I am a man of words normally, for 5 years now I have used my words in business, dealing with people - my words can pitch a deal, sell a product, yell at a company that has wronged me, and correct things business related that had some effect on my family - from my dad being wrongly billed for $50, to being billed nearly $1000 for a month of dis-service on a telco line.
I can sit on a phone and talk my head off, getting my point across, getting people to understand where I am coming from, what I am wanting to do to fix things and make it all right so we can move forward - or in emails, or heck this blog, using my text to get across a point, to share a thought, to speak my mind, to say what I can’t say in words. I have brought about lawsuits by my talk, legal injunctions, threats of lawsuits, words indeed hold power, and in this world wide web, get a few voices behind your cause, and you can have a large group of support from across the planet.
But one topic of talk, I have yet to master. I find myself tounge tied, hard to talk, nervous, sweating, toe tapping, fidgeting, (put in just about anything you do when you feel uncomfortable & nervous - and I probably have had it) - but what’s the topic? What’s the area of discussion that I can’t talk on - and yet I can go toe to toe with a CEO of a large telecommunications company with and not be nervous? Well for those of you who read my blog on a semi-regular basis probably already have a decent idea. The short answer is “Da Lady Folk!”.
So I missed spring to be the bambi term of “twitterpated” - but I dunno - I can’t even at this point decide what I want to do, but I’ll say this, it has indeed been life changing. Were not dating, just hangin - which for me, works for now, but I dunno, I dunno what I really feel - the reason? Most of my life my friends have tended to be female. Granted I do have a number of guy friends, but even growing up, I could always talk to girls, not cheesy pickup lines, but just conversations, heck if you looked at my AIM/MSN/YIM - a large population of females - I dunno, I have good convo’s with guys and me and dan have had 3-4 hrs worth of talk time hangin out, but I dunno - talkin with girls conversations can go anywhere, no where, and it’s comfortable, my words are easy to come by, but with this one girl - im crackin bad jokes, sweatin, nervous to high heaven, worried I will mess up a awesome friendship, not act soon enough and loose her - I dunno, I think it’s definately offical, as she says “I’m weird.”
1 Corinthians 13:4-10
4 Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
5 Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
6 Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
7 Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
8 Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. 9 We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. 10 But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.
While I may not be going to church on a regular basis, my relationship with the Lord is one thing I have taken more and more seriously, really trying to rely on him, trying to lean on him for the words, and these are the ones I found in my search, a verse I have know since I was a kid, something my parents did a lot to bestow upon me, about how to treat and lady, how to honor her, respect her, and treat her differently then I would guys I look at this verse and I try to apply it to all my relationships, a defination of love, a defintion of do’s and dont’s - but that’s where the area grey’s for me - how do you know? How do you know the time is right to take and move friend to more, a closer friend, someone who could possibly be ‘the one’ I dunno - thus I am at the present sticking to the friend, as at the moment that’s pretty nice as-is.
Who knows when life will change entirely for me, who knows if she is ‘the one’ - for now I am sticking to verse 5 in the passage above as a starting point - not trying to force anything, just being a shoulder to lean on, a help when I can be, and most importantly a friend - but for me this is definately new territory, 5 years I have spent my life on business, on brokering deals, programming code till the wee hours of the morning, and now I am having to learn new words which aren’t dollars, php, web hosting, or even computers (thats right folks, she doesnt know computers!) - it’s talking sports, art, school, her day, life, family, faith, etc. It’s definately nice - and she has gotten me out doing more that I have in years - apparently there are these places called resteraunts, it’s not like Jack in the Box or Taco Bell - but you can go in, and people serve you food! It’s wild!
With that - I am going to go turn on some fans and get the house cooled down (cooler is broke) - prayer are appriciated as I seem to be becoming mr. prayer requests lately - but thanks for the prayers for my rent’s just got the call from mom they landed safely in Seattle, and are getting their luggage.
After borrowing a Treo 600 for a few weeks, I must say I am hooked on the form factor, hooked on the features, and hooked on the fact that my pockets are no longer packed with the following objects:
Tungsten T3
Motorola V551
Thumbdrive
The 650 for me will give me the good hi-res screen I love with the Tungsten T3, the Camera & Edge capabilities of the V551, and storage via SD card of my thumbdrive (though I’ll probably still carry my thumbdrive). It was a BIG purchase, which means it’s time to go on a sales run again, anyone wanna buy $100 a year hosting?
I do plan to offer some new crazy deals this year, but I am wanting to get things rolling again on hosting, just coding this week (even though it’s only day #1) has been kinda nuts, hacking through some CSS and remembering why I hate it - just can’t get things to flow right in Firefox, and when I do get it right, in IE it breaks… *shrug*
Anywhoo, I do hope to have up my TipJar soon, as people keep telling me they want to throw cash at me for my help, but I never have anything setup for them to do it easy, so my PayPal based TipJar will be coming soon if anyone feels so directed to kick down a few bucks to show some love - it’ll help to pay off the Treo/food/etc. as I am back bach’n it this week with a house all to my self for 7 days.
Well time to wrap up code for the afternoon and head home to bother the niece for a bit as she’s hangin with Grandma, but do be praying for my niece, she is having tubes put in her ears to relieve pressure from fluid? Not sure on all the details of what’s exactly being done, but she goes in thursday - so prayers for her and our fam is appriciated.
Well I am in the process of clearing off my stuff from the Ubuntu partitions, while a great Desktop version of linux, I didn’t like my options for compiling things like Apache, etc. granted with some work I could probably get Apache/MySQL/PHP to compile, but honestly, I didn’t wanna sit around for a month or 3 doing so. My focus has been on security lately not re-vamping Debian(ish) distro’s to compule Apache properly - so I think I am heading back to Fedora Core (4 to be exact) - just have to stort through 200GB of data, logs, etc. see what I need to keep. Plus once I go gnome, I want to give a manual compile of Gnome 2.12 a try, looks lovely.
Anywhoo - a good last week, good sleep, good progress on projects (CMC now has custom RSS feeds for all areas) - and made some headway on HappyPalm.com making a come back, found a great look, working on tweaking it out and making a PSD or two for the crew to use for high-light articles and such - but this week I do expect more dev time as I am working on some more code for CMC, FH, and HP - lots of code to work on, so little time.
Parents fly out Tuesday for Washington, prayers are appriciated for their safe travel - they are going up to see my grandparents and other members of my dad’s family, as he is a Washington state native - so they are flying up for 7 days - which does mean I have the house all to myself.. how many parties can I have in 7 days? Hrm…
One other thing I wanna ask you guys to pray on - is I have a job offer on the table, as it stands I have been told it’s $30k a year, full benefits, which would indeed be nice, would improve my overall income, but may limit my time some balancing TN/FH with a 8hr job, but I am waiting to see if it’s even going to be a reality, I’ll know more the 20th (aka Tuesday) if it does pan out, it could be nice to have health insruance again - maybe go in for a checkup - have all my teeth made gold… so many fun options But time will tell.
Anywhoo - I am gonna go back to sorting files for a little while here, then its onto bed, hopefully at the very least I can get Fedora going tonight, and have it sinched up by tomorrow so I can get SSH back up and running with a firewall/bfd so I can remote console from the office again.. but one thing at a time
Was reading over some blogs lately, about some people’s lives. Lot going on around, I too am one of them, had people asking me “What’s this life changing event?!” or my favorite was “So, new laptop?” lol the purpose of this thing in my life is no matter what, a change will happen, one of which will change life, come the 20th, 2 fold 2 things may of happened, but again, “love is patient” - which leads me to “grace”.
What is grace? Getting something you don’t deserve, and in the simple context of life, when you probably least deserve it - but in life the thing that made me go “Wah!?” today is the things that bring about grace - I was talking to a guy on the phone, he was telling me about his dealings with someone and I mentioned “You know about XYZ going on right now right?” XYZ moved that person so much, they went from “Oh you know” to “Oh My… I’ll be praying.” How many times, do you do that in life? I know me personally I have made an effort over the years to try and get in someone’s shoes and really walk around a bit.
I work on the web, I have a office in downtown with my brother, but I have clients all over the world, some who speaka da english not so gewd - but I understand them, I take the time to slow down, get examples, and understand where they coming from, if I can’t do that I loose a client for one thing, but I loose a chance to understand cultures - but it prevents me from extending grace to another - they are upset, frustrated at me for not understanding, but I have a choice to make each time, get frustrated too - or take some time out of my life to stop, listen, attempt to understand.
Why does it take a tragedy, a horrible thing, a serious issue, or say a hurricane to make us extend grace? Why can’t we extend grace to others? I dunno, just struck me tonight as I read this one blog and saw a person having a rough day, family things going down, and the person just needed a hand, and someone starts to talk about them, and when it’s mentioned what’s going on in their life, its a different tune, then grace is given - they may not be GREAT friends, but come on, we is all humans (well I am part computer I am told) - but thats another story.
I dunno, random thoughts in my brain, and trying to unwind enough to crash out for the night, so figured better out than in. Think about it, and instead of calling out in anger, frustration, or without thinking, stop, breath, extend grace to even your fiercest enenemy - you might just change the world.
Well another night here at 3am, which I guess equtes to another “Morning” if one was to get techincal, however after you are awake all this time, day/night are kinda silly terms, more of “Still Dark Outside” seems to fit better
So the real questions is why am I up? Work? Not so much. Sick? I think I had some bad strawberry Quik, but I don’t think it’s that either. So what then? Not sure I am ready to talk about it just yet - for once, dare I even say it, it’s a ‘personal’ matter - yes ladies and gents, Chuck is up and about due to a personal life. I haven’t really had one in nearly 5 years, a matter of choice I suppose, building a business takes a lot of one’s time, and focusing on issues of clients vs. say going to the movies with friends was a choice, but throw in a touch of anxiety, and it wasn’t even really an option I chose to consider out of fear.
So what could be so important in my personal life that it is keeping me up? Choices. There are some choices on my mind, of which could re-work how my life operates, time priorities, etc. Granted this does tie into work some, as this choice will truly effect every part of my life, no matter which way I decide. Ah the vagueness
Needless to say I’d appriciate some prayers on it, no real specifics I can put forth currently, but I figure God has a good idea as it’s been in my prayer time for a few weeks now off and on, but the last week or so, part of what I am doing awake, just a lot of prayer time. But one way or another this choice will lead to good things, it already has, but the choice if I make it, I think would be an amazing journey, and expand upon the current mini-choice I already made Okay, enough vagueness, back to laying down.
Stopped by my buddy’s office today while I was wandering around town - he let me know about his wife’s dad, he was having some health issues, and tonight she let me know via IM what was up:
Please pray for my dad he has kidney failure and had a stroke or may be a brain tumor
Asked her to keep me updated - so as I know more I’ll post updates, but prayers are definately appriciated.
So here I am, 2am, I crashed early, after a day at the office, shortly there after a hangout at target with Rosie (hat popcorn and icee’s) I came home tired, got a bite to eat, replied to a few emails and crashed for the night - or so I thought. But as it normally happens, I am awake again
So what does one do at 2am? Well simple enough - Goto Foodmax to get some snacks for the week, maybe some Soda’s for the office, and then, attempt to pass out again
But today was a good day, Rosie got a great deal on a nice HP printer - $14.50 on the clearance rack @ Target, as usual they come with no USB cables now, so I have one here, going to take it over and help set it up, as well as the CD-RW/DVD-Rom as the stuff get’s here tomorrow - snagged her a spindle of the Geeks on sale CD-R’s (100 for $8.99) - and for a family thing, I got my mom a universal remote for the new ‘media room’ setup, so she can cut back on remotes, as she currently has DVD, VCR, TV remotes, so hopefully it’ll get cut down.
I am hoping to get back into swing at the gym, went Monday, hoping to go tonight, but time will tell with how much spare time I get today… or I could always goto the Syndicate again for a hotdog - finally a place downtown with a good hotdog! Enough rambling - off to Foodmax.
I look at this verse and I try to apply it to all my relationships, a defination of love, a defintion of do’s and dont’s - but that’s where the area grey’s for me - how do you know? How do you know the time is right to take and move friend to more, a closer friend, someone who could possibly be ‘the one’ I dunno - thus I am at the present sticking to the friend, as at the moment that’s pretty nice as-is. 
But time will tell.
