So I’m here at home doing absolutely nothing interesting in acknowledgement of it being new years eve. In fact I’m even going to go to work tomorrow so I can bank a vacation day for later. Yes, I’m that boring.. shh.. don’t tell anyone. I figured I’d make a blog entry since online friends like Hope bug me about not blogging more, I figured I’d make a quick entry in my blog before the year was up summarizing my life as of 12/31/06. This isn’t in order, likely leaves out some important things of note and no doubt drifts off in some tangents, but hey, it’s the thought that counts right? I’m giving myself about 45 minutes to write this so it’s really gonna be a stream of consciousness dump more than anything else. Ready? Here goes: [pressing play]
Life Summary – Emily and I met 16 years ago, have been living together for 14 years, married for 11 years, been in Maine for 9 years, been home owners for 6 years, and parent’s for 3.5 years. While life with a 3.5 year old is taxing, not to mention expecting another baby next month adds more stress, life is good. I love Emily lots, we’re good friends and make each other laugh and so far Owen seems like a creative and interesting individual, so hey, it could be worse 🙂
Owen – Most of my time outside work consists of playing with our 3.5 year old Owen. I’ve been totally remiss on updating his website since last May though some of that has to do with not having an easy way to upload the photos anymore now that I updated his photo gallery to Gallery2. There’s a lot to update on there too, he’s growing and changing so much it’s too bad I dropped the ball at this time in his life. My plan is to try to write some stuff ASAP before the past 6 months get washed away with all the new stuff that’s about to happen here in the next few weeks. These days he’s REALLY into being a super hero, not sure how this all started exactly, he just started talking about superheroes one day, specifically spiderman. We’ve since used the wonders of bittorrent to acquire tons of old Spiderman, SuperFriends, original Batman TV series etc. For christmas we got him (among way too many other things) the Superhero Starter Kit which is basically a red cape in fancy packaging but it’s been a real hit. More on this in his blog some time soon but our favorite quote as of late is him looking at photos Emily is scrapbooking from when he was 3 years old and him saying ‘Was that before you knew I was a superhero?’ 🙂
Work – Still working at The Jackson Laboratory and pretty happy with my job. I basically manage the webservers & backups for Unix & PC servers/desktops as well as the NetApp and Equallogic SAN storage. This has been a mess this past year thanks to exponentially poor support from Qualstar & Veritas (now Symantec). Finally seem to be getting a handle on that but really, it amazes me how much we pay for support for this stuff and how bad that support really is. I keep thinking as I deal with tech support folks & sales people about how they function in real life.. do these people even know how to listen & think? Does attention to detail count for anything anymore? “No… no.. that’s not what I said.. stop reading your tech support script and listen to me.. no.. I won’t do this pointless test just because that’s the next step on your list, that’s not the problem.. Look, I’m not an idiot, I wouldn’t be calling for support if it was obvious… AIGH!’ Anyways, work itself is good, there are 4 of is in the SysAd office for our department and we all get along well. It’s all very casual & friendly. While I’m sure I could be making twice as much at a for profit business in Boston, for up here I really couldn’t ask for more. No plans on changing jobs anytime in the future which means I’ll have been at the lab for ten years as of next October (which means another week of vacation then, w00t!)
I do wonder occasionally if I should be trying to get a masters degree on the side somewhere online but since my Comp Sci studies are now 14 years out of date I’m a bit worried about that. Then again, I’ve met enough folks with advanced degrees that have amazingly poor attention to detail and learning skills, so I suspect I’d adapt and figure things out if I pushed myself. The other question is would I want a Comp Sci masters or should I go for something else? I do have this fondness for non-profits so perhaps an MBA or something else might be useful. Ah well, this isn’t likely to happen in the next year, it’s more just something on the backburner.
Podcasts-In the past year or so I’ve helped the community radio station I volunteer at, WERU 89.9 Blue Hill, ME, to start ‘podcasting’ all their spoken word programming. I’ve also started listening to podcasts of all sorts driving back and forth from work.
Blogs – I was getting really into reading all sorts of friends blogs up until around May when I think I just blew a fuse and had to stop. This has pissed off a few friends who assumed I was still religously reading, but they got over it. Everytime I stop by Livejournal or open my RSS reader I get sucked in for a while ‘Oh right.. she had her baby’… ‘oh that’s right, they moved’.. etc. but then get overwhelmed again and have to quit out. Nothing personal folks, I do care about y’all. I need an aggregator that can do weekly summaries in short sentances 🙂
Times up, that’s all for this entry. More some other time.