The arvo then consisted of some serious planning for Friday. We have finally received an engagement document that we need to present to our team of account executives about our new job direction and stuff for this fin year. And because these guys are all pretty new, I have started to work on a schedule of wireless data training that I’d like to roll out over the next few weeks. It will be a whole new thing for me I think… but I am looking forward to it all.

I’m round at Debbie’s tonight… had some very nice beef with hokkien noodles for dinner, and now Debbie is having lots of fun playing games on my iPhone. I’m looking forward to having a go at jailbreaking my iPhone when I get home actually. There’s already some apps out there that assist the phone in becoming a tethered modem - quite cool.

As I sat down on Mum and Dad’s couch this evening, I opened it, punched in my details, and was getting quite excited about how amazingly simple, elegant and quick it was.

I typed in my blog address, and the admin username and password. And voila, that was all that needed to be done for a self-hosting WordPress blog. Amazing. Once open, there was a list of my latest 30 posts, and I could just click on one to read it, and then simply tapping on the text brought up the keyboard for me to edit.

All was going brilliantly… it was very impressive indeed! However, as soon as I tried to save any edits, the app just crashed. Sad. It does auto-save all your progress though, which adds to the impressiveness… but that is fairly useless when I can’t actually save anything that I type.

I’m sure an update will arrive very soon.

But as I sat here trying to think about the year gone by, and write down all my work acheivements in time for my yearly review, one song really stood out…

There are times I stumble and I’m up against the wall.
I can’t walk through this life on my own,
Holding on to nothing and searching for more.
I don’t need anything else in this world.

I feel stronger in your presence and safe in Your hands.
Even though I’m oceans away, I’ll take the life you’ve given me,
And I’ll live it again.
It’s grace that defines who I am.

You say that you love me always and forever.
You say that you love me. I know I will never,
Deserve all the love that you show;
It’s the light that is guiding me home.

I’m finding my way back to your shores,
With safety and shelter from the storms.
It’s here that you’re waiting for me,
With another chance to say that you love me,
Always and forever.
[Kutless - Guiding Me Home]

Yesterday was quite an interesting day. There wasn’t too many emails to get through, but there was a lot to get my head around. Last week, it seems there was quite a bit of talk about sales targets for 08/09, our sales commission incentive plan, and just general job role talk for this fin year. So it was a bit overwhelming at times.

Suffice to say, my job role for this year is almost that job I’ve always wanted - just focused on mobile and wireless data, and moving away from call rates and handsets and basic stuff like that. Unfortuantely, the job I’ve always wanted involved me being a support for things like that, and not having a sales focus. But alas, I will have targets and will need to sell :) Still, it’s pretty tops.

I was all excited about getting home last night and cooking an awesome pasta bake. I felt like pasta bake on Sunday, and Debbie suggested I cook it on Monday night for dinner. So off I went to Woolies to fill my basket with all sorts of things that would make my pasta bake awesome: chicken, prawns, broccolini, mushrooms. And I put it all in a baking dish and into the oven in went. Unfortunately, cos I had so much stuff in it, there wasn’t quite enough liquid to make sure that everything was covered - so some of the pasta was exposed. So consequently, 20 mins into the cooking, the top layer of pasta was badly burnt and I had to throw it out. But once I removed all that, it worked better, and it still turned out pretty nicely. But lesson learnt - when making a pasta bake, make sure the sauce/water covers the stuff completely.

Upgraded my site to WP 2.6 this evening. There’s a couple of cool additions… but nothing substantially awesome. The 2.5 update was the best in my mind - the admin interface was nearly perfect after that upgrade.

But sadly, the WP dashboard don’t work on the iPhone Safari. I’ve been searching for a nice iPhone app or WP plugin to make that happen. I think the answer is definitely here in the WordPress for iPhone app - a native app for the iPhone which you just configure with your blog details. Very cool. But sadly, not released as of yet.

In the meantime, I’ve found WPhone - a WordPress plugin that you install on your server, and then activate. Once activated, when you login from your iPhone, you can just check a box that activates a very cutdown version of the admin pages, and actually works pretty well. I like it so far.

edit: while playing around with WordPress things, I thought a new theme would be fun too. Just need to work out why Twitter isn’t working anymore.

And since I’ve done all that nerdiness tonight, I’m going to have some fun with a meme. It has been a while. Some of the questions are a bit stupid, but still fun.

a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page of search results, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into FD’s mosaic maker.

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favourite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favourite colour?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favourite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favourite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name.

meme

I’m still very tired though. Slept when I got home, then Debbie cooked me some dinner, which was awesome. And then had a normal night’s sleep. But I came round here to Deb’s place this morn, and proceeded to have another hour long nap.

Lunch time now, then it will be off to Luke & Elise’s engagement party, which should be fun. And then back to Toon town for a celebratory dinner; to celebrate 3 years of some awesome growth in the church. And I’m not actually doing anything - will just be sitting back, enjoying friends, enjoying the food, enjoying Miss Eliza Magill singing, and then it will be home to sleep.

On Friday evening, I bought myself a gorgeous iPhone on Optus. My goodness is it elegant. Better than I ever could have imagined I think. I only had to wait until about 11:30am on Saturday morning for my number to port across - which is pretty impressive considering the huge amount of mobile network activity across all carriers on Friday. Boy, did the iPhone launch cause some awesome systems failures in Telstra - worse than I’ve ever seen before in my 4 years of working there.

Anyway, all was good. The battery seemed to diminish qute quickly, but I was connected to wifi for several hours, so I shouldn’t complain.

But Saturday night, something started to go a little bad. It looked like my iPhone was taking ages to charge. After leaving it for a while, it seemed as though it just wasn’t charging over 10% before stopping charging. It’d then start charging again when it was almost empty. That was sad. And then last night, it just seems to not be charging at all… even though it has the little lightning bolt icon.

So here I am at the Apple Store, hoping that I will find my hero, and they will fix, or give me a new iPhone :)

Oh yeah… that camp that I’m running.

It’s awesome really. Things started off tough for me. It seemed to just take me quite a while to “be there” as far as mindset goes. It was a very though Saturday night and Sunday morning. But Sunday over lunch, I began thinking program, and started to feel like things were ok, and started to find my place and feel content.

What was cool was that as Sunday went on, I began to realise that the team of leaders this year is nothing short of awesome. I think I’d unknowingly “outsourced” more activities to them to run than ever before, and in the lead up to this week, I realised that and I think that might’ve made me a bit more anxious than previous years. But like I said, as Sunday went on, I realised these guys are fantastic, and they’ve taken the activities and really run with them. So much so that I was not at all worried about not being there this morning… it’s well and truly under control.

Big Brother axed for 2009.

Nice work. Pity it took them 6 seasons or whatever to work out it’s crap though.

Kedron is drawing nearer, and I begin to start second guessing myself a little and just wondering if I’ve done everything I need to and if everything’s organised. Even though I know it all is under control, I can’t help but get a little nervous and anxious. I was talking to Melinda (the overall camp director) last night, and sharing with her how I just can’t wait to actually get to Kedron and get into it. Once I’m there, that’s all I’m focused on. No outside world distractions - no work, no wedding prep (even though I love doing that, Debbie!) - just 100% camp. And whatever happens, happens. I can deal with it on the fly. I love that.

It feels like I’ve almost been debriefing camp in my head before it’s even begun. Perhaps I’ve actually just been debriefing the “prep” section in my head. Cos it hasn’t really been a pretty one this year. It’s been a lot of adjustment and been very different. I guess the obvious one of being engaged and having something else as a priority in my life, but the other difference and adjusting has been having the two separate parts of camp - teen (years 7-9) and senior high (years 10-12). I guess it was always inevitable that the other program director and myself would clash a bit and see things differently… but I don’t think either of us thought about that until just recently.

It will be a very interesting debrief time after camp as both of us program directors, and Melinda and Julius, the overall directors, sit down and talk about the new ground that was covered. It will be good to talk through what we all found hard about having two, sometimes very separate, camps running concurrently; but also what we found awesome - cos I don’t doubt that this is an awesome thing.

It’s always just hard being part of a pilot or trying something so new and different like this. You aren’t lucky enough to have knowledge and experience of previous years and camps. And you don’t get to sit back and learn from other mistakes from before - cos you’re the one making the mistakes for the first time!

It’s been ultra-challenging for me. But I don’t think it’s over.

I sat back last night and wondered if I want to do this all over again next year. And then I wondered why in the world I was thinking that. Yeah, it’s been the hardest year for me, for sure. But why the heck should I run away from Kedron cos I had a hard year? That’s a bit stupid I reckon.

It’ll be cool to look at it all from a distance in a few months though.

edit: one thing that is making me anxious is Howie coming up to camp to run a tear game. It’s awesome he’s coming - he does all the work while I get to go and have a nap… but I am worried about how much he’s going to offend people and whether they might send him away before he’s even finished the game.

Oh dear.

“Most classical musicians couldn’t improvise a fart at a Hungarian wedding.”
[Simon Tedeschi talking about his love of improvised Jazz.]

“Tomorrow is Kevin Bacon’s birthday. He will be celebraing with his friends Kevin Eggs and Kevin Fried Tomato.”
[Paul McDermott - GNW on Monday night.]