I haven’t written in way too long. I started out the year with noble goals. Post my thoughts more. Let things flow more freely. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time. I think they’ve reached the point where they’re fighting for space and the fight is going to spill out onto the streets. Then the thought police will show up and arrest them and bring them to jail. How’s that for an idea? Why no posting? Busy. Work the day, come home and help out my wonderful wife.
Sadly our second child isn’t even born yet and he’s already making life difficult. He demands that Liz sit back with her feet up and relax and that I clean and play with Laura and feed and cook. I don’t mind it that much really. Spending time with my daughter is wonderful, even though she can be a pill sometimes. I hung a swing from the center ceiling beam in the basement tonight so she can go “whee” downstairs. I introduced it to her and spent the next hour or so giving her pushes … or watching her give stuffed animals pushes. I finally convinced her that we needed to go upstairs and eat. I don’t think she was real thrilled with the menu but given the state of our refrigerator there weren’t a whole lot of options. Oh … did I mention that Liz is out with the girls tonight? I’m glad she’s getting out.
Last week Liz took Laura down to DeForest to visit her parents, leaving me instructions to do the following three things: 1- relax, 2- go out with friends, and 3- bag and freeze the chicken breasts we bought. I got 2 of the 3 items done. The chicken is frozen and I watched some MythBusters … so guess which one didn’t happen. I was also productive this past weekend. The garage has some newly constructed shelves which make things look much nicer. Driving factor for this is getting the garage tidied up so it can hold construction materials for basement work to come.
There’s work in my life too of course. I’m happy to have a job. I have an awesome boss. Coworkers aren’t too shabby either. At some point in the past few months it was decided that we’re ditching UNIX-based server platforms and switching to Windows. I can’t say as I’m enthusiastic about this. I know there are places that do it fine, but sometimes those places have nightmares. That’s not to say we haven’t had nightmares of our own, but I like to think there are fewer monsters in the Solaris closet. I think the theory is that this will save us money. We shall see I guess. All I really ask for is a stable, well-behaved platform to run apps on … and that those apps “play nice in the sandbox.” If someone doesn’t play nice, I want to be able to identify them and give them a timeout (though sometimes a spanking is warranted).
Back on the home front. I got my server upgraded to FreeBSD 7.2 this last week while Liz was gone. Thankfully that went more smoothly than I expected. No recompiling application X because all of a sudden code changed. I have been toying with the idea of switching to Solaris so I could gain more experience with the platform we use at work … oh wait, that’s going away (see above). I think for the time being I’ll stick with FreeBSD but perhaps play with jails or some other form of virtual servers. I don’t think I really need it security-wise, but I think some things belong in their own playpen.
This summer hasn’t been what I expected or hoped. I had hoped to have our basement project underway already. It’s probably for the better than we’re proceeding more slowly though. We’re re-considering the idea of having a single large bedroom. I like the idea of two rooms even though it means a smaller master bedroom and smaller bath. Reality is that we don’t really need a lot of space for sleeping. After all, how much time do we spend in the bedroom? It will require much additional thought and perhaps some adjustment of timelines to make the budget work. I had also hoped to get some video projects moving forward this summer. That hasn’t happened yet. Been too busy. Not sure when I thought I’d have the time but it certainly isn’t materializing right now.
Church life is still frustrating in some regards. We recently started holding services in our new sanctuary, but the timeline for doing that was never communicated clearly to the board of deacons. Sadly, this means members who relied on our video recordings are out of luck for at least several weeks while we scramble to address how to handle recordings again. This was something I was going to be involved in … getting our services recorded into digital format. Looks like it’s going to be a little more “rushed” than I had hoped. We’ll come up with something though. A colleague of mine at work is going to show me what was done at the church he attends, so that should be helpful.
I think I’m going to call this “a post” for now. The eyelids are getting heavy. More to come another day, hopefully soon.
