Recession and elipses

It has been almost 7 months now since I last wrote and 11 months on Weight Watchers. My weight is down a total of about 60 lbs. Actually it has been in that area for about 4 months now. I am just trying to survive the holidays - first the Jewish ones, then Thanksgiving (which let's just admit is just an American version of Sukkot) then all this latke stuff coming up and the candy everywhere...

On the home front things are good. I need to get a bunch of things fixed aroudn the house, like the leak from my shower, the gutters and I figure the roof over the den is going to need some work soon. The boy is studying for his Bar Mitzvah, at least when we remind him to. La Nina is fencing away and pissing off her madre at every turn. Having a teenager is fun. Having a teenager is fun. Having a teenager is fun. Just keep repeating that....

Work is... well let's just say there is a lot of it. Management realized that open source is saving them a shitload of money so they other music clubs are shutting down since they have to pay these ridiculous fees for Microsoft or Oracle or whatever Java application server they are running upon. Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl. LAMP. Repeat after me. LAMP.

I have been told my job is quite secure. I have been told a bunch of other things, but they are confidential after all, so I shan't repeat them here. This does sometimes feel like "Dear Diary", but it is public, isn't it?

Wayne and Laura got married a couple of weeks ago. I know this because I performed the ceremony as minister. My first since I was ordained - woohoo! Laura is great - everything one could want in a sister-in-law. She is witty and joyous and most of all she makes my brother happy. It was great to see his boys too. Wayne, if you are reading this, always remember: I may have had a lot to drink, but you are the one who left your wedding cake at the valet parking station! After all, I'm not the one who poured the Scotch. or the Wine, or the other scotch, or maybe it was the Tequila...

An interesting call from the wife from Hong Kong a few weeks ago the she couldn't get on her flight home because her passport was missing made for an interesting day. Fortunately she was able to get all of the paperwork done at the consulate quickly so she came home later the same day.

That pretty much hits the recent highlights. Winter is here early with 3" of snow over the weeken din Huntington - we seem to hae been the high water (snow) level for this one which suited Laura just fine as she had only seen snow like this once before and that was when she was a little girl. Matt and Jenn got a house and a cute new Dachund puppy and we all had breakfast with them on Sunday. Too much eating this weekend. time to go back to concentrating on the diet.

Upgrades

I was completing my profile on linked-in and it asked for my blog link. That made me remember that I have not posted in quite a while. So here we go...

So far this year at work has been about getting the software ready to move to a new hosting facility. We were originally going to go to a zLinux (mainframe) platform, but after running lots of tests and checking ROI, we decided to can that project. If they had listened to me it would have been canned a month earlier.

Of course it was canned the day after my boss left for China, not to be heard from for a month. Also his boss went into labor way earlier a few days after that, leaving me to report directly to the CTO for the better part of a month. I say they owe me!!!

So now we have this new platform and I ported everything over and did tons of version and module upgrades and tested it, only to have Internet Explorer fail. I am hoping it is because the times on the machines differ. Requests go through a load balancer, an apache 2.x proxy then to a back end apache 1.3/mod_perl/Mason back end.

On the home front, the pool needs a new liner, which should be delivered any day. My daughter toiok second in sectionals last weekend and my son's baseball team is tied for first. His basketball team took first this past season. Amazing for a kid who has a lot of my genes.

I guess the biggest news is on the weight front. I am down 42 lbs since the beginning of the year and going to the gym 3x per week. It feels good to be getting back in shape. It has been well over a decade since I was in any kind of shape, except round. My bicycle has been fixed up and I am riding that once a week as well. That will likely increase as we get into summer, but I really can't wait for the pool to be fixed so I may swim before work.

So I sit here, waiting for the networking group to sync my server and hoping for a release of the new iPhone shortly. Nothing more to report. We are going to a benefit concert this weekend as a guest of The Smithereens and have a BBQ on Sunday. I'm hoping to get to do the Ringo thing again this summer. :-D

blu-ray and hd-dvd

It's been about a month since my last post. I have a bunch of blu-ray discs now and I love them! However, there is still that annoying fact that Heroes and all of the Paramount releases (Star Trek, etc) are on HD-DVD. Even though Blu-ray is better and will eventually likely win ther format war, I really want that stuff in hi-def.

Yesterday I found a Toshiba HD-DVD HD-A3 for $95 online. I grabbed it! Of course an hour later the news comes out that Warner is going Blu-Ray only and that about does it for HD-DVD. That's just my luck. Ever feel that if it were not for bad luck you would have no luck at all?

Well, my luck took an about-face this morning when I received an email from amazon saying that the HD-A3 was priced low in error and as a result they are cancelling my order. I may have been the first person ever to be glad to receive that email!

Not much else happening. I did feel that was worth mentioning here though.