Absence makes the Camera grow Fonder
For my daughter Allison’s birthday in March, I decided to give her my Nikon D40x camera and lens kit as a gift. She had been dabbling in photography for a while with her point-and-shoot, so I thought it would be nice to see if she was serious about this picture taking thing. She has tried on various “hobbies” and nothing has seemed to stick. The tributary of this was that I would then be able to upgrade to a new camera – not that I had an ulterior motive! So my quest began.
My first choice for a camera replacement was a Nikon D90, mainly because of its video capabilities. I figured I would be able to save the money and make the purchase. The camera had been out for a couple of years, so I decided to check and see if there were any new cameras poised to be released. I checked with Nikon Rumors, a website that is dedicated to just such a venture since Nikon (or any other camera manufacturer for that matter) does not give any indication when it may be releasing new gear.
Well, lo and behold, in July, they stated that there was a camera coming out that would be a replacement for the D90. Hmm, now what do I do? It would be coming out in the fall. No name yet, no definitive specs, so I decided to wait. Why invest into a discontinued item? Finally, in August, they announced the name, the D7000. More information kept trickling in and I was getting more and more excited about this new camera. I still didn’t know what the price would be, but it would be available in September – October. It finally showed up on Amazon’s website on September 15th, and I placed my order for the body only. If it shipped soon, I would still be able to take some nice fall pictures. Well, here we are in November and still no clue as to when the camera might ship.
In all this talking about my dilemma, one important element has been glossed over. What about Allison and her photography experiment? Well, it stuck. She has fallen in love with photography and has even purchased a new lens (35mm f/1.8). She has taken thousands of pictures and has even has taken some senior pictures for her friends. She has a natural eye for taking unique shots. I have seen her blossom in more than just photography since then. She has found something that truly makes her happy and expresses her creative side.
It’s been eight months without a camera and I don’t think I have been without a camera for that long in my entire adult life. My love for photography has just grown during this absence and I get to see that love manifest in Allison’s photography. What has been my loss has been her gain and I could not be happier!
Perfection? I think I will pass . . .
When you are doing a task, do you feel if it doesn’t get done “right”, you aren’t going to do it at all? What does doing it “right” look like? Is it perfection? Diligent effort over a period of time will produce a high degree of effectiveness, not perfection.
Perfection is: “an exemplification of supreme excellence or an unsurpassable degree of accuracy or excellence”.
I was thinking about this and how easy it is to be in one extreme or another on this matter. One extreme is putting in a half-hearted effort over a long period of time and having only marginal results. Never approaching anything close to what would be considered perfection.
The other extreme is what I want to focus on, putting in so much time into a project because you want to get as close to perfect as you can. This results in one of two things.
- Accomplishing very little, but what you do is as close to perfect as you can get.
- Not starting anything because you know you will not have the time to do it to your level of perfection.
The end result is the same, being ineffective and having minimal influence in those things you do. I work at a church where we have an awesome music department, a great T.V. department, and a strong web presence. I oversee our IT area, along with supporting over 30 websites with a skeleton staff. Our IT staff has shrunk over the past few years and we have lost some good web programmers. We have taken over the support of more of our Outreach ministry websites from volunteers who develop in their own favorite flavor of code. In order for us to accomplish this, we had to change the way we do business. We standardized on developing all our sites in Joomla, realizing we needed to be as effective as we could with the limited resources we had. It was a complete shift in traditional thinking, but it has worked out.
Below is a chart of what perfection should look like. As a co-worker of mine, Matt Leonetti said, “If it passes the mom test, it is good enough”. What does that mean? For those perfectionist out there it is this: If your mom can’t tell the difference between the product (music, video, or web) when you get to the “Sweet Spot”, or when it is done to your level of perfection, it passes.
Perfection robs you of being effective.
Perfection robs you of having an impact.
I am certainly not advocating grinding out shoddy work, but I am suggesting that you aim squarely at the “Sweet Spot” that produces maximum results without wasting time trying to gain a more perfect result, that for the most part, no one would notice. Ask yourself if you can relax your standards to get more accomplished, which in effect, increases your overall effectiveness.
I encourage you strive to be as effective as you can by putting in a consistent diligent effort at all you do, knowing that unfinished work benefits no one. Take the time to look at what you do differently and maximize your results without sacrificing the quality of your work.
Portable Email
I don’t know about you but I go through continual changes and challenges in trying to better manage my Email. I have a corporate account managed through Outlook as well as a couple of Gmail accounts that I manage through Outlook as well. I use a .pst for offline storage. I have one .pst for my “home” mail and one for my “work” mail and I access them through three different machines.
The challenge has always been on how to share these .pst files across all the machines. My standard method has been to store the “home” .pst on a portable usb flash drive and leave my “work” .pst on my computer at work. The problem is I would need to remember to bring the flash drive to work and then back home so I could access it from both places and my “work” one was only accessible from work and not from home
Since I work from home, I need access to my “work” .pst, so how do I do that? It is fairly large, so do I dedicate one flash drive for both .pst files? Since I did not have an elegant solution, I have gone without that access because I really never had a better way to address this.
Well now I do. I have a Dropbox account which allows me sync my local files online. They give you 2gb of space for free. Just download the software, it creates a local file folder and just drag the .pst files there. Point to them from Outlook (from both work and home) and the files will stay in sync without having to think about it again. Pretty nifty!
The only cautionary tale is that the file cannot be accessed at the same time from multiple machines. I just started this method and I hope it works as well as I think it will!
Dandelions, the king of weeds
I was out mowing the lawn tonight for the fourth time this year. I thought I do a pretty good job of keeping the lawn looking nice, but then I noticed them. What were they? The enemies of the lawn. Weeds! Dandelions, creeping charlie, and clover.
Well what the heck! You want the grass, trees, and shrubs to grow and thrive, so you treat them nice, water them, fertilize them, and give them a regular hair cut and trim. Some parts of the lawn do well, some not so much. Some trees and shrubs are doing well, some are dying.
But those weeds. You attack them, pull them out, put weed killer on them, and generally try to choke them out… and they still thrive! So with all the disparaging treatment, why do the weeds seem to multiply? There is more weeds this year than last. Then, in mid-summer and into the fall, I start forgetting about them. The blooms die and they start blending into the lawn. Out of sight, out of mind.
It reminds me of those little issues I am trying to take care of in my life. Being a better husband and father, getting into the Word more, and finishing those open items that continue to gnaw at me. The "biggies" have been dealt with, but those pesky little ones are tough to completely eliminate. Sometimes they pop-up, flower, become apparent to everyone, bloom, and then drop seeds all over the place. Then as time goes by, they just blend in with the rest of my life. Then again, they pop-up again, worse than before.
If I was persistent in taking care of them, they would not become the nuisance that they are. It’s not a once-a-spring chore, it is regular effort throughout the season that gets results. I purpose to become a regular weed puller in all areas of my life on a more consistent basis. Not through guilt, but because I want to exhibit the love that He has shown me.
10 Things your IT guy wants you to know
I had this passed along to me and since I am a IT guy, I found some humor in it (truth sprinkled with humor). We deal with so many issues (most of them emergencies) on a regular basis that we have to find ways to be as effective as we can. Sometimes we can come across as a little “matter of fact” about those issues we deal with, but that is not always our intent. So seeing that other techies have the same struggles and how they would address “customers” was fun and funny to read. I thought you may in enjoy it also.
1. If you ask me technical questions please don’t argue with me because you don’t like my answer. If you think you know more about the topic, why ask? And if I’m arguing with you…it’s because I am positive that I am correct, otherwise I’d just say “I don’t know” or give you some tips on where to look it up, I don’t have the time to just argue for the sake of it.
2. Starting a conversation by insulting yourself (i.e. “I’m such an idiot”) will not make me laugh, or feel sorry for you; all it will do is remind me that yes, you are an idiot and that I am going to hate having to talk to you. Trust me; you don’t want to start a call that way.
3. I am ok with you making mistakes, fixing them is my job. I am not ok with you lying to me about a mistake you made. It makes it much harder to resolve and thus makes my job more difficult. Be honest and we can get the problem resolved and continue on with our business.
4. There is no magic “Fix it” button. Everything takes some amount of work to fix, and not everything is worth fixing or even possible to fix. If I say that you just need to re-do a document that you accidentally deleted 2 months ago, please don’t get mad at me. I’m not ignoring your problem, and it’s not that I don’t like you, I just cant always fix everything.
5. Not everything you ask me to do is “urgent”. In fact, by marking things as “urgent” every time, you almost ensure that I treat none of it as a priority.
6. You are not the only one who needs help, and you usually don’t have the most urgent issue. Give me some time to get to your problem, it will get fixed.
7. Emailing me several times about the same issue in the same day is not only unnecessary, it’s highly annoying. Emails will stay until I delete them, I won’t delete them until I’m done with them. I will typically respond as soon as I have a useful update. If it is an urgent issue, let me know (see number 5).
8. Yes, I prefer email over telephone calls. It has nothing to do with being friendly, it’s about efficiency. It is much faster and easier for me to list out a set of questions that I need you to answer than it is for me to call and ask you them one by one. You can find the answers at your leisure and while I’m waiting I can work on other problems.
9. Yes, I seem blunt and rude. It’s not that I mean to, I just don’t have the time to sugar coat things for you. I assume we are both adults and can handle the reality of a problem. If you did something wrong, I will tell you. I don’t care that it was a mistake, because it really makes no difference to me. Don’t take it personal, I just don’t want it to happen again.
10. And finally, yes, I can read your email, I can see what web pages you look at while you are at work, yes, I can access every file on your work computer, and I can tell if you are chatting with people on an instant messenger or chat room (and can also read what you are typing). But no, I don’t do it. It’s unethical, I’m busy, and in all reality you aren’t all that interesting. So unless I am instructed to specifically monitor or investigate your actions, I don’t. There really are much more interesting things on the internet than you.
Windows 7 RC
Well I did it, I took the plunge. I installed the new Windows 7 RC on my tablet. I am only a few hours into it and the jury is still out. The installation went very smooth and getting it up and running was effortless. It very much has a Vista feel to it.
First, I had a issue that I had to overcome before I could really look under the hood. I have spent the better part of two days working on connecting it to my wireless network at home. I mean come on! It works fine on other wireless networks, but nooooooo, not mine. But, I finally got the thing figured out. Maybe it’s a guy thing, but it is hard to let those things go when you can’t figure them out.
Part of the problem was that I hacked my Linksys wireless router and put a different firmware on it. I thought I was technically savvy, but when I get into things like this, I feel like an amateur.
So I hacked away and I have been running the “new” firmware on the router for the past 6 months with no problems. It actually has some great features. The best one is the OpenDNS that is built into it. If you do not know what it is, check it out.
But a rouge setting had effectively stopped me dead in my tracks. After much searching I finally found it. I am fortunate that I have another computer to compare settings with, or I may have given up long before I found it. All my other computers work fine, but Vista 64-bit, and now Windows 7 64-bit do not play well with that setting.
Now finally I feel like I can move on. The weight has been lifted. Time to dig into Windows 7 with a little more depth!
P.S. – If you have the “Tomato” firmware on your wireless router, make sure you turn off the “afterburner” setting. You will save yourself a lot of trouble.