After 4 years of blogging, watching myself write too many posts about worthless crap that even I don’t want to read, I’ve decided that it’s time to shut down TheCatsNuts.com. It’s been fun, and I certainly have enjoyed it at times, but frankly, I don’t find much joy in it anymore and am feeling more guilty than anything else. Every time that I want to write something, I just feel like I’ve been so neglectful of my blog that it’s just not worthwhile. So, with that, this will be my last post. I know there are a few of you out there that still check in on it every once in awhile, and I appreciate your hits, but it’s just not worth it anymore. I’ve been wanting to start up something a little bit more professional and open, and with all of the very personal things that I have posted in here in the past, I can’t very well have a forum that I can openly share with colleagues and new people that I meet in passing.
It’s been fun…or should I say… it’s been the cat’s nuts.
How about that. I thought this week was going to be slow and have nothing going on… boy was I wrong. Things have been humming along here in Greenville so I certainly can’t complain. We’ve got a new guy on board, so it’s been nice getting to know some more fellow co-workers.
Next week I get to hang out in Boca working from home. Hopefully I’ll be able to finish up some of this work that’s been hanging over my head. It’s been hard to get some of it done when I’ve been slammed here with conference calls and team discussion.
The following week I get to head out to Phoenix for a week. We’re going to be demoing our reporting environment for a bunch of folks, so that should be fun. It’s at a fancy resort type place, but unfortunatly, due to the fact that I am a vendor, I was not invited to stay there, so I’ll be staying at the wonderful and luxurious Springhill Suites by Marriott down the road in beautiful Scottsdale, AZ. What fun.
I’ll once again be flying, so I am going to tie up some loose ends here before I go to catch my flight.
Sometimes I feel bad about not writing in my blog and other times, I feel like just saying screw it. I know I have a small but loyal following that constantly checks on my updates, but even that doesn’t really give me reason to write. I don’t know why I really do it in the first place. If nothing else, it’s a little bit of a sounding board and a growing record of my life as it’s been in the past, and that’s been kind of nice to see what I’ve been up to.
So now that the holidays have come and gone, we’re into a new year. The holidays were spent in the hospital with Melissa’s grandmother, as she was recovering from some back surgery and we spent new years at home, Melissa cooking an amazing Beef Wellington, which as it turned out was perfectly cooked, just 4-5 hours late. Nothing like filet mignon at 11:45… no better way to bring in the new year.
This week I’ve been shipped up to Greenville to “kick off the new year”, but there’s really no on here…not even our project sponsor, so I’m kicking it here in the bullpen with a fellow co-worker. I have this feeling that the week is going to crawl. I’m sitting dead in the water in terms of getting cracking on work as I’ve been locked out of the system.
I have this feeling that I’m gonig to have a bit of time on my hands as this week crawls along, so I won’t go into too much details as to the happenings of my life, as I want to have something else to write about later on. Cheers!
I just got the information that I was waiting for. As of the end of this week, I’ll no longer be traveling up to Greenville to work at this client. I’ve once again moved away from one client and towards another.
The lovely thing about this next client is that I will be working from home 90%-95% of the time. It’s going to be amazing. I can’t wait to finally be in a working role from home where I feel like a normal person. The closest that I’ve been is being “on the bench” and being required to go into the office and pretend to do work. In this situation I’ll be working from my home office, being productive and setting my own pace. I’ve very much looking forward to it.
That just made my week… especially because the holidays are coming and I have zero interest in flying all around the country in the snow and holiday travel misery. I’ll leave that to my parents and brother.
I can’t look back at the past month and say that “nothing happened” because surly things have happened, but really nothing is jumping out at me that’s made me say “Wow….I need to blog”.
I don’t think that’s particularly a bad thing, but it doesn’t exactly make interesting blog reading.
I figure I’ll just do a little free-form listing of what comes to mind, so here it comes…
Got an Iphone, finally dumped the Blackberry but I hate the calendar.
Ordered couches for the sitting area and was able to find a good deal from Rooms To Go. I hate their “Discount” area…it’s a waste of money for most items in there.
I fixed Melissa’s brother’s X-Box. Totally took it apart and reseated the chipsets. That was a nice little win and now I have a working XBox 360.
We’re preparing for Thanksgiving at our house…30 people. It’s going to be a fun time.
Pud has been enjoying playing with unsuspecting lizards that wander into the house… and she’s been enjoying the outside. Killed a toad and left it in the heat…under the grill. That wasn’t pleasent.
I’m tired of working in Greenville….there’s talk of a new project on the horizon….working from home. That would make the holidays a bit more enjoyable I believe.
Installed Windows 7 on all my computers. My laptop needs a newer version installed… still has a trial version. Should have read the fine print. Oh well.
It’s finally cooled down to the point where this past weekend Melissa and I opened up all the doors in the house. It was amazing and windy.
Been disappointing watching the Dolphins lose on Sunday.
Looking forward to my parents and my brother coming in December for a long weekend.
Finally hooked up the surround sound in the living room. Not really all that pleased with it currently. Need to tweak it a bit and just haven’t had the motivation to go about doing it.
Been thinking more and more about a NAS type solution for backing up my computers and for accessing remote storage.
Anyway.. that’s about all that I could think of that’s really of any interest….
Last night was the release of Windows 7. I’ve been running the release candidate (actually the Enterprise Trial Edition) for over a month now, and frankly, it’s been amazing. It’s fast, easy to use and hasn’t really caused me much grief, which is more than I can say about previous Vista installations. Since I still have a .EDU email address, I signed up to get a copy of Windows 7 Professional for a whopping $30. After putting in my credit card number and getting an email this morning with my Key, I start looking into what it’s going to take to change my Enterprise Edition over to the new fanciness that is Professional Edition… That’s when I found out the bad news. Apparently, since my copy is for “evaluation” only… I have no way to change the version or to put in a new key. I am going to have to do a fresh install. Now… I wouldn’t care so much about that if I didn’t just get the damn thing tuned up, working flawlessly and doing everything that I needed it to do. It’s REALLY friggin’ annoying. I suppose that’s the price you pay for installing free software and not reading the fine print. I’m going to have to back up my whole damn computer and get this process started. Not looking forward to it, but at least I have next week where I’ll be working from home to make the switch while still having my desktop up and operational. Seeing as how I installed the same damn thing on my computer at home, I think it may be time to just wipe out everything and start fresh with both computers. Not really my idea of a good time, but having fresh, fast and clean computers is essential to making my work days productive.
Speaking of productivity, this week has been miserable. We’re in a “Go-Live” situation, and it’s been running smooth as silk, which NEVER happens. That being said, I’ve been tremendously bored. Don’t know what to do with myself. Oh well. The one thing that’s really fallen off in the past year is my desire to use my camera. I don’t know what’s been causing the decline in usage, but I’ve hardly picked the thing up. I think that some of that has to do with the PITA that it’s been to work with the pictures on my desktop, but that’s going to have to change. I’ve been looking into various NAS devices or even Media PC’s that could work as a remote file storage. I’ve not yet decided what I really want to do as of yet, but I really want to have a media PC that will take backups of both my and Melissa’s computer in addition to playing Blu-Rays, games, and hosting all of my media in an accessible location. I don’t care if it does any of the DVR fanciness, as I am using the AT&T U-Verse package, which has been great, so it really is going to act as storage.
I’ll be looking into it more as the week moves on. Anyway…time to start thinking about lunch.
I am currently sitting on the runway of the Atlanta Airport, half way home from Denver. Just spent a few extra days there, hanging out with Brad. For the past few nights, we’ve experienced a good bit of the beer culture in Denver, which, as it may be, is a fairly robust culture. We had a good time, kept it legal, and enjoyed ourselves.
While hanging out, I took my camera along, which is something I haven’t done in a long time. Pretty much since I moved to Boca, its come out only on a single occassion….considering how much I have enjoyed photography in the past, that’s gotta change. So I’m looking forward to assulting Dagny and Pud with the camera in the coming week.
Speaking of which, this is the first week in awhile where I will be working from home. I am pretty excited about the idea. Especially when the following weekend, I am going to be traveling up to NY to my parents house and then working from Perth Amboy for the week…..then flying out to San Diego to meet up with Melissa…..I have a bit of flying coming up.
Ugh….and as I write this, I get closer and closer to missing my connecting flight. This is miserable. I hate Delta.
Being in Denver, one of the hubs of beer culture in the US, I was looking around for a brewery that I could tour…I stumbled upon this video. Now, I know that non-craft beer has helped to provide an income for my parents and an education for myself, but it still sucks.
“No end in sight” is how Melissa described my traveling every week. When I first started to travel, the issues that surrounded it, or so I thought at the time, would be isolated to dealing with delays, weather, bag storage space, etc. What I didn’t realize was how hard it was going to be on my home life. Its so very difficult to have 2 days at home and then be forced to do house work and projects, wedding planning, etc. Typically, people would go home after work and take care of many of those issues without even thinking about it. I don’t have that luxury, so I am stuck cramming it all into two-three days. Things have to change.
The current client that I am working on has been a bastard about making us go up to the work site. There have been weeks that I have not spoken to a single person of value the entire week, so there isn’t even a point of us being up there. I spoke to my employer and he agrees, so with the next round of contract negotiations, he’s going to be working towards getting us on a one week on, one week off type pattern. I am very much looking forward to it.
This week, I’m stationed up in Denver. I watched some football with Brad and had a few beers last night. I don’t know what we’re going to do tonight, but it’ll be nice to see him.
Well, the weekend is over. Not exactly a nice thought, but the next one will be here soon enough. Melissa and I had a nice Labor day weekend, so I can’t complain.
We participated in a wing competition at a friend’s house. We ended up beating out some still competition from 7 other teams. Our secret, or so Melissa claims, is the brown sugar in the butter based wing sauce, but I tend to believe it was more the deep fryer that we purchased in order to make it all come together….either way, we’ll shortly have the trophy in our living room.
Anyway, I am mobile blogging and on my flight, so I have to go as they are closing the door.
