Monthly Archives: November 2006

QotD: What causes us to dream?

Instead of today’s real question of the day (on VOX), I’m going to answer/ask this one, what causes us to dream?

I ask, because last night I had an incredible vivid dream about a youth who hasn’t attended youth group in a while – in my dream she and I went out for coffee and got caught up.

Which, well, hasn’t happened. I haven’t thought about her for a few weeks… and I thought to myself when I woke up today, what caused me to have that dream? If you believe in God, could it have been God whispering to me to call her and actually do that?

I don’t know – I’d be curious what you think causes us to dream – but it kinda freaked me out. Enough that I’m going to call her this afternoon and see about coffee at some point soon.

Learnings from a sophomore

We are working slowly at Entheos towards having ‘permanent’ small groups, starting in January until the end of the school year.

On Sunday the youth met with the volunteers (everybody but me because I’m down at Apple right now) to talk about the what they liked and disliked about small groups in the past.

In Jennifer’s group, a sophomore named Kelsey who was in my small group last year mentioned that we had a great small group. Jennifer asked why and she said it’s because I let them be serious when they needed to be serious, and let them be goofy when they needed to be goofy.

This has gotten me thinking today about how to apply that to business. I believe if you are running a meeting or getting a group of people to talk about a topic, you should allow people to talk. Don’t forcefully cut things off. Allow some frivolity in your meeting before getting serious. And if it gets serious, let it. Don’t be afraid of frank and serious talk.

That’s my learning for today from a 13 year old teenager. Are there any young people in your life you can learn something from?

Update on my job at Extensis and an opening to join me

So, I’ve been meaning to write an entry on my new job at Extensis, but don’t seem to have time these days (I’m blaming the managerial finance class homework, which is killer). So, short and brief. Extensis rocks. The people here are smart, passionate about what they do, and care about customers. Very similar to Intuit, but better frankly.

My current task is working on a brand new project, where the goals are simple: made it the best Macintosh application. World class. Don’t skimp on things like appropriate animation, proper flow of the user interface, really great look and feel. Not The Delicious Generation, but what I think is really world class stuff.

It’s very very refreshing to be able to work at a company that values a proper look and feel on a Macintosh project, and is giving me the time to do it correctly.

And…. you can join the team. We have another opening for a Macintosh developer, very recently posted on Steven Franks CocoaDev Jobs board.

Here’s a link to the actual posting. If you’ve got any questions about Extensis or the position, feel free to drop me a line at lwdupont at extensis dot com.

Oh.. I’ll be down at Apple next week for some meetings, Monday through Thursday morning.