Working is work, Sunday is for rest!

Sunday, wonderful Sunday!
Well, that and actually getting up when the alarm goes off. If I were to sleep until the kids woke up on any day of the week, you wouldn't be seeing a journal entry here at all!

But yes, Sunday is wonderful... a truly needed day of rest. I rarely have time to volunteer for things, but I guess I do volunteer quite a number of hours every week. For one, I am a volunteer administrator for the LDS Mission Network (LDSMN), which is made up entirely of volunteers. I've been helping out in that regard since shortly after I moved to Bellflower, CA which came as a result of being laid off just before September 11, 2001 and just after the dotcom boom was coming to an end. I hope I never need to work for a company that doesn't make money again! We still lived in UT when September 11 happened, and any job leads I had at that time became very unsure. So, I spent my birthday that year packing up our house. I was given a great job lead where a position was to be created for me with Experian in Orange, CA. We were sick of no job for three months and felt inspired to move to California, where my wife grew up. We moved in temporarily with my wife's grandma as I went to two interviews and drug testing with Experian, but then they laid people off, and the department couldn't create any jobs.

With the free time I had (besides looking for a job), I turned up the heat on the development of the Mission Alumni/ae Site that I had been handling since just after my return home from a 2 year church mission to Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, Brazil. As usual, I had grand schemes, and finally a chance to actually do what I had planned with the free time. My website was already listed on mission.net but it was sorely outdated. I soon discovered that mission.net had some tools to help me out as a Web Developer of a mission alumni website, and their Site-In-a-Box (SIB) product looked like it would save me a lot of work. Before I discovered SIB, one of my grand schemes was to allow people who came to my site to be able to vote in polls. I thought it would be extremely useful. I asked the developer of SIB what it would take to get a poll feature added, and he said something like: "Go right ahead". Well, I hadn't any experience with php. Until that time I had been a Java/JSP developer with some Perl experience. They didn't teach you PHP as part of the Bachelors Computer Science at Weber State University I taught myself PHP at the same time that I developed the Poll Module for SIB based on the open source phpPolls written by Till Gerken.

Soon, I was recruited to be part of the SIB development team, which led to volunteering as a Mission.net Administrator. I continued interviewing for another three months around Los Angeles until I was hired by eDirect Publishing, where I've been ever since. So, given a little free time, I slated off portions of my time for the next 4 years to date and unseen years into the future.

By the way, regarding eDirect Publishing. Don't judge the company by the website. We are a small (but profitable!!!) company and we've never had the chance to update it in the time that I've worked there. I completed a new look for the site, but the content is yet to come, so we haven't converted over to the new look yet. We've got numerous great products and services under development, and it doesn't look like we'll have free time anytime soon.

Time is the great evader, the giver and robber of opportunity, and the promised land waiting to be conquered.

-- Daniel Gibby
(I just made that up, so don't forget to quote me.)

So you can now partially understand why I say "As if I have Time". Stay tuned to find out more.
For now, I need to do some volunteer Sunday "work" helping transfer a mission website to a new maintainer. Then I'll continue work developing the SIB Mailer digest.

Next Sunday I'll tell you what is so restful about a different kind of work.