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 had a rare day off today. I had lunch with my Mom - took her browsing for maybe a new cat. Then I headed off to the golf course. I played 18 by myself and walked the course. It was a beautiful day. I shot 85 and could’ve gone lower if I wouldn’t have made a few boneheaded shots.

 It was a nice day to relax. Tomorrow it’s back to work. We have a release coming up that is very important.

We have had some unusual weather since the beginning of this calendar year. As I recall there was a thunderstorm on New Years Eve. It was about 50. This was followed by a “more fridgid than normal” winter to make up for it.

Once we finally started to get warm weather it went from what it seemed like low 40s straight into the 80s. We just couldn’t seem to find that great summer-day temperature.

 That is - until this weekend.

Today was mid 70s with a perfect blue sky. And the forecast for the next few days is very similar. It is a graduation party weekend on top of this, so it couldn’t have come at a better time.

I did have my “indoor geek” type of plans made for this weekend just in case the weather was 100 or 40. That stuff will just have to wait. Time to enjoy a little of the sun!

A local country club went up in flames in my home town a few days ago. It is not a place I frequent, but you hate to see things like this. A few firefighters were hurt. It was a six-alarm fire and took them over 12 hours to put it out. Oh, and it was about 5-10 degrees out as they fought the blaze… 

I found out late in the workday yesterday that I had power back. I use Vonage for my home phone, which routes to my cell phone if it is down. Since I had no power, calling my home phone immediately rings my cell phone. Finally a call to home didn’t ring through - I knew my router was back up - I knew power was restored. Being the geek I am I should have a more sophisiticated way to check, but that worked.

I got home around 6:30pm. I could tell by my clocks the power was restored around 4:30pm. In that time the temperature in the house went from 35 to 55. Believe me 55 felt like 75 at the time.

By the time I headed for bed my home was it’s usual toasty self with computer fans whirring and the faint sounds of my dryer running. Boy, I love electricity!