Winner's Excogitations

When the word football is spoken in most parts of the world, what comes to mind is the football we are used to that involves running around and kicking a ball. To the residents of the United States of America though, that word means something much different. I got fascinated with the game when I got an opportunity to play flag football with some colleagues of mine and realized that the game was actually quite interesting contrary to my initial conclusion on seeing the game for the first time.

After asking a bazillion questions, I got a basic understanding of how the game was played and some of the rules involved. I decided to watch a few BYU (Brigham Young University) football games since that was the alma-mater for quite a few of my colleagues and I liked the school's ethos. After watching a few football games, the ever-seeing eyes of Google had started suggesting American-football related videos for me to watch. One of them was a series by NFL films called "A football life" in which they would detail a retired (and sometimes current) NFL football players life; from childhood to the NFL and even afterwards, they show their triumphs and their lowest points.

I watched quite a number of the documentaries as the stories of people fascinate me most especially successful people at whatever craft. As I kept watching, I began to notice patterns, patterns that almost guaranteed that a player would do well on and off the field and would do well after playing the game and patterns that almost guaranteed that the player would not have ideal latter years. I have codified these patterns and would detail them below. The purpose of this write up is to see how these lessons can help in our not-very-sporty lives.

• Completing their college degree programme: If a player knows that even though they love football and it could be a professional career for them, it cannot last for very long ( as the human body can only take so much) and having a college degree puts them in good stead after their playing days are over.

• A set desire entering into the NFL: An old saying goes thus "If you fail to plan, you have planned to fail". Most successful players had a desire and a plan for what they wanted to accomplish and the heights they wanted to reach personally, in and with their team and in their leagues.

• A dedication to self-improvement: "talent alone never made anyone successful". if a player was to be successful, they could not have rested on their talent alone. They put in extra work, out-thought their opponents and out-prepared their opponents.

• Show character while playing: A perfect example of showing character and class while playing was a former Detroit Lions running back extraordinaire. He exemplified humility in his playing days. He was a team layer on the field as well as off it. The players that did well worked hard but were respectful of their fellow players, their coaches, all the support staff around them and the media. It cost them nothing but it paid dividends in spades.

• Stay true to their religion/values: It is easy to stay with God when things are not going right but when there is money, success, fame, it is infinitely more difficult. those that stay true to their God and the values they grew up being thought and believing are those who make something of their football lives.

• Marry right and do right by your family: To have a successful football life, you must not do the celebrity marriage or the trophy marriage. You marry the person whom you have known, who shares your spiritual and other values and who knew and watched you before the stardom. Do not let fame cause you to cheat or neglect your family. Take time to be with them as a father and husband, I have seen that gives longer-term satisfaction for players than the playing time in the long run.

• Be fiscally responsible: When the big bucks start rolling in, do not think it would last forever. Live well below your means, save and get a trusted financial planner (not a family member or friend) to invest your resources. No flashy cars or lavish homes. Those can come later when your investments are paying dividends to cover luxuries.

• Retire on your own terms: Be the determiner of your path or as William Ernest Henly would put it, be the master of your fate and the captain of your soul. Do not wait to be pushed out of the team, and don't outstay your usefulness to the team. Know when it is time to leave, leave and don't look back. Something that helps is having a good idea what you want to do after the football career ends and this is the perfect segway to my next point.

• Do something productive: Those who do well are those who had a plan for their lives outside of football. Those who built careers, businesses or complete livelihoods after football. This is where having a college degree comes in handy. Go into a business or career where you are knowledgeable and comfortable so as not to lose your resources.

• Have a can't-be-put-down attitude: As a public figure, any and every mistake you make would be a news item and you have to expect that. Those who made it big did not let negative press get them down. They made mistakes, dusted themselves off, learnt from that mistake and moved on. With time those people, could share their stores and help others not to make the mistake or to get out of the mistake if they have made it already.

I thought about all of these and wriote them doiwn because I feel that as a non-celebrity I have an opportunity to look at those with public lives, see what made them successful (for those that became popular as a result of success), and learn lessons I can apply to my life. I hope this helps someone out there as well.

A leader in my then fellowship was asked a question by a visiting minister, “As a student of the Bible, who was the greatest apostle?” and his reply was swift; “Apostle Paul”. His answer elicited an immediate reaction in my spirit, by what criteria did he adjudge Paul to be the greatest apostle? Was it because of the numerous letters he wrote? Or the numerous beatings and lapidations he underwent? Or because he almost single-handedly established the gentile church? All these are true and should be enough to make him the greatest apostle, but my issue with that answer is that it is indicative a major wrong in the body of Christ that will soon destroy us if not confronted.

First of, who are we, what have we achieved in our walk with and work for Christ that we think we have gotten to the point where we can begin to rank the pioneering leaders of the church based on the visibility of their works?

Secondly and most importantly, I had always believed that Moses was the greatest man of the Old Testament and my opinion seemed based on the Bible (Numbers 12:6-8, Isaiah 63:11-14KJV); a man worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as the Lord Jesus Christ (John 1:14 KJV), the man on whom the whole Old Testament was predicated, a man counted worthy to stand with Jesus on the mount of transfiguration and these are just a few of many things that made this man Moses stand out in scripture. But my belief and assumption was shut down by what Jesus said in Matthew 11:11 KJV, “Verily I say unto you, among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” Meaning that prior to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the most important man born of woman was John the Baptist, and this made me ask myself, what John the Baptist did to warrant such a rank. To me, the only significant thing John the Baptist did was to baptize Jesus Christ and usher him into his ministry, and in the eyes of God, this was more important and had more gravity than the law that Moses brought, or the era of the prophets that Elijah ushered in. The aim of this discourse is that we seem to have forgotten that God does not see, judge or think as we do (Isaiah 55:8-9 KJV). And with our human propensity to judge by the visible, we have created a clamouring in the body of Christ for positions and assignments that make our work visible to men so that we may be regarded by them. Apostle Peter speaking for the twelve said in Acts 6:4 KJV “But we will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word”. The mandate committed to them was setting the church up by prayer. If they had failed in that task seeking instead to travel around preaching, and writing letters, they would have done much damage to the spread of the gospel. Our gospel is not spread by enticing or eloquent words but by spiritual power which is made available by effectual, fervent prayer (James 5:16b KJV). Please let us not get drawn into the trap of comparison, Paul writing said “…but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise” (2 Corinthians 10:12 KJV).

LET US BE WISE.

So I recently decided to learn developing mobile apps using Xamarin Forms. My decision to learn Xamarin Forms went against my very strong and vocal opposition to cross-platform, “write once, run anywhere” mobile applications of any sort as I felt that cross-platform apps would have to make comprises on the user interface and user experience on one or more of the platforms they target. I also felt that no matter how optimised or “Native” the designer of the hybrid And it seems the research confirms my hunch.

I come from a strong C# background and subconsciously harboured the natural resentment that .NET developers have for Java and those who fraternize with it, BUT I swallowed my pride and learnt how to develop native Android apps with Java and the Android SDK and in the process came to understand that a great developer leaves the religiousity and flame-war-ishness to lesser mortals and always select the best tool for the job.

That said, I wanted to pick up iOS development and I needed to make a decision as to whether or not I would learn Swift and the Cocoa Touch framework. Because I used Linux for a while, I had learnt about the Mono project and used Mono runtime for my C# development (still do). In the process, I found out about Xamarin and their product line. That was when I ran the pros and cons of learning Swift and the Cocoa Touch framework or using Xamarin Forms.

This is quite the anticlimactic end as instead of agonising over the decision as you would expect, it was quite easy for me. For starts, Xamarin Forms made use of C# for application log, a language which I love and am very versed in, and XAML for user interface design which I was familiar with from my Windows 8 (MetroUI) app development days, and to put the cherry over this already tasty cake, Xamarin Forms compiles natively on each platform.

As I progress on this journey of learning, I would be creating posts about my learning experiences, not just technical but all-around learning.

This documentation page is now obsolete, newer documentation with all new changes can be found on the dedicated documentation page

vCardLib is a library written entirely in C# for .NET. It is a library that enables contacts to be read from a VCF file. It can read multiple contacts from a single vCard file or single contacts from a single vcf file. The contacts are read into a vCardCollection object which is a collection of vCard objects. These vCard objects have properties that store contact information. As at now, the library supports only vCard version 2.1, support for versions 3.0 and 4.0 will be added shortly. Also, the photo extraction code is buggy and has been extracted from the production code, to see it, visit the GitHub link https://www.github.com/bolorundurowb/VCF-Reader

To make use of the library, add it to the project references and

using vCardLib;
...

var contacts = vCard.FromFile(@"vcf/ file /path");
foreach(var contact in contacts)
{
   \\ statements
}

The library can also be gotten from Nuget at https://www.nuget.org/packages/vCardLib.dll/

To see a test application using this library https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcf-reader/

What do you believe just because you were told so? Most people are in the religion they are just because they were born into it. Have you ever decided to just ask yourself why you are Christian/Muslim/pagan/atheist/agnostic? Have you ever checked the basic beliefs and tenets of your faith or otherwise to see if they check out? If you believe in God, have you ever checked if HE was real to you? We in Africa, have become so used to tradition that we fail to question whatever we are told. Once we are told something, we take it for law. This is the crux of most problems faced in Africa today, Islamic radicalism, corruption and other vices.

We should begin thinking and challenging the norms in our society, the ideas that have been perpetuated and passed down from generation to generation. If something is called a taboo or a sin, ask why it should be so. This would inculcate the spirit of diligence and the zest to always find answers. This attitude is what put the western countries far ahead of others. Even though this same attitude has excessively been turned into licentiousness by our western counterparts, we can succeed where they failed.

This challenge goes to all the children, teenagers, youth and adults (who are still thinking) to change our way of determining fact. We should begin to accept a matter or position as fact, only after understanding the premises and confirmation-research that it/they are true. Then we can as a nation begin to pull ourselves out of the pit we’ve placed ourselves in.