Finding Hope

This is a long post. I hope you’ll read it all, but if you want to skim, please start here. The last 24 hours have been hard. Like so many of our friends, Al and I started the night full of hope. Of course, we knew the margins. What seemed guaranteed only a few weeks ago, now looked […]

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World Vision

After I wrote this I realized that many of the posts on my blog are angry. I’m not mad all of the time. I think I just am driven to write more by anger than by other emotions. Two days ago, World Vision took an extraordinary step, opening employment to gay Christians who were either […]

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Don’t Like the Game? Change the Rules

  • Category: Opinion

Not only have congressional republicans forced a government shutdown and then launched a massive campaign to deny it’s their fault. They’ve also changed the rules so that only they can bring forth the vote that will reopen the government. Of course the only reason for this is to prevent democrats or moderate (read reasonable) republicans […]

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Persevere: There is a Time to Learn

  • Category: Opinion

Simple vs. Complex Recently I’ve been thinking about learning new things. A good portion of my life is spent learning things I didn’t know before. I’m a developer so this usually means learning new facets of programming languages I use, finding better techniques to accomplish tasks, discovering other ways of looking at problems and adding […]

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Why I’m No Longer Interested in Less than Amazing

  • Category: Opinion

Nothing I’m about to write is groundbreaking. If you’re looking to have your mind blown, move along. Actually, please still read. For me. :) As a self-employed mobile app developer, I spend a lot of my time building quotes for potential and existing clients. There’s a special tension between trying to make as much money […]

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The Scarecrow

  • Category: Opinion

This video is haunting and beautiful. Chipotle leads the way in bringing fresh, natural ingredients to the mass market. A few years back I watched Food, Inc. I don’t know if I could call it life changing—at least not in the sense that we normally use the term—but it did affect my outlook on what […]

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The Advertising Age

  • Category: Opinion

Modern advertising has been a part of our collective consciousness for as long as you or I have been alive. Television shows an average of almost 13 minutes of commercials per hour of content. Another 8 minutes in that hour is dedicated to “in-show brand appearances,” or product placement. Billboards are so ubiquitous that we hardly even […]

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How I’m Not Measuring Up (or … How High I Try to Aim)

I always hold myself and my work to a high standard. An unreachable standard, often. Unreachable, at least, within the confines of what I have to work with and the constraints I’m under. It’s one of the hardest things I deal with on a daily basis. I live with the knowledge that if I just […]

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How Terrorism Won

I want to like NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly because he’s an intelligent, no-nonsense guy who gets shit done. But he, like so very much of America, is merely a slave to fear. We want so badly to prevent the next attack that we—well, not me—are willing to sacrifice much for even just the hope […]

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Change the Way We Think About Charity

I just watched Dan Pallotta’s TED Talk on charity. It’s common sense, but it’s all too often shamefully opposite of how we view charities. Take a few minutes to watch, I think it’s eye opening. Our generation does not want its epitaph to read, “We kept charity overhead low.”

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