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Communication

My mind has been thinking a lot about communication lately.

There are area’s of my life where I want to communicate more, but don’t. The reasons are boundless:

  • Scared of what others might think
  • Maintaining a controlled perception of myself (related to #1, but not quite the same)
  • Laziness – I’d rather play video games

The funny part is, as I look back at this blog, there was very little I held back from it during the period from highschool to early college. I documented all sorts of stuff about my life… no matter how mundane… And to this day, it sits here, available for anyone to go and see things I’ve done in the past.

I could post to Facebook… But that’s not what I’m looking for. I’m not looking for comments. I’m not looking for short blurbs.

I could make videos – But do I really want to put this face to these words?

Well, for now, I just feel like writing something… So I’m going to… very much the same way I used to in the past.

I’m sitting at Math and Science Academy, in the server room, listening to the whir of the server fans. There’s no major problem at the moment. I don’t *really* need to be here. But my tech helpers are off at the First Robotics tournament in Duluth, so I decided to hang here to “cover the desk”. I’m working on various things at the same time, keeping up on emails, etc. But so far, it’s been a pretty average work day.

I had an idea to setup a VPN connection for the entire school to a remote location to try to solve a problem we have with our modem when to many connections start happening. I haven’t implemented it yet, but I’m dreaming of both how that might work, as well as what could be accomplished with such a setup. The real question though: could it be done with minimal latency such that it doesn’t slow the whole school down in any meaningful way :-). I’ve always wondered what kind of limits there were on all this cloud based stuff :-).

My kids are at school. I’ve been taking them almost every morning, and picking them up every day. It’s been a change in schedule for me as it greatly reduces my work time during the day… But it saves us some money, and helps the kids to not get overtired. It also gives me more time with them, which is a good thing I think.  Amber is picking them up today though… so I’m going to try to use the extra time wisely. Link has developed a love for math lately. Addition is his thing. We’ll see how far we can push that before he starts in public school next year. Ellie is just a constant bundle of love. I have no idea what her real passions are yet, or real talents are… but whatever they will be, I have no doubt she will attack them fiercely.

I have sound rehearsal tonight at Church. I still do that. Lately, it’s been pretty much every week. I enjoy it. It gives me a chance to think about life, to meditate, all while serving and listening to great music. Hearing the same sermon 2 to 3 times a week from different perspectives also has me wanting to “preach” myself. There’s that video idea from earlier in the post popping back into my head.

Overwatch is the game of the year for me lately. I’d love to be more competitive than I am, but for some reason, I just can’t seem to move up on the ladders. It seems like I’m back to Reinhardt this season, although when dealing with solo-queue’s, I’ll probably still push for D’va for the mobility. I greatly enjoy the pace at which the game goes… Anything less than competive these days though I tend to find underwhelming. A new hero was announced today. We’ll see what changes that brings. I still play World of Warcraft as well, just not daily.

Is it sad that Facebook is the primary form of communication for me about news about pretty much everyone in my life, with maybe the exception of Richard. It told me that my wife was on day 45 of 90 (way to go honey!) of her exercise challenge, which I knew she excised nightly lately, but not she was half way. It told me today was Nikki’s birthday, which I knew, but probably would have forgotten if it hadn’t told me (Happy Birthday!). I guess my communication has always been digital… just interesting that I get it all from Facebook now and not directly via the likes of AOL Instant Messenger (BTW: I use Skype now for most chat related things, Google Chat sometimes, I don’t text message very well, I’m never on AIM, and I’m always on Mumble for real-time voice communication (but I won’t tell you the mumble unless you ask me to).)

I doubt this will become a regular thing again, but it feels good to put some of this on paper just for the sake of archiving it. Documenting your life matters, if only for yourself to look back and see how far you’ve come.

Biggest concerns of the moment: Getting work done. Finding more work to do. State testing for all my schools!

This free writing has killed some time for me. Time to change locations I think to get some work done from the home office.

 

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