Life at Work – Page 16 – A Liddle Good News

“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.

Before there was Facebook

On Friday, I signed up for a Facebook account. Within hours, I connected with a best friend from high school. By this evening, I had thirty friends. Facebook is pretty addicting! I’m impressed with the site not just as an IT guy, but also as a simple, social human being — and as someone trained in social science research.

When Katherine I were on furlough back in 2000, we took a class called “Language Development”. In that class, we studied and discussed the things that influence language use and change. One of the concepts that caught my attention was that of “social networks”.

University of Michigan professor Dr. Leslie Milroy used social networking to study the use of the Irish language in that society. Once she was introduced to one Irish speaker, she established a rapport with that person and slowly worked her way through that person’s network and those of the people she met.

Dr. Milroy was able to learn a lot about “who knows who”, “who talks to who”, and “who uses what language with who”. Other important information included “how who knows who” and “how well who knows who” — are you tired of the Who’s yet? Dr. Milroy used the data she collected to paint a portrait of the Irish-speaking community she had visited, and she was able to draw conclusions about how the Irish language is used and how language change works its way through the community.

Such information is what we sought in our language surveys in Africa, and I felt that the idea might be fruitful if used among the very social African peoples. My research paper for that course focused on the ways we could employ social network theory in making decisions about Bible translation projects. Using it a village context, though, would be very different from making contacts on the Internet.

Facebook allows you to move through social networks around the world as easily as moving around your own living room. If I could add anything to it, I would add a meter that indicates how frequently you get in touch with each of your friends. The old language surveyor in me wants to add your choice of language, too (from the Ethnologue) — but that might be asking a bit much. Give it a try!