There are a lot of things about being scoutmaster that I'm going to miss, most of them having to do with the wonderful young men that are the scouts in the troop.  However, there are a LOT of things that I am decidedly NOT going to miss:

• Figuring out how to pay for summer camp
• Friends of Scouting drives
• Extra meetings
• Using up a week of my vacation for summer camp  (Though the summer camp itself, I AM going to miss.)
• Round Table meetings on the first Thursday of the month
• One evening every week taken up by a troop meeting
• Figuring out how to pay for equipment
• Stressing about safety on outdoor activities.
• Potty humor.  (These ARE 12- and 13-year-old boys, you know.)
• Stake Courts of Honor  (Sorry, but it's true.  I HATED them.)
• People who wonder how I, as scoutmaster, could let my son get a drivers license before he became an Eagle Scout.
• Clueless parents
• Making sure Fast Offerings are gathered on the first Sunday of every month
• Discipline issues when things don't go well
• Deciding whether or not I can take another week (or two) of vacation to go to summer camp with my own sons who are both older than 13 years old

I have to make a list like this so I'm not so sad about all of the wonderful experiences I AM going to miss.

One thing I left out of yesterday's post...

On Saturday evening, a member of my bishopric called me and asked me if he could meet with me about 20 minutes before church started.  We met for a few minutes and he asked me to fulfill a different responsibility at church.

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints take an active part at church.  We are given a "calling," which is basically an invitation to accept an office or responsibility in the Church.

For the past five or six years, I have worked with the Young Men organization of the church.  I first served as the secretary to the Young Men Presidency, which helps with the spiritual and temporal nurturing of all young men ages 12-17 in the Ward.  A little more than three years ago, I was called to be the Second Counselor in the Young Men Presidency and Scoutmaster.

I was, at first, quite surprised--stunned even.  I had a terrible experience as a young man in the LDS Church back in Billings, Montana.  My experience as a boy scout, for the most part, is something I would rather forget.  The other young men in my ward treated me like crap, and I didn't want anything to do with any of them.

Yet my experience as a scoutmaster over the last three years was a very VERY good one.  I received all of the training.  I understood the scouting program, and through Wood Badge training, I saw the ideal scouting program and I did my best to make the scouting program in my Ward meet this ideal.

Yesterday morning, I was "released" from this calling and now I will be a "Primary Worker."  I will be teaching a class of younger children in the Ward.

I'm going to miss scouting and the young men that I worked with.  I'm going to miss that a lot.  I'm not yet sure how I feel about teaching Primary children.  Initially, I'm not too excited about it, but hopefully, like my experience with scouting, this, too, will be something that I grow to love.

If nothing else, I'll get to flirt with the pianist.

6:00 am - Wake up and try not to roll over and go back to sleep.  Fortunately, this isn't a typical Sunday.

7:00 am - Stake Priesthood Leadership Meeting.  If I didn't have this meeting, I'd still be asleep until...

8:00 am - This is when I usually wake up on Sundays

9:00 am - Ward Choir practice.  We're getting ready to sing one song the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and several more songs on Christmas Day, which is on a Sunday this year.

11:00 am - 2:00 pm - Church.  Yes, we crazy LDS people have three hours of church every Sunday.

The rest of the day is usually spent with family.  Unless I have a Young Men Presidency meeting.  Next Sunday, the Young Men Presidency has a two-hour meeting for training and planning with the bishopric.

Sometimes there are other meetings as well.  I work with the 12- and 13-year old young men in the Ward, and we have a Deacons Quorum Presidency meeting once a month.  Last week, there was the "Priesthood Preview" meeting for the 11-year-old young men and their parents, followed by an Eagle Court of Honor for one of the Young Men in the Ward.

There always seems to be other meetings.  I'm not complaining TOO much though...  At least I'm not in the bishopric.  Then I'd have meetings all day long on Sundays, PLUS other meetings throughout the week.

8:30 pm - M*A*S*H time.  Usually the whole family watches an episode or two before going to bed.  It's fun family time.

9:00-ish pm - My wife goes to bed.  After she goes to sleep, I get some more "me" time, that seems to be rather sparse these days.  I'll usually play my guitar or read a book or do something else I've been wanting to do.

10:30-ish pm - Bedtime.

And they say that Sunday is a day of rest?  :D

Yes, I've been a bit under the weather. I had to take a sick day off of work, which bugs me because I'm trying to save up my Paid Time Off so I can do family things and scouting things like that.

I know, some of you are reading this and wishing that you had such a thing as Paid Time Off. I'm grateful that I can take a day off of work when I need to and I don't have to worry about how I'm going to make up the Time I missed so I don't take a hit in the budget.

It is also nice to have a way to work from home. That way, I only had to take ONE day of PTO instead of three. It's also nice for my team members because I didn't feel like I had to rush back in to the office, where I would cough and sneeze and spread wonderful viruses everywhere.

Still, it stinks to be sick. I didn't get to swim yesterday and my eating has been completely off. I'm going to have to reset my diet/exercise plan when I'm feeling better again.

Health is one of those things that I am often grateful for only when it seems to be in short supply.

Today's date (in a "short year" format) is 11/11/11.  It is the last day until January 1, 2100 that is a "binary day" or a date that can be represented with only ones and zeros.  It's the last binary day I'll see unless medical technology makes it possible for me to live until I am 130 years old.

So to celebrate this last Binary Day of my lifetime, here are some fun links:

Learn all about binary

Binary to Text (ASCII) Conversion Tool

Learn to count in binary on your fingers

Make a binary calendar from Lego (project 24 in this book)

 

I hate it when a major appliance has a problem.

A few months ago, our washing machine was making some pretty terrible noises. It was not pretty. I opened up the back (it's a front-loading machine) and saw that there was some abnormal wear on the large pulley that turns the drum around and around. This wear was causing the pulley to wobble back and forth. I ordered a new pulley, installed it, and for less than a hundred dollars, The washing machine was as good as new.

Also in the last few months, a plastic part on the ice dispenser our refrigerator broke. Again, I ordered a part, replaced it, and it's been working ever since.

The washer is starting to die. Again. In the same way. Ugh.

So now we're off to get a new washer and dryer. (We think that the dryer is causing little stains on our clothes, so it needs to go too.). And while we are at it, we're going to get a new refrigerator. We bought the one we have back when we moved into our first house back in 1998. It's more than 13 years old, so who knows when it's finally going to just die. And while we're at it, we're going to look at dishwashers because one we have is leaking. That one makes me the most angry because we bought it when we moved into this house in 2006. *grumble grumble*

This is why we have savings, but these things aren't supposed to happen all at once!

After looking more closely at the dishwasher, I found a screw loose.  (In the dishwasher, not my head, silly people.)  The screw was keeping the dishwasher door from closing all the way.  When I tightened the screw, it didn't leak a drop of water.  Hooray!  I won't have to replace the dishwasher just yet.

However, the washing machine is sounding worse than ever, and this evening, it was showing error codes instead of spinning the water out of the clothes.  I'm out of time on that one.

Older son's iPod quit working.  Well, it didn't really quit working.  Just one tiny part of the iPod quit working--the sleep/wake button.

He got it for Christmas last year.  He's had it for less than a year.  We bought it from amazon.com.  We bought it less than a year ago.

So we opened up a service ticket with Apple.  That part was great.  It was really slick...really smooth.  All I had to do was take the iPod to a UPS store and they packed it up and shipped it overnight to the Apple Inc. facility in Sacramento.

Side note:  The iPod went from Orem, Utah to Salt Lake City, to the Sacramento airport, to the Ontario, California airport (what the??), back to the Sacramento airport, and then to the Apple facility.  Quite the well-traveled iPod!  It still arrived the next day.

Then I received an email from Apple stating  the following:

Your IPOD TOUCH (4TH GENERATION) has been inspected by Apple technicians, who have determined that it has been subjected to accidental damage or misuse, which is not covered by the warranty, the AppleCare Protection Plan, or other Apple repair program. Therefore your original product is being returned to you unrepaired. You should expect to receive it within two business days along with a letter that gives details of this assessment.

What?? Older son is extremely careful with his electronics.  He takes very VERY good care of them.  He always ALWAYS had it in his Speck CandyShell case.  It wasn't misused.  It wasn't accidentally damaged.  Seriously.

So I called Apple.  They could tell me NOTHING.  However, they said that there would be an enclosure with the returned iPod explaining what the problem was.  The Apple tech even explained that often they even include pictures of the damage.

On Monday, we had a door tag from FedEx.  Nobody was home when they tried to deliver the iPod.  I stopped by home on my way (which was absolutely NOT on the way) to class, grabbed the door tag and picked up the well-traveled iPod.

I opened it up, and the note inside said this:

Dear Apple Customer,

Thank you for choosing AppleCare Service.  To ensure the highest level of quality and reliability, all work has been performed in an Apple-approved screening facility.

Enclosed you will find your original iPod.  We regret we were unable to complete the service you requested due to one of the following conditions:

[ ] A diagnostic evaluation has determined that your iPod requires service because of an external cause such as accidental damage.

[ ] A diagnostic evaluation has determined that the iPod has internal damage related to a liquid spill or submersion, evident by the pink/red color of the liquid contact indicator (LCI).  The LCI is located inside the headphone jack.  Please refer to Apple online documentation (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3302) for more information regarding the LCI in your iPod.

...Blah Blah Blah stuff about out-of-warranty service Blah Blah Blah...

Sincerely

AppleCare Service

Notice that neither option was checked!  And no other information was provided.  No photos.  No written information.  NOTHING.

We looked up the LCI information in the Apple Knowledge Base, and there was no pink or red color in the headphone jack or in the dock connector.  So we were back to square 1.  We still had absolutely NO information about what was actually wrong with this particular iPod.

I set up an appointment for the next day to have an Apple tech give me a call.  After holding and waiting for a while for the tech to find the photos of the repair, the tech decided that the website/tool that he uses to view repairs isn't working because it wasn't bringing up any photos.  He took my number and said he would call me back when he got the tool to work and he would email photos of the repair.

An hour later, I finally got a call back.  They never could find any pictures of the repair, so they're going to repair/replace Older Son's iPod.  Hooray!

Thanks, Apple!

Did you vote today?  I know, it's not a big election this year.  No Senate or House of Representatives seats are up for grabs this year.  Nobody will be elected President of the United States this year.

But sometimes, these "off-year" elections are actually more important.  You can vote for people closer to home that can actually make a difference in your local community.  Municipal elections often can make a bigger difference to you in your day-to-day life than other, supposedly "larger" elections.

If you haven't voted yet, get your voter information and get out and cast your vote.  If nothing else, it buys you the right to gripe if your candidates aren't elected.  ;)

 

On Friday, I posted about all of the odd jobs I've had. Today, I'm going to post about my "career."

After finding out that I really liked software more than hardware, pretty much the only good thing that ever came out of working for TransEra, I enrolled in school full-time at Utah Valley State College. My wife worked way more than full-time to support us and I scheduled classes in the evenings so that my wife could be home with our son. I stayed home during the day as "Mr. Mom." Once I had most of a programming class under my belt, I applied for my first programming job. Here's the rest of my career:

• InsurQuote - I was hired as a "quote routine programmer." InsurQuote software was used by independent insurance agents to be able to enter rating information once and then be able to compare different companies' rates. I wrote routines in a mangled version of Pascal to generate the rates based on information in insurance company rating manuals. Despite management being a bunch of pointy-haired bosses, it was a great springboard for my career and I worked with a lot of really cool people that are friends to this day. This was the first job I ever had with benefits like paid vacation and health insurance.
• Utah Valley State College - While attending college, I started teaching lower-level programming classes. It was nice because I could have a credit of tuition waived for every credit I taught. I love teaching and would teach full-time if I could make any real money doing it. I taught a class a semester until a year or so after I graduated from UVSC with my BS in Computer Science and Information Systems.
• Independent Contractor for Utah DCFS - A friend at UVSC lured me away from InsurQuote because his father-in-law was contracting with the Utah Department of Child and Family Services to work on the database that contained details about all of the allegations of child abuse. Originally, I was supposed to be able to work from home, which would be perfect for a part-time college student that needed to work full-time. It turned into a 5-day-a-week commute to downtown Salt Lake during the "luge" days of the I-15 reconstruction prior to the 2002 Winter Olympics. The first snowy day, I went crawling back to InsurQuote to see if they had any open positions. I HATED that commute.
• InsurQuote - They took me back and I worked on a couple of different teams, eventually interviewing for and accepting an offer on the coveted "Research and Development" team. At least, that's what I thought. Due to some very poor communication, I wasn't told that the R&D team couldn't afford to pay me what I was already making, so I left the old team, set up with the new team, and then a few days later, when the mistake came to light, I ended up back on my old team. Angry and disgruntled, I started interviewing at other companies right away.
• Dentrix Dental Systems - I was hired to work on a product called "EasyDental," which was a cheaper, watered-down version of their main product. I basically ported changes from one code base to another. I didn't really feel creative, so I asked if I could transfer to another team. Due to some strange HR policies, I couldn't transfer until I had been in my current position for a year. I ended up transferring to another job at a different company.
• Campus Pipeline - A friend from InsurQuote recruited me to come to Campus Pipeline. This was an incredibly fun company to work for. They had a miniature golf course all over the office, they had video games, ping pong, and Foosball in the break room. If you stayed after 5pm, they brought in dinner. It was a high energy start-up company that was a lot of fun. They also gave me stock options and really hyped that. I was commuting to downtown Salt Lake again though, which stunk. Fortunately, they opened an office in Orem a few months later. Unfortunately, my friend left to go to another company not long after the Orem office opened.
• PageLaunch.com - The same friend that recruited me to work at Campus Pipeline recruited me again to come work with him at PageLaunch.com. This was also an incredibly fun place to work, but for completely different reasons. We used free software (LAMP-Linux, Apache, MySql, and Php) to create a lot of software in a very short time. It was great until decisions based much more on emotion than on business sense caused the people I most enjoyed working with to no longer be employed. When I found other work and left the company a couple of weeks later, the company went under because nobody that had created any of the code or understood how it worked was left to continue.
• NACT Telecommunications - When I left PageLaunch, I had two different offers from two different companies. I accepted the offer from NACT over the other offer because I was sick of the .com boom/bust, and wanted some stability. NACT had been in business for 10 years and profitable for more than 7 of those years. Yet only a few weeks after I started working there, my boss started telling us that our next release (which was still vaporware) needed to be out in a few months or the company would let us all go and buy software that already existed. This made me nervous enough to again, look for work. This was during my FINAL semester at Utah Valley State College, so I could start qualifying for some better jobs that required a 4-year degree.
• Symantec Corp/Altiris/Symantec Corp - I worked on a team that supported a security contract for the Navy/Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI). We were a team that was distributed all over the country, and had quarterly team meetings in fun places like Key West. Five years later, Symantec closed my office, so I found another job at Altiris that was then purchased by Symantec a few months later. Symantec, with its stock options, Employee Stock Purchase Plan, and stellar benefits package was very very good to us.
• Utah Valley State College/Utah Valley University - While at Symantec, I started teaching Developmental Math classes and really loved it. I missed teaching, and I still wish I could make a decent living at it. I'm still teaching there today.
• LDS Church - A friend recruited me to work at the LDS Church. I loved working for the LDS Church. I mostly worked on an application for people to apply for roles in movies produced at LDS Motion Picture Studios in Provo. I was a contractor though, not a full-time church employee. Due to some mix-ups with my contract renewal, I started to feel some job instability.
• Ancestry.com - This is where I work today! I interviewed here when my contract renewal was still uncertain and they made me an offer that I couldn't refuse! I work for the team that develops and maintains pretty much everything under the "Search" tab on ancestry.com.

And that's it. I've worked at a lot of jobs. I job hopped for a while, but it's been a good career so far and I still really love what I do.

Older son is filling out college applications. Yes, really. I somehow became old enough to have a son that is old enough to be getting ready for college in the fall.

It is strange that he is doing all of these things that I so vividly remember doing. It doesn't seem like it has been THAT long ago, but apparently has been, because since then, I have finished college, married, had him, and watched him grow up.

As strange as it is though, it's an exciting thing. This will begin a period of intense growth in his life, and it will be fun to see how he grows and changes over the next few years. It will be fun to see the adult that he becomes and the great things that he will do with his life.

Yes there are sudden moments of panic that I feel as I feel that life is passing by altogether too quickly. I'm not really ready for this phase of my life to end, yet I know that I really have no choice in the matter.

If, next time you see me, I look distracted or in a panic, you'll know why. My son is college bound, and before I know it, they'll be fitting me for bifocals and maybe even a cane or a walker.