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Don’t hide your pyro under a basket…it’ll burn it up

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This has been a very interesting past few weeks. For the people that follow me, you may notice that I didn’t post last week and my tweets have been sparse. The short story is I ended up having to go the doctor unexpectedly last week, but everything is all good, so thanks for asking.

I have not been able to make as much progress as I wanted yet on the iPhone development course due to client commitments and the doctor visit, but I’m going to be mind-mapping it out this weekend. I’ve received a few good suggestions and I’ll be rolling those into the course as well.

For those of you that know, I’m a huge Panhead (Skillet fan). I picked up their latest project, Awake, the other day at Target. I have not been disappointed. Then, to top it off, Skillet was featured on Yahoo on Thursday for the video premiere of Hero. Very tasty pyro. I saw them at the last show of the Comatose tour with Disciple and Decyfer Down in Greenville, SC and again at Creation West when hanging out with Creation MC extraordinaire Mark Warfel. Neither time was disappointing.

If I was 10..20. . .I better stop. . .years younger, I would love to go back out on the road for a tour. Not a long one, but maybe a month or two. The five years I was on the road (1988-1993) were some of the best years of my life:

  • I met and married my wife
  • We had our first and only child
  • I got my CDL and could drive anything but tankers, haz mat or motorcycles (I still keep it current. I spent too much time getting it to let it lapse 🙂 )
  • I worked with some really cutting edge lighting fixtures from High End Systems
  • I rode and drove around in one of the coolest busses of all time
  • Got to play DisneyWorld not once, but twice
  • I started hardcore programming in PICK/Unidata/Universe on Wyse 50 terminals (amber, not green, thank you very much) connected to a 286 tower with 128K of memory

Even though I grew up around TRS-80s and PDP-11s, it was during those years on the road that I really got the bug for software development. For some of you youngsters, forget about not having Google, we didn’t have the internet. Getting a subscription to magazines or dialing into bulletin boards on 300 baud acoustic coupler modems was about as far as you could go to get information. Compuserve was in its infancy. A new startup called AOL was trying to make it easy to exchange information and play games.

Fortunately for us, there was a Micro Center right around the corner in Marietta, GA. To this day, that store is still open. I dropped by the last time we were through Atlanta. It was like a small homecoming. I could probably buy a small country for the money I spent there during 88-93.

Fast forward 16 years. Today we have the internet not only on our computers, but on our phones. We can constantly broadcast where we are. We can communicate with friends around the world at no cost via Skype.

How did we make it without this technology? The same way our forefathers did before Henry Ford invented the automobile. . .we got by, but boy, it is easier now.

Embrace technology, but remember it’s just a tool. But even tools fail, leading me to. . .

Today is 9/11. I thought I would write down what my day was like back in 2001. It will always help me remember.

Tuesday, 9/11/2001. . .I was in Trenton, NJ at a client’s office around my normal time of 7:30am. My day was going along pretty much like normal when suddenly, someone ran in and said that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers. Immediately, we tried pulling up CNN or any other website to figure out what was going on. No news websites were responding. Finally, someone was able to get a feed from a TV station in Russia rebroadcasting what I think was a CNN feed. . .just in time to see the second tower get hit.

A few minutes later, the client’s campus became a ghost town. I headed back to my apartment, thinking of the what ifs.

What if my family had been in town?

My family had just flown back home on Saturday after spending a couple of weeks with me in NJ. They were in the city on Friday. My wife gave our daughter the choice of going to a restaurant at the top of one of the towers or going to McDonalds. Of course, she choose. . .McDonalds. (BTW, they also saw P.O.D. at Battery Park that day at a MTV shoot. I really wish I would have skipped work that day 🙂 )

What if I can’t get home for a few weeks?

I was flying in and out of Philly every week. On Tuesday, no one knew when planes would go up again. I was scheduled for Thursday night, but they rescheduled me for a Friday morning flight. I wasn’t holding my breath. I arrived 3 hours early in Philly. There were military forces *everywhere* fully armed. I had never seen anything like it before in my life nor had any of the military ever done anything like this on US soil. Except for the very long wait times, most everyone played nice and didn’t do anything stupid. Some of my extended family didn’t get off as easy. My uncle and aunt were stuck in Vegas and it was going to be a couple of weeks before they got out. They were able to rent a car (thankfully) and drove straight through from Vegas to North Carolina.

What if. . .?

Don’t let another week/day/hour/minute go by without letting the people you love know that you love them. Do I get this right all the time? Ask my family. I still have a way to go.

Don’t put off doing something from your bucket list because tomorrow may blindside you and that something is no longer an option.

I just read a blog post entitled “Time is abundant, you’re just wasting it”. Do yourself a favor and go read it right now and then come back.

Really. . .I mean go read it now and then come back.

Now that you have read it, what do you think? How can you reclaim wasted time in your life to accomplish the What Ifs from your bucket list or to pick up the phone and tell someone that you love them?

This week’s post has been a little more somber than normal. I’ll try to get back to my more jovial self next week. (That’s a joke, BTW)

I’m also going to be tackling Capistrano and Chef this week with a client, so if anyone has shortcuts they can pass along, it would be greatly appreciated.