Actually, this blog is splitting up.

Elsewhere in Dreams

EID will be my poetry and artistic endeavours spot, if you will. Pooh had one, why can’t I?

Okay, Whatever.

OKWE is for everything else, like rants about things you don’t care about, much.

This blog (the one you’re reading now) is winding down. Twitter imports have stopped, Google Reader Shared Items imports have stopped, and no posting will be happening. However, the content will remain (Geof willing) as long as it can. I’m not forwarding the blog either, as that would just be to gosh darn hard.

In my industry, demand is quite elastic. There are wild swings in the amount of tooling companies are willing to buy. In bad times, the demand almost dries up. You need cash reserves to weather the bad times. In good times, demand explodes.

We’re in the good times right now.

It’s a nice problem to have, but it is a problem. We can’t expand the business to meet the demand as quickly as the demand builds. If we do, we end up with massive debt load that leaves us vulnerable to the next (inevitable) downturn. So we grow slowly. This isn’t like software firms, where VCs throw vast quantities of money at unknown properties.

The banks understand our valuation quite well. And we have to pry the money from their lifeless hands. There are no reams of money being thrown at the manufacturing sector, unless you go to China or India. They haven’t yet decided they can run an economy on music downloads and Facebook. They don’t think that’s a great idea.

All that to say we can’t just buy a bunch of machines and hire a bunch of people. We can’t. So we grow slowly, at a measured pace.

And we start pissing off our customers. We’re giving them longer and longer delivery times. During the bad times they take it for granted that we can turn tools around in a decent amount of time. The boom years roll around and… no such luck.

This is a good thing. We can afford to piss of a certain segment of our customer base. We can afford to tell them “no”. We can even afford to tell them “go somewhere else”. Mind you, all the tooling houses will be saying the same thing.

During the boom times, there’s an entire segment of the industry sliding around, looking for a better suppliers. We need to trade up.

We shove our least-loved into someone else’s arms and go after the good fruit. See ya. Good riddance.

It’s also a great time to trade up in business strategy. To clear our minds and grab some focus. We no longer need to do whatever comes our way. We can chase volume, if that’s what we want. We can concentrate on making better tools, for more money, with fewer people, for clients we want to work with, and retire, well-monied, to our respective cottages. Nothing wrong with that.

I’ve got a Kindle now. It’s a great device, and I really like it. It’s a lot easier to read a Malazan Book of the Fallen of it, as opposed to trying to hold up 700 – 1000 pages of book. It’s quite nice.

But ebooks are too expensive. They really are. I mean, there are free ebooks, and low-priced ones, but they’re not really anything I want to read. For the most part.

The ones I want to read are priced (maybe) a bit cheaper than physical editions.

But why? Why would I pay more to buy a product where the most costly part of the product’s production had been removed? It’s electronic. The wasteful, inefficient, expensive process of actually printing, binding, distributing, and selling of the book has been removed. That process must count as at least 75% of the cost of a traditional book. So for a paperback, I should be paying anywhere from $1 – $2 by my reckoning. This is what I consider to be a fair price. For a new release book, maybe up to $5.

That’s where I’ll stop. If you expect me to pay more than that, you’re crazy. I’m not made of money. I’ve bought only a very few books in the last couple of year because I’m not made of money. And here comes this revolutionary new book selling and distribution system that drives the cost of selling and delivering a book down to approximately zero (I know it’s not, but it’s close, especially if you think of Kindle books as loss leaders), and Amazon expects me to pay approximately the same amount as a hard copy.

I’ll say it again: That’s crazy.

If there’s one thing I want to leave you with, it’s this: Don’t waste your life.

Don’t waste your life worrying about wasting it. Do, and be happy.

If you enjoyed that moment you wasted… well, it wasn’t wasted, after all.

A bunch of my friends no longer blog. I’ve delisted them from the sidebar. I added Chris Hubbs back in because that just make sense.

Facebook happened, I think. Those of us who weren’t writers by temperament or by design stopped interacting with blogs and comments (it was too much effort) and started commenting on Facebook walls instead (far too little effort).

I don’t know if anything is lost in this transition. I don’t think so. There privacy of Facebook can be nice. I miss the openness of it all, though. I can honestly say I gained a few friends on the internet from blogging. I’ve only lost friends on Facebook. At my age it’s a lot easier to lose friends than to gain them.

How long will I keep this up, I wonder? I think as long as I’m making things, and thinking things, and want to write all those things down. I can accept that there are a lot of people out there who don’t care about that. They’re content to think things and have those thoughts boil off into the ether. There’s nothing wrong there. There are, after all, far too many thoughts and not enough time to write them all down.

So I soldier on. There’s that.

When I was a kid, my parents did their fair share of arguing in front of me. At least I remember it as arguing. They could have just been talking and my child-brain amplified it, as child-brains will do.

One thing they didn’t do often was go somewhere else and argue. “Not in front of kids!” and all that. I wasn’t very often in the dark that they were arguing. Or discussing. Or whatever.

This is probably a good thing. Because kids aren’t stupid. People aren’t stupid.

You go into the next room and do your arguing there, the kids know it. They may not know the content or the context, but they know what’s going on.

Now, I don’t argue with my wife a whole lot. We agree most of the time, and we’re wildly passive-aggressive the rest. But when we have kids, and when there’s something we need to discuss, I’m going to go ahead and discuss in front of the kids.

I don’t like the message that arguing somewhere else sends. I speak from a place of no experience, but still. If you have to go scream at each other in another room, you’re doing it wrong. You’re modelling a broken family dynamic. You’re teaching something about the way you think groups of people should function, and you’re teaching this to a bunch of little people who, frankly, don’t know their arse from a hole in the ground.

They will, of course. Eventually. Their peer groups will eventually take over teaching them things where you left off, and you’ll find that all your painstaking parenting really didn’t mean a whole lot. And they’ll probably come to look at you with contempt until they go ahead and repeat your mistakes.

But think about what this tells them about family, about friendship, about community, about church, about government. It’s okay to abuse each other, as long as you do it in private? Not a fantastic message.

Let your children see you disagree. Let them see you in your imperfections (they will anyways, so let them know that you know that they know). Let them see you try to inject grace into your dealings with other people. Especially family. Let them see you at least try to come to an agreement, or find a middle ground, or acquiesce without a lot of grumbling and hurt feelings.

This is truly impossible. I know it. I’ve been there. In front of our dogs, because we don’t have any children yet, but I’ve been in a place where Laura and I disagree and during the course of our disagreement it’s tempting to get angry, or withdraw, or do any of those horrific passive things humans do to each other. And I’ve done them.

I’m not perfect. (You already know that. I’m just saying. I know you know.)

One last thing before I end: Non-Christians aren’t stupid either. If you’re trying to give the impression that Christians never disagree (even on the smallest, least-essential things), you’re going to run out of whitewash really quickly. You may want to give some thought to how you’re trying to present your faith.

We’re not perfect. They know that. They’re so very aware of that, you wouldn’t believe it. And when you try to look like you are, they know that too.

Another of me is
staring down a rainbow
and winning, if it can be called that.
Is populating the stars.
Is building a rocket,
another rocket.

Another of me is
not. But this is as it should be.
Stillborn. In the wings the ghost
waits for a body,
another body.

Another of me is
running beside, behind, wherever,
binding strings to ever-failing
hooks. Loss of feeling
but a step, a step,
another step.

Another of me is
scraping the sky’s square feet,
hand in setting concrete,
hand over the reins,
a taller, taller, taller, ever taller almost
another meter.

Another of me
holds the gun.
Centre target,
not to be outdone.
She tries, tries, tries,
the metal’s hot:
a new clip,
another shot.

Another of me
can’t hold it together. Ball of wax, blazing sun, line breaks
and it’s done. Words don’t make sense, senses don’t make words.
Poor translation. From the tongue to the tongue or the keyboard.
Either way, there is no way. There must be a way. Not this way.
Another way.

Another of me
wrote is all down and forgot it.
Better to say what passes for nothing.
How are you – how about this weather! – how’re the dogs -
could have done without that snow – Leafs are out of the playoffs -
did you get that thing you were looking for – are you slowly dying -
but afraid to tell anyone that you’re slowly dying -
are you a prison unto yourself full of words that must one day tumble out -
will they tumble out of you into a stranger -
will they break free one day -
my goodness that traffic -
should have taken the 403 -
doing well – another dollar
another day.

Another is me
looks back at you. He asks,
“What have you read? What does it mean?”
And you say,
“It means what it means to me.”
He is frightfully angry because you
are wrong. Wrong!
But there’s nothing he
can do about it but write
another one.

Have you ever felt the tension between grace and work in scripture? I have. I do.

But that’s just the side of me that wants to put things in categories talking. That’s the ancient Greek in me that want to get out.

The reality is different. Or, at least, I hope it’s different. The reality is this:

You don’t get to have one without the other. Grace, works; justification, sanctification; salvation, service. However you want to say it.

It’s one coin with two sides. You have both, or you have neither. You don’t get to work your way into the Kingdom. But you don’t get to walk into the Kingdom saying you’re washed clean with a bunch of debauchery strapped to your body.

This is why Christianity preaches not only the death of Jesus for you, but also the death of you for Jesus. This is why we preach not only Christ taking up the cross, but also us taking up the cross. We preach not only Jesus’ resurrection and his glorified body, but our resurrection and our New Man as well.

We focus on the “once” of baptism, and the “always” of new life.

You don’t get to have one without the other.

Which is a good thing, really.

• You should ask the question, “Why do we have denominations? Why can’t we all just be Christians?” Then wait until someone asks, “What does ‘just be Christians’ look like?” As soon as you’ve started describing that, BOOM, you’ve started your own denomination. Then you should ask yourself the question, “Is it even possible to not have denominations?” That’s a much better question, and much harder to answer.

I’m a bit of an Android fan. I like the customization ability, the tweak-ness of it. I like that there it has its own “distros” like CyanogenMod (full disclosure, I run CM7 and love it). I’m (hopefully) not a typical Android user, though. I’m what they call a super-user, or an early adopter, or a technology maven. A one-man Lifehacker. Be that as it may.

The worst thing that ever happened to the personal computing market is Microsoft. Their monopoly (however it developed) changed the market, and Microsoft itself. It changed the market by inhibiting innovation (real innovation, not slapping a shiny new interface on an old hunk of crap) and preventing many potentially wonderful products from catching on. Microsoft’s monopoly made it into a giant bureaucracy that could only produce good, solid products by painstaking evolution (Microsoft Excel being one of these products) or by buying startups. Google is on its way to becoming this sort of lumbering giant as well.

Look, instead, at the console market. There are a bunch (and have almost always been a bunch) of competing consoles. And they’ve figured out how to gain the lead, to gain mindshare: rapid, disruptive innovation. Not just the generative, evolutionary advance of processing power and better graphics (boring!) but new game-play modes and methods (interesting!). The Wii and Kinect are examples of the latter. The PS3 is an example of the former. The Playstation team needs to (and hopefully knows it needs to) do something, anything wonderful and different to gain that mind-share back. Otherwise they’ll lose their place in the market. While everyone else is having fun making a fool of themselves with a motion-sensing controller or an infrared camera and some neat AI… PS3 owners can sit in the dark and shoot every-more-realistic zombies.

I don’t ever want Android to become like Windows. I don’t want it to have 90% market share. I want it to do well (after all, getting stuck in Apple’s gilded prison shouldn’t be something anyone wants), but not too well. I want Android to excel, but not dominate. There’s a place at the table for everyone. As there should be. Apple can have their shiny, crippled products for those who want such things. Android can have its tweak-able, customizable guts and interface. WebOS can have… whatever it has. And Windows Phone can pick up the scraps that fall off the table.

This way there’s competition. This way there’s innovation, disruptive change. This way there’s benefit for the customer, no matter whose customer you might be.