It's been a nutty few months here at Casa dé Hambone, personally and professionally.
Personally
We had a 40' tree removed from the back yard, the stump ground out and the electric to the garage severed in multiple places in the process. I've finally dug a 3" wide, 1' deep and 50' long trench from the house to the garage in preparation of running all new electrical ... now to find the time to finish!
We've set up a 3,600+ gallon, 15'x42" Intex above-ground pool. Along with that I installed a new GFCI outlet - which included pulling new wire - a digital timer and a salt water pool system - a fancy term for a chlorine generator. I must say, I was skeptical about the chlorine generator but we have been enjoying clear, clean pool water for some time now and enjoying the pool.
We adopted Sonata, a 9 week old mixed pit bull terrier pup from Heartland Animal Shelter. She's been a pure joy. The kids are thrilled to have a family pet. We invested a good deal of time in watching Cesar Milan: The Dog Whisperer and have learned the difference between leadership training and obedience training. We've also invested 8 weeks in basic puppy training at our local PetSmart that, combined with consistent effort, has provided great return.
In May, my grandmother passed away and we spent two weeks in California with family. This may sound odd to some, but her funeral ceremony was a blessed, joyous event. It was truly inspiring and, while I'm saddened at the loss of my grandmother, I have a distinct peace in knowing her own joy at truly being home with our Lord and Savior.
In June we celebrated both my daughter's and my birthdays. She's getting more beautiful each day and I get more gray each day. Why can't I get more beautiful instead?
Professionally
At Microsoft, we closed out fiscal year 2007 at the end of June and have already started our planning for fiscal year 2008. It seems that the groundwork is laid to have our commitments in place by the middle of August. To some, this may not seem like a big deal but in years past we've waited as long as September - sometimes October - before being locked on what it is we're being measured on for the course of the year. Suffice to say, loosing an entire quarter that would otherwise contribute to delivering results sucks. I'm encouraged to see the faster start this year.
I delivered a talk at Tech*Ed 2007 on integrating information cards and Windows CardSpace. Since attending my first Tech*Ed some 13+ years ago, I thought how cool it'd be to speak at the conference. The Connected Systems Division provided me the opportunity this year and I had a blast.
I delivered an introductory talk on information cards and Windows CardSpace to Dave Platt's programming class at Harvard University Extension. Hard to believe that I got to walk the halls of and lecture to students at Harvard after not completing college myself. Dave is an awesome guy and I highly recommend that you read his book, Why Software Sucks and visit his web site, Rolling Thunder Computing.
The Move to webhost4life
In the process of all the above, we've suffered more than our fair share of power outages - both self-induced and nature-induced - have seen another computer failure for the self-hosted version of casadehambone.com and, as a result, I've relocated www.casadehambone.com to webhost4life.
I'm thrilled to see that webhost4life supports .NET Framework 3.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 applications running in full trust. I've been able to move my entire instance of DasBlog over without any issues by simply zipping up the existing site, uploading to webhost4life and setting some DasBlog-specific permissions. Furthermore, they will even install my existing SSL certificate enabling me to provide continued access using information cards.
The upside for me is no longer worrying about the status of the site on my end. I get to offload bandwidth, backup, hardware maintenance, etc., to someone else. I also get to turn off one more machine - a savings in power consumption, heat generation and space.
So, if you're reading this then you're receiving the feed via the new webhost4life-hosted version of casadehambone.com! I hope you enjoy an increase in availability of the site.
What's Next?
I plan to upgrade to the latest release of DasBlog - the last release that targets .NET Framework 1.1 in the near future, but doing so means redoing the information card work. On the up side, I've learned a lot about information cards and Windows CardSpace since my early integration work and hope to provide a better overall user experience.
Oh look ... the dog made another mess in the house.