A noted lack of deep meaningful posts has certainly been the norm here in my little geeky corner of the web. The reason for this can be easily determined by looking at my travel schedule from the last month or so. Here, dear readers, is the summary of What I’ve Been Up To…
July 20th – Fly down to North Carolina for the National Cohousing Conference. I volunteered my Mad Registration Skillz to help them run registration for the event. All in all, things went remarkably well despite the foolish move on my part of leaving endor in the airline boarding area on the way down. It sure makes it hard to run badges when you don’t have your server. Noel helped enormously trying to get hunter to function as the reg server, but while we could get the database and web stuff up, the print driver was giving us problems. Alas, in the end, we had to hand-write the badges. The database is good and complete, but it was not a shining day for Stonekeep Consulting.
July 23rd – return from North Carolina
July 27th – Go to Logan Airport and have the nice folks in the State Police office return my server to me. I head home, further chagrined.
July 28th – Drive out to Simons Rock with Cat and Zach and Ben for the SRC reunion. These are always a lot of fun, and despite being pretty tired from all the travelling, I still had a good time. Got to see some old friends, and got to play some great music.
July 30th – Return to Natick, sleep!
July 31st – Drive down to NJ to meet spend a few days with my client there. This was a big date, because I was going to present to them a working ‘proof of concept’ piece of code that demonstrated the architecture I had designed for them. I have to hook up my laptop to their monitors (they use several small flatscreen monitors on a conference table rather than a projector), and I wanted the afternoon to test it out at the office before the demo on Tuesday.
All went very well, the client was very happy with the work, and we spent the rest of the week hashing out the next steps in the project.
August 4th – Drive from NJ up to Leominster to pick up Mom. The traffic was ABYSMAL, so what is normally at 4 1/2 hour drive turned into a 7 hour drive. Nuts. Cat and Ben decided to pick up the van and drive the trailer and Pascal (who was staying with us for the weekend) and Zach up to Maine, so that saved an extra leg in the journey for us. Picked up mom, and we both drove up to the Maine house.
August 7th – Drive to Leominster to drop off Mom, then to Marlborough to drop Pascal and Zach off at the Mosaic meeting where Cat’s been since earlier in the day. I was feeling pretty wiped, so we decided to hang out in Maine a few hours more while Cat and Ben drove down. The kids had a great time all weekend, and Mom got a chance to be out of the house for a few days. I think the 2 hour drive with a pair of 7 yr olds was a bit wearing for both of us though, so I think she was happy to be home.
August 8th – Fly to Tampa, Florida for Fetishcon – a convention… well, you can figure it out from the link. Blk was my second for this event, and she did a great job of keeping me sane through amazingly long work hours. An interesting week was had, the convention was a success, despite initial problems with the pre-printed badge stock (Note – when the printer says “We used the thermal laminate, you should have no problems!”, make sure you quadruple check with him before starting the event.)
August 14th – Fly back to Boston, then Logan Express to Framingham, then a cab home. Ahhh.
But wait, we’re not through yet! One more trip in the offing, back down to NJ from Sunday evening, August 20th through Thursday the 24th. Then a few weeks respite before a camping trip.
Who said summer was for relaxing?
Crazy schedule. :-/