Raible Designs

The Last Day

Today is my last day working for Starz on their Vongo project. While it's been a fun project, it's been painful commuting to South Denver everyday. I'm pretty pumped to start riding my bike downtown again. I rode downtown on Monday to help Max with some Drupal stuff and quickly realized the best part of Virtuas is riding my bike to work. Of course, there's many other good things about it, but that's #1 on my list.

Now is probably a good time to reminisce on other last days: in 2004 and 2003. I like working for Virtuas - where the last day at a client doesn't mean I have to find a new gig right away.

Welcome to 2006

Happy New Year everyone! 2006 should be a fun year. My goals? Happiness, Health - both driven from skiing, riding, playing with the kids and enjoying my job. I still can't believe they pay us to do this stuff.

Here's this site's stats for 2005:

Christmas Break

The past week has been great. Not only did I stay off the computer for most of the week, but I had a ton of fun with my Mom, Dad, sister, Julie and the kids. My parents flew in last Tuesday, and that marked the beginning of my Christmas Break. On Wednesday and Thursday, my dad and I pulled the engine on the Bus. Ironically, the first day we couldn't figure out how to get it out, but w/in 5 minutes of consulting How To Keep your Volkswagen Alive, we had the solution. The bus is a bit different from a bug - there's only 3 bolts (instead of 4) and one of them is on the inside of the engine compartment. Daddy's Bus should be ready for the shop sometime in January.

The weekend was awesome - complete with mimosas on Christmas morning while unwrapping presents. Abbie and Jack are at a terribly cute age - and it was a blast to see their eyes light up when opening presents. It was tough to get them to open the next present b/c they were so enthralled with the one they just opened. After all was said and done, Abbie is now riding a "big girl" bike and we have a trampoline in our back yard. That should work out nicely when we get our first surprise snow storm. Fortunately, the weather has been gorgeous (almost 70!) for the past week.

Yesterday was an epic powder-day at Copper Mountain. My sister and I headed up in the morning and skied (she snowboarded) all day in 10" of fresh powder. We're heading up again this weekend for the New Year (Breckenridge this time) and it's supposed to snow in the hills for the next 3 days. Yeeeeeeeeaaaaaa hhhhhhhhhaaaaaaawwww!! Two days at my client this week and then back up to the wonderful pow-pow. Next week, the contract with my client finishes up and I get to return to our office in downtown Denver. I'm pumped because that means I get to start riding my bike to work again. I took it in for a tuneup today and should get it back in a couple days.

2006 is going to be a good year. I get about 2-3 e-mails a week about mentoring and consulting and it looks like I'll be quite busy. I hope to squeeze in some time for Spring Live and AppFuse in January and hope to have AppFuse 1.9 released in the next few weeks. My Dad's 60th birthday is in mid-January, so my family is heading to Cancun for a week. Should be a good time for sure.

Awesome weekend

On Friday night, I skipped out on The Spring Experience's activities and headed out for a night on the town with Julie's Aunt and Uncle, who live in Miami. "Uncle Tim" married us and we had a great time - I even talked him into doing his first Irish Car Bomb. The cab dropped me off at my hotel room at 3:20 a.m.

I slept for 2 hours before getting up at 6:00 a.m. to catch my flight back to Denver. I arrived home safely, played with the kids for a few hours, and then headed to Castle Rock for the Virtuas Christmas Party. They had a "murder mystery" show during the party, and it was very entertaining. We left early (8:30) because our babysitter couldn't stay late.

Sunday: woke up, family breakfast at UPC and picked up a Christmas tree at the local Nursery. We decided to wait a few hours before decorating the tree, so I headed to the garage to work on the Bus. Within 5 minutes, I got a call from a good friend asking if I wanted to join them for the Broncos game. "Hell yes!" I said and 30 minutes later I was sitting in the South Stands. The game kinda sucked, but the Broncos won, and the tickets were free. All in all, quite a weekend.

North Americans - how's that weather treatin' ya?

I can't help but link to James Halberg's post titled More of the Spring Experience.

To anyone reading this anywhere in the country other than Miami (and especially you suckers in Wisconsin), I would just like to say: ha ha, ha... ha ha... ha. I hope you're enjoying the weather.

Well said James.

New Computer - should I keep it?

When I arrived here in Florida on Wednesday, I got a call from Julie saying my Windows Desktop was hosed. When she started it up, she just got a black screen. This is the problem with having a 23" Cinema Display hooked up to a Windows box - you can never see if anything went wrong on startup. I told her she needed to hook up one of my humongous 19" CRT monitors from the basement, and plug it in to see what was wrong. 10 minutes later, she calls me back and tells me the problem: it can't find the hard drive. I walk her though putting in the XP CD and trying to repair the drive, but it doesn't work. I tried to convince her to live w/o e-mail and the internet until I got home, but that didn't fly either.

I got a call from her yesterday afternoon telling me that she'd just bought a computer from Best Buy. I cringed. "Best Buy?", I thought. Knowing my penny-pinching wife, I figured the machine would be a $300 eMachine. However, she sent me a link and I was pleasantly surprised. She bought a HP Pavilion a1250n, which seems to be a dual AMD 64. After further reading, it seems it's a dual-core and not a dual processor. Regardless, I was quite proud that she bought something that I've been thinking of getting. I've used AMD-based machines in the past and they've always seemed much faster than an equivalent Pentium box.

This machine does seem to be a "media center" PC, which is expected when you buy it from Best Buy. But what exactly does that mean? Does it mean it won't make a good development box? We have 14 days to return it, so I'm wondering if I should. I don't really want to buy a new desktop (unless it's a G5), but my 2.6 GHz Dimension 8300 has thrown up quite a few times in the last few months - so I'm probably due. I tried to talk Julie into a G5, but a lot of the software she's using for her new business is Windows-only ... and VirtualPC sucks.

Update: I've decided to keep the box, mainly because my Dell Dimension 8300 is getting old and this one seems much faster. It's unlikely I'll ever have a Mac desktop because we still need and enjoy using Windows for a lot of things. I'd love to, but it just won't fly with the wife - as well as many software vendors out there. To make things a bit speedier, I did buy 4 GB of RAM for the HP today. I'll likely turn my Dell into a Suse box for Subversion, CUPS and Samba.

Sunrise at Bal Harbour

I could get used to starting my day with this view. Don't tell Julie, she's ready to move back here.

Brrrrrrrrr

Good thing I'm heading to Florida today.

For those of you stuck in Denver this week: enjoy the weather!

Update: To see my notes from this evening's session, see The Spring Experience: Rod Johnson's opening Keynote.

Skiing in Colorado - it's looking good this year

The last couple of weeks have been frustrating. Actually, it's really been the last couple of years. You see, I live in Denver, Colorado - a city that's close to some of the best skiing on the planet. Furthermore, skiing here is pretty cheap. Starting about 10 years ago, all the resorts reduced their "season pass" prices from thousands to hundreds. You can get a ski pass to Keystone, Breckenridge, A-Basin, Vail and Beavercreek (5 mountains!) for a mere 350 bucks.

When Julie first moved here, we were pretty regular skiiers. We both got passes and went skiing almost every weekend. In 1999-2000, I worked for a .com that had a "9-inch" rule, where we got to go skiing whenever it snowed more than 9 inches the night before. This happened to coincide with one of the best ski seasons ever, and we managed to ski an average of 3 days per week (including weekends). Needless to say, I went from being a decent "black skier" to skiing chutes and bumbs with ease.

Then the kids came. The first year it wasn't so bad. When Abbie was first born, I had my first book deal, and I started AppFuse - so I didn't notice the winter pass me by. That was the first year I didn't buy a pass in quite a few years. The next year, I made sure to buy a season pass and barely got my money's worth (only skiing 5 times). I bought one again last year, and still only made it up 4 times. This year I didn't buy one.

For the last 2 weeks, I've gotten a 9" snow report in my inbox almost every day! It is dumping in Colorado this year and looks to be one of the best ski seasons ever. This year I'm planning on taking Abbie up with me, and getting her started on the "slopes." The problem? Why haven't I been up there yet? Work - how bad does that suck? And it's not real work IMO. It's open source and conference preparation. Ugh.

I need to get in shape, I need to find a client with a 9" rule - and I need to get to the hills! Ahhh, the good ol' days. I miss 'em.

Note to self: mountain biking and skiing should have a higher priority than any of this career mumbo jumbo.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I have to admit, Thanksgiving is one of the best American holidays there is. No gift giving, no marketing hype - just good food and hanging out with friends and family. This year, we took a break from the norm and canceled our trip to Florida - instead opting to stay home and relax a bit. We're certainly glad we did as things are much less stressed and we had a great dinner with friends this evening.

Like previous years, I have a lot to be thankful for. I owe you, the readers of this blog, a huge thanks. Your comments and feedback are always appreciated. I also owe a big thanks to Virtuas for hooking me up with a kick-ass job and fun folks to work with.

Last, but certainly not least - I'd like to thank Julie, Abbie and Jack. You guys are the best part of this whole world and make it tremendously fun to live in.

Happy Turkey Day Y'all!