These are quotes which stood out to me, possibly for use in a sermon someday. Their presence here does not mean I agree with them, it merely shows that I might want to reference them later. The default view is five random selections. Use the tag list on the right to view all quotes relevant to that theme.
Excerpted from the (long and very worthwhile): "In The Beginning Was The Command Line", by Neal Stephenson, author of Snowcrash. http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= THE HOLE HAWG OF OPERATING SYSTEMS Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army. Most people know it only by reputation, and its reputation, as the Dilbert cartoon suggests, is mixed. But everyone seems to agree that if it could only get its act together and stop surrendering vast tracts of rich agricultural land and hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war to the onrushing invaders, it could stomp them (and all other opposition) flat. It is difficult to explain how Unix has earned this respect without going into mind-smashing technical detail. Perhaps the gist of it can be explained by telling a story about drills. The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company. If you look in a typical hardware store you may find smaller Milwaukee drills but not the Hole Hawg, which is too powerful and too expensive for homeowners. The Hole Hawg does not have the pistol-like design of a cheap homeowner's drill. It is a cube of solid metal with a handle sticking out of one face and a chuck mounted in another. The cube contains a disconcertingly potent electric motor. You can hold the handle and operate the trigger with your index finger, but unless you are exceptionally strong you cannot control the weight of the Hole Hawg with one hand; it is a two-hander all the way. In order to fight off the counter-torque of the Hole Hawg you use a separate handle (provided), which you screw into one side of the iron cube or the other depending on whether you are using your left or right hand to operate the trigger. This handle is not a sleek, ergonomically designed item as it would be in a homeowner's drill. It is simply a foot-long chunk of regular galvanized pipe, threaded on one end, with a black rubber handle on the other. If you lose it, you just go to the local plumbing supply store and buy another chunk of pipe. During the Eighties I did some construction work. One day, another worker leaned a ladder against the outside of the building that we were putting up, climbed up to the second-story level, and used the Hole Hawg to drill a hole through the exterior wall. At some point, the drill bit caught in the wall. The Hole Hawg, following its one and only imperative, kept going. It spun the worker's body around like a rag doll, causing him to knock his own ladder down. Fortunately he kept his grip on the Hole Hawg, which remained lodged in the wall, and he simply dangled from it and shouted for help until someone came along and reinstated the ladder. I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs, which it did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few six-inch-diameter holes through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I chucked in a new hole saw, went up to the second story, reached down between the newly installed floor joists, and began to cut through the first-floor ceiling below. Where my homeowner's drill had labored and whined to spin the huge bit around, and had stalled at the slightest obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid consistency of a spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel pipe handle and a joist, producing a few lacerations, each surrounded by a wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. It also bent the hole saw itself, though not so badly that I couldn't use it. After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror. But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner's product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure to envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it. A smaller tool is dangerous too, but for a completely different reason: it tries to do what you tell it to, and fails in some way that is unpredictable and almost always undesirable. But the Hole Hawg is like the genie of the ancient fairy tales, who carries out his master's instructions literally and precisely and with unlimited power, often with disastrous, unforeseen consequences. Pre-Hole Hawg, I used to examine the drill selection in hardware stores with what I thought was a judicious eye, scorning the smaller low-end models and hefting the big expensive ones appreciatively, wishing I could afford one of them babies. Now I view them all with such contempt that I do not even consider them to be real drills--merely scaled-up toys designed to exploit the self-delusional tendencies of soft-handed homeowners who want to believe that they have purchased an actual tool. Their plastic casings, carefully designed and focus-group-tested to convey a feeling of solidity and power, seem disgustingly flimsy and cheap to me, and I am ashamed that I was ever bamboozled into buying such knicknacks. It is not hard to imagine what the world would look like to someone who had been raised by contractors and who had never used any drill other than a Hole Hawg. Such a person, presented with the best and most expensive hardware-store drill, would not even recognize it as such. He might instead misidentify it as a child's toy, or some kind of motorized screwdriver. If a salesperson or a deluded homeowner referred to it as a drill, he would laugh and tell them that they were mistaken--they simply had their terminology wrong. His interlocutor would go away irritated, and probably feeling rather defensive about his basement full of cheap, dangerous, flashy, colorful tools. Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix hackers, like Doug Barnes and the guy in the Dilbert cartoon and many of the other people who populate Silicon Valley, are like contractor's sons who grew up using only Hole Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters, play video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they cannot really bring themselves to take these operating systems seriously.
RULES FOR BANK ROBBERS
According to the FBI, most modern-day bank robberies are "unsophisticated and unprofessional crimes," committed by young male repeat offenders who apparently don't know the first thing about their business. For instance it is reported that in spite of the widespread use of surveillance cameras, 76 percent of bank robbers use no disguise, 86 percent never study the bank before robbing it, and 95 percent make no long-range plans for concealing the loot. Thus, this advice is offered to would-be bank robbers, along with examples of what can happen if the rules aren't followed:
1. Pick the right bank. Clark advises that you don't follow the lead of the fellow in Anaheim, Cal., who tried to hold up a bank that was no longer in business and had no money. On the other hand, you don't want to be too familiar with the bank. A California robber ran into his mother while making his getaway. She turned him in.
2. Approach the right teller. Granted, this is harder to plan. One teller in Springfield, Mass., followed the holdup man out of the bank and down the street until she saw him go into a restaurant. She hailed a passing police car, and the police picked him up. Another teller was given a holdup note by a robber, and her father, who was next in line, wrestled the man to the ground and sat on him until authorities arrived.
3. Don't sign your demand note. Demand notes have been written on the back of a subpoena issued in the name of a bank robber in Pittsburgh, on an envelope bearing the name and address of another in Detroit, and in East Hartford, Conn., on the back of a withdrawal slip giving the robber's signature and account number.
4. Beware of dangerous vegetables. A man in White Plains, N.Y., tried to hold up a bank with a zucchini. The police captured him at his house, where he showed them his "weapon."
5. Avoid being fussy. A robber in Panorama City, Cal., gave a teller a note saying, "I have a gun. Give me all your twenties in this envelope." The teller said, "All I've got is two twenties." The robber took them and left.
6. Don't advertise. A holdup man thought that if he smeared mercury ointment on his face, it would make him invisible to the cameras. Actually, it accentuated his features, giving authorities a much clearer picture. Bank robbers in Minnesota and California tried to create a diversion by throwing stolen money out of the windows of their cars. They succeeded only in drawing attention to themselves.
7. Take right turns only. Avoid the sad fate of the thieves in Florida who took a wrong turn and ended up on the Homestead Air Force Base. They drove up to a military police guardhouse and, thinking it was a tollbooth, offered the security men money.
8. Provide your own transportation. It is not clever to borrow the teller's car, which she carefully described to police. This resulted in the most quickly-solved bank robbery in the history of Pittsfield, Mass.
9. Don't be too sensitive. In these days of exploding dye packs, stuffing the cash into your pants can lead to embarrassing stains, not to mention severe burns in sensitive places--as bandits in San Diego and Boston painfully discovered.
10. Consider another line of work. One nervous Newport, R.I., robber, while trying to stuff his ill-gotten gains into his shirt pocket, shot himself in the head and died instantly. Then there was the case of the hopeful criminal in Swansea, Mass., who, when the teller told him she had no money, fainted. He was still unconscious when the police arrived.
ROBERT CLINTON ON LEADERSHIP
Robert Clinton has spent a major part of his life studying, writing, and teaching about leadership, especially biblical and ministerial leadership. Two of his books, The Making of a Leader and Connecting, are essential when reading about leadership and mentoring. In December 1999, Clinton participated in a Leadership Network sponsored forum on leadership development and after the forum responded to a series of questions we posed on leadership.
EXPLORER: 20-25 years ago we didn't talk about leadership or pastors as leaders. How has that interest developed?
CLINTON: Secular society has had a lot of influence on talking about leadership. Early on in the '60s there was a real thrust toward the manager, which is one form of leadership. The whole concept of management by objectives and doing job descriptions for people so we know how to hold them accountable swept over from the secular world into the parachurch world, not as much in the church world. Then I think the culture itself was talking more about leadership, and that influenced the '80s. In the mid-'80s we had major leaders fall, leaders that everybody knew and it just demolished confidence in leadership. It's been particularly devastating in the Christian world because you expected more from them not to fall. So leadership became a focus. At the same time, beginning in the early '80s giftedness became important, and when you start studying spiritual gifts, you begin to recognize that certain people have certain kind of gifts and those people lead.
EXPLORER: What's your definition of leadership?
CLINTON: A leader is a person of God-given capacity and God-given responsibility to influence specific groups of people towards God's purposes. In some sense all people are leaders as they use their gifts, but the difference in that and what I'm talking about is responsibility to God for the people. They have a burden for it and they're going to answer to God for it. They influence. That's the dominant thing, not their position.
EXPLORER: From your observation of churches that are doing an effective job of developing leaders, what are some common elements regardless of their denomination or size?
CLINTON: One, they're intentional about it. They have pools from which to select, some way of finding out who in the pool should be selected. Most of them have some kind of training process they send people through. They have some sort of structure for doing it but in churches that are developing leaders, they can immediately put the training into application. In some, not all, mentoring is important. They have personal relationships, small groups, sometimes mentoring in a group context or individual mentoring. That's the dominant way that people are most effectively trained.
EXPLORER: What's different now about skill sets for pastoral leaders than say ten years ago?
CLINTON: In the United States in the last 15 years, multi-ethnicity or cross-cultural understanding is the major difference. We have to be much more culturally sensitive to lots of things such as structure, how we operate with people, and our congregation. Another one that leaders have to know something about now, which many of them do not, is change. How can we implement things in our church? In the old model you just did it. You told people and they did it. Some people came along and some got off the bus. In the future, people are going to have to know more about how to lead change and how to bridge into it, how to lead people into it so that when change happens, they can get ownership and less trauma. A third thing is they've got to learn how to develop leaders. Senior pastors on the whole don't develop their staffs. They have staff meetings. The staff has programs that they are running and report on. They pray together. They love each other, but they don't think about developing enough leaders. How do I train people to do what I do as opposed to how do I do it?
EXPLORER: Why is it so hard for pastors to make the shift from a doer to a developer of people, or a doer to an equipper of others?
CLINTON: I think it is because of the models they are taught and have seen. People basically teach as they were taught and operate as they have seen others operate. Most were not taught about developing leaders. They learned exegesis, homiletics, and philosophy rather than people skills.
EXPLORER: We talked about new skills of recent years, but are there skills that are essential to being effective in the future?
CLINTON: This is not a skill but an attitude that will result in skills. It is adopting the concept of learning posture. If you don't have a learning posture, you're not going to make it because things are changing and you've got to be able to learn. What you learn isn't as important as how to learn. People have to have a learning posture in order to be flexible about learning what's needed as situations change. Also, leaders in our culture, which is an egalitarian culture, are going to have to learn more about how to operate in a participative team context without losing their ability to make decisions as leaders.
EXPLORER: Can you unpack that a little bit more? It seems that many pastors talk team, verbally value team, but they can't build a team or operate as a team.
CLINTON: That's true or at least not a consensus model. I don't think a consensus model is a good model because one person can control everything. Basically what you want is one among many, and the leader's right to countermand decisions of the many sometimes. A wise leader will make decisions that generally flow with the team but there will be times when the leader will say, we're going to go this way anyway. You need a combination of that but there has to be a sense of ownership and participation at both levels.
EXPLORER: What trips up most leaders?
CLINTON: Few leaders finish well. The ones that don't finish well predominantly lose it in the middle game, not in the end game. In looking at leaders who don't finish well, I have identified six barriers that stop them. One is pride. There is a proper pride in recognizing who you are and operating out of what God's done for you, but there is also the danger of an inordinate pride, a pridefulness. Abuse of power is another. It happens when leaders operate unjustly or unfairly with people or because of their position and they start taking privileges or they influence people wrongly. A third one is lack of integrity with finances. That includes everything you can think of, embezzling, using funds that were earmarked for something else, not good accounting. Family issues, all the way from divorce or dysfunctional relationships between husband and wife or children, are a fourth barrier. Sexual issues are the fifth barrier and I'm not talking about simply adulterous affairs. I'm talking pornography and other sexually related issues. The last barrier is plateauing. Some plateauing is good. If you've been through something intense, it allows you to take a step back but over the long haul, you've got to move on and off the plateau.
Opening scene from "Contact" is a good illustration of the insignificance of man in the universe
Joel Lynn, manager of residence services at Mount Royal College, said nothing surprises him any more in the lengths parents will go to monitor their child's education, particularly of those living on campus.
"We've had fathers slip their business cards to residence staff and say, 'if you need me for anything, give me a call,' parents who want to be part of the discipline process and parents demanding to know their kid's grades," he said. "The most bizarre was the Vancouver mother who moved into her daughter's room."
In that case the mother, worried her daughter couldn't combat a cold alone, stayed a week. Staff forced the parent to leave when she began meddling in the daughter's roommates' affairs, telling the other three students when to go to bed, do their homework and to stop watching television.
http://www.canada.com/calgary/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=62467bde-e0ba-4dfd-93c9-9ea039844165