Monthly Archives: April 2008

The Encyclopedia of Me: C is for contentment

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Last fall I began a series of posts called “The Encyclopedia of Me” with the intent to go through the alphabet and in the process, describe more about myself, my family, my beliefs and interests, etc. Obviously that process stalled in a big way (I only got through B), but that won’t prevent from starting it up once more. Better late than never, I suppose.

I chose to focus this post in the Encyclopedia of Me series on contentment because it is a characteristic I admire so much in others, and one that I lack. I wish for more contentment. (Does that mean I am discontent over not being content? Forget that circuitous logic for now.) There are many definitions of the word but I like the definition that says contentment means “happiness with one’s situation in life.”

For some reason, most of my life I have struggled with discontent. The sources of my discontent are as varied and changeable as the wind but include:

  • problems with people (relationships)
  • work issues
  • spiritual deadness and/or myopia
  • thinking I don’t have enough money
  • wanting material things that I can’t afford or don’t need
  • dislike of my physical appearance, wishing I looked different
  • striving hard toward a goal (e.g. buying a house) only to find that it doesn’t satisfy
  • a deep sense of personal failure

I hope as I get older (and I am starting to really feel my age) I will learn to be content with what God has provided for me and my family. I hope to be like the apostle Paul, who learned contentment even in the midst of extreme suffering and trial, including beatings, privation, and imprisonment.

I think one key to understand is that I wasn’t born content, and I live in a world environment that bombards me with messages that promote discontent. I have to learn contentment. Sometimes I get fed up and frustrated with my situation and I do one of two things: I mope around, giving up altogether; or I rebel and fight hard to change my situation somehow. These are two extremes. What about the middle ground of contentment? What about just being satisfied with what I have and waiting patiently for direction and guidance if a change is needed, waiting for the Lord to open a door? What about accepting who I am, who God made me to be?

Change to iPod Touch

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The other day I decided to try “jailbreaking” my iPod Touch. As far as I can tell there is nothing illegal about doing this; it just invalidates the warranty from Apple. I didn’t have an original warranty to begin with since I bought it refurbished from eBay, so no worries there. iPod Touch customized screen I’ve included a screenshot of one of the screens to give you an idea of how different you can make an iPod Touch look using a custom theme and installing third party apps. I think this is pretty cool! I know that the iPhone SDK is coming soon and I also realize there is some risk involved in doing this but I’m comfortable with what I’ve done in terms of being able to recover to the original state if need be. There are some incredible (free) third party apps already available including a full-featured pinball machine game complete with sound effects that is really nice. And there is a Labyrinth game that makes nice use of the iPod Touch’s accelerometer. Interestingly, one of the most innovative and full-featured apps is basically an electronic version of an Etch-A-Sketch complete with the ability to shake the iPod Touch to erase what is drawn and start over.

An update about my first poll

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Mark Lindner kindly pointed out to me today that some people may not know where the poll is that I mentioned in a post a few days ago. This is because if you read this post — like most people — via an RSS aggregator and go to the single post page on FML, you won’t see the poll at all in the sidebar. Instead it is only visible on the main page of FML. Doh! You’d think I would have thought of this and avoided it but no.

Anyhow, to make it easy on anyone who wants to participate, I’ve included the poll below as part of this post. Take a moment to tell me what you think:

[poll=2]

Sick today

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Last night was difficult due to Brinley and Cohen coming into our bed in the wee hours. I gave up trying to sleep around 3 a.m. and went to sit on the couch in the living room. I couldn’t get to sleep for quite a while though because the cut on my forehead (long story) was aching a lot for some reason. Then when I woke up I had a really severe headache that I have spent most of the day trying to get rid of.

The past weekend was pretty nice because we did some fun things and then some other things that weren’t fun but needed to be done. On Saturday afternoon we went to Lamb’s Farm to see their pet store and resale shop. The kids loved it there. On the way back home we drove through Independence Grove to see the amenities there. I think we’ll definitely go back to go for walks and bike rides. They also have a nice beach for swimming. Best of all, everything is free.

Sunday afternoon the kids and Michele spent outside playing. I went to Home Depot and picked up an electric leaf blower, a carpet cleaner, and a few other things. Keegan then used the leaf blower to finally clean the gutters and Michele used it after that to clean off the driveway and gather the huge amount of leaves in our yard into big piles. While they were busy at that task I cleaned the carpet in our family room downstairs and also the living room, hallway, and stairs. I am really pleased with the steam cleaning system I purchased. It was expensive but worth it. When you have four messy kids and two extra messy dogs who often have “accidents” then you can imagine just how gross and dirty the floors were before I cleaned them. I think the steam cleaner I purchased already paid for itself when compared to the cost of hiring a professional company to do the cleaning.

Poll: What motivates you to comment on a post (or not)?

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In an effort to try something new (polling) as well as to get some feedback on aspects of this blog, I loaded up the excellent WP-Polls plugin tonight and created an initial poll. The question I’m asking from now (Tuesday, April 22) through next Monday (April 28) is the following:

What motivates you to comment on a post (or not)?

Please take a minute to fill out this poll so that I can get an idea of what you think about commenting on blog posts. The poll is in the righthand sidebar. It should only take you a few seconds to complete. Results of the poll will be available for you to see. Thank you in advance!

Pray for a friend

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I was deeply moved by an update from the wife of a friend and fellow librarian, in which she wrote today that:

“I do not know exactly what to say. We are in the Valley.

These are holy moments. The Lord is near.

John is exhausted from fighting the disease and an infection.

John gave me a blessing this afternoon. I was sobbing too hard to hear all of it. I am hoping Stewart and Katherine will remember the details.

Thank you for your companionship and prayers. We are all one in the Lord.

Blessings, dear friends, Margie”

and she also wrote:

“Tonight John came up and took each child in his hands. He prayed for them and blessed them.

Josiah didn’t know what was going on and just wanted me to hold him. Charlotte said, “Is Daddy going to die tonight?” “I don’t know, Charlotte. I don’t know.” Charlotte cried and cried.

Then she stood behind me and buried her head in my back. And then she dried her tears and went to her “treasures.” She said, “I am getting Daddy a gift.” She brought John a beautiful wooden box. Inside she placed a shell, a pink pearl bead and an acorn. “Keep this with you, Daddy. Keep this right by your bed.” John said, “How precious Charlotte. How beautiful.” He took it and put it right by his bed.

And then we told Charlotte again the story of how Daddy held her right when she was born and said, “I love you Charlotte. I’ve always loved you.” She said, “And then he opened up his shirt and put me on his chest.” That’s right my dear. You have always been close to Daddy’s heart.”

John has been fighting a resurgence of cancer for several months and has been close to death on more than one occasion. But from the sound of this most recent update, it does appear that indeed the Lord is near.

I don’t know John really well but I know enough of him and about him, and about his wife and family, to love them very much in Christian love. I have been so incredibly impressed by their great faith and love for God in the midst of extreme difficulty. Ever since hearing about his renewed cancer battle I have been praying for him, for Margie his wife, and for Charlotte (I think she is about four or five years of age) and Josiah (I think he is about two years old).

Would you please pray for them now as well?

Interesting feed analysis tool

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I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to site statistics for FML and one of the reasons for that is that I am not really a numbers-and-math kind of person. Plus FML is such small potatoes and it is not ad-supported in any way that I don’t feel compelled to knuckle down and pay close enough attention to site traffic.

Having stated that, I am always interested in trying out tools that help me quickly grasp interesting facts about site traffic. I learned of one such tool this afternoon via the Performancing blog, called Feed Analysis v1.1 by BlogPerfume. It’s a free service that uses a nice interface to take a Feedburner-generated site feed and output interesting graphs and analysis. Below is a thumbnail of a report from FML (click on it to see the full size screenshot).

feedburner-analytics.jpg

What I found particularly interesting in this tool is the analysis of a blog’s “worth” in terms of possible ad revenue, and the projections it can generate in terms of subscriber growth for the future (e.g. in six months, FML will have x number of subscribers; in twelve months, it’ll have y number). By the way, FML is monetarily almost worthless. No big deal.

Really all this service does is take Feedburner information and present it in a nicer, more intuitive way. But that’s its value and I think it is great! For instance, before I ran a report in Feed Analysis v1.1 I only had a foggy concept of changes in subscribers to FML. I had an impression that the subscriber base had grown over the past year but nothing more specific. Thanks to the report shown in the screenshot give above, I can instantly recognize a fairly consistent growth rate, and I can see how many subscribers are added or lost over the past several months. I can see the general growth rate but I can also quickly see the specific rate of new subscriber growth. In the screenshot shown above, I’ve added a straight line to match the lowest and highest points to give an idea of a generalized growth.

The other chart that caught my attention was one that tracked all kinds of things together with different colored lines: hits, views, subscribers, and clicks. To understand what each of those means you have to be sure to read Feedburner’s definitions of these statistical terms and how they are counted. But anyway, I was startled to see how big a jump has recently occurred in terms of overall interest. I’ve highlighted that by marking a portion of the chart in a red oval in the screenshot. What is also cool is that when you run your cursor over the graph, e.g. left to right or vice versa, you will see dynamically changing totals for all of the stats mentioned.

Overall, a definite thumbs up.

Earthquakes and cougars and bears, oh my!

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We certainly live in interesting times….

I’ve written a couple of times before about the weirdness of cougar (a.k.a. mountain lion) sightings where I live. Last week a cougar was cornered and killed by Chicago police on the North Side. Yesterday everyone was abuzz about the news that another cougar had been sighted early in the morning by a security guard at a large business, as well as by a few other people. Although the Chicago Tribune didn’t specify which large business, I can tell you that it was MPOW. Freaky. No cougar could be found when people went looking for signs of it based on the report, but many people are certain there’s another one out there. I don’t know what to believe. I mean, who would have ever thought one cougar would be found here? Well, that turned out to be true, so it’s not hard to believe there is more than one. But the weirdness doesn’t end there…

Early this a.m. I get an email from my brother who lives near Indianapolis, asking me and another brother who lives in central Illinois if we felt an earthquake. I didn’t but my family in central Illinois sure did. It was the biggest earthquake in the area in 40 years, a 5.2 on the Richter scale. Weird. Now I’ve been in a few earthquakes before, one of which was when living in central Illinois and another time when I was visiting Los Angeles (that was the Northridge quake). But still it is a little weird to have it happen and on such a scale. Later there was a fairly significant aftershock felt throughout the region.

When on a conference call with a colleague in Germany this morning, I was telling him about these strange events. He marvelled about it and then mentioned that something similar had occurred in southern Germany last year, when a wild bear started frequenting urban areas and had to be shot eventually.