Tornado

Those of you who read this blog regularly will that I have a weakness to work too hard [some have even remarked on this]. However, I have a hobby which helps me relax and recharge and get closer to God. The hobby is sailing. A couple of years back I bought a second hand Mirror dinghy very cheaply and have been learning to sail. And loving every minute of it!

Only last weekend I had a really great time with sailing around the bay here with the 10 year old son of a friend of ours as my crew. The weekend before I had this lad and my 10 year old nephew as crew. We had a really great time and I was looking forward to sailing again this weekend as the week has been very tiring... we have a couple of new staff members [one short term] and have been supervising them and remotely supervising development in Egypt and... yes it goes on at the normal pace of my life.

Friday morning I woke to see the curtain dragged out of the window and the windows rattling and storm around. It was louder and more violent than any storm I have experienced before. The rain was nothing like rain in the UK, it was kind of like opening a fire hydrant from the sky and letting it rip.

We have had heavy rain before and I was concerned about what was happening at the office as last time some water had come in through the office roof and though I had asked a builder to look at it, he had not yet had time to come. In God's provision one of the two staff members was staying in a guest room at the office and so he got up and moved some of the computers and boxes and boxes of software out of the water pouring down through the ceiling. Roads were flooded... this is what it looked like on one of the roads between the office and our home.

When I got to the office, the french windows from the balcony to my office had blown in and water had also come across the floor of my office. Attached to the balcony is a satellite dish which downloads material off satellite which we then re-encode to upload to the Internet. The dish was no longer pointing at the satellite but at a neighbouring tree. It took a while to re-point the satellite dish correctly and get the radio station re-broadcasting on the Internet.

While I was doing this I had a phone call from a friend of mine saying that a tornado had crashed through the sailing club and although their boat was fortunately undamaged, mine was not so lucky. They had put it back on the trailer, but I was not going to sail her this weekend. So after lunch I drove down to the sailing club with my wife. On the way we saw this caravan that had been about 50 metres away on the beach last weekend now wrecked alongside the road.

My dinghy had also been lifted and blown from one end of the sailing club to the other. My friends had put all the parts together and put it on the trailer, but closer inspection showed it was not going to sail again without extensive work.



The hull had been punctured in many places and almost all the panels would need replacing to sail her again. The number of holes was too extensive to look at just a patch here or there.

Because it had been bashed about so much the fibreglass stitching that holds the panels together had all come adrift and it would be almost impossible to get new fibreglass to take to the old wood even if it were repaired. The Bible has something to say about trying to patch old wine-skins with new. Fireglass to old marine ply is pretty similar!

I had spent the winter stripping down and re-varnishing the boom, gaff, mast, rudder and centreboard. Now the gaff [part of the mast] had been damaged and would need a new gaff. All the buoyancy tanks had been damaged, ripping pins and panels apart.

Some of the structural pieces were also damaged. The boat isn't matchwood, but I don't think it's ever going to sail again as it would be much quicker to build a new one [quicker, mind you, not quick] than trying to repair this one.

So... I am feeling low. Sailing has been my sanity preserver and we are at the start of the sailing season not the end.

When 4th best is good enough?

I can't believe its so long since I wrote on this blog, I have posted a couple of items on my other blogs, but basically not had time to blog for a couple of weeks or more. Pete and I are reviewing what we are doing. We are running about 220 component projects for various people and having problems maintaining it all. Running Internet servers grows more complex by the day.

Last week one of our partners from Spain flew over and we had a couple of days with him and one day with another partner too thinking through what we do. One phrase struck me that he said, 'Many times I am doing my fourth best option...' More and more we are faced with the least bad option rather than the best. Obviously choosing between a good and a bad option is a no-brainer. Choosing between two equally good options is easy, but we find choosing between two equally bad options very difficult. There is a phrase I remember from when I grew up 'Heads you win, tails I lose'. When its like that it just feels... well... strange.

Because we are so short of staff we are faced with making cuts in some of those 220 component projects. Which ones? Any cut will affect somebody seriously. Some people may not hear the message if we do cut. Another thing this guy from Spain said was that on the questionnaires he has to complete for any project he does within his organization there is a significant question that he has to answer for his bosses: 'What will happen if this project is not done?' I puzzled and puzzled over this.

Something about the question concerned me. Was it because we were faced with a similar one 'What will happen if this project is cut?' or something deeper than that. The more I puzzled the more I could not see it till the Friday evening. On Friday evening a bunch of folk who all follow Jesus come round to our house. We have a meal together, pray for each other and then look at the Bible together.

Anyhow, on that Friday evening we were looking at the book of Acts and about Peter and a Roman Centurian. The question came up "What if Peter had said 'No I'm not going to visit the Centurian'?" The answer we came to is that God would have found another way to communicate His love to the Centurian. Ahh... here's why I was so perturbed. The re is one answer to the question 'What will happen if this project is not done?' and its the same in every case. The answer is 'God will find another way to communicate His love to those He wants to'.

But that doesn't actually make the decision about what to cut any easier. It could mean 'Does anything I do matter if God will find another way to communicate?' Pete and I came back to what we feel God is calling us to. This guy from Spain again... he said we need to come back to our mission statement. We knew and could easily state what our 'unique selling points' [don't you just love marketeer speak?] are, but a mission statement?

Every company and organization has their mission statement today. McDonalds mission statements starts off 'McDonald's vision is to be the world's best quick service restaurant experience. Being the best means providing outstanding quality, service, cleanliness and value, so that we make every customer in every restaurant smile...' or how about 'Establish Starbucks as the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world while maintaining our uncompromising principles while we grow...' Trouble is that reading too many mission statements makes me want to vomit.

Anyhow, we did eventually get a mission statement and core values. We have also created a questionnaire that will help us evaluate all the projects we are involved with. Now all we have to do is persuade our partners to fill in the questionnaire... maybe we should offer a prize. Any suggestions on what the prize should be? Leave a comment...

Email working and spam being killed

At last, we sigh with relief the main parts of the email upgrade are working and spam seems to have been reduced dramatically. A very boring week of testing, checking, compiling programs and configuring.

I was getting about 40-50% spam and now in the last two days [since we switched on the extra spam checking] I have had only one spam email. It seems so strange to me, why people are bothering sending spam, it really is a constant battle and more and more people are killing more and more spam emails... and so they have to send more and more and more and more...

Today I spent most of the day writing a couple of small [but complex] scripts to create all the SPF and Domain Key records for our DNS system. Time was when DNS was simple. Now it grows in complexity and reading the files gets more complicated. And looking at things I can see it getting more complicated by the month. Oh well...

Just looking at part of DNS that we are not using yet: Service calls. Instead of typing http://www.blogger.com your system would ask blogger.com what http services it supports and sent you to the right machine. Complex but useful for the way the internet will be growing in the future.

Our Egyptian programmer is approximately half way through his time here and the messaging system is working functionally, but with some glitches. Hopefully we will go into testing mode next week. This is the core of a new website which will be about community interaction.

What makes the messaging system different is that it works like a threaded discussion forum, but with the primary key being the person you are interacting with. This is because the focus is on relationship building.

This weekend is Easter and I will take a couple of days off and hopefully go sailing.

Email gets more complicated by the minute

OK, so we have the email upgrade working but... we do a lot of email forwarding and the new SPF and Domain Keys don't handle forwarding well. It appears that I have to violate one RFC [RFC's are the Internet 'rules for how things work'] in order to get other RFCs to work.

Oh well, lets watch it over the next few days and see what happens. It's now past midnight and I kept working to try and get everything sorted so email wasn't breaking.

Blogging from my phone

OK, so its possible to blog from a mobile phone, but does it work for me? If this post is on my blog then it does!