Tom Squared

I just got the following e-mail form one of the teens who left youth group a couple years ago because their family moved.  She said this: I bet you don't even remember me. Since getting in loads of trouble a few years back, I have made a complete turnaround.  I graduated from high school near the top of my class, and am now on a scholarship to the University of Florida. I wanted to tell you how much of an influence you have made on me, you sorta inspired me to pursue my nursing degree. I am working now part time for goodwill, and I have a 4.0 gpa in college.   Well thanks for everything, and I hope to hear from you soon. Interestingly, I remember this girl very well, but I never had a whole lot of interaction with her beyond youth group meetings.  Even at those meetings we never had many chances to talk one-on-one, but I've always been nervous about how her life is heading.  To know that my life has made this kind of impact, even indirectly, is...

Merry Christmas to all.  I hope it's a holiday filled with love. Peace, +Tom Photo by Rachel and Tom

Rachel, Colin, daddy and mommy were in daddy's van driving to school.  While they were driving down the road Rachel chatted with Colin while he looked out the window as the world passed by.  Rachel started looking out of her own window to see what was so interesting. While she was looking out the window Rachel saw something white fly past the car.  She kept looking and the white streak slowed down and came right up along side the car. "Look mommy, an angel!" Rachel called out. As soon as she called out, the car began to lift off of the ground. Daddy looked out the window and saw that there were four angels, one for each of them in the car.  Each person had their own angel.  One was holding the car beside Rachel, another holding the car beside Colin.  There was another one holding up the front of the car and another holding the back.  The angel's wings beat powerfully in the air as the van rose higher and higher into the sky. They c...

I came across this video looking for loops for our Christmas pageant.  The video is great, and worth watching through.  I have to be impressed that while they sell the video to show in church, they've also made it open for anyone to view on YouTube.  Seems like a great idea to get the video seen by as many people as possible and encourage you to buy it to share. Peace, +Tom

I've been reading Marcus Buckingham's Now Discover Your Strengths book and preparing for a bible study on it in January.  One of the key points here is to find your innate talents, those things you're really good at, and grow them. I'm in the middle of a chapter where he's talking about some ways to identify your talents.  From yearnings you've had all your life to rapid learning where some switch flips and you recognize your talent to satisfaction where you recognize your talent as something you are satisfied doing.  While purchasing the book gives you access to the strengths finder quiz to help you identify your talents and strengths, something clicked in my head to help recognize some of those yearnings and satisfactions, what answers do you gravitate toward? A month or so ago I joined answers.yahoo.com and askville.amazon.com .  They are both sites where you and pose a question for the community to answer.  I personally prefer Yahoo Answers right n...

While surfing Flickr for the photo in my previous post, I came across some others which I can't help but share.  The first is this one on the right of Jesus, the caption, "Jesus shopping for a nail puller..."  Come on, that has got to make you smile.  there are some other interesting photos by Professional Recreationalist worth checking out. Then I came across this next image. With the title " I Hurt Myself Today ." Poking around a little more I came across this picture, which is downright hard to look at and made me stop, think, and pray for a bit. The description for these photos does a better job than I could. ...we had a little chat. She wasn't too keen on her family seeing her like this. The local TV crews have been sneaking up on the street community, trying to get candid shots - but it's pissing off the street community and making my job harder. Voyeurs and Rubber Neckers - reporting the news - for profit. She likes photog...

With the coming of Winter, and dry-weather season, my fingers become a mess. My cuticles get dry, cracked and hurting and my nails seem to be more brittle or crack more easily.  In the end, my fingers becomes something I don't really want to be showing off to people I've just met and work clients (I'm anal about appearances, who knew?  Well, besides my friend Taylor).  A couple years back I found out that going to a nail salon every two weeks to a month heals up my fingers and feels great.  Of course, I've been letting that slide quite a bit lately, and my fingers are again hurting a bit.  Unfortunately, I don't have much time now to go get my nails done, which takes about 30 to 45 minutes, and I began thinking about how I could probably take the time during lunch some day at work.  Except . . .  There aren't any nail salons within walking distance of work. I have to think that a traveling nail salon would make a ton of business.  Call it som...

Last Sunday our priest talked about something, I don't remember what.  But one example he gave was his water bill for the last quarter.  It was ridiculously high, especially given that he observed a water conservation ban in October ($490).  That's a lot of clean drinking water that other people even somewhat nearby in other states don't have to drink and survive.  He then mentioned one way to conserve water was through taking shorter showers and some other methods which he listed in her sermon text. Being a closet environmentalist, I tend to stay on top of the immense waste humans, and especially Americans, produce.  Water has been high on my list for a long time, and, as weird as it sounds, the fresh water we use is not reused, so we have a limited amount.  I wanted to throw out some ways we waster water which I think very few people recognize. Toilets The Earth Day Network noted that a low-flush toilet uses 5 gallons less water per flush than a r...

I'm in a reviewing/evangelism mood, so I thought I'd mention another program which is so much a part of my daily life I could barely get by without it.  I finally got tired of having to enter my Web passwords into both IE and Firefox, and decided to try out some password management software. While there are a couple of different open source (free) tools out there, none have been as easy to use or have as many options as Siber's RoboForm .  It's been so good we've gotten licenses for my wife and mother-in-law.  Neither of them think they can ever go back to entering passwords, and Erin's mom felt almost helpless when she got a new computer and didn't have her passwords remembered. Essentially RoboForm sits in your Web browser and in your task tray, near the clock.  It remembers all of your passwords, letting you pick one secure password to encrypt all of your information.  It even remembers your windows passwords in most cases.  Whenever you sign-up for...

Every now and then I come across a program that becomes so ingrained in my daily work that I hardly know how I'd get by without it.  I'll probably break down a couple over the next few days, but for database work, I have never found anything as good as Red Gate's SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare .  Essentially these tools let you compare two SQL Server databases (all objects, users, permissions, functions, diagrams, anything) and update changes to whichever database you want.  This is amazingly useful for deploying database changes to a test or production environment (do it to production with ridiculous care, even though it will generate a SQL Script for you and run all updates in one transaction), and making sure everything is synchronized. For releases we can just generate the compare script, confirm that the changes match the updates we want to go out, and store it all in one place with the release details.  This is true for both the structure and the d...