davemclain.com

Here are the pictures of the painted interior.

I was sitting on my back porch eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich, drinking sweet, looking at the trees and listening to the birds. Driving back in from church I passed 2 lemonade stands, one which didn’t even have any adults in sight. Every yard in the neighborhood has an American flag in it (not exaggerating, someone took a whole bunch of American flags and put one in front of every house). I didn’t move to the suburbs, I moved to the 1950s.

I’ve put in three more days of effort into operation chicken little, but that’s rather pathetic given the nearly month long period that has transpired since day 2. Day 3 was the third bedroom. I was joined by Jeremy for Day 4 when we took down the entire living room in one go.

Day 5 was the entryway and “dining room”. Special thanks to Dylan and Dorothy for bringing burgers and beer. Now, I’ve got my parents coming in a week from today, but I’m not entirely sure what projects will be worth doing at that point.

I have vanquished the sky in bedroom 2 (the north-west one, for some reason I think of this as Swanson’s room, even thought that has not been discussed).

Lessons learned:
8 feet 4 inches is plenty wide when it comes to 2 mil plastic sheeting
Use more masking tape when attaching the plastic sheeting to the walls, it’s worth it
Never, ever paint over popcorn ceilings, it’s like kicking a puppy, except over a much longer time horizon
Use more water. I know you’re afraid of messing up the sheetrock, it’ll be fine.
When you use more water the mess you make is much more satisfying

This evening saw the beginning of improvements to the house. I’m typing this post on the iPhone because I do not yet have Internet. Those of you who read my not so clever titles already know that the project that I began was the removal of the acoustic ceiling (the sky is falling) I chose the master bath as I’ve already discovered that the shower doesn’t work properly so I can just use the other one for now. It took longer than I hoped because I am an optimistic estimator and it turns out the ceiling in there had been painted

Yesterday I moved into my new place, this morning I was working in my (mostly empty) living room, and looked out my back window to see a neighbor in my back yard, eating my lawn.

she saw me…

then she fled, story of my life. Oh well I’m sure she’ll be back.

Edit: For those of you having trouble:

Amazing what procrastination does to my posting. Stupid packing.

Last night I went out to Shakespeare in the park with the Mankeys, and despite the fact that Dorothy didn’t think I enjoyed cultural things, it was awesome. Their rendition of Much Ado About Nothing was quite good. This also marked my first time going to Barton Springs (I’ve only been living here for half a decade, gimme a break), which just might be the largest pool I’ve ever been to unless you count the ocean or lakes. All of this is just to provide context for our
shocking discovery:

Amazon and Apple, in an unholy alliance, have created a psychic interface to online shopping. Dylan and I were discussing our mutual desire to purchase Digital SLRs. Ever since I got to use Jesuit’s D30 and D60 back in 2002-03, I’ve really wanted one, but the price was prohibitive. Anyway, we were debating about how much they actually cost, and I figured we might as well actually check. I pull out my iPhone, type in Amazon.com and right there ABOVE THE SEARCH BAR is a selection of DSLRs. I have never opened Amazon on my iPhone before, so they don’t have the connection to my fairly substantial purchase/recommendation history.

Their ability to psychically determine what I want to buy combined with their black magic recommendations lead me to believe that soon I will have no choice but to go slave for them again inside their art deco insane asylum on the hill, if only to get the limited employee discount while I slake my thirst for consumerist happiness.
That seems far more likely than iPhone users, who have already shelled out 300 bucks for a small shiny object being very similar to the demographic of DSLR buyers.

One of the most famous of Jesus parables is the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-23), and I heard it unpacked this weekend in a rather indicting way.

The basic story is that the younger son asks his father for his half of the inheritance, gets it, and proceeds to live a life of excess in a far off land. He runs out of money as the economy tanks and ends up working as a pig farmer’s hand (totally not ok for a Jewish guy to work feeding pigs). He repents of his folly and heads back home hoping to get a job working for his father. His Dad hears that he’s coming home, runs out to greet him on the road and throws him a huge feast because he has returned.

The elder son becomes indignant that he has never had a party thrown for him despite his years of service, and refuses to go in. The father says to him in reply: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.”

I’ve had a few conversations with people about this particular story because it is such a succinct view into God’s grace and his embrace of the repentant sinner, but the other half of the story is the danger of living a religious life thinking that somehow you are more deserving of the love of God.

Both brothers are more in love with their father’s things than their father, the younger brother just has the stones to man up and say it to his face. Modern readers gloss over the younger brother’s request to receive his inheritance early, but he’s essentially saying to his father “I’m tired of waiting for you to die so that I can have your stuff, give it to me now.”

It is central to our fleshly nature to treat God like this, to trust in the things like wealth or relationships or drugs or anything else but Him, because God’s Stuff rarely makes the same demands of us that a relationship with Him does. One of the fun things about finite things though is that they run out and at some point you run out and are left wondering what to do next.

The younger brother runs out of food and turns back to his father in the hopes of living a life of service to his father in order to get more of his stuff, but the father has better plans for him. He will not live as a servant but rather as a son again.

The sinner turning to God is a beautiful and awkward thing. True repentance cannot come without an awareness of the depth of the transgression and an implicit understanding of the appropriateness of punishment. But the Father does not greet repentance with wrath but with rejoicing. Christianity is not a list of rules but a relationship and sin is that which hampers that relationship. Make no mistake, the God of Abraham is a jealous God and his discipline is one of the great confirmations of our adoption as his sons (cf. Hebrews 12:5-11)
But the greater fool is the elder brother. We all think we want to be the elder brother because he is faithful. He does not spit in his father’s face, he serves him in his fields, and tends his flocks. And all he wants to know is where his party is, why all this celebration over his brother being found when he, the elder, had never been lost in the first place.

How much more beautiful would the Body of Christ (the Church) look if we weren’t so busy being the elder brother, if our joy was found in our relationship with Him instead of being proud that he has allowed us to work his fields? How much less judgmental and more loving could we be if we actually rejoiced in the returning of our lost brothers instead of begrudging them the feast that we have the opportunity to join them in? Being a Christian isn’t about abstaining from the things of this world, it’s about partaking in the things of the next. There can be no pride in being a Christian because the things we do that matter at all were prepared for us to do (cf. Ephesians 2:10) and the other things we’re doing either don’t matter or are actively harming the most important relationship in our life.

Sometimes I forget that I am a great sinner and the only thing that I can boast in is having a great Savior.

I own too much stuff. I have boxes that I haven’t unpacked since I moved off of Oltorf in 2005. This can only get worse moving into a house.

The house does not feel real to me yet. I am only sleeping in my current residence for two more nights, but packing is a beating because my brain hasn’t realized that I actually need to do it.

Coding Horror, one of the many things on the internet that sucks away my time, had a story a few years back comparing software development to moving stones for a pyramid. The gist is that there’s a big stone block a distance from your building site and you have a deadline to get it there. Brute force says take the distance, divide by days, move it that much every day, which is great, but likely to result in unhappy slaves (meh) and non-reproducible results (ouch).

The lesson is that every day you need to move the stone at least one day closer to its eventual location or do work that increases your speed such that the moving stone can get there in one less day.

I think thus far in my development efforts my approach has mostly been of the brute force method, which kinda hurts. I do my best to quickly write code that gets the job done well, without any n factorial algorithms or similar badness, but ultimately my current problem is in those first few words “I do my best to quickly write code”. I’ve succeeded in the past based on the ability to solve small problems rapidly, but ultimately the more valuable skill is the ability to solve large problems early. It’s one of the reasons I really like being at Credera, so many of the senior people in the technology practices approach problems in methodical ways that I think I used to mistake for a lack of agility, but now recognize as using proven resources and techniques.

It’s silly to walk up to a hunk of marble and say “lets not use logs to roll this piece” because it’s not made of granite.