Saturday, May 24, 2008



Andrew - graduation day

Tuesday, May 20, 2008


Wow, long time since last posting. So much has happened. Adam and his partner Geri were here for a long Easter weekend visit. They managed to catch the most miserable weather of the year here - sleet, freezing cold, snow. Hopefully they enjoyed the holiday trip anyway.

Then Andrew came over at end of April for a week or so during spring break. We had a ball - he lucked out with generally warm and sunny weather. The last full day of his visit was gloriously warm and sunny and Asti, Andrew, and I left at 6am for a day trip to Bruges. Fast drive down to Dover, the P&O ferry across the English Channel, then another quick drive and we were sitting back, basking in the sunshine, drinking excellent crisp pilsner at a street cafe by the T'zant plaza in Bruges. Lovely little place where we had grilled steaks with Bearnaise sauce and sizzling fites.

It was a really excellent day. We dragged Andrew to our favorite chocolate shop and loaded him down with some goodies to take back to NYC.

At work, I finally completed the dread London Disaster Recovery Test. Nightmare! Four weeks+ for what should have been simply an intense 5 days. That's what happens when you neglect your DR environment for over a year, possibly close to 18 months. I ended up expanding an EVA into a 2ndary cabinet, reconfiguring another EVA, building our first DR ESX system (a descent into IT hell!), and building 14 replacement servers for ones that could not be repaired with simple parts replacements. Ugggh! I just finished the Gantt tiimeline chart and the Issues matrix on Friday and handed them in just before the bell at 4pm.

On a lighter note - I found this website sweet - http://colorwar2008.com/submissions/youngnow?page=1

In 9 days we fly to New York for Andrew's graduation from CCNY. He's getting a Research Honours BA in Chemistry and even won a prize. He's been accepted into the Chemistry PhD program at CUNY so school resumes in the fall. We'll all be at Capsuoto Freres Friday night celebrating after the commencement.

I'm looking for a new contract this week. My contract with A&O finished a month ago and was extended but it was only covering a secondment of the regular DR guy so now it's finished. Such is life for the IT contract worker.