journaling: enabled

… I don’t do enough of it.  Projects languish.  To-do list languishes.  Stress builds up.  Kids have something to do with it, namely not having large blocks of time to do things, but I think another part of it is not being ready to jump on time when it becomes available.  I need to make a to-do list that’s handy and remember to visit it.

Work is still somewhat busy.  Wrapped up some things recently and hope to wrap up a few more this week.  Had some unscheduled outages yesterday morning.  The outages themselves didn’t bother me too much but it was rather rough after being shorted on sleep due to a certain little boy.

Finding time to work on church tasks has been a big challenge.  I want to get started on ordering equipment so we can finally get our show on the wire so to speak.  Thankfully something positive has come out of the delay … the price of the camera we’re getting has dropped about $200.  Yay!  I need to chat with our audio guy and figure out who’s ordering what from where.  I can hunt down deals online but there was talk of going back to the vendor he got the equipment ideas from.  We won’t be able to order everything he wants because budget doesn’t allow it.

We finally broke down and replaced the snowblower this past week.  The old one that I had gotten for free quit in the middle of a blowing session a few snowfalls ago and I haven’t been able to restart it.  It wasn’t really up to the task some days anyway.  The new one has no such problems and doesn’t require a work-out to get it started.  Plug it in … push start … I can handle that and so can Liz.  I gave it a bit of a workout on some drifts last week and am hoping we get at least one more major storm so I can see how it works for the upper part of the driveway.

In other news, I bought a processor on eBay for a computer that was junked from work.  Unfortunately, it still doesn’t work.  I’m not certain which part is the problem, but the fact that the eBay seller didn’t ship the processor in an anti-static bag makes me suspect that it is the culprit.  Not happy about it but I don’t have any way to verify which piece of the puzzle is broken and I can’t afford parts to test on.  At this point I’m sucking it up as wasted $$. 

Anyway … hopefully this week I’ll get some “me” time scheduled and figure out how to fit in time to work on church projects (video, website).

I can’t believe it took me until January 13th to do my first journal post of the new year, but here it is.  Life has been pretty busy lately.  Work has mostly consisted of combination of the following:

• experimenting with and/or configuring Commonspot
• planning/training for Active Directory / Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) implementation
• PowerShell experimentation for FIM
• scripting for upgrade of mailman
• scripting for/testing/configuring for upgrade from ancient Twiki to Foswiki
• testing/working on moving FootPrints from Linux servers to Windows servers

There are probably other incidental items.  At lunch time, I’ve been hunting digital furry woodland creatures with a good friend.  After work, home to the family to rescue Liz’s sanity (I’m not always successful, which is why she escapes with friends).

This year we’re making another attempt at improving finance management by using mint.com.  There is some more work to do with it but I think it will work better than the php finance solution I had tried last year.  It supports automatic retrieval of transaction info from our bank and has an iPhone/iPod Touch app!  There is also of course the efforts to improve our physical fitness.  I’d love to go running again but I’m disinclined to try it right now when I’d fall on my rear unless I wear ice cleats (which probably aren’t any fun to run in).

Upcoming post topics … church, geek stuff, Christmas …  Final thought … if you could remove one problem from the world (e.g. AIDS, hunger/thirst, etc.) … what would it be?