I know I haven’t posted in a while, but just wanted to post a Merry Chistmas and Happy Holidays message to my one and a half readers out there!

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Jen’s been working really hard to get her disertation work done as well as apply for internships, so I just wanted to publicly give her a pat on the back! Last night we overnighted the first application since it was due earlier than the others. Way to go Jen! (And maybe now she won’t always post a comment saying I’m a tool since I’ve only been posting techy stuff!)

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Jef Raskin, the human-computer interface expert largely credited with beginning the Macintosh project for Apple Computer, died Saturday at age 61.

This was strange news since I’m currently reading Revolution in the Valley, so I had just learned more details on Jef and the rest of the Mac crew. The book is great, by the way - it’s a collection of stories from the Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories blog created by Andy Hertzfeld, one of the Mac creators.

Insanely Great, which I read years ago, is also a good book on the Mac story.

I’m also becoming insanely jealous of Jen’s Mac mini! After shopping for some accessories for the mini Mac, I’ve grown more aware of the elegance and style of the Mac. I played around with OS X a while ago and it’s only gotten better - although Jen still has only let me touch the thing like twice!

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Ok, finally got some snow pics to post! Cincinnati officially got about 9 inches of snow right before Christmas, but as you can see the snow drifts were huge. We had three feet on the deck and about four on the front porch. I forgot to get pics of Jen and myself doing a massive amout of shoveling - doh! The UPS guy didn’t deliver some packages we needed for Christmas Eve, but things worked out in the end.

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Merry Christmas to my three, ok two, blog readers! But I still have another Christmas coming! We’re heading up to Chagrin Falls for New Years and to celebrate Christmas with Jen’s family.

The first Christmas was pretty cool. Jen got me a telescope! Jen says it’s not a great one, but I’m not an expert at telescopes, so I just think it’s great. I’ve always loved looking at the stars, so it should be really cool. It was a cool surprise since it was something I never would have thought to ask for, but would have liked! Those are usually the coolest presents.

She also got me a wireless outside temperature sensor. Being a gadget freak, I thought this was cool. Now… can I hack it and hook it up to my computer?
I’ll report more next year! (I was going to post some Cincinnati snow pics, but I grabbed the wrong SDRAM card from the camera!)

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Congratulations on the new job!

Hey everyone! Jen’s got a new job! She’ll be counseling kids 6-14 and some families and stuff. She’ll squeeze in her third sign language class and continue work on her dissertation too! She’s quite talented along with being a wonderful person - did I mention I’m a lucky guy?

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Kerry conceded so I guess we’re in for 4 more years of Bush. I’m not sure what will happen. I’m not happy with the war in Iraq, not to mention some of the problems here at home. (By the way, you can be against the war and still support our troops! That arguement is totally lame!)

I just hope people see how close things turned out and take that into consideration - two presidential elections back to back that are so close has to say something! I hope Bush counts his blessings and sees that the nation isn’t 100% happy with him - and is barely 50% happy. If he is cocky at all, I’ll blow a gasket! I hope whatever happens, we can unite and come back together as a nation - this partisan stuff is getting ugly and is hurting the county big time. It’s interesting… The events of September 11, 2001 originally united the U.S. and now it’s tearing us apart. One of the main things I hate about the Bush presidency is that it claims we are safer now, but they continue to spread fear. I WILL NOT LIVE IN FEAR.

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Hey everyone… Get out and vote tomorrow! Better yet, vote for Kerry!

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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!

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Jen and I are heading up north to Niagara Falls tomorrow for a week. Should be tons of fun! I’ll be sure to post some pics when we get back!

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