Joshua Arnold

I’ve gone a while without truly sitting down to reflect. I’m a large supporter of the value found in introspection and I’ll be the first to advocate its importance – yet, somehow I still let myself go for long periods of time without doing it. I’m up nice and early on a Saturday and now I don’t really have an excuse not to take the time.

A lot has changed for me in the past couple of months or so. Two months ago I sat down and drafted a few goals that I promised myself I would make happen:

• Begin to truly define my career path
• Get into shape
• Strengthen my faith
• Strengthen my leadership skills

The past two months have been a journey of doing exactly that.

Defining my Career Path

I’m an avid supporter of Neumont (the university from which I graduated) and I began advocating to strengthen the relationship between my company and the school when I first started here. That’s not the only thing I’m constantly advocating for. Let me digress a little bit…

It’s funny. A lot of people know that I work with computers but not too many people actually know what it is that I do, ha ha. I specialize in software architecture, requirements gathering and analysis, information modeling, and software project management; just in case you were wondering .

Anyway, starting in August I began using the methodologies that I’ve seen work in all of my previous projects. I began shaping my career path and getting a good feel for where I stood within the company. I’ll tell you this much, I’ve been loving every minute of it since then.

It’s stressful at times, I won’t lie about that. One of my greatest weaknesses is that I have the tendency to make my projects my life. When you’re that adamant about the success of something, you’re bound to be ripping your hair out at some point. I began realizing that I really need something else to do with myself besides going home and working…

Getting into Shape

A little over a month ago, my roommate and I decided that we were going to get into shape. This wasn’t one of those “let’s go to the gym every once in a while” type of decisions. We showed up at a gym the next day and purchased monthly memberships and training sessions with a personal trainer. He promised us great results and assured us that we could expect to lose 8-10 lbs and 3-4% body fat every month for the next 3-4 months. I thought he was full of crap but decided that anything was better than nothing at this point.

We started with the diet. This has NOT been an easy feat, by any means. It was not your average cut in food consumption. It’s been brutal! We try our best to stick to it. We may deviate every once in a while, but we’ve been pretty good about it so far. Then there’s the workout…We’re at the gym an average of an hour and a half each day…six days a week. I went from going to the gym about twice a week for about 30 minutes each visit to THIS.

Four weeks later and our trainer was right. We’ve dropped a very significant amount of weight, we’re looking and feeling healthy, and well on our way to hit our goals by the holiday season.

Strengthening my Faith

My original goal was to strengthen my leadership skills. While I was still set on doing that, I realized that this was something I couldn’t do without first strengthening my faith. You see, my faith plays a key role in every single thing that I do – even though I may forget this fact every once in a while.

I began doing a lot of reading, the result of which can be found in one of my previous entries. I’ve read the book Blue Like Jazz at least twice now and I just cannot get enough of it. As I promised in that previous entry, I will be continuing a series of entries that explains everything more in detail.

Strengthening my faith isn’t something that comes easily for me (for anyone, really). This book addressed so many of my problems, complaints, and questions but I have to truly internalize it all before I can expect to move forward. I have changed a great deal in the past two months but I know I could be a lot farther along.

Strengthening my Leadership Skills

Like all of my other goals, this is one that I will be perpetually seeking to perfect. I’ve spent countless hours buried in reading. From re-reading Leadership and Self-Deception to re-assimilating every project-management book that I can my hands on, this is something that’s been a big priority for me.

I’ve always been pretty confident in my ability to manage a group of people and get a job done. In fact, I’ve rarely ever doubted that I could do so. Lately, however, I’ve been focusing on the process more than I have the end result. I’ve been focusing more on ensuring that I’m “out of the box,” if you will.

I’ve been busy, there’s certainly no denying that, and I’d like to think that I’ve changed a lot in the past few months. I’ve grown both intellectually and spirituality and I think I’ve matured a lot as well. I hope all is well with each of you.

Love to All,
Josh

Technorati Tags: 2008 adventures, career, growth, reflections, resolutions, self-learning

I’ve been obsessed with a few artists lately. The most recent one (for the past several hours) is Sam Beam of Iron and Wine. He’s an amazingly talented musician and he truly just blows me away. The others, to name just a few, are Leslie Feist (namely the album Open Season) and almost anything by Ben Gibbard (most notably the song Couches in Alleys by Styrofoam).

I began a new series of entries a couple of weeks ago and have yet to follow up on it, terribly sorry. I do intend to do so this weekend now that I’m adjusting to this new routine that my friend Drew and I have found ourselves in. If you haven’t heard, we’ve decided to make some major changes in our lifestyles to really get into shape. From an extreme switch in diet to a very intense workout schedule with our personal trainer, there have been some drastic changes around here.

It’s interesting to think about how life has changed over the past year for me. Some years can sneak by and you barely notice them. However, anytime you move across the country more than once in a single year, that year can’t just “sneak by” you, y’know? Moreover, the changes in job and lifestyle are just astounding. I’ve gone from hating my life (and complaining about it constantly) to loving everything about my job and well, life in general. It doesn’t stop there, either.

It seems as though every day my responsibilities grow, I am challenged, and I get a chance to truly show what I can do. After years and years of hard work, I’m starting to get a preview of the benefits. As confident as I may be, this is something that I can never truly say that I deserve. I find myself incredibly blessed on a day-to-day basis and I only hope to be able to leverage my position to do something great. Let’s just hope I can actually pull it off .

Technorati Tags: 2008 adventures, career, iron and wine, music, ramblings, reflections

I had originally planned on writing about Blue Like Jazz in its entirety but I’ve finally come to realize that it just isn’t something that I can do. I’ve been struggling to wrap my head around my thoughts and feelings about my latest read and, well, it’s not something that can be wrapped up in a single entry. It’s a continuing process of change and understanding. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that I barely took the first step today.

I think I’ll randomly take excerpts from chapters and explain how they’ve affected me. My dad is the one that recommended I read this – in fact, he bought a copy and had it shipped to me so I kind of felt obligated to read it. You see, him and I have both struggled with the modern-day church (a topic I ranted about some time ago). He told me that this book helped him wrap his head around a lot of his issues and thought that it could be of help to me as well.

I reluctantly opened to the first page and began my search for something that pissed me off. This is something I always do when I’m not exactly “excited” to do it. The first chapter was void of any of my pet peeves so I decided that I would give it a shot (and by “give it a shot”, I meant continue my search in chapter two).

“I believe that the greatest trick of the devil is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather have us wasting time. This is why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man’s mind into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God. I was into habit. I grew up going to church, so I got used to hearing about God.”

The author had me with this one. “It was an interesting way to open the second chapter”, I thought to myself. “No, that’s not it”, I mumbled as I continued to figure out why this statement was so captivating. It happened to be a combination of a couple of things. I’ve lowered my view of my fellow “believers”, if you will, to such a point that I almost find it amazing when they say something that truly moves me. It’s the repetitive and blinding routines that seem to suck away all traces of intellectual thoughts. This one was even more interesting to me as it’s something that I had been thinking for quite some time. It was one of those issues I had that I just couldn’t put my finger on: there really can be something WRONG with being that religious.

In this chapter alone, he began to bring the concepts of Christianity to a level of humility that I could actually relate with him. Taking a very neutral stance from his faith, he very calmly and clearly stated that there is something wrong with our image and practices.  He apologized for the wrongs that I firmly believe 99% of all Christians are guilty of and convinced me that he had something genuinely interesting to say. He didn’t sound like he was writing this as a preacher and he sure as hell didn’t sound like he grew up in a temple. Instead, there was dialog that happened in every day places over current events, and broke the taboos that infuriate me.

I was officially hooked after the second chapter. I wanted to hear more from this man that clearly knew things that I didn’t. He had managed to find a way to accept his faith and not throw away his mind or his happiness. Not only that, but he still managed to present himself as someone that I would love to have a deep conversation with over coffee and not someone that I would never want to be seen with in public.

As if that wasn’t enough, I’ll leave you with the words from that back cover of the book:

“For anyone wondering if the Christian faith is still relevant in a
post-modern culture,
For anyone thirsting for a genuine encounter with a God who is real,
For anyone yearning for a renewed sense of passion in life…”

Technorati Tags: 2008 adventures, discoveries, finding my faith, reflections, religion

I’m about 55% unpacked and it’s starting to feel great! I spent the majority of this afternoon moving things out of storage and starting to decorate. It’s coming together and looking pretty good if I do say so myself. I’ll be posting pictures soon.

This free time thing is pretty…foreign? Yes, foreign is the word I’m looking fo. I don’t know what to do with myself! It’s nice to have some time to sit down and just…think. It’s been quite a while since I’ve been able to unplug during the week.

I can’t promise that I’ll be back with the typical Josh-flare in my writings. I think that majority of my inspirational writing occurs when I’m in the middle of some sort of existential funk. However, with that being said, I think I’m finally starting to understand where I am and how I got out of that “funk”. Perhaps I’ll start writing about that…

Anyway, I’ll be back with entries over the next couple of weeks. Hope to see you around .

Technorati Tags: 2008 adventures, decorating, existentialim, moving

Most of you know that I’m quite the workaholic. I enjoy spending my time in front of a computer when it involves learning something new, pushing the envelope, and working on a project that I genuinely find interesting. You must also know that before this project, I’ve never had the privilege of working on a project like this for work. Instead, I would find projects to work on with friends outside of work that would engage me. So what happens when my job is to work on a project that I find interesting?

In short: I disappear for weeks at a time.

It’s been a rough past few weeks. That’s not to say that I haven’t enjoyed every minute of this experience, but the overall fact remains that this immediate switch has taken its toll on me. It’s been a true test of my abilities to see this project come together — and we’re still only roughly 70% complete. If you asked me what I expected to be doing when I first started here, I would have never guessed I’d be managing and leading the development of a project from scratch.

I’ve expanded my knowledge of so much these past few weeks and I have every intention of sharing what I have learned. I’m in the process of moving http://blogs.rev-net.com over to the server hosting this blog, and I will begin my technical blog at http://blogs.rev-net.com/jmarnold (along with Dave’s at http://blogs.rev-net.com/ddewinter).

In the meantime, if you haven’t heard from me too much in the past month or so it’s not that I don’t love you . I promise, I’m trying to get into the habit of allocating at least half an hour to writing everyday.

I’ll be back soon!

Technorati Tags: 2008 adventures, announcement, career, informative, rev-net, rider-rally

So, earlier this year, my friend Jason had a brilliant idea. There was tons of hype in the development community around Google’s android platform. Being the genius mastermind that Jason is, he began working on an idea to combine the aspects social networking, location-based services, and his love for mobile development. Not long after some brainstorming sessions, I found myself opening up Eclipse and working with him to develop and consume our REST service.

There were long days and there were tons of hours thrown into this project. Not only were we staring at a rough deadline with only two developers (that have full-time jobs), I moved to Austin in the middle of it! It’s also worth noting that when it comes to location-based services, EVERYBODY wants in. We saw competing projects popping up every single day. Despite the competition, we rest assured that our core idea was solid and more suitable for the general public than the services being developed. We kept moving forward.

We didn’t quite finish everything that we hoped to accomplish in time but we still made a LOT of progress and turned it in time. I don’t know what kind of competition we’re up against but I guarantee you, we’ll give them a run for their money .

Technorati Tags: 2008 adventures, announcement, announcements, development, google, ideas, informative, mobile, side projects

It’s taken me a little bit longer than I had planned to get back to blogging. Even with all the supposed “down time”, it feels like life has been moving at a 1000 miles per hour this past two weeks or so. Moving halfway across the country has the tendency to do that to you, I suppose. Nevertheless, I am back and I’ll start with a brief summary of what’s been happening with me.

Not too long ago, an opportunity presented itself. It would be risky and it would be stressful; but above all else, it felt like it would be worth it. After exhaustively discussing the situation with my family and quite a few of my close friends, I accepted an offer in Austin and put in my two weeks notice. I was “excused” from work two days after giving notice and had some down time to work on side projects and get ready for the big move. Needless to say, I spent more time on the side projects…

My friend Ben was kind enough to join me on my adventure across the country. We left at roughly 2:00am on March 20 and after two LONG days of driving/sleeping/and being completely disoriented, we found ourselves in Austin that Saturday night. I made a last minute decision to take my car out here so we followed each other the entire way. Word of advice? Don’t ever do that. Also, walkie talkies are the coolest invention. Ever.

So…I’m here in Austin, living with my friends Rex and Drew while I look for my own place, I’m part-managing and lead-developing my first project at work, and I am LOVING it. I’ll be posting regularly again and probably getting back into some more insightful and creative writing. It’s late and I need to get some rest but figured I’d get in a quick update.

Technorati Tags: 2008 adventures, announcements, austin, career, informative, work

We’re in Montgomery, Alabama and getting ready to hit that final stretch to Austin. Last night was pretty rough, but mostly because we were running off of pretty much no sleep. We got some good rest today so we should be fine until tomorrow morning.

Austin here we come .
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Technorati Tags: 2008 adventures, traveling

It was never something that I could quite put into words. I desperately grasped for words that were suitable placeholders for the thoughts and emotions. I may never have come close to capturing it, but the search inspired a wide variety of ramblings. Perhaps I was too naive to see it; maybe it was my immaturity that prevented me from understanding it. Whatever the case may be, the curtains have been drawn this evening.

The better explanation may be that I knew what would happen if I truly understood that I was never really chasing anything. To be more specific, I was chasing a void that I had warped and twisted into my blinding definition of reality, of existence, and the universe itself.

If you imagined it as a string, it would be the one that thing linked me to so many of the people that I know. It would be my one link to forgotten memories and sensations that I quickly outgrew so many years ago. No, it was much more than this. It was more than a link to this “missed childhood” that I tend to speak so negatively of, but have never truly regretted for an instant. It was my escape from the pressures of adulthood that I, despite my maturity, was never truly ready for.

The conclusion from a glance into my recent reflection: I’m reforming my reason for writing. I once considered myself as observant; I had lost that until very recently.

---

It really feels like everything is falling into place for one big moment. For those of you who don’t already know, I am moving to Austin this week. There are many reasons for this departure and every one of them feels right. It’s not impulsive and I’m not running away.I’ll be updating on a regular basis again and I’m sure they’ll be another cover coming soon. I have a burning desire to make one of Limousine…maybe that’ll surface soon.

Technorati Tags: 2008 adventures, announcement, career, coffee, realizations, traveling

It’s an interesting thing to come face to face with reality. The ridiculous part about it is that you thought you were staring at it the entire time. Sometimes it’s like waking from a night of perfect sleep. Other times it’s like getting hit with a semi-truck. The situation at hand, sadly, is the latter. It’s the foundation of a suite of daydreams and the final touches on the worst nightmare you’ll have in years. Regardless of the circumstances, I believe every one of you has experienced exactly what I’m talking about. It’s the realization that your world is upside down and even though you think you saw it coming, you never knew how drastic it would be. We learn, we grow, and we adapt but it doesn’t take away from the profoundness of the moment.

It’s like I was looking in the buildings for my reflection. I was waiting for that moment where you see yourself in a whole new light and everything changes from your side. I was privileged enough to feel it from both ends this time around. I saw my reflection in the beauty of the skyline. There’s something about unplanned travel that gets me. It’s one thing to plan your getaway to some foreign land, but it can be equally as invigorating to have a day to pack before hitting the streets of NYC and finding yourself wandering Times Square.

It was the quite an experience and, even though it could have been better, it was exactly what I needed. City lights get me every time. Soon I’ll be staring at the lights of Tokyo again. Until then, however, I’m content with where I am.

Enjoy some pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/rnCodePoet/MyNewYorkAdventure

Technorati Tags: 2008 adventures, new york, random, self-learning, traveling