Small Things

We've had this fly stuck in our house for at least a week now. Just one fly. Flies normally aren't that big of a deal to me, but this one seems hell bent on irritating me. For some reason, it enjoys hanging out in my room and bathroom. I've thrown out my trash and picked things up but to no avail; still it buzzes around in here.

This fly first started irritating me at night when it would land on me while I sleep. I would wake up and then have to fight it off before going back to sleep. So this fly and I have begun a nightly ritual of me waiting up for it until it goes into the bathroom. I then jump up and run to the bathroom and shut the door imprisoning it there and hoping that it doesn't figure out that it fits under the door.

This worked until last night. I awoke and felt the fly on me and just felt this wave of discouragement and frustration come over me. "God, why is it that something as small as a stupid fly is bothering me so much! This is just ridiculous. I shouldn't be afraid to go to sleep because a fly might land on me."

Then it hit me. Here I am talking to the GOD OF THE UNIVERSE ABOUT A FLY.

Then something else hit me. He cares about how I feel about this fly. He wants me to bring everything to him. He wants me to surrender all to him, even this silly fly. So often we give God the big things, but not the little things because "I can handle it." And while maybe we can handle it once, all those little things add up until we can't handle it anymore.

I don't know where that fly is now, but I thank God for putting him in my room so that I can keep learning to bring the little things to him.

On a more work related note:
Paul and I are close to finishing the website! Most of the pages are fully built out with just some tweaking needed. We have one major section to finish and then we will be working on getting the application for all OM Canada trips online. This is a pretty big undertaking so be praying for us as we try to find the best system. Thanks!

Flexibility

Today we bring you our first joint blog post! Well, rather Ashley is typing and Paul is watching. All the other blog posts have been done independently. The past two days we've really felt some major spiritual warfare in the tech world.

The whole time we have been here we have been having issues with accessing files that live on the server and not in joomla. We've been having permission errors and this has prevented us from saving things in vertain files. Mostly, we wanted to do some cool CSS stuff. But, since cool CSS isn't necessary at the moment we've been working around this issue and not worrying about it.

Yesterday we were trucking along, making good progress when suddenly...dun dun dun! The live OM Canada site was down! This was a huge issue for us because that is where we are drawing most of our content from. That and it's not good to have your live site down.

We eventually figured out that it was down because the hosting company (the people who own the server that our site lives on) decided to upgrade their php (the language that our site runs on) in the middle of the day without telling us and the new php didn't want to play nice with the live site. Fortunately, they have super awesome customer service and it was fixed quickly.

This morning we walked in and saw that the live site was up and running  and felt pretty good. Until we realized that the site we are working on was down. We just can't win. Some investigation revealed that we had exceeded our memory limit. We found the file that sets the memory limit and found out that whoever built the file had set a variable as "memory_limi = 32MB". Well, that missing "t" in limit was causing all of our issues. We could have easily fixed this in 5 minutes except that the permission issue I described at the beginning of the post prevented us from doing so. So, we submitted a  request to the hosting company (less than 24 hours after submitting one for the live site) to fix the permissions issue. We weren't sure how long this would take so this is where the "flexibility" title is coming in.

We literally couldn't do anything, so we started pitching in with other office work putting Paul's envelope stuffing skills back in use. <sarcasm>Which he was incredibly thrilled about. </sarcasm> We did get to have some fun though, we used a machine that automatically stamped and sealed envelopes.

Dear offices of the world: obtain one - Yours truly, Paul.

Thankfully, an hour and  half later the awesome customer service had fixed the permissions error and another guy who helps out occasionally got the memory issue fixed. We have more of a functioning site put together, so if you want to check it out just navigate your browser to http://omcanada.org/joomla25. (And to prove to you that we are working). Feel free to give us any feedback on it, especially concerning menu navigation and usability. Note that if you see any forms, they don't work currently :) Thanks for the reading and have a blessed day!

Long Short Week

Looking back, this week seems to have gone by fast. Of course that's usually how I see things looking back. Even the years since high school seem to have flown by. But this week felt a little slow while I was in it still.

It was very difficult not to get frustrated this week while at work. First we looked for a template for the site. I can't remember if Ashley explained what these are in a previous post, so I'll do my best to explain it here. The way Joomla (the software we're using to create the site) work is by placing articles in a page, and whatever other things you want to have in the page, called modules, in to things called positions. The positions are a huge deal to us, because they determine where we can place things on the page. The templates we looked for were all free, and there's a very good reason they are all free. The positions in the templates are not in the best places, and there are very few of them; there's maybe 6 or 7 of them. So we tried all week to get a free template to do what we wanted, when finally friday we were able to access the ones that OM already had, and VOILA! there was one we liked the look of, and it wasn't originally free so it had something like 60 positions. Perfect. But that was friday, so for 4 days we struggled with that free one.

The second thing that was frustrating about this week was finding the 'modules' that we needed to do the things we wanted. But we could only use free ones... Now, free modules tend to be better than free templates, so it wasn't too bad. But they do still have their problems. We were using one module all week because it did what we wanted and looked pretty good. But we got to friday and had to place it in the main page with the new template and it seemed like it was eating the other positions around it. The modules that we placed around it appeared behind or inside of it. So we ended up having to scrap it and find a different one. Fortunately we found one that works well and it only took around 10 minutes. 

So the better part of the week was a little slow, and annoying. But friday was really refreshing, and gave me new confidence for the beginning of next week. God is helping us with this. It may seem weird that God would need to help build a web site, but satan wants to do everything he can to keep us from making a good site that brings people to OM. So, when I say God is helping us I mean it, we couldn't do it without him. We couldn't have even gotten here, let alone raise enough money for the trip. 

One a lighter note, I managed to cook my own breakfast today. 3 fried eggs, that could have been better, and two pieces of toast that I toasted in my brand new toaster oven. An oven that I got at a yard sale for $30 new still in all of the packaging. Looked online and it goes for $70 usually, so I think I got a pretty good deal. After this summer I should be able to survive on my own cooking, with a little help from the internet and Ashley =)