Personal

Persuasion, Correction, and Righteous Influence; a How To

The following is an excerpt from a post to the MormonVeg email list that I helped moderate several years ago. After a major upheaval over post topics, conflicting opinions, and accusations of apostasy (in both directions), I wrote a studied response which really summed up my feelings about righteous influence and persuasion, while respecting an individual's agency.

Originally posted Mon Apr 22, 2002 12:22 am, I have added some links and edited a little here and there to apply the message generally.

Managers, Meet the Maker's Schedule

How do you manage your day-to-day schedule?

A friend just pointed me to this recent post by Paul Graham, about a schedule's impact on the productivity of creative types, "makers" as he calls them.

Frugal Families Are Happy Families

One of the best outcomes of this adoption was a unified monetary policy in my family. We saved every penny before spending it. This was extremely challenging, but more rewarding than I expected. I discovered quickly that most of my stress in life relates to money (particularly with someone else spending it). But with a plan in place, stress is reduced, fear is gone, and life is simplified and happier.

Little Fingers, Big Problems; Kids and Computers

Each of my children relates to computers differently. While age plays a part, most of the differences are psychological. Some of my children are puzzlers, thinkers, explorers. Others are quickly frustrated and want others to make tech work for them. But all of them love keyboards, mice, and mischief.

Heads Up! Massive Life Changes on the Way

I'm back! After a two week vacation, I have a lot to share!

While I have avoided publishing much about my family, for privacy reasons, you need to know a few things for the next few posts to make sense. My wife and I just finished adopting two young sisters from Ethiopia. We have several biological children already, but even before we married, my wife brought up adoption as one of her life's goals. We have now finished the long, hard process and I've learned a lot.

Coping with Loss: Tales of a Garbage Can

I am bereft! I am feeling shock, anger, fear, anger, frustration, sadness, shame, and um, anger. This is very rare for me. In fact, the analytical portion of my brain is intrigued by the extent of my emotional reaction to this tragedy. You see, I may have accidentally thrown away $500 worth of library books and media.

BYU Removes YouTube Ban

BYU announced the following this morning:

YouTube is now available on the campus of Brigham Young University. Given the educational information and materials available on the video-sharing service, the University determined to make the service available on campus. The press has been following this issue quite closely, and Carrie Jenkins has released this information to them earlier this morning.

Finally, Open Development for the LDS Church!

I have been hoping that the Church would open up some of their projects to outside help. Last week, Joel Dehlin announced that the church unit websites will soon be more open to general development.

This is welcome news. It's a good step in the right direction. Next, I hope they open-source the Membership & Leadership System (MLS). That would be fantastic!

Twitterpation Emancipation

I have a Twitter account. It's relatively new; I created it in December for the DIWD conference. At first, it was enigmatic—strangely liberating in its strict limitations. But I didn't know what to do with it.

The DIWD conference illuminated one good use for it. And then the conference ended and so did my use of Twitter, for a while. When I had people listening to me, and me to them, in an immediate social environment, it made sense to have immediate "shout-outs" of public messages, thoughts and questions. But I still wasn't sure what to do with it.

Social Categorizing and Belonging

I don't think I belong to a "generation" as social scientists classify them. I live in too many worlds; shift between too many paradigms. For example, I am old enough to remember life before the Internet, before the World Wide Web & email (I started college in 1992), but young enough to use them, and their variants to their fullness. I'm old enough to have been taught how to write paper memos and young enough to have never written one, using email instead.