simon

Suggestion 1: Have children and help them with their Maths homework.

Suggestion 2: Signup with https://www.khanacademy.org/ and work through from 1st grade until you feel that you've gone as far as you wish.

Sorry for the second reply, but I have written a blog entry on my book writing experience. It ended up larger than I expected, yet still doesn't exhaust all that I would want to say, so more may follow.

http://simonpeter.org/mechanics-of-writing-a-book/

Sorry for the delay. I generally abstain from HN over the weekends.

Feel free to email me, there are several addresses in my profile entry. I reply fastest to the GMail one.

I really should blog about my experience of writing a book. Some parts were easier than I expected, while others were about as hard as I expected. All together, I think with the facilities available through services like LeanPub and CreateSpace, it was easier and smoother than I initially expected.

Wrote a book (non-technical). A very interesting experience indeed. I used LeanPub for the content and then CreateSpace for the deadtree version.

Twenty years ago, back in England, I had 5 weeks of vacation and standard public holidays. I moved to the United States and after twenty years I have "progressed" to zero vacation days and all public holidays as unpaid time off.

I do not see the negative connotations that you do with the word "geek". I describe myself as a geek or geeky.

That aside, the article is a good one and I have read it several times before and feel that it gets much right.

Yup. Man I remember my childhood and it was awesome ... no planned sports, regular family meal times and plenty of time to just play or read or ride my bike or walk for miles in the local fields. I try to provide something close to this for my kids.

Step number one: no TV! Step number two: remind them that boredom is life's way of encouraging them to be more creative!

I'm a pastor (and former geek) and I would love to see more info on your landing page before handing out an email address.

Not sure if my congregation is ready to go "online giving", but the organization I belong to may be interested. Is this only suitable for church congregations, or would a church organization (state level) be able to use it?

That's easy ... the worst thing about most project management software is the project manager (PM) that uses it. :-)

Now that I have gotten 23 years of corporate IT cynicism out of my system I'll try to be more sensible. I have only rarely used PM software, so I really cannot speak to it, but I have been inflicted with bad PMs for the vast majority of my time.

My observation is that it is the way that PMs approach the process of PM, not the software that makes the difference. As long as projects start out with a due date and a cool name, it doesn't matter what the software is or does or doesn't do, because the project is doomed already. Who needs estimates when the completion date has already been carved into stone?

The in-house methodology states that requirements will be gathered and estimates will be collected and they'll be put into the approved software and then they will begin to suffer from bit rot because they were bad to start with and will never be revisited. The requirements are always incomplete because there are whole aspects of software development that are never considered, especially testing and creating administration capabilities. The estimates are always wrong because projects are rarely enough like previous ones to make prior experience useful, programmers are by nature optimistic and project managers are people pleasers. (I've seen my careful estimates cut in half right in front of me.) And don't even get me started on the "green shift" that PMs apply as they report up the food chain!

My favorite way of describing most IT projects is "measure with a micrometer, mark with chalk, cut with an axe!"

Scary and exciting!

Seven months ago, I became a full-time pastor. Quite different from web development using Java and programming in general. Twenty three years working as a geek is not the most helpful background for pastoring. On the other hand, I love the pastoring and I made sure that the church has a decent web page. :-)

The biggest thing for me to get used to was (still is) managing my time, being a 24x7 people person (I'm a type B personality) and juggling the needs of a congregation. Do I visit A, B or C today? And don't forget to phone D, pop an email to E and be sure to remember that you have lunch with F today and breakfast with G on Saturday. And must have a sermon ready for Sunday. And be available for people to phone or text or Facebook chat with. It's all good, but can get complicated because of the people issues ... and it's all people issues!

I am so using that. Thanks for sharing.

Both ... just not at the same time. That would be like crossing the streams!

Not sure. I know you can edit comments for up to an hour after posting, but I don't know about top level stories. People with moderator privs can change things. Perhaps one will see it and change it.

Or you could just post a new top level story with a better URL.

Either way, I'd hate to see this story get no traction. Good on you.

A great idea, but the blog entry linked is from April 2012. Go to the site, click on the site title and then navigate around from there. It would be helpful if this link had gone to a page that gave a summary or a list of links to the material. It just seemed a dead end at first.

I'm glad that you have had more positive experience on HN with faith/religious comments than I have. Others have made similar observations to mine.

Some conversations have gone well, but there are more that have not. Most likely my own fault for calling people on their intolerance rather than just shrugging and finding another story to comment on. :-)

More people have been killed by officially atheist governments (esp. in 20th century) than by any religions.

Thank you for the pointers, I shall read some more on this.

Sorry you departed the faith. Perhaps, you should have been really, really into this stuff? :-)

Your whole answer radiates a tone. Tone is that sentiment that is expressed over and above the words actually used. You could say that tone is found by reading between the lines.

Describing something as a conspicuous flaw is not a statement of lack of understanding. It is an assertion. You can say that you don't understand the Christian perspective on the flood account and then we could have a conversation about it. But making a strong assertion does indeed set a tone.

As a former atheist, I understand the perspective that causes people to make such statements, but please do not confuse my willingness to point out such things with being a sensitive little snowflake. Your whole reply is intolerant because of the combination of your statements and the tone you have used. Methinks you are the sensitive one here. :-)

Your point about "Tolkien fanatics" is a good one, but I was not reacting to just one word. As a Toby Mac fan, I like to refer to myself as a Jesus Freak, so mere labels aren't the issue. It's the tone of the whole comment and the inference that one who believes the bible is the literal word of God is an unwise and foolish person.

I do not find this to be the case here on HN.

When there are difficult or tragic circumstances and we believers speak up to try to help or encourage, we get voted up, but the rest of the time, we get downvotes and negative responses.

Thank you. I shall both upvote your original comment and thank you for your update to your original comment.

I am one of those literal word of God people, but that kinda comes with the territory as a pastor. :-)

Yeah, although it pretty much depends on how you define bible.

The Catholics use the KJV with the Apocrypha inserted between the OT and NT. Most of the denominational churches (loosely what you referred to as Protestants) use similar bibles unless you want to be picky over their use of different translations or get into which original manuscript they were translated from. And that's just getting warmed up. I'm into this stuff.

Technically, "bible fanatics" is only insulting to one religion, Christianity. The Jews observe the Torah, which while being 99'ish percent the same as the OT is technically different because of ordering of the books and the combining of some.

Careful, your lack of tolerance is showing.

There are records in the ancient historical stories of many cultures of a world-wide flood.

Update: the downvotes have started already! Thank you for firmly establishing my point! :-)

Will do.

Very impressed with the layout. I'll have to look at the process that leanpub use to see if that might work for me.

Thanks, I'll look into the links you provided.

Interesting that you mentioned dental health, as after a year or so of following the slow-carb diet, my dental nurse complimented me on the good condition of my teeth and gums. Sugar is not our friend!

I downloaded this and the PDF looks nice. I'll try the EPUB file on my Nook later. I'll read it and if I like it, I will likely go back and purchase it for real. Thankyou leanpub for making this available for free.

Slow-carb diet (from the Four Hour Body) and Intermittent Fasting (primarily eat in the evenings, per The Warrior Diet) and Kettlebell exercises (swings and getups).

My life is too busy (I'm a pastor) for anything more complicated, but I find that this combination works well for me.

Clickable links or it isn't true! :-)

http://fourhourbody.com/

http://warriordiet.com/

http://www.dragondoor.com/shop-by-department/books/b33/

I completely agree with a default plan of not burning bridges anywhere. But it is still possible to do that without tipping your hand to the employer.

If the employer needs more than two weeks to be ready for an employee to leave, then the employer needs to be better organized or they need to ask for longer resignation timeframes. Of course, the two times I was ever "let go" (both from re-structuring), I had zero advance notice, so that doesn't seem very balanced.

I'm all for playing nice with your employer ... stayed late on my last day at previous client because they scheduled an install for the project I was the technical advisor for that weekend! Yes, really. Sigh. It went well in the end.

The problem is that my observations of corporate America leave me very cynical about your requests. After 23 years of seeing the exact opposite behaviour, it gets harder to believe that the company cares about what you think or feel. I have learned that when the words and the actions don't sync, you believe the actions.

Now, HN is likely mostly populated by young hipster developers who work at fun trendy places where playing nice is appreciated, so I'm just an old dinosaur roaring off in the distance. I accept that as my role. :-(