Not too much has changed since my last post. Life’s still busy as hell for both of us. Between my normal work projects, the new warehouse opening up, and now all of the renovating we’re doing at our office I haven’t had a whole lot of time to think about anything but work. Kirstin hasn’t been doing a whole lot of reading and writing for her summer classes. Thankfully we managed to get away to see family for a few days a couple of weekends ago for Father’s Day, and we had some family up with us last weekend to hang out and go to a beer festival hosted by the El Dorado in downtown Reno. Both of those weekends were a lot of fun. We’re both REALLY looking forward to our vacation to Mexico in August. It can’t get here fast enough. We’ll both be more than ready for a break by then. As if we aren’t both completely ready right now… I’ll also be heading out to the East coast for some training on Exchange 2010 in a few weeks. Not that that will be a very relaxing trip, but at least it will be a welcome break from the day to day tasks I’ve been doing.
We’ve been really busy lately. I’ve been working long days getting several projects completed at work. There’s a new warehouse opening up that needs all sorts of IT work completed in it before we can use it. I’ve also been spending a lot of time working on migrating our email servers to Exchange 2010. So far I’m really impressed by the new version of Exchange. There’s a ton of cool new features we’ll be using. Kirstin’s been working hard at school/work and just recently finished her first year of her doctorate program at UNR. She’s definitely a more devoted student than I ever was. Hopefully once the warehouse is complete I’ll have some more time to myself and will be able to blog more. I know I always hope for more personal time, but it never fails that as soon as I finish one project another one (or more) pops up. At least I have job security. :)
I’ve been following the development of Google’s Android OS for smart phones since it first came out a while ago. It has some really nice features, not the least of which is almost complete integration with Google’s web services as well as true multi-tasking. Around the same time that Android was starting take off, Palm was releasing their Pre phone with their new WebOS system on Sprint. Since I was already a Sprint customer and they didn’t have any Android phones at the time, last year I bought a Pre a few weeks after it came out. I’ve been very happy with WebOS itself, but Palm’s hardware (frankly) sucks. It’s cheap plastic, and I constantly feel like I’m going to break the phone. To that end, I had to have it replaced by Palm after I had it for about six months due to the case cracking near the charging/USB port. Even though I’ve been relatively happy with the Pre, I’ve kept up with developments in the Android world this whole time and have been wanting to try one out.
Last Friday, Kirstin and I went to our local Sprint store to look at a new phone for her since her HTC Touch Pro was constantly cheek-dialing people while she was on another call. Since (like me) she really likes having a physical keyboard, she was immediately drawn to the Samsung Moment, which is an Android phone. I played around with it in the store as well and immediately liked it. Since Sprint had it on special for only $99 we went ahead and both got one. I have to say that after having it for only a few days, I’m already glad I ditched the Pre for it. I don’t miss the Pre’s hardware at all. While I do miss WebOS a bit, I don’t miss it nearly as much as I thought I would. Android is on par, or better, than just about everything WebOS has.
This is starting to get long and rambling, so I guess I’ll sum it up by saying that if you’re looking for a new smart phone you should definitely take a hard look at the Android platform. I’m certainly glad I did.
Kirstin and I have become totally hooked to the Big Bang Theory TV show. Several weeks ago we managed to catch an episode of the current season, and really enjoyed it. We decided to put the entire first and second seasons into our Netflix queue and have been catching up on all the past episodes. In just a few weeks we’ve managed to watch all three discs from the first season, and three out of four discs from the second season. We enjoy the show so much, that we actually catch ourselves watching an entire six episode disc in a single night. I don’t know what we’re going to do when we finish the last disc of the second season though. The third season is still running on TV, but we haven’t been recording it. I guess we’ll just have to wait until the current season comes out on DVD to watch it, and make sure we start recording the fourth season once it starts airing.
This has been a rough week. It was the first time in a long time that I caught myself trying to convince myself that I really do love what I do. It seems as though everything at work that could go wrong did go wrong. Just about every system we rely on a daily basis had some sort of problem. I got hardly anything done with the projects I’m responsible for because I spent so much time trying to fix all the crap that was breaking. Thankfully, today broke from the rest of the week, and was actually pretty good. Nothing broke, and I managed to actually get quite a bit accomplished on one of my high-priority projects. Hopefully next week goes a bit better because now I’ve got to play catch-up.
Kirstin’s been just as busy as I have been. She’s got a presentation to give at a conference in a couple of weeks and has spent just about all of her free time working on her materials for it. We really haven’t seen much of each other and that’s probably not going to change any time soon. Good thing for her she really likes all the new things she’s learning and the things she’s researching. Her passion for what she does keeps her motivated.
This week I’m in Chicago visiting my company’s office here. Getting here was definitely an adventure. I left Reno on Sunday morning on a 6am flight. The night before, Reno got enough snow fall to break an almost 100 year old record for snow fall from a single storm in February. Nearly two feet fell overnight. The snow plows had barely touched the freeway, so what would normally have been a 25 minute drive to the airport turned into an hour. I managed to get on my plane ok though. Then, because of the snow and ice, the plane was 30 minutes late taking off so that the airport crew could de-ice it. I had to catch a connecting flight in Denver, which I barely made due to the delay in taking off from Reno. Thankfully though I made it to Chicago ok and mostly on time. There was snow pretty much the whole way here. It was still snowing in Denver, but not enough to delay that flight. Then it started snowing in Chicago a few hours after I got here. I’m pretty much of driving in the snow now. Thankfully, the Chicago area does a MUCH better job of keeping the roads clear than Reno does. They actually lay salt down on the roads before the storm even starts. What a novel concept…
Why do vehicles have to be so frickin’ complicated? Both of our cars have had issues lately. Mine continues to have a check engine light on because of the stupid gas cap sensor. I’ve had it into the shop, they’ve replaced the gas cap, yet the engine light still persists. I guess it’s time to get it back to the shop for another round. Last week Kirstin’s car needed a jump start when she tried to leave UNR after dark. We have no idea how the battery died, but I still had to drive over 20 miles back into town just give her a jump. Then, today, we took Kirstin’s car to get a smoke check for her registration renewal and it didn’t pass. Apparently, when the onboard computer loses power all the stored information gets wiped. She hasn’t yet driven the car enough to store enough data in the computer for it to pass smog. I didn’t even know that cars stored that kind of data! The part that really sucks is finding out after talking to a technician at the dealership that the data the smog check needs comes from mostly city driving. Because of where we live in relation to the rest of Reno, almost all of our driving is highway driving. Which means now we have to cruise around town for as much as 50 miles just to get enough information in the stupid computer so that the car can pass the smog check. What a joke.
Life certainly has been busy lately. Between all of the projects I have going on at my job, and Kirstin starting her second semester of her doctoral program at UNR, our lives haven’t consisted of much outside of our respective jobs lately. We did manage to catch the Super Bowl this weekend with some friends, but that’s about the extent of our social interaction lately. Kirstin is sure to remain busy for the foreseeable future. However I hope that after these next couple of weeks my job is able to slow down a bit. The biggest thing I’ve got on my plate at the moment is putting together a proposal for moving a bunch of our systems to a third party data center. Just putting together the proposal is a daunting task since I have to include all the various pros and cons for three different data centers we could potentially move to. Once the proposal is finished, I should have several weeks to wait before the powers-that-be in my company decide on the best course of action. That will be a nice little break from what I’ve been doing lately. However once a decision is made, it will once again be full steam ahead as we actually do all the work involved to have a successful move. As challenging as it is, I actually kind of enjoy it. I like learning new things and taking on projects that push me into areas where I haven’t been before.
The process of getting all of the non-blog content from the old site to the this new site is progressing. Since I have to learn WordPress as I go along, it’s taking a bit longer than I’d like it to. I’ve got a plugin for the recipes we post, but there’s no content in it yet. I’ve also found a really nice plugin for the photo gallery. I’m in the process of getting all of our photos imported into the new gallery. So far I’ve only got our wedding photos in there. Once I get it all imported, I’ll have to go back through and make sure all the images are properly rotated and have the correct thumbnails generated. At least all the content will be there though.
After nearly 6 years of using e107 for the What The Toast blog, I have finally decided to make the jump to WordPress. The e107 system worked for us for the most part, but it was difficult to manage, had numerous security issues, and was rarely updated with fixes and new features. So far, I have to say, that I am very impressed with WordPress. It’s definitely a learning process, but it’s definitely a step up from e107.
Due to the nature of moving to the new content management system, all user accounts will need to be recreated. Most of the site’s content will be available to anyone that visits the site, even if you don’t log in. However certain features like commenting will be reserved for logged in users only.
With this new content management system in place, our intent is to eventually replicate all of the capabilities of the old site on this new site. I’m specifically speaking to the image gallery and the recipes we hosted. It may take some time to find suitable plugins, but we’ll definitely have those features and contents back online as soon as we can.
