My Thought Spot

And a Happy Christmas to you!

Thanksgiving

We had a good Thanksgiving meal with a cousin who lives in the area. I am 15 years older than he is and his parents had moved away from the rest of the family when he was born. This cousin and I have only been together fewer than 10 times in our lives. It was kinda funny since we are cousins but don’t really know each other. But, since there are no introverts on my dad’s side of the family, we didn’t feel like strangers.

House

We got moved into our house. I think we are closing in on 3 weeks here. Most of the boxes upstairs are unpacked. It looks like we are settling in. That is, until you check out the piles of unopened boxes downstairs. There is still plenty of work to do.

Furniture

We had a friend over to the house a couple of weeks ago for supper. We only owned 2 chairs at the time (actually, they are borrowed from the office). Thankfully we have a couple of 5-gallon buckets and short trash cans to sit on. That is what we boys used while the girls used the real chairs.

When we were with my cousin for Thanksgiving dinner he gave us 4 dining-room table chairs. We let our most recent lunch guests sit in real chairs. Fancy.

While driving to the library on Saturday we saw some furniture sticking out of a dumpster. Not wanting to pass up a potentially good deal we had to check it out. We pulled enough parts out to scab together a recliner and threw it into the trunk of the car. With a few screws, a hammer and some ingenuity I was able to get a very comfortable recliner out of the deal.

It’s not pretty, but it’s functional.

Upcoming

Our daughter reminds us each morning how many days are left until my birthday. She knows that Christmas can’t come until my birthday is here. She isn’t sure how many days after my birthday that Christmas will come (10 days), but she does know it is a formality that has to be dealt with. [This ends your yearly subtle reminder that you still have time to buy me something. I don't mind if it arrives late.]

There are lots of Christmas activities coming up in the church. I get to speak at one of the Christmas gatherings next week. I am looking forward to it.

We will be home most of this month and the next. It is a great time to get settled in before we begin traveling in February.

Whatcha Getting for Christmas?

We got a new house. Top that!

A church we were in last month gave my wife a gift card for Target. She bought a Kindle. I got a “new” recliner. We bought a machete for our son so he can mow the lawn. He doesn’t seem that excited about it. Maybe we will get him a pair of scissors for Christmas so he can trim the bushes. Our daughter found 2 new friends up the street. We have all had a profitable December so far.

We enjoy traveling and feel like we are coming back to our roots with our move back to the US. We have been back for 3 months and have done a little traveling, but now things are really starting to ramp up. This week we are on a trip that is so reminiscent of our travels from 1994 to 2004.

Start Your Engines

We left home on Thursday and traveled up to visit some missionary friends in Indianapolis. Technically we were working since I am their director at the mission board. However, we enjoy spending time with them and hardly feel like it is work to visit them and talk for several hours.

After meeting with them we moved on to my brother’s house where our kids played together and the adults snuck off and played board games. My brother taught a CPR class I was able to attend and where I got re-certified. If you need my services to beat on your chest I would recommend you try to book me early since I am trying to stay booked 6 months or more in advance.

We stayed with my brother for two nights and moved on to Ohio where we had a Sunday morning meeting in the church of one of my college roommates. He has been pastor of this church for about 10 years. It was good to see him and his family again.

Hang On

Between church Sunday morning and Sunday night we moved to a different city in Ohio where I spoke briefly in a church and stayed overnight before moving to another part of Ohio.

We stayed two nights near Toledo and then scooted over to Syracuse, NY. The church I taught in on Wednesday night is one which has been a friend to us for many years. The deaf group was excited to have us there and we enjoyed renewing acquaintances.

After a brief night in Syracuse we moved over to Massachusetts. We are staying two nights here without any meetings. This is a staging spot for our next meeting starting in New Hampshire tomorrow night (Saturday). We will be in New Hampshire at a church mission conference for a week.

Finish Strong

After the conference we will head to Maryland to preach in a church that we have never been in before. However, the pastor is a man we met when he was in Massachusetts. While we are there we will discuss the possibility of helping them get a deaf ministry established.

The next Monday we start a 3-day meeting in Tennessee near where we live. It is a meeting that our mission board organizes which gives pastors and missionaries a chance to meet and work on booking meetings.

The Back Story

We were supposed to close on a house the day before we left on this trip. Since the paperwork was not done we needed to have someone else take care of the documents for us. Though they could be overnighted to us, we weren’t sure where we would be when the papers were ready. Therefore, we gave power of attorney to my parents and they signed the papers yesterday. Today the former owners signed their part of the paperwork and we are officially home owners again. But, we won’t move in for another 2 weeks since we are traveling.

This has been a fun trip in that it brings back so many memories. For our children it will take some getting used to. This is a big transition from our ministry in Argentina where we didn’t even have a car to go across town, much less across the eastern part of the whole country.

If you are looking to go paperless in your home or corporate office the book Take Control of Your Paperless Office by Joe Kissell can provide you an outline of what you need to consider in the process. It gives specific recommendations for equipment and workflow. However, if you are not fully ensconced in the Mac environment, some of the recommendations will not be that helpful. Even though the cover gives no indication of this, the book is heavily weighted towards Mac users. This does not mean that Windows and Linux users won’t benefit from the book, but they will need to find their own set of software tools since the other platforms are covered very lightly.

Several pages in the book are dedicated to educating the reader on why they should consider going paperless. Scanning and archiving every piece of paper that comes through your hands (and then throwing it away or shredding it) may not sound very appealing, but Mr. Kissell gives some compelling reasons why it will help you in the long run when you are trying to find specific information. Even though you won’t have the original items of many documents, you also will have fewer storage and retrieval problems. By the way, not every item needs to be shredded or tossed. The author helps you know what you should keep and what is safe to throw away.

While the software and workflow recommendations are platform specific, hardware choices are a little easier. The book explains different types of scanners and why you might choose one over another. Within the different types the author gives you a list of recommended scanners. Each one has features that can help you accomplish your scanning needs. Regardless of which specific scanner you choose there are many settings that will be the same on all of them. He tells you why you should choose the settings he recommends.

Because of the hardware choices and settings recommendations this book is helpful for anyone wanting to decrease their dependence on paper. But, it would have been better had the author provided more information for the other operating systems.

For many of us, we would feel overwhelmed at even getting started. After he tells you how to set up your software, hardware and workflow, the author gives some tips for catching up on the 20 year’s worth of paper you already have piled in your office.

The majority of the book deals with scanning documents then filing them locally and off-site. However, there are many other ways to go paperless. The book deals with sending and receiving faxes via email, signing documents digitally and how to cut down on your need to print as much.

This is certainly not a book for casual reading. I would only recommend this if you are serious about cutting down your dependence on paper. If you are only interested in learning how to effectively scan a few documents, this book probably goes into much more detail than what you need.

I read version 1.1 of the book on my Kindle. Like many reference books, the Kindle is probably not the best device to read on. If you find yourself needing to jump back 8 pages to get a snippet of information then it is pretty frustrating. Was it really 8 pages? Or was it 6? Or 10? The nice thing about the ebook is that you don’t have to read it on just one platform. The publishers let you download various formats once you buy the book.

[Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book through O’Reilly Media.]

While we are not in Kentucky or West Virginia, we are close enough that we can go barefooted all the time. We completed the move to East Tennessee last week. We moved up here to be closer to our mission board office where I will be working as our home base.

Since we got here last week we have looked at several houses to potentially buy. There is one that has stood out. The price is a little high, but there are a couple of problems with the house and sellers that may drive the price down significantly. The house is within the area we want to live and has all the amenities we wanted. We just can’t pay the asking price.

That may be a moot point as we found out last night that foreclosure proceedings have already started. That means they can’t sell it at any price at this point. We will have to deal with the bank unless a couple of big hurdles get knocked over.

While it sounds like a mess, it really is a position I like to be in. The decision is not ours at this point. The bank has to process the house and deal with it in one of a couple of different ways. It depends on how everything falls together over the next three weeks that will determine if we can buy the house. If it doesn’t go in our favor, then we will take it as a sign that this was not the house for us.

While looking for a house to buy, we have a friend in the church who is letting us rent his house for a reasonable price without any obligations. If we stay a year, that is fine. If we move out next week, that is acceptable as well.

We won’t be doing our normal traveling until the end of October. We will be in town over the next few weeks to deal with everything that is necessary with buying a house.

Exciting times!

I have a wonderful program that I use to secure certain applications on my Android phone from prying eyes. It is called App Lock. It is a simple screen that comes up prompting for a passcode when trying to access certain applications. I like this for the simple fact that I can secure some programs without locking down the whole phone.

Up until this morning the App Lock app had worked without any problems. But today I turned on the Accessibility features of my Android phone to play with a new keyboard. When the Accessibility screen comes on it puts a layer over the bottom half of the screen which lets you navigate the device with gestures. In doing so, when I tried to go back to the settings in my phone to turn off the Accessibility option, I could no longer press the numbers on the number pad. For some reason the passcode screen would not move up from behind the gesture screen to allow me to put in the numbers.

I thought that I was locked out of my phone and would have to somehow wipe the system and start over. That was not a prospect I was looking forward to.

In my research to find a solution I came across a security flaw in the App Lock software. This is a serious flaw and I assume that the App Lock guys will work to fix the problem. Until then, maybe this will help someone else get control of their device again. I realize that bad people could get this information and use it to exploit someone’s phone. I regret that the possibility exists, but I am personally thrilled that this security bug saved me from having to rebuild my phone setup from scratch.

Here are the steps that I was able to take to get control of the device again:

• Turn on App Lock and press Protection list
• Press the Home button on your phone
• Turn App Lock back on again
• Press FAQ
• Press the back button

This will reveal your list of applications that are blocked and give you a chance to turn the block off. For me that meant that I could remove the block from my Settings menu and make the changes I needed to make. For others this means that their information isn’t as well protected as they would hope.

Obviously the makers of the App Lock software may fix the problem by the time you read this. That is a good thing…unless you are locked out of something because of turning on the Accessibility feature on your Android phone.