Dinner Impossible is Back!

I normally hold out for complete truth in all that I do and I expect it from others, but I am very glad that Dinner: Impossible on the Food Network now has Robert Irvine back on the show. He was definitely the spark that made the show as good as it was. The substitute (Michael Symon?) just didn't have the same spark and dynamic presence. After all, it is more entertainment than it is really about cooking.

I did see that it was no surprise that Robert's past lying cost him dearly, almost permanently. My own two sons (now both adults) have been known to stretch things a bit, telling some really fancy tales in the past, so I could definitely understand a bit about what Robert did. I can also understand why he was initially canned, but he was the show, so doing without him meant the show was dead.

I still would not be likely go into business with him, but I am glad to have an entertaining show to watch with my wife again! Hopefully he pulls off the same standard of the first season!

Driving Yourself to Achieve

I see two different kinds of people today. Those who are driven to accomplish something and those who just float along through life, at best. While neither group is always successful at its task and a few of the floaters end up doing well in spite of themselves, the first group is much more certain to accomplish something of value.

I am firmly in the first camp, driven to achieve something, though I am often driven to achieve too many things, which can also be a problem with reaching my goals. Still, I would rather be driven than not. Too many people go through life complaining that they just don't have time to do things. Their day job, family life, or something else that is vitally important takes up too much of their mental effort and time in their eyes, justifying their lack of effort.

Clearly you can only work with the time you have, but most people can free up some time to make a positive change, yet many will not. In fact, they will often argue with you about how much they cannot accomplish anything. Even putting that effort into accomplishing the goals would make a change by itself.

I have a lot of thoughts jumbling through my head right now on this, so I am going to stop here, but I wanted to get started actively driving this blog and this seems like a great topic to ponder and write about.

Using a PDA is an Interesting Experience

I finally took the plunge and got a PDA. I had been with Sprint for at least 4 years, but they don't have in network coverage where my mother lives in rural Iowa, so I had to go. Neither did AT&T or I would probably have an iPhone now. Instead, I got the new and high rated Samsung Omnia.

It is a decent phone, though I am still learning my way around it.

My biggest challenge now is to know how to enter podxycasts and RSS feeds. Neither seem to have a way to paste in an address. This makes it very hard to edit them. I also can't figure out how to open and/or edit an OPML file, so I am stuck until I get back home.

It is sure a pain typing thisvin one character at a time. I can go a bit faster now, though well short of my normal typing speed! Hopefully this will help me blog more though.

Twitter Account

I decided to set myself up on Twitter today. My account is bradtalk. My name is not available, but it does not appear to be used, so perhaps I can change it to just bradandrews in the future.

For now, it remains http://www.twitter.com/bradtalk

Let the banality begin!

Keeping Your Focus

One thing I really struggle with in life is to stay focused on just one thing. One the one hand, this ability to jump between things enables me to keep many things going at the same time. On the other hand, it can be really hard when a dedicated focus is required.

My life sometimes reminds me of the people who would spin plates on top of poles on a TV variety show. Things worked well when everything started up, but it would continually fall into peril as plate after plate started slowing down and wobbling, threatening to fall on the ground and make a serious mess. In spite of this threat, the spinner would somehow manage to always get back to the plate just before it fell, saving the day.

This often feels like my life, applying spin to another plate to keep from making a huge mess. While energizing at times (and boy can it be energizing), it can also seem quite discouraging at times, when the end of spinning plates never comes. While that is not accurate, it often seems that way things can run in life, at least for those of us with the ability to focus on many things. This ability to focus on many things often leads us to focus on "just one more thing" before being satisfied.

I am not sure what the complete solution is here. Just saying to "focus on fewer things" is nice in theory, but is highly unlikely to happen. Perhaps I will figure it out someday, though I expect I will be spinning plates until I am no longer able to do so. Not doing so would be far more frustrating anyway!

Brad

Instilling a Love of Learning in Others

One of my biggest "failures" with my own children is that none of them seems to have the passion for learning I have. While I can be a big slacker at times, I am constantly trying to learn something new. Right now I am putting a lot of effort into learning topics related to my career in information security, but I am also trying to learn more about project management, low carb and low glycemic cooking, business in the area, etc.

Unfortunately, I only have so many hours in the day. And I am the only one pushing it, so I can't even feed off others in my family. Sure, they think they know it all, but they need to do some research to validate things and complement their existing knowledge.

This is a mixed post and is not coming out as easy as I thought. I wanted to pose the general question of how to motivate others, but I also wanted to share the frustration of wanting to know more than is possible.

We really need a way to hook people like this up. I would have loved to have someone who would have stirred me on when I was a teen myself (at least I think so). While I did some things well (Eagle Scout, etc.), I didn't have anyone pushing me on in academics. I often wonder if I could have excelled more if someone had taken that level of interest.

This makes me wonder if we could hook such people up. Perhaps such a system exists already, but if I never found out about it, how many others are missing it?

Brad

Have You Improved Yourself Today?

Many people get stuck where they are in life. While this can often be wrapped in terms like "being content", it is often just an excuse to be unmotivated. While you should certainly be content throughout life, you should never grow complacent.

Always ask yourself if you are doing all you can to advance the skills you have. Aim to learn at least one new thing each day. While most of these should be something significant, even small minor steps will ultimately take you to a better place than where you are today. It will also help you be a better steward of the skills and talents you have been given in this life. Note that significant things can often be small!

Avoid the pit that says only large achievements really mean anything. While this sounds great, it will almost certainly result in you not doing anything. Each small step is one step closer to a significantly better place.

You will have to determine what is significant for you. That may take some time, but it is worth figuring out. You also don't have to limit your steps to a single area. Some focus can be helpful to keep on track, but occasionally taking on a different learning goal may ultimately help you reach all your goals quicker. It will provide some needed variety in your life and your success in one area is almost certain to spill over into other areas. Good feelings tend to follow good feelings!

Don't let the size of the goal deter you either. Take a single step toward your goal and you will be one step closer!

Brad

Fitting Desires Into Life

Fitting all my desires into my life has long been one of my strongest challenges. I am interested in so many areas that I often get overwhelmed when I try to focus on just one. I want to know it all, but that is clearly just not possible. Still, I need to keep going. You only get to the end of the journey by taking each individual step. Making sure the steps are all headed the right way can be a big challenge, but what would life be without challenges.

Hopefully I can stir up some interesting thoughts in this blog over the coming months....

Word of Faith Leaders in Trouble?

Anyone who watches any news is sure to know that several prominent Word of Faith leaders are being investigated by the Senate for excessive spending and other "crimes that will make the politician doing the investigation look really good for exposing."

I would note that I grew as a Christian in the Word of Faith movement and I still find many of the core principles to be completely consistent with the Bible (contrary to the claims of many Christian leaders). That said, I had a growing discomfort with the ostentatiousness exhibited by many in the movement that became even more pronounced with the Money Cometh message's growth in the late 1990s.

A big problem for me personally was that money wasn't coming, or at least it wasn't staying. It flowed out about as fast as it came in, and it was coming in at a good pace during those years! The main reason for this was that I didn't tightly control my spending and focus intently on getting out of debt. Instead I focused on living high on the hog and enjoying life, a key tenet the movement pushed during those years. Of course, getting and staying out of debt was always a core principle, but it was drowned out by the idea of really enjoying life.

I am firmly convinced that the generosity of my wife and I is what kept us from serious bad times during those years, but I lament how much better I could have done if I had instead focused intently on debt reduction and elimination.

As I noted in a previous post, I am once again seeking to focus on that goal, but I face the common trouble most in my generation hit: consumption! It is a lot harder to change habits than many think.

Getting back to the current scandal, I would note that this has been going on for many years, why is anyone surprised? While I have serious issues with the flagrant waste of the things given to these ministers, I see completely political motives in pursuing them now. If Congress would start really investigating its own waste and foolishness I might take their self-righteousness a lot more seriously.

I am reminded though that judgment begins at the house of God. I expect this is only the beginning of some cleaning. Unfortunately, it will likely also serve as ammunition for those who claim you cannot trust what God has written, including those within the church who are the most loudly proclaiming false prophets in this context. These people fail to take God's promises of provision and blessing above that seriously. Instead they claim that we can never know what God is going to do.

If God hadn't written it, they might be right, but they ignore countless confirmation of the blessing nature of God. I plan on writing more on this in the future, so I will leave this argument incomplete now.

I do wonder if I am one of the few people who believe as I do though. I a firmly convinced it is God's will for people to prosper and I believe it is sin for so many Christians today to not do so. Most of this failure to prosper is more due to slavery to debt than the will of God that many claim. People do struggle, but how many of those are spending hours in front of the television instead of improving themselves? How many are working 6 days as noted in Genesis? (The sixth day could be spend building a business idea improving themselves for a promotion, etc.)

More to come on this....

Brad

Getting Into Debt?

Earlier this summer I decided to do some work on the house that really needed to be done, but which caused me to (temporarily) increase my debt load.

We had done several things a summer ago, including resurfacing our pool. This left the concrete around the pool in a very poor state. We made it through last winter (a mild one here), though I was concerned about water getting into the open cracks between the nice "new" pool and the concrete this winter. So I found someone who could do the whole job for a very good price. The problem was I figured we should also replace our driveway which was starting to get some serious and large cracks, to the point I was concerned about a tire getting caught on one of the cracks. I also figured I should raise the "patio" floor a few inches to keep water out (which would flood part of it when a heavy rain came). We were already pouring concrete anyway, right?

Well, a $7K project went to about $17K, though we now have pretty good drainage and a lot of good concrete now. The driveway also has room for my daughter's car as well. Now I just have to work to pay all this off.

We did decide to close in the patio as well. The added square footage should increase the value of our home beyond the price of that area, though it may also increase my taxes in the long run. :(

While we may do some smaller things, including inside and outside painting, our major renovation push is over.

The partial moral to this story is that a deal on a fixer upper house may not be such a deal if you are not good fixing things up yourself. While I believe we got our house below market value, we have easily put much more than the difference into it since then. Looking at historical price guesses (such as at zillow.com) indicates it was worth much less than we thought when we bought it. Either way, we have not gained much value in the time we have lived here.

While my last post was about my newly found desire to get out of debt, I really need to stir up that desire again. It is very easy to lose the focus and fall back into old, bad habits.

The good news is that my wife and I like the house, so we plan on staying a while and enjoying all these renovations. :)

Brad

Why You Should Give Your Life Away

I have been reading a lot about personal finance recently, as I have finally gotten serious about getting out of debt.

A recent post on The Simple Dollar leads to a good discussion of if someone is really "good" if they only think about themselves. I see a common claim, in many areas of life, that you can be a "good person" even if you don't do X, Y or Z. While that may be true, I think a lot of it is based on our skewed value of what "good" is. Saying someone who never gives anything outside of themselves is "good" seems a bit in error to me. Of course you can do good things and be pleasant to be around, but are you really doing anything to justify your taking up space on this planet.

I suppose I could go with the libertarian argument that you are enabling others to work for your consumption, but life should be about more than just taking care of yourself. Since I reject the evolutionary philosophy, I also reject the idea that just caring for yourself is a valid approach to life. (This would be the so-called selfish gene.)

It also is an issue of what is really good. That is something I may post about later.

Brad

Keeping Up to Date is Hard to Do....

So much for my committment to write regularly, at least so far. I haven't given up, but I figure I may as well write about why keeping a blog going is much more of a challenge than it seems at first.

The main problem is that you have to write something. That means you have to consciously break your routine and post something. While this may become simpler once this is a true part of my routine, I am finding it harder to fit in one more thing than I thought I would.

You also need to cover some useful topic. That is also a challenge. I am full of ideas, but figuring out which ones to discuss here is another challenge. Though that is not completely accurate. I can do stream-of-consciousness writing at almost any point if I have overcome the first hurdle of making the time for it as noted above. The problem here is that such writing is not always that worthwhile to read. In fact, I don't know how this will come across since I am creating it on the fly.

Though I think I will reach my goal of blogging better if I just start writing. The way you master something is to start doing it. The refinement can come later. Whether anyone reads this or not is another story, but that is not my concern now. :)

Brad

Time to Start This Up Again

I have let this blog lapse. Life has a way of being more important than my own ramblings. :)

A big question is if life is really busier today. We certainly do not have to scramble most of our waking hours for food anymore. Most of us are even beyond needing to work the Biblically proscribed "6 days." Most of us have more time than we really realize - we just waste a lot of it. I am bad at this at times. Over the holiday I found myself playing rather pointless games of Age of Kings (AOE2). I managed to fritter a way a good portion of my holiday beating up on the computer.

While many people play for a challenge, I just play to beat up on the computer for a while. This seems fun enough to me, and I still like that the best of all the "Age" games. (I own AOE3 and my son got the expansion for Christmas, but I haven't tried it yet.)

It makes me wonder how many others are like me? The magazines and websites are full of people who want to play the ultimate challenge, but how many are like me and just want to relax for a bit and beat up the computer.

Another one of my top games is Settlers IV, though it does not have an "easy" mode or any really good cheats. Playing through a game of it can eat up the good part of a day or two, as I end up botching it and keep restarting (along the way or at the beginning) until I figure the correct strategy. I always tend to build too many things and end up slowing myself down while they are completed.

I do wish the bugs in this game could be fixed. While it isn't perfect, it remains a fun game and is a good diversion from the normal conquer the world games.

Enough comments on this for now. :)

Brad

The idea of a creator must scare a lot of people. Look at how frenzied they get when something dares to even raise the problems with the Theory of Evolution.

A recent article on slashdot talked about an article claiming that discovering how bees fly put a "nail into the coffin of ID." http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/10/1950222

Right. I know how my computer works, so it must have just come together by "time and chance"....

Another recent story shows how much of "science" is full of mythical stories: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/15/1921258

From the article: 'The team believes the plane could have formed in several ways. In one scenario, the galaxies may have fallen towards Andromeda along an invisible filament of dark matter. Computer simulations show these filaments can form a cosmic web along which galaxies flow.'"

The original article is at http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=dn8571.

Note how believing in a creator is anti-Science, but believing in mythical "dark matter" (which has never been seen) makes perfect sense to many people. And we trust these people as our modern high priests?

I think I will stick with "The Heavens declare the glory of God." :)

Brad

Salt & Light?

It is a shame that so many Christians today are not being salt and light in our modern world.

We tend toward two extremes:

1. Huddle in our own little group crying about how bad it is and how lost others are, but doing little to actively get the transforming message of the Gospel out to unsaved people.
2. Actively engaging the world by participating fully in it, but failing to challenge things. This group goes to junk movies, spends hours watching TV, and participates in other such activities because they are fun. Sometimes this group will claim to be reaching those in such things, but their outreach will be very limited. Few of those who knew them would say they were Christians. And even if they were known as Christians, their witness is meaningless since they have no difference.

Instead of either of these we need to be actively developing Godly alternatives. We should be producing the materials and providing the services to transform our society. Modern presentation methods make this easier than any time in the past, yet too many Christians (myself included) are spending too much of their money piling up more toys for themselves, instead of investing in eternal things.

Can we see a change in this area? Will we?

Brad

Paranoid Evolutionistas

Isn't it interesting how paranoid the modern Evolutionistas are? They worship the two primary gods called "Time" and "Chance". Anything that dares stand against them is fought tooth and nail. It sounds more like a modern priesthood desperate to keep its control than a valid group of scientist with some real truth on their side.

How anyone could look at this world and say, "It all just happened," is beyond me. Would anyone look at a computer and say that it all just happened? Yet evolutionary doctrine says just that - organisms more complicated than anything we can create just happened, when we can barely keep our computers running without lots of intervention. How is the modern creation myth (called Evolution) any different than the myths of ancient civilizations like Egypt, Greece and Rome? All were believed with a fervor and allowed no dissent.

One reason I see for people standing so staunchly against anything that chips away against Evolution is because if they even allow for a creator (small "c"), they then have to figure out how they relate to that creator. And that is a very uncomfortable thought.

Not all are afraid of a creator, but I have a feeling this is a much more significant factor than many people realize.

Brad

Lets start this again.

Interesting test:

You are a Social Moderate (43% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (88% permissive) You are best described as a: Capitalist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

I am not sure that I agree completely, as I am very conservative socially. I think the difference came out because I am no longer in favor of the massive "drug war" that is doing little good and only serving to limit our freedoms.

I think most people are rather apathetic about politics. Who wants to spend their days following this stuff when life has so much that needs to be taken care of?

The problem is that many of our political "leaders" take a lack of response from the electorate as an endorsement of their actions and policies. Instead of marking them as illegitimate in much of what they do, they take inaction as endorsement. And the news media lets them get away with it, especially if their agenda matches that of the news media.

Another aspect of this same problem is that those who favor "traditional life" are too busy surviving their attempt to live it to spend a lot of time defending it. Unfortunately, those who oppose it are more than willing to spend their time (for they don't value "traditional" things anyway) trying to change things. Thus those who want to destroy have more time to devote than those who want to preserve, or maybe even return (or go) to a more stable "traditional" role.

While everything "traditional" is not always good, it remains a good term to describe those that are. If you think a family should allow a mother to stay home and actively raise her children, you will probably be too busy doing just that. You won't have time to actively lobby for laws to do this. On the other hand, if you think that this is not important, then you will have no problem leaving your children to the care of someone else (if you have children at all) and then using your work time to push for the changes you want to support your choices, or those of others.

I see this as another aspect of our continued slide into destruction. I am not sure an solution to the problem exists, outside of Divine intervention.

Brad

As I write this I am watching the show _Alien Planet_ which recently aired on The Discovery Channel.

Talk about Science Fiction! Though they note it is in the future, it is shown with the same level of "this is the way things will be" that was used in the _Walking With Dinosaurs_ series they aired (from the BBC I believe) a while back. Here they make outrageous speculation, acknowledge it as such, and yet continue long.

It also presents Evolution (the particles to people kind) as a given. After all, if it happened here, it would happen many other places, right?

But even if you believe in Evolution, this program has many flaws. While the mission is claimed to have contingency plans, in the end it only has 3 landers/explorers, one of which is damaged on entry to the planet and another of which is killed while trying to communicate with an alien creature.

This is rather stupid. Would you go to all the expense and trouble to send a probe to another world and have only 3 landers? Of course not! You would have a bunch more, perhaps even hundreds. Also, the one probe is killed by something surprising it while it is trying to communicate, but is it realistic that a probe would drop all scanning to communicate with a single alien? Would it not continue to constantly scan for dangers in all other directions?

Another unrealistic access is that it seems very ludicrous that probes would be launched before a full scan of the planet was performed. With even modern photographic techniques (let alone those we would theoretically have in this future time) could discover a lot of things from the relative safety of space. This is especially true if it only had 3 probes, let alone if it had a lot more.

The show also emphasizes over and over that life now is the result of lots of accidents. As with most of modern science, it has no allowance that we are specially created, let alone specially created by a Creator who cares for us.

I don't even rate this as good science fiction. It is full of a lot of fantasy, much of it needlessly so. Instead of some balanced fantasy, they had to go off the deep end.

I see this as more attempts to prop up the modern mythology that we call Evolution. We have believed the incredulous, so we are willing to believe anything that is fed us from "experts". Are we really any different than the ancients, with their own elaborate myths and tales? Will we ever stop to realize that the truth is much more believable than all this fantasy - that a real God created everything and really cares about each of us? That is doubtful since doing so would require us to then be accountable to that God, and we can handle any level of fantasy as long as we don't need to be accountable!

Brad

Lets get started again. :)

I am getting rather sick of hearing the Democrats talk about how the Republicans are going to stop open debate if they force a vote on judges as they are indicating they will do.

I would ask the Democrats, when has all this debate occurred? I am all for keeping the debate going, but make them debate! Make them stay there 24 hours a day until the debate is solved and things can be brought up for a vote.

An interesting thing to note, Republicans are too wimpy to pull something like this. Even if they found themselves in the minority again, they would almost certainly find themselves back in their old pattern of "go along to get along." While they may raise some issues, we have never seen strong principled conservatives, no matter how much the Democrats and other liberals claim we are just about to become a religious dictatorship. :)

As I think I have noted before, I have no great love for the Republicans, but the Democrats and their media pals annoy me so much I am finding myself much more in line with them (Republicans) than I would prefer.