Nathan's Occasional Blog

First off, it’s been a while since I’ve put a picture of the best thing to happen to me this year on my blog … so here you go!  This picture is from the end of September.  You can see more pics of us at our Smugmug picture site.

I’m sitting here in my office at work with tons of stuff to do, but being distracted by what’s going on here at the office today.  All I can really say is that THE MAN is here today for our annual review meeting, and needless to say that’s taking over as the most important thing to be here for.  I don’t have to go give a presentation; I don’t get to sit in on the meeting.  But I do get to meet him later on.  And I do need to hang around to make sure something doesn’t go wrong (projector bulb burns out, etc.).  Anyway, it’s quite a day and there isn’t much actually going on here productivity wise.  🙂

So it got me thinking … today is roughly the 1 year anniversary of me blogging as it was last year’s review meeting when I got started.  My blogging “life” has taken quite a leap forward since that day when I first saw MSN Spaces had gone live (beta).  A year ago I signed up for an MSN Spaces account and was super-pleased to get “Nathan” as my blog.  Spaces was a little rough around the edges back then, and I even found a security bug that I reported to the MS team.  The service has grown substantially since then and added lots of cool features (RSS, trackbacks, new themes, etc.).  In fact my wife Alicea is still using Spaces for her blog.  But I moved on from Spaces to Blogger back in April because I wanted a more customisable experience, and a service supported by blogging tools like w.bloggar and BlogJet.  The fact that I had to log in to Spaces with my Passport account just to post something was a pain in the arse for me.  I haven’t looked back since.  [Note: I saw yesterday that Spaces now supports blogging tools – good work guys!]

Now I’m sure you’ve noticed that while I’ve had a pretty good platform for getting my posts out to the world over the past year, I haven’t exactly been the best at keeping up with it.  Don’t get me wrong, I want to … blogging just gets shuffled down the priority list.  Most often by the time I get home after a 10 or 11 hour day at work I’m not real interested in hopping on a computer and spending more time at a keyboard.  And my darn job has this bad habit of keeping me so busy I can’t blog at work either.  The nerve!  😉  Seriously, though, I want to make a re-commitment here to doing a better job of posting daily.  And I want that daily post to be content that is from me – my thoughts and comments – rather than just linking to someone else’s work (though I’ll still continue to do that).  BlogJet 1.6 has some cool new features for pictures and pings, so hopefully that will cut down on barriers.

My year “in reality” has been a blur, and most of it dominated by my beautiful baby daughter Kaitlyn.  I can’t begin to express how wonderful her addition to our family has been, no matter how stressful her entrance was.  Thankfully Alicea has emerged from her ordeal with preeclampsia (aka toxemia or PIH) with no reprocussions.  She’s back to work at church too, serving as a full time assistant in our music ministries department.  Fun times all around.

At work I’ve spent what seems forever replacing our aging Nortel PBX (phone system) with a Cisco AVVID voice-over-IP phone system.  We were supposed to launch in late-May, right before Kaitlyn was slated to arrived.  Then it got rescheduled for mid-September … which got blown out of the water by horrible project management from our vendor.  We finally launched in late-November and the project was a rousing success!  Of course we’ve got a few loose ends to tie up, but what project doesn’t.

There’s lots of other stuff that went on this year; some good, some bad.  But that’s the high level view that I’m going into right now.  Thanks for reading this post … all three of you!  🙂