Family, friends, fun, career, and more…

Rough drive from the airport when I returned home last night. Landed to find more snow than expected and made my way home in a fun 90 minute drive that should have been about 40.

This morning’s commute brought more fun, but I was the passenger in a car pool this week. Accidents doubled our commute time (fortunately not our accidents).

I had a great meeting regarding automated builds and deployments with a colleague. It is crucial for our very active agile teams to get this in place. I provided my vision and was pleased to receive feedback that the team’s progress is closely aligned to my vision. Now all we have to do is do it! That’s the hard, yet fun part!

Today I am in our office of Questia. I currently work for Gale (a part of Cengage Learning). I was part of the due-diligence team during the acquisition of Questia and am now part of the teams that will integrate the technology (both applications and infrastructure) with our core business at Gale.

Regarding Houston. You would think that traveling from the Detroit area to Houston in February would be a welcome change. Well….it snowed in some areas near Houston last night. I didn’t see any snow myself, but it was cold and blustery - not the 70 degrees I was hoping for!

I decided to pay some attention to my blog. Ok for a few minutes anyway. I managed to find a new, decent looking skin. And also am updating via the iPhone for once.

Speaking of the iPhone. I did discover it is not well equipped for “push” when dealing with Exchange. Kills the battery in hours. Now that push is off, I can avoid carrying (and borrowing) iPhone charging cables.

As mentioned in my previous post (the pre-show, nervous part of the post ), I was given the opportunity to be a guest as well as co-host the Internet Advisor on WJR-760 Detroit.

I had to drive in white-out snowstorm for two hours to get to the studio. Of course I had visions of being late, but I made it with 30 minutes to spare before air-time.

The first few moments were really interesting to me. I could hear the music playing, but as soon as the show started (with Foster Braun providing the intros), the studio goes completely quiet. I never really thought about it, but it became obvious that they don’t want music re-entering the microphones. I didn’t have headphones on, but later, when taking calls, I had them on and things “felt” more normal.

The first hour was interviews with me and also with Leah McChesney. The hour went extremely fast. I really couldn’t believe it was over that fast. The second hour we took calls. I faced a window that looked south down over the Detroit River and over to Windsor.

I tried to take as much of this in as I could. It was a great experience. Gary and Foster are great at their job and they made me feel comfortable. I feel I did a pretty good job, and I am proud of my first “radio gig.” I look forward to sitting in on the Internet Advisor again!

I posted of the copy of the page from the Internet Advisor site for the show on my own site just in case.

I have a great opportunity tonight. I am going to be a guest host on WJR on a weekend show: the Internet Advisor which is hosted by Gary Baker and Foster Braun. I work closely with Gary at Borders in IT. The show is on from 6pm to 8pm. The show will also feature Leah McChesney.

I will post more after the experience, but I am very excited and looking forward to it.

For the record, Connie is more nervous about this than me.

Well a few folks that are close to me know this already, but all of my friends outside of Michigan do not know. I am getting married Saturday, December 6th!!!

It has been hectic the last few months and Connie has taken on most of the planning duties. She has done a tremendous amount of work and also has done a fantastic job. She even organized a surprise bachelor party last weekend.

Our wedding will be fairly small - around 80 - and it starts at 1pm with the reception later that afternoon and evening. The really surprising thing to me is that the closer I get to the day, the calmer I actually get! I hope that trend continues; I think that it will.

Carly (Connie’s elder daughter) is my best man and Maisie (Connie’s younger daughter) is the maid of honor. The wedding party is the four of us. We are looking forward to being together in a single home - a great place to come home to every night.

My work has taken a lot of my time and Connie has done a great job doing so much to plan the wedding and reception. We head to Cancun on Sunday morning for seven warm days.

Thank you Connie for everything you have done for me - the best is yet to come.

I don’t often post regarding a product I use or evaluate for my work life, but I recently ran into a product that bears mentioning. It’s called ClientVantage and it’s part of the Vantage suite offered by Compuware.

I have been responsible for Borders.com for some time now and it has offered up all the fun that a newly launched, large-scale, eCommerce website can produce. We have performed reasonably well, but when problems happen they tend to be ugly. And worse, we have a hard time getting to the root cause.

Enter ClientVantage.

About a month ago, Compuware contacted our CIO and got a change to do a proof-of-concept (POC). The product was set up in a few days and immediately started to shine a light inside our website, showing where problems are (and even as important where problems aren’t).

The product is made up of two forms: agent-less and agent. The agent-less provided almost everything I needed immediately, but the agent-based version will provide details down to the Java method call.

When they pulled the POC hardware away from me I was immediately in withdrawal. After some negotiation we decided to move forward with the product. And what a difference it makes in my life.

I am now able to see the performance of our website from many points (physical points and points in time). We don’t have to speculate nearly as much as we did in the past. On top of the performance of the product, Compuware’s engineers who worked with me on site are the best of the best. I almost never come out the other side of an implementation feeling like everything is complete and in order.

With ClientVantage I feel informed and armed to keep the site up and running.

We leave for vacation tomorrow heading up the west coast of the lower peninsula of Michigan.  We will start with one night in Saugatuck, then on up to Manistee for three days of camping at Orchard Beach State Park, then finally up to either Petoskey or Charlevoix for two additional days before heading home.

 Should be able to post a few pictures after the Manistee portion.

Looking forward to this time off to really relax and forget about the work world for just a bit. Work has been very challenging, crazy, and rewarding at the same time. But it’s time to kick back and not worry about a single thing for one week.

It’s been a little over a month since we launched Borders.com. The website is Border’s entry into the online commerce world and marked the end of a long relationship of…well let’s say one of those “other” online booksellers.

I am responsible for the operation of the site and am also extending my efforts out into the development teams to help stabilize the site and allow us to handle more traffic. I like having the background of a software engineer and an operations manager. It allows me to work with a lot of interesting people - each one of them thinks differently and tackles problems in a unique way.

We have busier days due to email campaigns and tomorrow is one of those. I enjoy the pressure of a tough day and always love the feeling of ending the day knowing you processed as many transactions as possible.

Make sure you visit Borders.com (or any Borders or Borders Express store!).

Just a quick post. Chris Wascha just pointed me at an Outlook plugin that is pretty cool. It’s Xobni. The plugin provides new ways to organize and search Outlook email, view threads, and connects better with my mind’s version of organization.

It has cool built-in analytics that I found very useful right away. I currently get in excess of 200 emails (from humans) a day and even more than that from systems throughout our enterprise.

Give it a shot!