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Shalom…

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ― Albert Einstein

Ok, before I dive into this subject full-bore I want to offer up some basis for what I’m building certain assertions off of.  One of those things will be the Hebrew word Shalom.  The idea of Shalom is just as critical now as it was then.  I’m also going to leverage a very pointed commandment from Christ himself during the course of his ministry found in Mark 12:30-31.  To anyone reading this of a differing world view, I urge you to stick with me and hear what I have to say on the subject.  I’m also going to briefly discuss some philosophical thought process stemming from Quantum Theory, more specifically to the idea of a prime observer and multiple unperceived dimensions that continually impact that which is.  I’m also working from the doctrinal principles in the Westminster Catechism.  First that “The Chief End of Man” is “To glorify God, and enjoy him forever”.  Also the doctrine of the trinity, which states: “There are three persons in the Godhead; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory”.  Finally sin, which is best defined by: “any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God”.  Now to put this most simply since the 1st commandment is “You shall have no other God’s before me.” it’s safe to declare sin as anything that takes your focus and worship from God.  Yes, the standard for perfection is that high.

Now lets begin.

A human being is a part of the whole called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

I agree completely with what is being said here, and it has a significant doctrinal relevance to it.  Man is a part of something greater.  A creature with a purpose, and these creature’s are intended to serve one another and to glorify him who created them.  However, due to the fall , we are separated from God and unable to see that connection.  More focused on ourselves, and what serves us better.  Our own personal God, ourselves, which we place before our Creator everyday.

God is, in my view, the great observer from Quantum Mechanics.  He is outside of time, he sees everything and is in control of all things.  Scripture says he knows the end from the beginning, and I find peace in that.  I also find peace in the belief that my position in space and time is known, and ordained for his purposes.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

In our own self worship, we build up an undeserved sense of self-importance, which further fragments us from others, and our God.  I really enjoy the use of the word “prison” in this quote, as I think it’s a very appropriate word.  We are trapped, unable to escape without help.  However, that’s a deeper discussion in and of itself.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Now this is where the idea of Shalom to me is most clearly stated.  Which in its simplest form means, harmony and peace.  Sounds familiar right?  Almost all world views and religions believe that this is an achievable standard.  Given the trinity, I believe it is part of the natural design and order.  I look at the trinity, in equal measure, glorifying one another in an endless dance.  Christ, the son, commanded us to love one another (even our enemies).  In a perfect world, one free of sin, I believe we would see that same role played out (or will after glorification).  What use would I have to care for myself when the man next to me is doing so, and I in turn am focused on the one beside me.  Not only would life be simpler, but we would be mimicking our creator, which I believe is one of the sincerest forms of worship.

We do live in a fallen world however.  I do believe this is part of a greater plan that actually will bring about greater glory, and joy once its reached it’s completion.

One last thing I wanted to discuss before closing this post is that in quantum physics there is a theory that states there are multiple things that influence everything around us, but we are unable to perceive them because we aren’t aware of them.  In other words, our perception is our reality, but that perception is not an absolute representation of the truth.   Even in the midst of  the perceived chaos around us, I believe in a sovereign God who is in control of all things.  So I think it’s important that I state I believe there is harmony, but that we are in constant rebellion permitted by the will of God.  I believe that harmony in the created universe is that testimony to him.  Scripture states that God’s invisible qualities have been very clearly displayed in creation.  However for those who are believers in God, we have been lead to belief by the Spirit, which is a very deliberate force in our universe.  That those who are made aware of it no longer see the world as being merely a matter of chance, but of a like deliberate nature.

So how does this intellectual and theological meandering meet our everyday life?  I believe it meets the same purpose of what the original quote sought to convey.  For everyone, we need to stop and recognize that there is more than us in this universe and we should have a heart for them.  Additionally, for the believer, that in serving others we serve and bring glory to the God who made us.

MMS 2012 and distributed responsibility…

MMS was a blast. The amount of information, and networking possible is just staggering. I was also pleasantly surprised to find strong brothers in the faith while I was out in Vegas as well.

I’m excited about the future with CM12, Intune, App-v, Powershell, Server 12, Hyper-v, and Ops Man. I had an interesting conversation today over lunch about the essential folly of strict delegated authority and technology specialization that happens inside corporations. I would like to hit a few of the high points I was arguing to substantiate my claim that smaller work forces with broader skill sets offered a stronger IT work force as a whole. In terms of retention, satisfaction, cost of operation, and potential for innovation.

Employee retention and satisfaction will increase.

As I had posted on here previously, money does not serve as a motivational tool for cognitive tasks; which we can all agree on is where most IT engineering level jobs reside. Give enough money that money is not an issue, and you’ve essentially reached the end of money’s power of motivation over your employees. So then how do we motivate these employees to do more? Essentially, give them more to do; or give them diversity in their work and more to solve.

So? What can we conclude from that?

That a highly technical person (who is paid appropriately) will become a more productive (and one could read loyal) employee if given more opportunities to work.

What does delegated authority, and technology specialization teach us? Don’t give them enough money to make money NOT an issue, but instead give them a fixed growth path, and limit their technical involvement to one area. Generally this breeds a mercenary type behavior born of a loss of interest resulting in poor production. This WILL result in higher turn over as employees seek better opportunities, generally using a skill set they cultivated on the previous company’s dime… So why isn’t retention an issue? That’s lost revenue in training, hiring, terminations, and man hours to complete the tasks involved with all of this.

Reduced headcounts, with improved availability

Doing more with less, or less with more. Lets just look at this for a minute and really think this through.

t*(e^x)=c

Technologies that need to be supported (t) times the total number of employees (e) required for each piece (x) then I can get a rough estimate of my required headcount. To keep it simple lets assume that ideally these technologies can be supported 1 for 1. If I find myself in a specialized state the value of x will have to be 2. In some cases you could get away with 1, but if this is a tier 2 or higher item you are at a serious risk in terms of support availability. This is a problem with specialization, you can cross train, but rarely does that cross training work appropriately for hand off in a crisis situation.

However if your standard mode of operation allows for covering multiple areas then workloads will delegate themselves between employees evenly. When one leaves another can step in line to carry that workload without any impact. You have effectively reduced your required workload by 1 per technology. Now of course this is very basic, and doesn’t account for a lot of variables that would exist such as synergies that already exist, but if one adopts distributed responsibility more synergies will be found and that head count will reduce. Salaries will be released to go back into the company, and to the salaries of your remaining talent.

You’ve now found the way to take the subject of money off the table, and increased your support availability. When I talk about availability, I don’t just mean in terms of support, but even in project through put and time lines. You won’t be hit as hard by your “so and so guy”‘s vacation in terms of project completion.

Innovation’s will be found more frequently

I’m not going to go too deep on this as it’s a pretty simple benefit to identify. You have more eyes on something, the greater the chance is you find an improvement to that.

You will have an increasingly more motivated work force

By establishing a distributed responsibility system you have also given your employees two of the 3 fundamental keys for motivation.

  1. Autonomy
  2. Mastery

How so, you might ask? By exposing your employees to more technology and work you have given, or even forced them into a state of self governance. They are given the reigns to see what is needed and respond accordingly to those needs which in turn will result in mastery of the technologies that they support. Look, we can spend as much time as we want discussing how people learn and what makes the best teacher, but inevitably we all know that experience is king.

Great, I’m sold, so what are the pitfalls?

You need to identify the right talent, and you need to always evaluate service level requirements and demand.

These are areas that require strong management to be able to identify. In truth, you could spend a lot finding a solid recruiter for talent selection, but I think your current teams should be more involved in selecting their peers. The reality is, they are your source that should let you know if the new person will have the technical chops and personality to fit in and do the work.

Anyway, I could go on further extolling the merits of this model, but I feel most my points would just be beating a dead horse so I’ll stop now.

Have a good one.

Edit:

So valve’s employee handbook and business model serves as an excellent (and humorous) example for what I’m talking about.

My wonderful wife…

Moved me to tears with her 19 month post for Maggie. I know she doesn’t like a lot of attention drawn to herself or her blog, but I just had to share this post.

Poem from her post:

Special Child
by Sharon Harris

You weren’t like other children,
And God was well aware,
You’d need a caring family,
With love enough to share.
And so He sent you to us,
And much to our surprise,
You haven’t been a challenge,
But a blessing in disguise.

Your winning smiles and laughter,
The pleasures you impart,
Far outweigh your special needs,
And melt the coldest heart.

We’re proud that we’ve been chosen,
To help you learn and grow,
The joy that you have brought us,
Is more than you can know.

A precious gift from Heaven,
A treasure from above,
A child who’s taught us many things,
But most of all – “Real Love”

Starting to sound like a broken record….

yea, that is hppening

For those who are closely involved in my life, and I have not told yet… Yes, I still have a job.

However, with this splash of good news comes the realization that I am about to enter into a whirlwind of intense workloads and even more intense deadlines. I still intend to post my logon framework here (hopefully within the month) so there is still that to look forward too. I apologize to anyone who has or is checking this on a fairly regular basis that I’ve been so flakey this year on posting.

Oh, and I’m going to Vegas next week for MMS!

vegas

(extended) Family Update…

So for those who know, and for those who don’t.

My mother in law was recently diagnosed with breast cancer, and after a bit of testing had her first surgery this past Tuesday.  I won’t go into vast amounts of detail, but the tumor was succesfully removed, and 2 of the 3 lymph nodes came back negative upon the initial inspection, and the tumor came out nice and round (generally meaning it was well encapsulated).  I’m thankful that initial crisis is behind us, and we can look forward to (hopefully/prayerfully) continued healing of her body.

I’ve been loaded down with work, and personal issues lately that have prevented me from posting anything on here in quite a while.  Hopefully I can get some solid script/code/technical content posted here soon.  I really want to get my logon framework posted up here, but I’m not really sure the best method for achieving that right now.

Until then, take care.

Amazing things…

The simplistic beauty of nature in my back yard.

 

Seeing my daughter with cerebral palsy crawl over, push her self up, and begin petting her dog.

God is good, and infinitely greater at revealing his mercies than I often believe possible.

Failing MP.MSI repair 1603 SCCM 2007…

Ran into this on a failing MP repair in our DMZ.  The error was a 1603, and according to the mp.msi logs it was unable to create the virtual directories for the MP to function.  What was looking like a complete IIS rebuild turned out to be a known issue surrounding BITS; and a far simpler solution then I had originally imagined.

The long and short or it; uninstall and reinstall the BITS feature, then reinstall the MP site component and bam.

 

Are you a problem solver…

Are you a problem solver, or are you a button pusher?

When you are faced with something new, and well, problematic.  Do you marvel at it’s complexity, or do you look for the first point of attack?  Do you fret about all the damage this new issue has wrought, or do you relish in the new lessons you will learn?

There are issues around you everyday.  Some more obvious than others, but they always lie, under the surface of everyday life.  Steady course often works well to suppress these cataclysmic eruptions, but not always.  Perhaps the steady course with no correction gave these problems the added pressure to reach their boiling point.

At the end of the day it’s worth every bit of your (current and future) sanity and those around you to take time and evaluate things.  I don’t care if it’s technical, spiritual, emotional, physical, or other.  The bottom line is, change is always possible, and solutions do exist to problems.

Stop pressing the same buttons over and over again and start thinking critically.

 

Work Work, Zug Zug, Dabu…

To say I’ve been a bit busy lately would be the understatement of the year.

Finalizing critical content packages to allow the decommission of our previous systems management software.  Transitioning our infrastructure to the new systems as well, and performing software rationalizations in our environment has put me at a limit to sitting and writing.

Oh, did I mention general systems integration for a new company that I’m not certain I have a future with still?

I do thoroughly enjoy the work though as it’s largely technical and requires little (or allows for little) theory crafting sessions on the best possible way.  Don’t get me wrong, I love planning, but planning without action to me is just a miserable existence.  I don’t thrive on anarchy, but I enjoy doing work as opposed to talking about it; and I enjoy clutch situations at times.

In other, life altering news; our daughter was officially diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy last week.  I’m not really sure where else to go with that outside of the fact it is what it is.  It was a rough day last Monday when we got the news; but I think I am past the diagnosis and back to looking at my daughter for what she is, not what she will or will not be.

I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace.  In the world you will have tribulation.  But take heart; I have overcome the world. – John 16:33

When I see my beautiful daughter smile, I’m reminded how lucky I am that she’s alive and in our care.  Even if that burden is great, I gladly bear it; as would most parents.  I’m sure there will still be anger, and pain dealing with this so please, if you have been then continue to pray for us.

Will on the other hand, my main man.  He’s absolutely digging “getting muscles” lately and is continually asking me if such and such builds muscles, or telling me how or where he got some new muscle. He’s also been doing a really great job lately with being a responsible big brother to his sister in her trials.  Admittedly he still gets frustrated at times with the amount of attention his sister receives, but his love and encouragement for her continues to amaze me and makes me proud to be his father.

So back to the building muscles thing.  I came home last night from work, and my son comes yelling  “DADDY COME HERE I WANT TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING”.  So I walk into the family room, and he’s taken a toy shopping cart and pulled it up to the mantle, and proceeds to do wide grip overhand chin ups.  It was a rest day for me too so I just did some yoga that night as well, which my son was MORE than eager to get involved in; the entire time explaining to me how or why it builds muscles.  That kid is awesome.

Hah, well I ended up writing a lot more then I expected; I should quit while I’m ahead.  Take care until next time.

Reasonable…

A reasoning individual without doubt is unreasonable.

-Daniel Belcher

Reason:

  1. a basis or cause, as for some belief, action, fact, event, etc.
  2. The mental powers concerned with forming conclusions, judgments, or inferences.
  3. Sound judgment; good sense

Reasoning:

  1. The act or process of a person who reasons.
  2. The process of forming conclusions, judgements, or inferences from facts or premises
  3. The reasons, arguments, proofs, etc., resulting from this process

Reasonable:

  1. Agreeable to reason or sound judgement; logical.

Doubt:

  1. to be uncertain about; consider questionable or unlikely; hesitate to believe
  2. To be uncertain about something; be undecided in opinion or belief.

 

For one to reason, they must be able to question the very premise of that which they currently believe, else that reasoning is suspect and lacking in sound judgment.  Mind you, there is reasonable doubt, and that is what I’m speaking to directly here.