Ran across a lovely quote tonight. It expresses well a basic tenet of mine, that people and groups do everything they do for a reason. I might not agree with the reason but every action grows out of the person or group's beliefs, values, and understanding of the situation. Of course, teasing out the real reasons behind an action is incredibly difficult and we almost certainly never succeed. But the effort to do so is always valuable and I don't think anyone can claim to understand much about the world if they resort to cheap caricatures when describing people and groups.

I was explaining to someone in IRC earlier this week about why I was building my own project management software and said it was basically because managing my projects and tasks (or more abstractly, what I pay attention to) is so critical to everything else I do that I want to control the software behind it.

Recently, for fun and learning, I built a group chatroom feature for Drupal 6.x. I've been learning and using Node.js and Backbone.js the past few months and building a chatroom seemed like a great project to stretch my skills.

I've recently pronounced it "finished" and the code is available on Github. There are a few obscure bugs left but by and large, it's plenty stable for those wanting a chatroom on Drupal 6.x.

I'm starting work soon on building a new open source Getting Things Done web app that I'm tentatively calling SimpleGTD. I've tried a good chunk of the GTD apps out there and have been dissatisfied with each of them for one reason or another.

Motivations

I have a few reasons for starting this project.

"The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together."

"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."
--Eric Hoffer

The following is a talk I recently gave at the local LDS church I attend. Our church doesn't have paid ministry meaning everyone who attends occasionally takes their turn preaching and exhorting.

I'd like to share today some things that I've learned about developing faith.

When I arrived on my mission, I thought I understood faith much better than I did. I was soon humbled to learn, as I tried to teach people, that no, I really didn't know much about faith. Now properly contrite, I began my study of faith.

Since recent changes in my life have forced me to look for new employment, I've had to relearn the long-forgotten art of writing a resume. Since the actual process of writing a resume is fairly straightforward, and boring, I decided to spice things up by figuring out how to do it in Latex, a recent hobby of mine.

This is from a most excellent biography of a most interesting person, John Boyd.

From the most excellent book, "The Organization Man":

As part of my work with my (now defunct) startup Eduglu, I wrote a Drupal module that integrates with the popular analytics service Mixpanel.