Wow - the last post was way, way back on Talk Like a Pirate Day. I think that this ties my record for the longest I’ve gone between posts, but I’m not willing to commit to that given the current state of my memory. However, I have a really good excuse this time around for the delay.

After just slightly more than 12 years of working as a IT consultant, I’m back working in-house again. In a complete bit of irony, I’m back in East Akron at the same place I started my career in IT nearly 13 long years ago.

Everything is going swimmingly now, but it was a bit rough back in September. My company had gone for months without any work of note, and my anxiety level increased in an inverse proportion to the company bank account. There is a whole sordid backstory on the gradual decline of the company - we had looked to selling the company to the vendor that owns our bread-and-butter software package - but I’m not going to get into that here. It’s too irritating for me, and isn’t all that interesting for anyone else.

The end of August and the first week of September was when it started to get bad - the writing was on the wall by that point - September 14th was D-Day. If we didn’t have more work by then - or if the vendor didn’t buy us - we were all going to be out of work. It was pretty much anxiety city for everyone - there were ups and downs on a day-to-day basis. Everyone was stressing out in their own unique way. I’m sure none of us were really fun to be around those few weeks.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I have this amazing ability to increase my anxiety level to incredible degrees at the slightest concern. This wasn’t slight though, it was the first time I faced unemployment - and I didn’t like it. I’m used to being able to take care of my family - and the thought of not being able to do that really bothered me.

Now here’s the amazing, how the hell did this all fall into place? part.

I had gotten in touch with my old employer when they were looking for upgrade assistance with one of their servers. This project had been stalled waiting for funding for a few months when I stopped down to have lunch with the IT Director early in September. During lunch, he mentioned that one of the employees in the department had quit, and made a joke that I “could always come back home”. At that point I decided to talk to him about possibly coming back before I left, but he beat me to it and asked if I would consider coming back.

I talked to Beth about it and confirmed with her that the answer was a resounding “yes”.

Quite serendipitous, no?

I managed to do my normal mind***k routine over the course of the next two weeks, but when all was said and done I walked in for my first day (well, first day in 12 years) on October 23rd.

You know what? It’s great to be back working with a user community of a small company again. Don’t get me wrong - consulting was good to me in many, many ways. There’s things I’m going to miss from consulting, but there are also things that I’m glad to leave behind.

Many things have changed since I last worked down in Akron - the business has changed, the systems and applications have changed, and some of the infrastructure has changed. However, much has stayed the same - many of the people I worked with 12 years ago are still there. In some ways, the biggest change has been me - I’m no longer the cocky 22 year old with the chip on his shoulder that I was back then. I’ve seen first hand that the grass is not always greener on the other side, and I’ve learned that happiness for me is found more in taking my son to his sports practice than in driving an expensive sports car.

It’s strange - in some ways this is a new job for me, but in some ways it’s like I’ve never left. For the first time in many months, I’m not worrying as much - hell, I’m actually starting to relax.

I’ll be honest - in some ways, it feels weird…but I suspect I’ll get used to it.

Well, it’s been almost a month since my last site update so it would appear to be time for me to get off my backside and put something up. I guess I’m not doing too well with my plan from a few posts ago regarding posting frequency.

Beth, Alex, and I have just returned from a trip to Dayton - unlike most of my recent business travel this time I was able to stop and relax a bit. Two of the other consultants from the company are down at our client in Dayton, so while the three of us worked Beth and Alex were able to visit the local children’s museum, watch a movie, swim, and do some other fun stuff. On the other hand, we worked….

This was a fairly short trip - just Friday through Monday - but we managed to pack quite a bit into it. There was the work component, but we also were able to all go to the USAF Museum. For anyone who has not been there and who likes aircraft it is a must visit - the collection is nothing short of amazing, and in the 20 or so years that I have been going there they just seem to keep adding on. The latest additions (at least to me) are the Cold War gallery and the Missile Gallery.

Also, I was finally able to get down and visit some of my favorite relatives, my Uncle Dan (who happens to be my godfather), my Aunt Anna, and my cousins. They still live on the same farm that they have been lving at for the last 25 or so years - I place where I have quite a few fond childhood memories of.

Alex had a blast playing with the chickens, ducks, geese, and other assorted farm life. Would make an interesting video documentary - city boy goes to country.

Next on the agenda is to try and get back down again in the next month or so, but this time I need to cut that whole work component out of the mix!

Well, I’ve just come back from a few weeks in Dayton, Ohio. Most of you may have realized that something was up when I wasn’t returning your phone calls or emails. Some of you may have wondered why I fell off the planet, hell some of you may have been happy about that!

Anyways, to make a very, very, very long story short - the company has a new client in the greater Dayton metropolitan area. They’re actually one of the more fun groups of people that we have worked with in the past 6 years or so - and they’ve got major problems with their systems.

This all started back a few Thursdays ago (time has ceased to really mean anything to me at this point) when I received a call from Chip, who had just spoken with the IT Director at this client. We were needed down there, more or less right then. (Sounds kind of exciting, eh? Like MIS SWAT team or something?)

Picked Chip up at the airport in Columbus and drove to Dayton. Worked about 30 hours. Slept for 5. Repated. Went home for three days. Back to Dayton and to more of the 30 on 6 off bit (boy does this do wonders for your productivity!). This stretched out until the end of the first week in April. By then we had called in Peter Gale from the UK to spend time at this client as well. HIs extraction should be coming sometime today.

But….I will probably be going down there again next week. Although things have stabilized from where they were initially, they are still having problems. The vendor has had people onsite for the last few weeks, but they have not made much headway.

The rest of my life has been - more or less - on hold during this little episode. Alex has started baseball, so hopefully my next post can be on the troubles and travails of trying to teach 6, 7, and 8 year olds how to play the great american passtime.

Until then…..

Out in San Diego again, and very tired. The flight out was delayed, the connecting flight out was delayed as well, so I was very delayed in getting out here. A trip that normally only lasts eight hours from the time I leave my house stretched out into 15 agonizing hours of sitting in airports and on planes. Four or so fitful hours of sleep later I was at work prepping for a meeting.

On the plus side that was yesterday and I did manage to get about ten hours of sleep in last night. Things seem a little less blurry, and I feel a little more coherent. I’ll be finishing up the last of the migrations for our client here in San Diego tomorrow, but after that I will have the rest of the weekend free to enjoy San Diego. Which is probably a good thing, as I don’t think I will be coming out here all that many more times - well, at least where this client is concerned.

So, as to the subject of this email, which is decidedly not related to work in any way, shape, or form. I’m a bit excited about the latest version of Tinderbox . I downloaded and upgraded a week or so ago. This is actually my first chance to work in it (for those of you who don’t know, I keep my weblog and some other writings in Tinderbox). At a very high-level, and without really having a ton of time to try all the things that are talked about in the release notes I do have to say I like what they have done. There are some subtle things with the user interface - it feels much smoother now than it did before. I will spend some more time in this app over the weekend and will probably post again on it….

Now as to the other subject - NaNoWriMo. This is the shorthand for National Novel Writing Month, an interesting little event that I read about last week. The premise behind this is that you spend one month writing a 50,000 word (or more) novel.

This is taking the premise that everyone has a novel in them and raising it to a whole new level. Per the insane gentleman who started this (fellow by the name of Chris Baty), the thing that is keeping everyone from writing is….well, not having any reason to write. Or, more accurately, the lack of having a deadline to complete their writing.

There are two ways you can participate in this insanity - first, you can pick November (which is the official month), sign up on the NaNoWriMo Website and participate with a whole slew of other idiots (er, I mean fellow travelers on this insane journey, or something like that). Or the other suggestion is to pick a month and try to go it either alone or with as many other socially challenged, and stupid friends as you can get to go along with your harebrained scheme.

The first thing that came to my mind when reading about this was “hey, doesn’t this result in a whole slew of garbage being written?” Well, this Baty guy has an answer - he notes that it is because you are writing so much garbage that you can complete your insane novel in a month. That by having this ridiculous deadline you are enabling yourself to - basically - write crap and not care too much about it.

As I read further about it - and yes, I was intreguied enough to buy Chris’ “No Plot, No Problem” book about this event- every single objection I could muster was smoothtalked by this used-car-salesman/novel writer.

My final thought was “what kind of idiot would actually want to go through with this?”

And of course, the next thought was - yeah, I’ll probably do it.

Everything has been a mess lately - work, home, social. You name it. It’s fluxing. (Is that a word? Oh well, it is to me now…)

I had planned on getting a post out last week, but that didn’t go off as planned. But, later is better than never. So what’s going on?

Well - at work we’re currently talking to four or five prospective clients. At least two of these look to be almost a sure thing - we’re at the point where we need to fill out applications for business licenses, get signed statements of work, etc. The others are all good leads which most likely will develop into something.

The one downside to the work angle is our current big client - we’ve been in a mode of “de facto” transition for several months now. Their stated goal is to reduce reliance on outside consultants, and bring as much of their operations in house as possible. Which - believe it or not - is fine with us. A good consultant works to put himself out of a client - because they know there are other clients out there. However, the communications with this client have not gone as smoothly. At this point, however, things have come to a bit of a head and we should be able to reach an agreement on what will be happening over the next year.

Social - well, I don’t do much in a social sense. The recent spurt of travel and the fact that I was sick for most of the last few months has really put a crimp on my social interaction with my friends. But we’re working on changing that - Beth and I have a babysitter this evening so we will be going out tonight. We have plans next Tuesday to meet an old friend of ours and his girlfriend (however still no sitter as of yet - that’ll need to be resolved), and I’m planning on visiting my friend Dan out in San Diego next week. So things are looking up here as well.

Home? The big thing here is that Alex is now starting to eat other things at dinner. Yes, we are finally making some inroads in his whole “cheese and bread”-centric style. Note that this is not being done without any whining. On the contrary, it can take him up to 60-70 minutes to eat a small bite of some horrible substance we have put on his plate - like meatloaf, potatoes, or steak. (Yeah, we’re incredibly mean parents - we once made him try a donut and he cried).

I’ve also been spending some time the last day or so helping a friend with their computer. Windows 98. Oh, how I have missed you! One thing about having a Macintosh - it makes you forget all those exciting little PC viruses and Ad/Spyware programs. I’ve spent part of the last day taking a crash course in how to repair Windows from this garbage. Which is what I’m going back to doing now…..

More in a few days.