Wow - am I thriving

I was told this mornign that I thrive I stress. My response was that I must really be thriving!

So the company that I work for is now owned by a private firm. That is both good and bad. The medical coverage sucks, but there is a lot of room to help guide things I am interested in.

Most recently I went through training in Agile development with the whole group here: business, developers, and everyone else you could think about. I cannot tell you how great this is. I do not know that it is for everyone, but so far I love it, and it seems to be working well for us.

If I was only working on that it would be great, however I seem to have fallen into the lead position from the applications standpoint of the move of our system over to a new facility with new hardware. Do you know how people tell you to make lemonade when you are given lemons? I am drowning in the lemonade at this point. But on the bright side, it does all seem to be turning into lemonade.

While all of this is going on at work, this recession is turning out to be a huge boon on the consulting side. This weekend is the big convention for one of our clients that we get stuck attending, so I am prepping computers and my 42" plasma screen for the weekend there, all the while setting up a bunch of virtual servers on a high-end Dell 2850 running VMWare ESX. Good stuff. When linux natively has virtualization like this with KVM or whatever they actuallly end up with, I will be happy to go over to it, but until then this is great!

Child #1 is fencing away, doing trwo days per week in the city now, while taking an SAT prep course alkl on top of all of the AP classes she is taking. Now too much stress there either. Maybe she could actually make the bus one morning?

As for the "little" one, the countdown to the Bar Mitzvah is down in double digits now. I suppose I should start studying my torah portion at some point soon, but why put off to tomorrow what can be put off to next week!

The Programming VP post at the shul is almost done. Shabbat Across America is coming along nicely and attendance is far more than I expected. I hope this goes well!

Then there is the planning for the big trip to Israel this summer. That's sort of my holy grail right now. It has been 25 years since I was there and I cannot wait to get back. Everyone hasd cameras now and we are all practicing with them. Documenting a trip in this day and age is going to be far different than it was in 1980. I write an adventure game for the TRS-80 on the flight home back then. Look it up some time - it is called Jerusalem Adventure and can still be found in the TRS-80 archives.

At the end of the month is fest. I will be tweeting live during the fest as well as doing the webcast. Should be interesting, especially after 7 or 8 drinks in on Saturday night.

Should I ever complain that life is boring, just point me to this post. As for now, am I thriving!