Wow… it’s been quite a while since my last post! Things have been quite busy. To bring things up to date, here’s what’s been going on…

Vacation to Niagara Falls

The Falls are awesome. The power of nature can be fully realized there. The main drag, Clifton Hill, has a Las Vegas, high tourist feel, but fun. Jen and I had a wonderful time and walked all over - I even got her into the new casino for a bit. The first few nights we stayed at the Embassy Suites and had a great view of both the American and Horseshoe falls.

Then we stayed at the wonderful Park Place bed and breakfast. (The one in Canada, as there is also one in New York.) Have the stuffed French toast - it’s terrific! We stayed in “The Carriage House”.

Niagara-on-the-Lake has a less touristy feel and was beautiful. I didn’t take many pictures of the town, but it’s very nice and friendly. We had quite the dining experience at Escabeche, the restaurant at the Prince of Wales Hotel - including a local winery wine at $90 a bottle. I also indulged in a pricey cognac. I think the bill was like $250!

On the way home, we stopped on the US side of the Falls in New York and paid a visit to “Goat Island” - home of the bridal veil falls.

Check out the pictures!

Refinancing the house

Refinancing was a bit hectic with all the paperwork, appraisal and such, but all in all it went great! The house was appraised for a little more than I hoped, so that was an added bonus. Even with a second mortgage, I’m paying $150 less a month than my original first mortgage! And I was able to pay off a couple credit cards and got some to put into savings! Finally I’m getting my finances back on track after the “bursting of the dot com bubble” - at least that’s what I call it so as to not have to go into details of the fiasco that occurred!

A wedding in Vermont

Jen’s friend Kerry got married in Vermont on October 2nd. We trekked back up north - this time by plane - for the event. Vermont is beautiful in the fall! We had a really great time!

Check out the pictures!

Work

Work’s been picking up and we’ve got a few new projects on the table. Really cool stuff.

We got some investment and have been slowing building up our mini data center. I will never again build a full data center! But it’s nice to have a good development setup that can serve as our production environment until we have enough revenue to co-locate. I still have a need for physical access to the boxed for now - I haven’t been able to go to dedicated hosting. Maybe that will change as we mature our product, but not yet. We’re looking for 97% uptime from our current location - until we need 99.999% (the magic 5 nines!) we’ll be fine.

APC has some cool racks. I settled on the NetShelter VX 42U in black. I went with the 600mm - standard 19″ - for a few hundred dollars less, but the 750mm would have been a little more flexible.

Once we get in a few more servers and I rack ‘em, I post pictures.

I’ve also been doing a lot with XML, Java, JBoss, Perl, Hibernate, CSS and even some Flash as well as the eBay and Amazon APIs. I’ll post more about these soon, I hope!