Welcome to this amazing life!

Welcome to this amazing life James Patrick Fullan! James is my great-nephew, and he took his first breath of air yesterday morning. He’s a great looking little guy, but I’ll leave the pictures to his mom and dad. Bad looking Irish folks just don’t exist.

James made the first great leap from his comfort zone yesterday when he left his small world of warmth and instantaneous problem resolution probably very much against his will. His transition was uncomfortable for him and painful for his mother, and he now has to learn to cope with varying temperature, hunger, pain and sickness. I’m sure today it doesn’t seem like a very good trade-off to him, but he didn’t have much of a choice.

As his reward for passing his first test in life though, he now gets to experience the loving comfort of his mother’s arms and the pride of his father holding up his boy for all to see. He gets to experience the gift of sight, perhaps not yet well-defined, but no matter. Every minute of his waking life will be a trip to the New World full of adventure, discovery and accomplishment. Already his journey is bringing joy and a renewed sense of community and family to those around him.

James’ father will very quickly experience a painful transition of his own as he leaves the innocence and beauty of his newborn son and heads back to war in Afghanistan. It seems the rest of the world did not care that James was born, and they continue to fight. James’ dad is a great man, and his life will provide a high bar for this boy as he grows to understand the lesson of birth: Life is a constant, unavoidable stream of change and struggle, but each challenge faced brings new experience, joy and gained understanding.

Had he been given a list of potential mothers to choose from, James could not have selected a better one. If fathers are there to push us into the fray, mothers are there to hold us together during the fight. Moms make sure that the struggles of life don’t break us, and they give us the gift of love, comfort, unwavering support … and personal hygiene. James will have a hot plate of cookies waiting for him after a hard afternoon of getting dirty in the back yard, a nurse’s healing hand on those mean owies, and a shoulder to cry on when he gets his heart broken. His mother is one of the most quality women I know.

Most importantly, James will have a Family. A Dad and a Mom with a sense of purpose and demonstrated love and devotion to their Creator. He will learn early of the Savior that will make his life eternal, and of the wisdom that will produce value in his temporal life. He will see modeled a sense of duty and sacrifice, virtue, music, industry and charity. He will be gifted with the foundation of family both immediate and extended. He will be a child of privilege in the true sense of the word.

So no pressure James Patrick, but we’re all watching you. Walk boldly into the breach, and learn your lessons well. Our world needs more great men and women like your dad and mom, and you look like a good candidate. May God bless your life, and may you be a mighty man in Him!

PS. Thanks for finally making me a great uncle!

What’s up with CNN.com’s “Ticker”?

Has anyone else noticed that CNN.com’s Ticker has an obsession with Sarah Palin and her family? I noticed this a few months ago, and started checking in on a fairly regular basis just to see if this was truly news-driven, or if someone at CNN had a Sarah Palin fetish. I believe the latter is true.

CNN claims their Ticker is “The latest political news from CNN’s Best Political Team with campaign coverage 24-8.” Apparently the best this crack team can come up with are invariably negative headlines rotating through favorite topics such as making sure everyone knows when Palin’s polls have dropped, how Bristol did on Dancing With the Stars, implying a vast right-wing conspiracy directed by Fox News, and making sure the world knows what such main-stream celebrities as Robert Redford and Tina Fay think of Palin (in case we hadn’t guessed).

Not that it really matters all that much, but perhaps CNN Political Producer Alexander Mooney should let go of his personal views and report on the rest of the 2012 candidates. Additionally, he could leave the intellectual baby-formula to TMZ and provide articles on the issues relevant to all American citizens. He could turn his obvious writing talent to creating a forum for factual, un-biased reporting on those issues, and what both the current administration and the presidential candidates are or would be doing to handle them.

Whatever you think of Sarah Palin, join me in requesting that both CNN and FOX leave behind their social engineering efforts and start reporting the facts for us to digest on our own. We are a great Nation with widely varying views of our country and world. We would appreciate respect from the media in recognizing that we can form our own opinions. We don’t need to be led to a conclusion or out-right told what to think.

The Ant and the Grasshopper – 2010

I copied the text below directly from a comment appended to an article on www.telegraph.co.uk.  The post was from a user named mike_espana.

Ant & Grasshopper (old version)

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

MORAL OF THE OLD STORY: – Be responsible for yourself! 

Ant & Grasshopper (new version)

The ant works hard in the withering heat and the rain all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving.

CBS, NBC , PBS, CNN, ABC & the BBC all show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America & Britain are stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green…’ ACORN the liberal group that advocated prostitution for minors stages a demonstration in front of the ant’s house where the news stations film the group singing ‘We shall overcome’. Then Rev. Jeremiah Wright has the group kneel down to pray for the grasshopper’s sake.

President Obama and his socialist friends from Britain condemns the ant and blames President Bush, President Reagan, Maggie Thatcher, Christopher Columbus, and the Pope for the grasshopper’s plight.

Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share. Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government Green Czar and given to the grasshopper.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his free-loading friends finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which, as you recall, just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn’t maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again.

The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and peaceful, neighborhood.

The entire Nation collapses bringing the rest of the free world with it.

MORAL OF THE STORY FOR AMERICANS : – Be careful how you vote in 2010 & 2012.

Attention to Detail

“The difference between something good and something great is attention to detail.”  – Charles Swindoll

I have this saying hanging on my office wall to remind me to put in the hard work it takes to produce something great.  Everything we produce in life from the shortest e-mail to our life’s masterpiece is the product of a string of small decisions and actions.  These minutiae may seem inconsequential in and of themselves, but they are the building blocks of the product we seek to produce.

I like to think of attention to detail as ”execution integrity”.  Integrity is typically thought of as doing the right thing in our lives even when people aren’t looking.  Integrity is really about having principles and standards in life and choosing to govern every little decision we make in life by those principles.

Attention to detail in our work is no different.  We have to develop a set of principles to work by (standards), and then discipline ourselves to apply those standards in every action we take throughout the day.  The end result will be a consistent product that does more than look good on the outside, it is truly great.

CSIA Executive Conference 2010

I first began attending CSIA Executive Conferences in 2007, three years after founding Vertech.  The content of the sessions, quality of the speakers, and the great networking have kept me coming back.  This year’s conference was the best I have attended yet for content, and I look forward to attending next year’s conference in Orlando.

The Control Systems Integrator Association (www.controlsys.org) is a professional organization dedicated to increasing the level of professionalism for control systems integrators.  The organization’s best practices and bench marks have helped Vertech improve our business, management and project execution across the board.  Vertech’s level of success today would definitely not have been possible without the information gleaned from this great organization!