I was reminded today that I haven’t updated the blog in a LONG time so I thought I would do that.

It’s been a long year for Mindi and I. We experienced a lot of death with her Grandmother, my Grandfather, and her Mom dying in the last year or so. We also have also had our faith tested in people as we have witnessed ever rising levels of stupidity in some of the organizations we are involved in. I have also personally seen many lows this year including some dark periods at my job earlier last year.

But I think we are making some headway and I think we are probably happier now than we have been in some time. We finally extricated ourselves from a self destructive involvement in online community full of two faced people who only care about themselves (with some exceptions of course). I finally received the payoff for the last 3.5 years worth of the hardest work in my life with a promotion to Supervisor of the team I have worked on for the last few years. To be honest it is an honor considering the high profile nature of my job and the incredible team I work with. Mindi and I finally have finally gotten our home life a little back in order. More of that will come once I am on 1rst shift in the next few months. We have finally had to make some tough choices about our spiritual and volunteer lives that we will probably be acting on soon. I also feel we are on the beginning of period where we will get control over our finances and our weight issues due to changes that will be coming in our lives very soon.

Personally I am optimistic if not a bit stressed right now but this is the good kind of stress.

One thing I did realize after breaking through the clouds a few months ago is that I have been miserable for at least a year and I just didn’t realize it until recently. We’re still not where we want to be but I feel closer to Mindi then I have in awhile and I feel we are starting to get our lives as a couple in order.

I am looking forward to the future and I am glad I have my wife to share it with me. She is the best thing that has ever happened to me.

Mindi’s right about our frustration with a lot of the elements in our life. But tonight I was reminded of how talented the folks I work with really are. Around 15:30 today we began to have issues with PC’s in our environment that were later traced back to the follow issue:

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.zotob.e.html

http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/default5.asp?VName=WORM%5FRBOT%2ECBQ&VSect=T

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/08/16/computer.worm/index.html

Again I doomed my workplace by sending out a warning email that we need to patch on this issue soon. Every time I do that we seem to get infected quickly. Our team pulled together quickly and resolved all of the issues caused by this issue. Myself and a co-worker did a lot of work to track down the actual worm infection, even before it was reported anywhere. This same co-worker managed to write a program, in a very short period of time, that actually cleaned infected PC’s. Granted our job is application support, not desktop or server support, but we managed to find the root cause before anyone else could. We also pulled together a large number of IT Teams to quickly get all servers patches and back in operation with minimal impact to our customers.

In short I was reminded of how talented and resourceful our team is, and how in debt our company is to all of us.

It also reminded me of what it is like to work with a group of competent folks who strive for excellence. It is such a stark contrast to the people Mindi and I have been struggling with for some time. It gives me hope that we can eventually get to that point together in our non professional causes. But even with all of that said, the hope seems dim at times when we have to deal with the things we have had to deal with recently…..

I have to admit that I think the stress in our lives is finally catching up with me. I have been really irritable lately and during an issue this morning Mindi told me my face turned the color of my red/purple shirt I had on.

It’s pretty easy to get to where I am at, so I am trying to relax a little bit more. We’re really busy with right to life and Shrapnel and then I seem to be involved in everything at work.

I’m hoping we can take some time off an go to someplace that has warped backwards into the 19th century for a few days ;).

The last two weeks have just been insane. I have had a ton of training at work, which is great, but most of it is on first shift so my sleep cycle is just gone. Mindi and I have gotten a lot done for Shrapnel and for our other web projects but it’s been stressful while being fun.

I am looking forward to getting back on a somewhat normal schedule and I am excited at how much progress I have made in a lot of areas in my life lately.

Mindi and I had a nice candlelit dinner for Valentines and watched The Notebook, which was an incredibly moving movie.

Actually Mindi and I have had a lot of talks lately about the last 10 years of our married lives. We have had our ups and downs but we both know we were meant for each other and that God is guiding our steps to something we can’t yet see. I am looking forward to the day when all of our dreams are realized.

Kind of of rambling hmm? Well I’m in that kind of mood :P.

Well time to sign off….

I have just realized that this is going to be a very long two week stretch for us. I have a lot of training revolving around Project Management coming up, as well as some fairly significant projects at my work place that are altering my schedule. It’s nice to be needed and to get opportunities, but I may need a vacation soon :).

The good thing is when it is all done I get to go home and be with my Wife, who makes the whole thing worthwhile.

So if you don’t see me posting much you will know why. There’s no reason to alert the authorities.

Seriously though what is the deal with CSS and cellspacing/padding. I mean CSS has been out for a LONG time and IE still can’t support this properly. So after I go to the trouble of making everything orderly with div tags in something I am working with I HAVE TO GO BACK AND EMBED THEM IN TABLE TAGS TO TAKE OUT THE SPACING!!!!

And don’t even get me started on why IE decides to put in space on it’s own just because it feels like it.

Well as Mindi has told you this has been a pretty hectic week for us. My job can be pretty demanding but I have received a lot of recognition for my work, so that’s at least nice. It helps when you do work that at least seems important ;).

Today Mindi actually played her first real board wargame :). We’re beta testing a game for our side business and she played a turn as Germany crushing puny Poland. We also played some D2 and did some Shrapnel work. On D2 we’re both at level 72 and almost done with Nightmare level. At this point through it takes AWHILE to finish a quest.

So we had a good day today, which was nice after this week. Tomorrow we have a commitment in Columbus and then we are planning on seeing Meet the Fockers.

So that’s it, but I couldn’t pass up passing along this strange link of the week:

Man peed way out of avalanche

There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.

Have you ever noticed that when a debate over some program really degrades it becomes an argument over whether someone can afford X or eat dog food.

I always find this funny since most of the folks who are arguing this in Washington have never really been poor. See if they had been they wouldn’t be arguing that folks who are poor would eat dog food as their primary choice of food. Even at the cheapest dog food is just not the way to go if you don’t have money.

The first year my wife and I were married there was a period where we lived on 15 dollars a week for food. If we had chosen dog food we wouldn’t have made it past Wednesday.

Next time maybe they should consider this instead ;).

Well it’s that time of year.

I love the new mid season start process from the networks. So many good shows are starting right now, so our DVR is working overtime. Of course our number 1 show is 24, which we are incredibly addicted to.

Well I guess it’s almost time for me to have fun again. Tomorrow I pick up the pager for our group, and I expect nothing short of the end of the world :).

But then again I have my reputation to uphold. Prior to my current job I worked for a large telecommunication companies web hosting division. We had two folks on-call for all of our production servers, and I was one of those people. So every other week I got to deal with the issues from 100+ servers. The problem was every time I had the pager, the majority of the issues we had would occur. Thats not to say that my counterpart had no pain during his on-call, but primarily if it was broke it happened on my week.

This has followed me to my current job. It isn’t quite as bad as my previous job, but it’s still there.

But it keeps life interesting I guess ;).

So Madonna and an Aircraft Carrier walk into a bar…

Okay so you’ve heard that one before.

But seriously…

So I was watching the Tsunami concert NBC was holding, and the first person up is Madonna. This almost makes me switch the channel but I decide to stick it out. Then she does the unimaginable. She beings the concert with Imagine, by John Lennon. Now I understand that is the theme song of the pseudo-intellectual Hollywood crowd, but I think it’s in poor taste during an event like this.

Esther, err I mean Madonna, what about Kabala? Well that is if that is still your religion of the week. If there were no religion you wouldn’t be able to redefine yourself as the new spiritual Madonna. Or is it Esther again?

It also insults the various religious charities who are doing much of the heavy lifting in Tsunami relief so far. Sure atrocities have been committed in the name of religion, but they also have in the name of nationalism, anti-globalization, environmentalism, etc. Whenever a major disaster happens the people of faith, whether they be Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Sikh, rise up and respond to help their fellow man. And they don’t need a media event to do so.

And besides that why do we even need an event like this? If the major Hollywood stars, besides the few that have given large sums of money already, would just give a small chunk of their annual salaries to the relief effort then there wouldn’t even be a need to hold an event like last nights. And of course many of the folks who gave last night more than likely have already given to the other charity events that didn’t require camera time to fulfill.

And now to the Aircraft Carrier….

I came across this blog entry the other week and it reminded me of the same feel good, anti-bush crap I would expect to hear backstage of this event if I were a fly on the wall. Enjoy….

Today, I was “Unprofessional”…

Hello World!

Okay well hello to the few people reading this :).

This project has been something we have wanted to get up for awhile. We plan to make this a place for us to talk about what we are interested in. We also would like to share those interests with the folks we have met along this journey called life. And since we have a lot of interests, there should be a lot of opinions ;).

We also wanted a place to share pictures from our past, present, and future. Well maybe not future, we haven’t figured out how to do that quite yet…

More than anything we wanted a creative outlet that we could call our own. I hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to our new site! We’ve been wanting to do a personal website for quite some time now but other web projects have always taken first priority until finally we said enough is enough, we NEED this site! Why do we NEED this site? We need this site because we want to be able to vent..er, um…blog. Yeah, that’s it….blog. No really, in all seriousness we are very excited about this endeavor. We created this site so that family, friends and anyone else who wants to wander in can gain a little insight into our world. We have friends and family scattered across the nation and in some cases across the globe and don’t get to see them near as much as we would like. We are hoping that everyone will be able to get to know us better through this site; much more than a yearly Christmas letter and family vacations. So welcome to our world! We hope you stop by, put your feet up and stay a while. Just remember, this is our house and even though you might not agree with all the conversation in our house, please don’t stain the carpet…it’s new.