments or anything remotely interesting.

Oh well.

[Note: This was the first post of my personal blog, Type 11 Error. The idea was have a blog that wasn’t restricted to professional endeavors. If you can’t bore them with code, bore them with your personal life, I always say.]

Its all Elaine’s fault, as usual. I was going about my merry way when she starts pestering me that I haven’t posted to my blog recently. That’s why this atrocity was born.

I actually have another blog, Safe from the Losing Fight, but I haven’t posted to it in a while. Its mainly about professional endeavors and thoughts, and I’d like to keep it that way. I haven’t updated it recently because of various NDAs and just simple lack of time. Since I’d like it to be professional the posts there take longer to compose and edit than the simple “what I had for breakfast this morning…” posts.

I’m starting this blog for several reasons:

1. I have a new toy to play with (i.e. iWeb. A hint to those with engineers in their lives: If want something done, buy the engineer a toy that does said job. They still might not finish the job, but at least they’ll be happy for a while. And really, isn’t that the point? To make your engineer happy?)
2. A place to log thoughts that aren’t necessarily professional, well composed, logical, or human.
3. For the proud llamas. You know who you are.

As you might note, with some dismay no doubt, the name of this blog is even geekier than that of my “professional” geek blog. I’m quite proud of that. It just goes to show I’m even more of a dork in my personal life than in my professional. I try not to disappoint.

[Note: This was the orginal post for my “professional” blog. It attempts to describe why I started a blog. It certainly wasn’t because I’m interesting.]

Or writing is hard, I should say. But “math is hard” is what one of my coworkers told me. I was trying to explain something technical (like how virtual memory works) when her eyes glazed over. I get that a lot. Anyway, she got some terms mixed up and said something like “so should I test the multiflange array for tacheon emissions?” Or something like that; I don’t really pay attention to the QA people. But her response to my laughter was “math is hard.”

Although math has never been all that hard for me, it did remind of what is. Writing. Being a software engineer I’m more used to communicating with computers in written form than humans. That means writing interesting specs or design documents or just communicating with coworkers is pretty difficult for me. Unfortunately submitting instructions via email to someone isn’t like writing a program to run on a computer. People don’t listen well and take exception to being called “buggy.”

Recently Joel Spolsky has been writing about the lack of good writing in the software engineering field. He’s asserted that good writing skills are essential to a software engineer’s career, and even compiled a book on what he considers to be good writing. Among his suggestions for engineers wanting to get better is something he calls “practice.” I decided to give that revolutionary idea a chance before Microsoft patents it.

So that’s the point. This is just practice. i.e. This is pre-alpha quality writing not meant to be used in a production environment. Use at your own risk, and keep all appendages inside the cart at all times.