Best Laid Plans

You wrote:

Interesting, may I ask why you are glad that you did? Maybe God intended something else for you but you used your will to thwart his plans? The point I am making is along the lines of the best made plans of man go astray -- perhaps we should not try to bend something to our will? Who knows, perhaps you and/or the Mrs would have met someone else (or not) and have been even happier? Isn't intent potentially a doubled-edged sword?

I was operating from a broader framework of Biblical understanding -- and this was before I was a professing Christian. As you know, I was divorced once before. One of the things I carried into my second marriage from the wreckage of my first was the notion that marriage is more than a convenient relationship between two people. I hadn't yet come to the understanding of it being a convenant made before God, with God. But I did have a sense -- divine insight? -- that if I were to marry Lisa that I had to first consider very carefully the gravity of the commitment. I really did do some soul searching prior to marrying her.

During our period of trouble, there were many places where I could easily have walked away and been perfectly justified in doing so. But again and again I kept coming back to a vague sense of commitment, and I don't mean to use that word in a way that conveys merely obligation. Had you asked me at that time, I wouldn't have been able to tie it directly to the notion of a convenental relationship between me, Lisa and the Lord. But perhaps that's what was given me to get us through that patch so we can be where we are now.

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I took no offense to your comment about presentations. :-)

I've been thinking about my presentation style, and what I do relative to what the consultant guy the other day was talking about. I use humor, but never the "here's a joke" variety, and never to start the presentation. That's way, way too risky -- and particularly so for someone who's nervous to begin with. (Which is why I feel the consultant guy's pitch was overplaying the humor angle too much.) There is nothing worse that a failed joke, and it'll suck the lifeblood out of a speaker. The pros can shake it off, but a newbie will be rattled to the bones. Better, I think, to avoid that until the person has come to figure out what humor they can deliver comfortably.

For me, that's a measured dose of self-deprecating humor. For example, I will admit to embarrassing techncial mistakes I've done -- spending two days debugging a problem that turned out to be something really simple and trivial. But even that I measure out carefully. I sometimes crack small jokes about some shortcoming of the IBM product, but it's always about some trivial, peripheral thing ... never a core element of the product. I never joke about Microsoft or other competitors -- too risky.

The better advice for newbie presenters would be, I think, to err on the side of gracious humility. Don't try to be a rock star; don't try to be a funny-man. Just be sincere and helpful. It's a hard-hearted person who rejects that from a person.

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I can't for the life of me regain my sleep patterns after being in China for a week. Ever since coming back I've been waking up at midnight and not being able to get back to sleep. Tonight was the same story -- asleep at 10:30pm ... awake at 1:00am and now it's 4:30 and I'm still up.

When you come to the U.S. for an extended stay -- one week or so -- and then go back east to the U.K, do you have trouble re-adjusting?