Dean Lisenby

What did you say? (Part 2)

2009-11-09T07:22:00.000-08:00

So I left Urgent Care feeling like there was an end in sight.

Monday, the sun rose and I knew I couldn’t make it to work. Heck I couldn’t even walk the steps. I came down for breakfast, went back upstairs and took a 2 hour nap. I did it again after lunch! By nightfall, I was unable to stand up without feeling like I was going to pass out. I put Terri on alert!

Tuesday, when I woke up, not only could I not hear but the entire right side of my face was numb. I couldn’t even tell I had an ear. I asked Terri to drive me to my doctor! I never ask ANYONE to drive anywhere. I like to drive. I enjoy driving. I need to drive. Not today! I want to get there safely! The nurse practitioner worked me in (although I got there at 9am and left at 12:15).

When she looked in my ear, she said, “Well that’s interesting” – again, not what I wanted to hear. (no pun intended). She mentioned some big doctor words and suggested I see an ENT immediately. She made the appointment for 1pm. When she said immediately, she meant it. Of course, I pushed for it since I wanted this problem to go away.

The ENT checked me out and suggested that I had a nasty ear infection only and everything should be fine in a few days. He wants me to come back and see him after it heals. I am not sure I can wait! I stayed home from work Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I have to get back to work.

Thursday afternoon Update: I worked today. I can feel my face. It’s there. It does exist. The best description I can give you is simply that it feels like my face was coming off a Novacaine shot at the dentist. It was all tingly but I think I’m making progress. We’ll see.

Friday and Saturday have remained he same. No change. Again, I can FEEL my face so this is good but I still can’t hear out of the right ear. I’m tired of telling people this especially when they whisper something to me. I am hoping to feel better soon. Correction: I feel fine. I just can’t stand the feeling from the neck up.

Sunday Night Update: No change except now I feel like my left ear is stopping up! HOLD THE PRESSES… What the HECK? I won’t be able to hear at all. If that’s the case Monday Morning, I’ll be making a trip BACK to the ENT doctor to get some more meds. Heck, for that matter put me in the hospital with an IV drip for 12 hours! I need the relief!

What did you say?

2009-11-08T19:17:00.001-08:00

Some of you could care less about my troubles…in case you do, here ya go.

It was Saturday night, October 24th, two weeks ago yesterday that I began to get the sniffles, then the snotty nose, then the complete blockage. I was travelling Sunday through Tuesday and wanted to stay healthy so I stepped up my meds. I generally only use my Flonase and Claritin on days when I feel “it” coming on. So, since I was travelling I added good ole, Sudafed.

On Wednesday, I had not gotten any better so I opted to add in the “behind the counter” Sudafed. You know, the stuff that contains the ingredient needed to make Meth? I had to sign for it and all to ensure that if I bought too much of this stuff the DEA would show up at my door asking lots of questions.

On Wednesday, I made it to work but only a half day. I had no energy so I came home and worked some then took a nap. I felt a little better so I went to work again Thursday. Again, around 2pm, I was unable to continue, so I came home again early. Friday, I repeated however I made it the entire day. Woo Hoo! I’m getting better.

Within an hour of being home Friday night, it hit big time. I began the worst 15 hour period of pain that I have ever experienced as an adult. Multiple times throughout the night I considered an emergency room trip. My ear needed to be removed from the right side of my face. I persevered, mainly because I was experiencing the symptoms of vertigo and lightheadedness. I didn’t need to be walking around much less driving (the kids were asleep and they didn’t need to be getting up on my behalf.)

I made it through the night on about 2 hours of sleep and the pain subsided. I was unable to hear at all in my right ear though. Instead of going to Urgent Care on Saturday, I thought I’d wait it out one more day. No change on Saturday.

On Sunday, immediately following church, I headed to Urgent Care. I’m still unable to hear anything out of my right ear at this time. The Doc took one look in my ear and said…”I’ve seen hundreds of these and I’m thinking this is in the top 10% of worst ear infections that I’ve treated.” Great! I feel justified in all my whining now.

She gave me an antibiotic and sent me home. She told me to see my regular doctor when it got better.

Part 2 coming up….

Energy Update

2009-11-02T14:57:00.001-08:00

Every year for the last few I’ve taken time out to enjoy the National Solar Tour. The first year, I made the trip to see local installations in the Greenville area. To be honest, it was a letdown but the crew that put it on, did the best they could. It got better every year. This year was great. To my knowledge this was the first year that Myrtle Beach had its own tour. A friend and I headed to the beach for the weekend. We took our families with us and while they enjoyed the grand strand, He and I toured from Pawley’s Island to North Myrtle Beach. For the first time, we were able to see all that we wanted to see.

Solar Photovoltaic
Solar Thermal Water Heating
Geothermal Air Conditioning
Wind Powered Electricity

Primarily there were two installers.

Carolina Solar of Surfside Beach
Impressive Green Buildings

While each of the Carolina Solar installations was impressive, I found out the most information from Tom Baker at Impressive Green Buildings. To be fair to Carolina Solar, they may be just as knowledgeable but Tom was available and took well over an hour to explain things to James and me. He had EVERY installation mentioned above on site at his building. We could it see it all working together for his building. THAT’S WHAT I WANT.

He convinced me that before I spend ANY money on generating electricity using Solar or Wind Power that I should first work on sealing my house to make energy conservation work for me. Then, he suggested we spend our next dollars on solar water heating. He was bold enough to say, “It should be illegal to heat water in SC any other way”.

I enjoyed my conversation with Tom and expect to have him out soon to help me develop a plan to finally start doing something with my solar future!

I’ll keep you informed.

Do you manage your inbox?

2009-10-08T20:14:00.001-07:00

Many of you know by now we had some very long nights last week due to an issue in our datacenter.

I thought I’d share a few thoughts over the next few months about what I’ve learned and how we managed.

First, I’d like to address email. Our Exchange 2003 Mail server had some issues with its mail store. In a nutshell, the mail store was corrupted.

In researching the issue, I realized that we have many users that do not manage their inbox and subfolders.

I thought I’d share a youtube video that I found that may help users manage their mail. I found this to be quite friendly.

I would suggest that you archive your mail to your “My Documents” folder under a subfolder called “My Mail”. Enjoy.

Update: My friend, Nick Nicholaou, wrote a short article on this also.

National Solar Tour – October 3rd, 2009

2009-10-02T20:53:00.001-07:00

Dear Solar Enthusiasts!

This is a final reminder that the SC Solar Tour is tomorrow, October 3rd from 1pm to 5pm in Columbia, Charleston, Greenville, and Myrtle Beach. You can view any home or business at your own pace for free and speak to the owners about their experience with solar energy.

To download the tour guides for each area go to www.scsolarcouncil.org.

Please forward this message to others who may be interested and thanks again for your continued support!

- SC Solar Council Team

2009 Mud Run Results

2009-09-20T19:55:00.001-07:00

Ok.. we made it. The Mud Run is officially over and I officially declare my entry into the 2010 USMC Mud Run, assuming there will be one.

The results for the teams that I know are as follows:

Rank* – Team Name – Team Captain – Total Time – per mile pace

847 - THE 30TH OBSTACLE - DOUG GAINEY - 1:09:53 - 16:39
1004 - SUPER TWITS - STEVE CUMBIA - 1:13:18 - 17:28
1239 - DAWG POUND - NICK CAMPBELL - 1:19:26 - 18:55
1244 - MESSY MUD CHUCKERS - DEAN LISENBY - 1:19:32 - 18:57
1322- JUST MUCKING AROUND - NATALIE PHILLIP - 1:21:44 - 19:28
1392 - MUDDY MUMMIES - PEGGI BRANHAM - 1:24:36 - 20:09
1548 – DOJO RATS – Will Smith – 1:32:31 – 22:02

Stacy Kennedy’s team lost their chip somewhere on the course but they finished with an unofficial time. I’m waiting to get that information from Stacy.

I also know Samantha Molnar participated but I am not sure of her time either.

If I know you and I don’t have your time here, please let me know so I can archive it with this post.

I must say that I’m proud of us all. Only two people out of the 28 that I know had ever attempted something like this. To my knowledge no one I know got hurt.

Here’s a few links to check out.

Full Length Video of the entire mud run. - compliments of Steve Cumbia’s waterproof camera that Page Brooks wore using a chest strap.

Celia’s Photos
Terri’s Photos
Christy’s Photos
Sally’s Photos

PS: My apologies to those that are disgusted with my bare chested photos. I’ll work on that…

Come over and sit a spell…

2009-09-07T18:06:00.001-07:00

Back in the “old days” this meant to feel free and visit for a while. Today, our neighborhood held a cookout to get to know each other. The official party/event was to be held from 3pm to 5pm. About 40 people (adults and kids) came to visit. It turns out we spent over 3 hours “sitting a spell”. I met about 15 couples in my neighborhood. Some of them I knew by name, others I’d never seen.

All in all it was a great afternoon spent getting to know my neighbors. My neighborhood has approximately 50 or so houses. I know about 5 families that weren’t there today. That leaves about 30 families that I still don’t know.

Do you know your neighbors? I know MORE now.. I encourage you to invite your neighbors over to sit a spell.

Life….

2009-09-01T20:58:00.001-07:00

This past week we got our first puppy in 19 years. The family is calling her Lollipop… not sure I like it.

We started school in the last couple of weeks. That is one rude awakening. I need sleep.

I’ve been fighting a cold for over 2 weeks. First sickness I’ve had in the last couple of years.

The Mud Run is only a few days away (September 19th).

I spent the entire month of August deep in the trenches at ACS. I lost a lot of momentum on projects I had going but we made significant progress on testing performance and finding some key ways to make it fast again!

I want to write an iPhone app but not sure where or with who(m) to start.

Happy that my mom made a great decision this week that she’d been pondering.

Rolling out the red carpet for some customers this week.

so…just a quick update…

Leading my team

2009-08-21T19:48:00.001-07:00

I put this together a year or so ago for my benefit. I try to instill this in my team. Do you have any thoughts?

Dean’s Core beliefs

Urgency – have a sense of urgency, be available to others, be urgent in your response to each other. Respond. If you are not sure how urgent something is, ask.
Check behind yourself follow up, be accountable
Complexity – do not underestimate the complexity of our systems.
Teamwork – we need to function as a team, be available.
Instant messaging and emails cubicle-to-cubicle should not happen. Get up and go talk.
Understand why. Ask questions. A request does not obligate IT. Make sure you understand the NEED, not just the request.
Coverage – Everyone works at least 8 hours a day. Everyone arrives by 9am, make sure there is coverage including lunches.
Confidence levels – need to know your stuff, be confident in answer and be right in the answer. If you don’t know, say so.
Commitment and accountability. Your word is your commitment, keep each other accountable to your word and commitments
Time management – encourage to turn off outlook pop-ups, msn, etc. get rid of distractions. ( I think we can now add Twitter and Facebook!

Any thoughts? What core beliefs do you instill in your team?

Kill-A-Watt

2009-08-11T13:17:00.000-07:00

I wrote this blog post about 8 months ago and never released it… Not sure why but here goes:

I have a keen desire to figure out what costs me so much money each month in my power bill.

Immediately, I plugged this device into the electronics that run the most in my house. This UPS supports the following devices:

1 Philips 46" LCD TV
1 Scientific Atlanta Cable Box for HD and DVR
1 DVD Player
1 Bose Lifestyle system
1 Wii
1 Wii Charger for the remotes.

I thought of all the items in my house, this is one area that I'll be able to save some money. Boy was I wrong. Here are the stats.

I left it plugged in for 488 hours. That's 20 days. I left it plugged in that long so I could get a better trend than just leaving it plugged in for one day.

During that time, the total usage was 38.76 KWH. I pay 11 cents per KWH.

My total cost to run all these components for the entire 20 days was $4.26.

I'm convinced it's simply A/C and Water pumps (drinking water and swimming pool) that cost me all the money each month.

Update: My rate/KWH is now 13 cents per KWH

Phantom Power usage?

2009-08-08T13:18:00.001-07:00

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know I’ve been watching this “green” thing for a while now. I made strides in my life to make a difference in my power bill. As much as I’m sure others would like for this to be about the environment, for me, it’s about the power bill FIRST then the environment somewhere down the list.

I have seen several commercials and articles that suggest your Cell Phone chargers are actually wasting power and should be unplugged during the day when they are not in use. So I wanted to test this theory.

I took my Kill-a-watt and put it to good use.

Terri has a Pantech Cell phone that she charges at night. So, I took it, plugged it into the Kill-a-watt and I was shocked. It read a whopping ZERO Watts. It read ZERO amps. It appeared that it was consuming ZERO power when it’s not plugged in to the phone. Am I missing something?

So, I took my iPhone charger and did the same test. It’s using ZERO watts. It was using 0.01 VA (see the definition). So, again, am I missing something?

I did however, check my Electric rechargable shaver and since the battery won’t recharge anymore, it IS consuming 6 watts of continuous power. If I’ve done my math right at $0.13 per KWH hour, this would cost me 56 Cents to leave it plugged in for the entire month (not counting the times I use it). For the record, it only uses 3 watts when it’s running so it’s clear that it uses more power when it’s not in use (trying to charge the battery) than when it is in use).

So… Once again I conclude that the majority of the power bill at my house is Air Conditioning, Clothes Drying, Water Pumps, and heating Water.

Need to convert video…

2009-07-10T10:08:00.001-07:00

Recently, I took on a side project for one of my web site hosting customers. It involved converting videos that he had taken to a web viewable format. Admittedly, I am a novice in this area but I took on the challenge so I’d learn something new.

Here was the challenge:

Convert these files to a format that we could stream without downloading the entire file first.
Find a place on the web to hold many many hours of video.
Perform the research necessary to give him an idea of cost associated with streaming these videos.
Keep the files as small as possible due to items 2 and 3 above.
Maintain sanity on this project which I knew nothing about.

So I started with a DVD that looked like this.

It played fine in my PowerDVD player loaded on my machine. But I needed to rip it to a more standard format. I chose to use a product called Handbrake to allow me to convert it to MP4 format. This is quite standard and streamable, but they are huge! The example above settled out at about 1.6 gigabytes.

So at least it’s ripped now but too large, I then use a product called Super © to convert to FLV format. Flash Video is even MORE standard that MP4, is much smaller and won’t take up so much space on the host servers (which mean cheaper!).

After conversion, the files are now only 280 megabytes or so. The space savings is about 80% over MP4.

I found a SWF player to play the FLV videos. Check out FlowPlayer 3.1.

So, we have items 1 and 4 above covered.

To keep this blog reasonably short, I’ll cut to the chase.

There should be an easier way to convert straight to FLV from a DVD. Someone out there knows that way! Please share it.
I settled on using Rackspace’s partnership with Limelight to provide the cloud storage and streaming. They have a great system but I have had quite a bit of problems getting the files uploaded. They eventually work but with lots of errors.
Cost is relative to the amount of folks watching. We’re still discovering all the hidden costs.
I am not aware of a format smaller than this. Anyone?
Not sure I ever had sanity. This one whipped me and I’m sure I’m not efficient enough on it.

Maybe one day I’ll be able to grow and be like Ian Beyer! He’s the king of Live Streaming on a Budget!

If anyone wants more details, I’ll be glad to answer them as best as I can.

USMC Training

2009-07-08T20:32:00.001-07:00

WARNING: This post is not about bragging or being proud. This post is for people just like me who struggle with exercise and don’t ever stick to it. I’ve got a long way to go but I’ve come a long way to date!

Back in April, Terri and I went to the beach with the kids during their spring break. It was the week before that when Mark Williams and I were talking about the need to get back into shape. We made a small wager (1 bottle of water) to see who could lose the most weight before the ACS 2009 National Convention. I don’t “diet” well so I decided to cut down on what I eat but to continue to eat what I want.

I knew I needed to exercise. When the wager happened, I decided that I had put off “running” as an exercise way too long. I had two knee surgeries back in the early 90s and I’ve been using that as an excuse since then. So I started running…. jogging I guess you’d call it. I made it about 200 yards and had to stop for AIR! I’d walk a little…run a little. I did this 4 out of 7 days as far as I could. Within a week, (remember we’re at the beach) I was jogging almost 3/4 of a mile without stopping. I’ve kept this up since then.

Then I decided that I wanted to do something I’ve never done before. So I started looking around at 5K events, 10K events, Cooper River Bridge Run, etc. I came across the United States Marine Corp Mud Run event. I started talking it up at work and others became interested. Sweet! I now have some accountability partners to train with. By the way, over 20 people at ACS are planning on participating. Our motto: We’re not here to compete, we’re here to complete!

So the real training has begun. Tonight, I went to the gym.

Here’s two photos of the equipment that I trained on. First, the treadmill.

That was a 50 minute walk/jog/run. I made it almost 4 miles and burned 627 calories.

Then I went off and did 25 Sit Ups, 30 Push Ups, some free weights and then jumped on the bike for a 10 minute ride that made it an additional 3 miles.

Bottom Line: I have lost 14 pounds to date without “dieting”. I’m able to run 4 miles pretty easily and can do it with only a few one minute walks in that 50 minute period. My knees don’t hurt (yet) and I’m well on my way to actually running in a 5K event as well as the Mud Run. Come on America, Exercise and cut back your eating. It’ll be good for all of us!

Dean

You really should go there!

2009-07-01T18:51:00.001-07:00

On April 2, 2009, I celebrated an anniversary with my wife of 14 years. We took the time to go out and eat dinner together at a place we had never heard of. This place was in Boykin, SC and was called The Mill Pond Steakhouse. Here’s my review.

Their slogan is: “Where the only thing better than our view is our food!”, Here was our view:

and here’s the food:

Bottom line: I dropped over a $100 for this food but without a doubt, the best steak I’ve ever put in my mouth and Terri agreed.

The view was awesome. But best of all was the company!

Good luck finding it but if you do, it’s worth it!

A big shout out to our friends Billy and Cathy Rolfe for the recommendation!

Don’t blame me…

2009-06-08T07:06:00.001-07:00

I’m just sharing a video.

I hope I can do this at age 89!

2009-05-31T10:26:00.001-07:00

Fran and Marlo Cowan have been married for 62 years. Marlo is 89-years-old in this video. And both found themselves at the Mayo Clinic.

There happens to be a piano in the clinic’s atrium, and the Cowans decided to play.

There is more cheer and energy in this couple than many 20-year-olds. And they fill a hospital with laughter and smiles.\

via

The Law of the Garbage Truck

2009-05-21T21:16:00.001-07:00

A friend, Jeff, shared this with me the other day….

“One day I hopped in a taxi and we took off for the airport. We were driving in the right lane when suddenly a black car jumped out of a parking space right in front of us. My taxi driver slammed on his brakes, skidded, and missed the other car by just inches! The driver of the other car whipped his head around and started yelling at us. My taxi driver just smiled and waved at the guy. And, I mean, he was really friendly. So I asked, 'Why did you just do that? This guy almost ruined your car and sent us to the hospital!' This is when my taxi driver taught me what I now call, 'The Law of the Garbage Truck.'

He explained that many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of

disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it and sometimes they'll dump it on you. Don't take it personally. Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Don't take their garbage and spread it to other people at work, at home, or on the streets. The bottom line is that successful people do not let garbage trucks take over their day. Life's too short to wake up in the morning with regrets, so... Love the people who treat you right. Pray for the ones who don't. Life is ten percent what you make it and ninety percent how you take it!“

Apparently David Pollay has written a book about his story.

How’s your vision?

2009-05-18T18:29:00.001-07:00

Do you have a plan? know where you’re heading? Let me introduce Jonathan.

Jonathan works with us at ACS and he’s a player on the local arena football team, the Florence Phantoms. He told Pattie White, one of our executives this story the other day. These are the words of Pattie:

“He told me how his coach talked with them about setting their eyes on winning the championship. And his coach coaches on life – not just where you’re headed in the next 20 minutes but the next 20 years. Jonathan said it’s pretty powerful stuff. The Phantoms were the 2008 AIFA Champions. BTW, Jonathan’s set his sights on ACS and a job in marketing as his next stop.”

I’m betting he gets that job in marketing soon.

So I ask you again, do you know where you’re going? do you have a plan? If not, seek out Jonathan, I bet he can help you!

I wanna do something different….

2009-05-15T19:41:00.001-07:00

Today, I was cleaning up my inbox at the office and came across an email from one of my employees, Will. Will was suggesting that ACS put a team in the annual USMC Ultimate Challenge Mud Run.

My first thought was WHAT? Has he lost his mind? Then I remembered seeing some photos on Facebook that an ACS Customer had just finished a mud run also. Anne was having FUN. Sure… it was grueling but she had fun!

So I started thinking… maybe? should I? nah… wait. Maybe we should get a team together and challenge the other departments at ACS to see which department can finish the fastest (all in fun!)

Maybe we can get these folks out from behind their desks and get some exercise. The run isn’t until September so we can get some exercise in before then.

So, here’s my questions:

Have you ever run one of these?
Did you do anything to train for it?
Would you do it again?
Do you think I can do it?
Will you enter with me?

Remove the nagging Instant Search Bar in Outlook

2009-05-07T06:20:00.000-07:00

For my technical friends and those that get aggravated like me when it comes to nagging screens.

If you're like me and you hate desktop search applications (other than Google Desktop), you've installed Office 2007 and you keep getting nagged in Outlook to install Windows Desktop Search with an annoying 'Click here to enable Instant Search' tooltip, turning it off is easy.

In Outlook 2007, go to Tools -> Options -> Other -> Advanced Options and remove the check for 'Show prompts to enable Instant Search'."

There… gone.

A Challenge from a guy named Peter

2009-05-04T18:54:00.001-07:00

Yesterday in worship, there was some scripture read that brings out a pretty bold challenge.

1 Peter 3 says this:

Live in harmony with one another
be sympathetic
love as brothers
be compassionate and humble.
Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing.

David went on to read 1 Peter 4. Here’s what it had to say:

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.
Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling.
Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms.
If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God.
If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength God provides

So how’s that for a challenge in less than 5 verses in the Bible?

Vacation Wrap up….

2009-04-18T19:25:00.001-07:00

So, I recently told you about the vacation that my family took this week. I am amazed at what a budget did for us.

We budgeted to spend $750, outside of lodging, for the 5 day stay at the beach. Here’s the breakdown:

Misc Groceries for the room: 25
Breakfast Money: $70
Lunch Money: $90
Dinner Money: $190
Entertainment: $175
Random Shopping: $200 (I had to let Terri be herself for a little while)

So get this… we arrive at the hotel to find that our Breakfast was INCLUDED with the room. This wasn’t a “continental” breakfast. This was a hot breakfast meal. Grits, Eggs, Waffles, Pancakes, Fresh Fruit, Cereal, Bacon, Sausage.. and to top it off. A BUFFET! Sweet.

We checked in and headed to dinner at TGI Fridays. we have a rule when we are out of town; We don’t eat at restaurants that are available in Florence. We pulled into the parking lot at Fridays, to be greeted with a sign that said, Kids eat FREE Sunday through Thursday…. SUH-WEET! So, instead of spending $40 to get a nice meal, it costs us $24. cha-ching. Another savings.

Then we headed to the grocery story to get what we needed for misc snacks and lunches. We were expecting to spend around $100 to be able to eat in the room for 4 of the 5 days at lunch and to give us some snacks to munch on. Somehow, it came out to $31. Sweet! again…

Anyway, I’ll keep it short. (there are other savings…) Here was the final breakdown.

Misc Groceries for the room: $31

Breakfast Money: $0

Lunch Money: $77

Dinner Money: $111

Entertainment: $92

Random Shopping: $138 (I know what you’re thinking. She actually left money on the table.)

Misc drinks, medicines, slushies, etc: $81

We had $220 leftover from a budget that we felt like was pretty good from the start.

Here’s what I believe to be the morals of the story.

Set a budget and then work to stay within the budget.
We took CASH… no Credit card allowed. Credit Cards are too easy.
Look for opportunities and take advantage of them (i.e. kids eat free). We almost ate at TGI Fridays AGAIN just for the savings.

What else did I miss? what other morals do you see?

All in all, this allowed for us to spend more family time together also! and we had fun too!

we’re on vacation!

2009-04-15T19:55:00.001-07:00

So, the family and I are on vacation this week. We’re down here at Myrtle Beach. Let me tell you a quick story.

Terri and I have been planning a nice trip somewhere for the last year and this is where we ended up.

We got our passports last year so we could go anywhere we wanted to go. By the way, for the cost of these passports, we could have went on a mini-vacation.
We saved up Frequent Flier Miles so we could fly anywhere.
We got us a Capital One Credit Card and started building points, paying it off every month (or most every month) so we could redeem the points for Gift Cards for Gas or to Restaurants that we liked.
We joined Hilton Honors and Marriott Rewards so we could save up points to get some free hotel somewhere.

All that worked for us. We saved some spending money also. We could have went anywhere we wanted to go. Then something happened. We started thinking about lots of different things. Here’s my thoughts:

I need to get out of debt, including my house. That’s Dave Ramsey’s fault.
I need to be saving money in this crazy economy. That’s Terri’s Grandfather’s fault. He beat that into my head.
I committed to give quite a bit of cash to the Ebenezer Baptist Church Capital Campaign. (It is not too late for you to give either!)
I can have just as much fun right here in SC as in another state. (maybe)
I’ll wait and take my wife to Hawaii next year for our 15th anniversary.

So, here we are in Myrtle Beach, SC and we went from spending several thousand dollars to trying to make this vacation cost less than $1500, including 5 nights in a really nice hotel. Check back later to see how that’s working out for us.

You are a failure.

2009-04-06T05:49:00.000-07:00

You are a failure and you should be proud!

Sometimes, as a society; a company; a department; and even individuals, we’re afraid to step out and try new things because we’re afraid to fail. Save this email and when you’re struggling a little bit, I want to use 7 minutes of your life to show you what happens when you fail.

http://dreams.honda.com/#/video_fa

It’s ok to try new things that you think will make a process, product, procedure better. It’s ok to fail.

Just think where Honda is now. If you don't know, you didn't watch the video!

Special hat tip to Curtis Harris for sharing this video via Twitter.

14 years of "happily ever after"

2009-04-01T19:50:00.001-07:00

Today, April 2, marks the day.... it was 14 years ago that Terri Ann Parker said yes and became Terri P. Lisenby or as I like to say.... Mrs. Larry Dean Lisenby, Jr. Please join me in celebrating this special day!

I won't even try to tell you how much I love this girl. She's perfect for me. We complement each other so much (except in a couple of areas.. ;-) ).

So... Here's a snapshot of us from the past. These photos were taken in 1989 when we first started dating.

Those photos led to this:

We've lost both our dads but we've spawned these two:

Today, we're a family living the American Dream.

Thank you Jesus for bringing us together (even through all my stupidity)....

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