Blog Yellek

Over recent times I have been following a couple of sites (Lifehack.org and 43Folders) that talk about all those little productivity tips that make life easier and help you to get things done. As these sites are secular they don’t necessarily talk about all of those things in your Christian life that you never seem to be able to find time for, like praying and reading the Bible. I figure that there are heaps of things that could be contributed in this area so I thought that I’d share a couple of mine.

If you are like me there will be days when the routine just gets messed up which means that your normal time to pray and read your Bible just isn’t there anymore. Normally this happens to me when I’m up late the night before and so sleep in a little longer in the morning. I know for a fact that I’m not likely to “catch up” when I get home in the evening despite my best intentions (especially if I’m tired from being up late) so rather than get into a multi day slack cycle I sometimes need to fit these things in in the middle of my day.

Idea 1: Read on the Bus
I have an old Palm Pilot PDA with Bible software on it. This morning I managed to read all 5 chapters of our church devotions at the bus stop before the bus came. Sure I didn’t have time to write it all down in a journal like I should but reading on the run is certainly better than missing it all together. You don’t necessarily need a PDA to do this, a small pocket Bible would do just as well.

Idea 2: Pray in your Lunchour
I’m someone that likes to pray whilst I walk so if I miss my usual time to pray in the mornings I can go for a walk at lunchtime and do it instead of what I usually do.

These are simple (and obvious) steps but the trick is to have the discipline to step out of your normal routine and use your available time to do the things that are important to you.

What are your hacks for fitting in your prayer and bible reading when you are busy?

Yesterday was a historic day, we actually managed to finish a game of Civilization for the first time, a true epic. Civilization is one of those games that you have to be just a little crazy to play because of the length of time it takes to complete. Three friends (here, here and here) rocked up at my place yesterday at around 10:30 am and we started in on our journey through ancient history. After a road trip to the local shopping centre to get lunch, some pizza, lots of snacks and some really good laughs we finally finished at around 11pm after numerous rounds of taxation and movement and city building and trading, not to mention numerous disasters visited upon our fledgling civilizations at the most inconvenient moments. I’m glad to say that I emerged the victor but I think that I wouldn’t have cared had I come last because it was such a good day (although I didn’t think so this morning at 8:30 when I was running up and down Montefiore Hill for City to Bay training). In future I think that my fellow players will be less likely to let me carve out an empire in Asia Minor in relative peace and stability whilst the Assyrians, Babylonians and Egyptians fight over the rest of the eastern Mediterranean and I don’t think I can count on such a good run with disasters again.

All in all a very enjoyable day and I hope that we can do it again sometime.

At around 4pm yesterday afternoon Annette’s struggles over the past week finally ended and she went to be with Jesus. Although we knew it was coming there is still a sadness that the vibrant loving friend that we all knew isn’t with us any more.

Annette we are going to miss you. We will miss the way you used to put salt on everything. We will miss your lack of a sense of direction. We will miss the way we used to joke with you and stir you all the time. We will miss the times that we sat across a lunch table at the Paradise hotel after church and laughed and laughed whilst we talked about everything and nothing. We will miss playing Brighton Rummy late at night around Manny’s kitchen table.

We will miss you wisdom. We will miss your attitude that never gave up. We will miss your dedication to Christ that infused everything you were. We will miss your love for those around you. We will miss your no nonsense attitude. We will miss the way that you used to push through anything that was getting you down and press on towards the goal. We will miss the fact that despite the fact that your life hadn’t been easy that you were one of the most positive people we knew.

Annette right now you are enjoying the new body that God has given you in heaven and the blessed fellowship with the Father who has welcomed you home. We can only dream of the day that we will join you when we too can rejoice in His wonderful presence when we will all be together again. Until then we can only hear the echo of you that is left behind in the hearts and lives of so many who were touched by who you are and the way that you brought Jesus closer to all of us.

Annette we both rejoice and mourn. Goodbye till we meet again.

Many people I know absolutely hate to have their photo taken, probably because of bad experiences with how photos have turned out in the past. If that is you then you may benefit from 5 Steps To Being More Photogenic over at Digital Camera University, I know I’ll be “clenching my butt cheeks” from now on

Just a warning that this site will be offline for about 4 hours starting at Midday wherever the server is (in the US somewhere so about 4am Australian Time) whilst they move the site to a new server.

There’s a friend of mine lying in a hospital bed not very far from where I’m typing this and by the time you read this it is likely that she will be dead. Not dead in the eternal sense but certainly the body that she has now will be gone. Every hour that goes by I wait for the phone call that will bring the inevitable.

The final chapter started on Friday when I received a phone call from another friend saying that Annette had taken a turn for the worse and was not expected to live more than a day. I hadn’t even known she was in hospital. I knew that Annette had been fighting a second round of cancer after apparently beating leukemia last year but I didn’t know to what stage the disease had progressed.

I immediately left work and walked down to the hospital because I knew that another friend of mine was there by herself having just heard the news with Annette. Sometimes the carers need our support more than the person who is dying. As I arrived at ICU one of Annette’s sons arrived and went in so I could spend some time with my other friend in the waiting room. I’m not one of Annette’s “inner circle” or family but I wanted to be there to support those that I could. After a time several of the pastors from church and another friend came down to see Annette. As Pastor Mark came out he beckoned to me and I was able to go in to say goodbye. Annette was fairly vague from Morphine but we talked about stuff, about heaven and what it would be like mostly as I recall. Annette and I both knew that she was going to a better place. As I left Annette, most likely for the last time, I told her that I would see her in heaven. With Annette you never have to wonder if she will get there, it’s obvious.

Friday night life group was hard in a way. Annette has been a member of the group I lead for about a year now and a number of the people there are close to her. It was a pretty somber mood. There were tears. Some of them were mine even. In other ways the fact that this was only temporary and that we would get to spend eternity with Annette helped is celebrate the person that she was, except she wasn’t gone, yet.

Over the weekend Annette’s condition improved. Those who went in to see her mentioned that she seemed much brighter and wasn’t even using an oxygen mask. My other friend from the hospital was telling me at church on Sunday how much they had laughed together the day before. Knowing Annette that didn’t surprise me.

I know that because of the weekend there are a number of people believing for the miraculous, that Annette could be healed. I know God can do it but somehow I think that maybe her time on earth is at an end and that we will catch up in heaven. Sometimes the gap between faith and denial is a very thin line indeed but so is the gap between realism and doubt. I’ll keep praying.

Today Annette is worse and I think that sometime soon I will hear that she is no longer with us. We are going to miss her.

Really good discussion on code unit testing by Cedric Beust on his blog. It is worth reading through the comments on the bottom of the post too to get the different opinions expressed. A really good discussion of the pros and cons of automated unit testing and coverage. I particularly liked the comment by Neil Bartlett:

Half of the time I spend writing JUnit tests is wasted. Unfortunately I don’t know which half.

I just wish that the coding practices at my daytime place of employment had reached the level of maturity that is taken for granted by many of the people commenting on this post.

David Goodman has come up with a new analogy to explain RSS in his post Newbie to Ninja 3 - Beginners Guide to RSS and Bloglines where he compares RSS to someone trying to check all the odds at different bookies at a race track. I also did a post trying to explain RSS to someone who hasn’t seen it before but this is a really great analogy too.

Clifton Craig has started an interesting series over on his blog called Groovy Invaders where he is attempting to write a space invaders game in Groovy using JOGL for the graphics routines.

I know I don’t have time to follow this but it is interesting to see the diversification of what people are doing with Groovy and the increasing usage of the language in new and interesting areas. I’ve already blogged on what I think of Grails which seems to me to offer all of the advantages of Ruby On Rails but with application server support and a smaller learning curve for Java programmers.

We are also using Groovy at work in a limited way to provide us some functionality in our ant build environment.

Groovy is one of those languages that when you “get” it makes you wonder why you were doing things any other way.