No, I’m not dead – just been keeping very busy personally & professionally.
We just returned from Florida to have my daughter have more visits with Dr. Bradstreet for her Aspergers/Autism. We were down for two weeks and made really good progress. If you have a child with Autism or ADD run, don’t walk to Dr. B – I can’t recommend him highly enough!
On the home front, we are remodeling most of our house all at once. We have a bedroom addition, complete re-flooring, kitchen gutting and basement re-finishing going on all at once – and I’m acting a general contractor for all of it and grunt worker for most as well. This week saw the installation of HVAC to the addition and the last of the old carpet come up out of the basement. I’ll be glad when it is done, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever live to be that old. We also got our first dog, Bastian. He’s a 5 year old Corgi that we rescued. He’s a very mellow dog and easy to get along with. Once we get the housebreaking 100% down, that is…
At work, our infrastructure overhaul continues. I got a quote for all new Cisco switches at our five buildings and an complete overhaul of our data center by APC. We’ll be discussing the Cisco work, trying to figure out to replace the switches all at once or over the next three years. I’m also looking at replacing the fiber between our High School and Middle School (it’s over length and has been spliced three times now due to moves and trenching accidents). We are working on re-working our private IP addressing scheme, and transitioning our public IP addresses as our ISP is switching ISPs and we’ll be losing our public IPs. Finally we are transitioning from our current Chipnet lunch POS system to Horizon’s FastLane system. Since we just switched to the fourth U.S. distributor and support provider since we purchased it six years ago, we’re excited to get to a product that has good support. Infineer, who created ChipNet and supports the product in the UK does a great job of support – but working through a third party didn’t work for us. Once I get our ’06-07 budget hammered out, I should be able to catch a breather and check out SuSe 10.1!