Two years ago I first entered the world of iPad note taking. I was starting my first semester at VDS and had purchased a first generation iPad Air a few months before. My intent was to use my iPad to take notes during lectures and in my many meetings at work. — I was still rocking a giant, heavy HP Elitebook 8760w 17" portable workstation at the office. — I started down the path of pen input, but quickly realized that wasn’t the best way to go. Pen input wasn’t supported well by iOS and wasn’t automatically converted to plain-text like my beloved Newton would. For plain-text note taking, keyboard entry was still the best. I went to Amazon, purchased a bluetooth keyboard, and started carrying my iPad to meetings at work and lectures at school.
Read more...I have long been a skeptic of AgileTM. There is no doubt that team-based, flexible, and product/value-focused software development is the best way we’ve discovered so far to build great, useful software. That, I believe, is fairly established even in the most corporate of environments. What I remain skeptical of is “methodologies” and processes which claim to “govern” and “better manage” the agile software development team and process. In my career I’ve found most of these techniques to serve MBAs’ and project managers’ need to track and quantify rather than to serve the team or improve the craft or quality of software. On the contrary, many AgileTM methodologies I’ve experienced over the years have slowed the development process, hurt developer moral, and led to software that was behind schedule and didn’t provide the full value needed.
Read more...Having recently left one employer for another, the topic of talent retention is fresh on my mind. When I started my new job at LifeWay the director over my department asked me to read The Alliance by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and and Chris Yeh. At first glance The Alliance looked like the typical IT management book. At only about 150 pages with a largish font and a trendy cover, my expectations where not high. Luckily, however, I was surprised by what I found inside. It is not a weighty book. It doesn’t go super deep. It does waste a lot of paper and ink – especially the later chapters. But, even though the content of this book would make a better blog post than a full publication, The Alliance makes some important points and gives useful guidance for the contemporary IT leader.
Read more...Mary Magdalene and the other women disciples with her had followed the dead body of their Rabbi from the foot of the cross to the tomb on that Friday. On the Sabbath they mourned the loss of their great friend and teacher and prepared for the task of making Jesus’ body ready for burial at the new week. Early the first Sunday morning after the death of Jesus Mary expected to find the tortured body of her great mentor. She expected the difficult task of preparing a loved one’s body for burial. Though she was a disciple of Jesus, though she had seen him do many miracles, though she called him Lord, Mary did not fully understand who Jesus was. In the garden where the tomb Joseph of Arimathea had provided lay, Mary’s expectations of Jesus collided with the reality of who he truly was and her entire world changed.
Read more...Teresa Berger’s Women’s Ways of Worship was a surprising book for me. Based on the title alone, I approached the book cautiously, entirely expecting to push through an approach to liturgy I disagreed with. Though the final chapters of the book did live up to my initial expectations, in the first part of Berger’s work I found my mind opened to a new way of thinking about the architecture of time as it relates to bodies in worship of God. Though we worship together as the Body of Christ, each member of the Body comes with an embodied rhythm of life that experiences the liturgy in different ways.
Read more...On the surface Luke 13:1-9 is a little cryptic. There is a lot of talking about a lot of things that aren’t exactly clear or seemingly even related. Once the context of verses 1 through 5 have been made clear, however, its relationship to the parable of the fig tree becomes evident. Jesus is teaching the crowds that gather around him a lesson on God’s mercy towards fallen humanity and the expediency they should have for reconciliation with the Divine.
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