Friday, September 28, 2007

We the winners!!!

We just won another delivery award on my current project. This is the second one we've won. Here's the writeup, which describes what we've done. Sorry if it's unreadable, I can't reveal the customer in a public place.

"
The Oil Company team just delivered Phase I of the application. The application will be available in nine countries and thirteen languages. The team took over the code base from a competitor, migrated the code from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0, added new functionality, and improved performance dramatically.

The Avanade team worked on a code base in parallel with our competitor. In the end, Avanade’s code base was selected over the competitor’s to go to production due to overall dominance in the performance capability. Our code base was able to handle 14x more users per server than the competition.

In addition, the Avanade team was awarded development for the next phase of the project which will add an additional 25,000 users to the existing 8,000 user base. The USDC team also delivered new technical design documentation for seven sub modules within a very tight timeframe and the USDC team has begun development on this next phase.

One of the project’s biggest challenges for the USDC team was consistent communication from the customer. The team was able to deliver successfully on Phase I without proper documentation, poor requirements, and lack of communication from the customer. The team also spent considerable amounts of time redoing poor documentation created by the customer. Even with all the hurdles, Avanade is on track to deliver the next phase of the project on time.
"

To paraphrase American Beauty "We Rule"

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Humbility

Humbility (n.) - The act of humbling oneself the way God intended us to be humble.
Humbleness (n.) - Humbling oneself
Humbilosity (n.) - Fake humbleness
Humbiliousness (n.) - Extreme humbilosity

I have struggled with humbling myself in my life. I am immensely proud of the gifts that God has given me and I love to use them, however, humbilosity and humbiliousness come easier to me than humbility.

I think that the reason for this is the fact that in my mind to be proud of one's accomplishments is to not have humbility so I easily oscillate between opposite extremes: pride and humbiliousness. God, through baseball, has taught me a valuable lesson via a man I like to call my hero, Casey Blake.

Casey Blake puttered around the minors for many many years finally getting called up to the Indians for good in 2004. In 2005 he sucked, flat out. If the game was on the line, you might as well start quoting "Casey At The Bat" where the Mighty Casey strikes out with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 9th with 2 out. In 2006 he busted out and became my hero after I watched him destroy the Orioles singlehandedly as I lay in the ER. Casey Blake, the phoenix, taught me that it was possible to rise from the ashes.

This year Casey hit 2 walk off home runs in 4 days. Walk off means that once he hit it, the game was over, Indians win. The baseball equivalent of the Hail Mary. After he hit his second, he rounded the bases triumphantly pumping his fist and "woo hoo"ing his way around the bases. A happy man who had just defeated the rival Tigers in the 11th inning.

The next day he apologized to the Tigers for his display saying that he did not mean to show them up or to disrespect their team with his actions. Casey was proud of his actions and celebrated accordingly but did not forget that there were people around him who may have taken offense to his reaction. Jim Leyland, the Tigers' manager, said that the apology was unnecessary because of the quality of Casey's character and the fact that he was celebrating a joyous occasion. Casey Blake, the man, taught me about humbility.

Humbility is the act of being proud of accomplishments but not gloating about them in a way that may make others feel inferior. In other words, if your boasting runs roughshod over other's accomplishments then it is not good, because you are telling God that His gifts to another are worthless. On the other hand, if your humble feelings detract from the value of the accomplishments God has allowed you to make, you are effectily telling Him that His gifts to you are worthless.

The world appreciates humbiliousness, God is after humbility.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Post the first

I decided to switch from Xanga to blogger because xanga seems...college. Not that I'm a huge fan of blogging in general, it just seems to have more of a ring to it. I would like for this to be a more professional version of my former love. Xanga still holds a spot in my life, but I could not seem to break the feeling that I was still writing as a sophomore in college.

Anyway, last week at small group we had a discussion on what our passions are and where we find our value. I have many passions most of which are listed in the title above, the main omission being my wife. I realized that of all of my passions, none of them give me value. I have struggled with the extremes of valuing myself too high because of my abilities and too low because of my faults but I do not think I struggle with it anymore.

Let me explain. Value is a comparison of worth. Either I am valued meaning I am worth more than I expect to be worth or I am not valued meaning I am worth less (not worthless). When I think of the value of myself, I cannot define a value for myself without comparing myself to either me yesterday or another human being. Since I could not define a value for myself in the past since Christ has already said that I am immensely valuable as is everyone else, the only way to assign a value to myself would be to tear down my self of the past or to tear down the value of another.

Neither of these seem to be a viable option so I am left with a conundrum when answering questions like that. Do I truly 'gain value' by realizing that I am a child of God? That thought at this point of my life is null since it is the same question as whether or not I 'gain value' realizing that I am a man or that I have freckles. None of these are things that I can change.

I believe that the only time that I gain value from being a child of God is when I feel not valued by being something else. For instance when I am made fun of for being a Michigan fan, I realize that my value from being a child of God far outweighs any loss of value I would have for being a fan of a team that is 1 and 2.

I had a very difficult time explaining this at group because I hadn't ever thought about it. My value is something that I do not wish to think about. I am content with my existence without thinking that I 'need' value. I don't need anything but the grace of God (My Grace is sufficient for you, My Power is made perfect in your weakness) and since I've already got that, I try not to think about anything else. It is hard enough for me to get the sufficiency of Grace and intrinsically loved child of God things through my skull, let alone trying to figure out what my supposed value is and what brings it up and down.

This is where I am right now. Whether this is a continual place of growth or an area that God has completed His work in is yet to be discovered and I'm perfectly fine with that.