Author: David Liddle

I grew up in Media, Pennsylvania, close to Philadelphia. I graduated from The Citadel in 1994. In 1995, I joined Wycliffe Bible Translators and have served in Africa, the United States, and Germany. Katherine and I were married in November 1998.

Irons in the fire

Today I gave a pilot presentation of our impending email change to my own department. It was good to have a rehearsal for the similar talks we’re planning for the rest of the people who work on our campus. Rather than deliver this major news to one large group, I hope to work with small groups to pass on information that could be somewhat overwhelming to people.

I think my little seminar was well received. No one tried to kill or maul me.

For a lot of the Wycliffe members I serve here in Dallas, this change in email is going to necessitate a major shift in thinking and practice. Much of the work of Bible translation is progressing through email messages that flow constantly around the world. Any disruption to what is now a familiar daily exercise is bound to cause anxiety.

I don’t need the Counseling department breathing down my neck because I’ve given them more clients than they can handle. But after today, I think I can prevent the stampede.

At the same time, I am also working on a major overhaul of our helpdesk system. Have you ever submitted something to a support website? Ugh, even the terminology sends me reeling! “Request”, “ticket”, or “incident”? “Helpdesk”, or “support”? “User”, or “customer”?

When we first put this system together, the handful of us working on it looked at things almost exclusively from a geek’s perspective. It’s easy to see that now. And even while those 1,000 mailboxes occupy some part of my mind, other parts are bent on making our helpdesk “user-centric”. The whiteboard in my office is losing its white-ness to all the ideas I’m putting on it.

These days, Bible translation needs technology in order to work smarter and faster. When it doesn’t work, I want the people involved to have their problems resolved as quickly as possible. A smoothly functioning helpdesk can help make that happen.

In the week ahead, please pray that the Lord, my King, would give me the wisdom, patience, and perseverance I need to bring glory to Him through these projects. Hmm … even now, Psalm 46:10 comes to my mind. Did you pray before I hit the “Publish” button?

“The Clone Wars … begun they have.”

That’s what Yoda, the Jedi master, says at the end of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, after the Republic’s newly-acquired clone army arrives to deliver a contingent of Jedi knights from destruction by the droid army of the Separatists. It’s an ominous premonition of what is to come.

If you haven’t seen that movie, it’s OK — I’m not really trying to fill you in on the plot. It’s just that Yoda’s statement came to mind today.

This morning, my Wycliffe colleagues in North Carolina successfully upgraded the email system that many of us will change to over the course of the next year or so. It’s the one that most Wycliffe members around the world have been using for years, but now it’s robust enough to handle the additional traffic that nearly all of us will throw at it. You can’t begin to imagine how much Bible translation relies on email. It’s a staggering realization for me sometimes.

So I thought about what Yoda said, and in our situation I interpreted it as, “Something big has just happened, and we’re going to have a lot of hard work to do as a result of it.” You see, in Dallas, we’re responsible for more than 1,000 email accounts. Some of those aren’t actually in use, but most of them will need to be moved to the new system. I have six people on my team, including myself, to do that work — which is in addition to our regular workload. If you’re a believer in Christ, you can correctly interpret that as a prayer request.

In the end — when the work is done — the change will be a good one. Our people around the world will be able to communicate and collaborate better — and at a lower cost. The result won’t be similar at all to the one Yoda would face in that story. Friend, thank you for praying me through this time!

Is Microsoft getting it right this time?

This weekend, I downloaded the Windows 7 Beta DVD to my work computer so that I could set it up and test it out. I created a “virtual machine” today on the MacBook I’m using in the office and installed this successor to Windows Vista. I’ve been hoping for a while now that the successor would actually be successful.

So far, I’m finding those hopes fulfilled. I haven’t been annoyed by ridiculous security pop-ups (as opposed to wise security pop-ups), and the changes to what you see on the Desktop and in the Start Menu are good ones. It’s been easier to make customizations to themes and menus. For example, you don’t have to dig to China in order to change the behavior of the Power button in the Start Menu.

One interesting discovery is that the beta doesn’t come with an email program as Windows Vista and its predecessors do – you know, Outlook Express and its alter ego in Vista, Windows Mail. You have to download Windows Live Mail, Messenger, and other programs from the Internet. This change would partially satisfy the European anti-trust regulators – Windows Media Player is still there from the start, as is Internet Explorer.

My initial experience is good, so far, and I hope to dig a little deeper as time goes on so that I know what to expect when the real thing comes out. The people I support here will want both advice and help. If my experience can help you make decisions about your own computer, then that counts as a good thing, too.