Performed Well

Almost two years ago, I ran into an old friend of mine named Evan (not his real name, since I haven't asked his permission to tell this story) who was somewhat recently married and working a part-time job.  I knew him to be an intelligent person and quite capable of learning new skills.  I pitched him on the idea of starting a new career in Software Development. I had made a Software Development Curriculum a few years back that centered around Lynda.com as a tool for developing practical tech skills and frequently practicing them with do-it-yourself projects.  My brother Davey had used this, and it was a major starting point for him learning the skills to take on his first full-time job as a software developer.  He is still working as a software developer to this day and making a very good living doing so. I wanted to use the curriculum to help Evan also.  Evan worked diligently at following the instructions and learning HTML, then CSS, then JavaScript. ...

For many years, my mom has had a dream about buying a theater to use for musical performances.  Most of her children--myself included--were fairly skeptical of the plan.  We thought the idea was rather far-fetched and impractical.  My folks had casually looked at various theaters over the years, but rarely with much serious interest in actually purchasing one. Then about a month-and-a-half ago, they ask me to come look at a property that was less than a mile away from my house.  I expected to go there, tell them all the reasons why I felt it would be unwise, then head home.  Much to my surprise, I found myself believing in this particular property and investment just as much as they did.  The price was great, the seating capacity was near-perfect (340 seats), and there was an immense amount of good, usable space.  People who've toured the place since kept saying things like "ANOTHER huge room?!  This place just keeps going!" At the end of this...

Last month, Christine surprised me with the best news I had heard all year: we're going to have another baby!  I was overjoyed as were all of the kids.  I knew I wanted another baby, but I didn't talk about it much because it wasn't something Christine and I had agreed on together.  I was perfectly happy having 5 terrific children anyway. But hearing that we were having another one got everyone in our family so very excited.  The kids were all cheering about it, and we made this cute announcement for Facebook: Several weeks later, we were hit with the horrible news that our baby didn't survive past 6 weeks in utero. We had never experienced a miscarriage before. In our minds, that was hardly even a possibility. And now it was a reality.  The hardest part for me was telling the kids. We told them each individually. Angel rushed into our arms and cried with us. Harmony sobbed and said through her tears "We were so excited." Chase handled it like a c...

This is another technical post, so I recommend skipping it if you're not in a technical field... Over the last week, I've been learning to implement Webpack at work.  I've got some mixed feelings about it, so I'm posting them here while they're still fresh in my mind.  Maybe in a few months'/years' time, i'll look back at this post in feel differently. On the one hand, learning something new is almost always exciting, and I love that my job affords me the opportunity to grow like this. On the other hand, I also get this nagging feeling like I could be so much more productive if I were doing something I'm already good at. As for webpack itself, it's a very cool module bundler, and I'm quite impressed at the number of things it seems to be able to do automatically.  At the same time, however, the more things it "just does," the more it seems like magic, and the less control I seem to have with it. Yesterday, for instance, I ...

The last time I made a blog post, it was three weeks before the November 8 election.  Now it's nearly 3 weeks after the election is over, and to almost everyone's surprise, Donald Trump won and will be our next President. I didn't vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump (though I did vote down-ballot for conservative republicans including Kevin Yoder for congress).  I explained my reasons in my last blog post , so i won't repeat them here. However, as the voting results came in for each state, and we saw more and more of them turning Red (victories for Trump), I couldn't help but feel I was on the winning side of all this.  I am still apprehensive about President Trump, but I am so pleased that Republicans have regained control of the House and Senate, and I truly believe that the country will be a better place in 4 years than it is today. I am still concerned that Trump will only last 4 years and then we'll have another Democrat in the office, but...