This weekend, instead of flying home to South Florida, I’m flying to Orlando to meet Melissa. She has a conference up there, so I figured that instead of hanging out by myself at the house, we’d take a trip up to Orlando together.

One evening we’ll head over to the Magic Kingdom for their “Extra Magic Hours” or something like that. I am looking forward to it. It’s always nice to get away from the grind, especially since the past month has been focused around getting our house all set up, which, by the way, is coming along nicely. We’ve got out bedroom, both bathrooms, the kitchen and the living room done. Having all those rooms totally set up makes the house feel much more homey than it has, so it’s an enjoyable place to be, even if we do have a 3ft. tall stack of boxes that still need to be unpacked.

I am going to take my terrible feeling self over to my dashboard page and see if I can get some work done.

For the past 6-7 years, my brother, Scott, has worked at a retail bike shop. During that time, I’ve gone down the path towards my consulting career, seemingly miles away from anything that he’s been doing. To all outsiders, we have totally different careers and that’s just the way things are.

The other day, I got an email that Scott forwarded onto me. In the email was a job posting looking for a Java programmer. While at first blush, I tried to think of a few of the Java folks that I have worked with in the past and found a few names and forwarded them the email. I didn’t really give it much thought past that.

A few hours later, Scott called me up and we started into our typical ramblings about the daily trials of life. Eventually we started talking about the job posting that he forwarded to me. I got to thinking about some of the experiences that I’ve had with open source software and how that could be used as an open-source solution for his company. The gears started turning and in the end, I was sending out an email to his boss, asking him for more details regarding what his company needed to accomplish.

One of the issues that I’ve had with my job is that I don’t see the results of my work. We’ll come in, put in a dashboard and that’ll be that. Nothing more and I’ll never hear about it. I’ve thought a lot in the past about gathering up the skill set necessary to put in small scale open source BI implementations for small businesses. Over time, this didn’t really happen, but the idea has always been in my mind. I brought up the idea of creating a application suit using open source software to the guy that I am working for and he lit up. After talking about it for awhile we came to the conclusion that if we were able to put in some significant effort into a project such as this one, we could build a custom application that could be put into other similar businesses in a modular form. The software would be free to the customer, offering an outstanding value proposition, and we’d have a product that we could push to all levels of client.

I proposed this option to Scott’s boss and he seemed to be interested, so next week we’re going to be on a conference call to talk about what our business can offer theirs. This is the kind of engagement that is a, I hate to be cliche, win-win, where we can justifiably offer a solution to them at a lower cost, actually probably taking a loss as a business, but develop strong intellectual capital. As you might be able to tell, I’m pretty excited about this and not to even mention the oportunity to head up to Boston to work with my brother on a project.

I am going to be taking this on as my own little baby as we move forward, trying to push sales and push us into this potentially lucrative market, so I’m sure I’ll have plenty more to say about it as time goes on.

It’s been about 6-8 weeks since I proposed to Melissa and frankly…the wedding planning hasn’t been going so well. We recently moved into our new house, so pretty much until we’re all settled in, we agreed to put the wedding planning on hold. Well, that doesn’t stop everyone from ASKING about it. The big question that usually comes is “When’s the date”, as if it really matters to most people.

The next question that we usually get surrounds the “How big?” And frankly, that’s a question that Melissa and I have yet to reach a decision about. Everyone from my mother to Melissa’s Grandmother has been pestering us to figure out what we’re going to do.

The one thing that Melissa and I said about our wedding was that we were going to do it how we wanted it and we weren’t going to led the agenda of anyone else…and we mean ANYONE else effect what we choose to do, who we invited, where it was held, the color scheme, type of flowers or the flavor of the cake. There are too many stories that go around about allowing other people’s influence come into your wedding and the amount of stress that comes from trying to please everyone. Melissa and I lead very stressful lives as it stands. She’s the director of marketing at a small technology company, and I’ve just recently started my own small company, so to invite another stressful element into our lives wasn’t an option.

One of the key points of contention that we’re already running into from both sides of the family is the “Who’s going to be invited”. Both Melissa and I have members of our families that we’re not particularly fond of and frankly would rather not see at the Wedding. We also have those family members who we’re indifferent to, and that being said, if we’re indifferent to them being there, then why bother with the expense and stress of coordinating yet another group of people into the mix?

After expressing these views to our respective family members we’ve gotten a mixed bag of

“It’s your day, do what you want…”

to “I am going to cry if your Aunt and Uncle aren’t invited”…

and pretty much anything between. At this point, we have no idea what we’re going to do for a wedding, or at least we’re no closer to deciding them we were a week after the engagement, but the one thing that we’re sure of is that we’re going to be doing it the way that we want it…not the way that someone else thinks we should be doing it.

Enough said.

You know, the more and more I sit behind my computer during the day, the better I feel. Why is that? Because every time I get up and go to the “other” form of media in my home, the television, I just get disgusted. I will be flipping through the channels and see these news organization, blabbing on about something that no rational person could believe, or better yet, no rational person would waste their time listening to, let alone talking about, then it hits me.

The ol’ profit motive. We’ve moved so far away from journalistic integrity in order to bolster the pockets of the news organizations, so now instead of “how factual can we get” we’ve moved into a “how sensational can we get”. It’s just disgusting. Hence why I try to get my news and information from community news aggregators like Digg.com or Redit.com

Jon Stewart says it best:

Just watch and enjoy.

One of my key gripes with Movable Type was the inability to actually have comments that worked and wouldn’t get spammed to all end. I’ve enabled comments here and hopefully it’ll be better now that I’m using Wordpress and their comment security functionality. Happy commenting!

This week, while I have been extremely busy with unit testing at work and getting things all squared away for our eventual deployment of the new reporting tool, other ventures have been going on.

Melissa and I finally found a house to rent. It was a long search, and a frustrating one, filled with many false starts and some true downers. This was by far the hardest time that I’ve ever had finding a place to live. Though it was a hard search, I think that what we finally found will 100% meet our needs and be a very comfortable home for Melissa and I while we plan our wedding and prepare to eventually purchase our own home.

We got a house that’s about 3 miles from her Mother’s house, 3 miles from the beach and close to the area shopping stuffs. The house itself is a 3/2 with a “bonus” room. It has a 2 car garage and many nice perks. There is an A/V closet that controls the sound system throughout the home, tile floors, security system, a beautiful Florida room with glass walls (sliding glass doors), a covered seating area outside and a fenced in yard for Dagny to run around in. Melissa and I are very excited about getting in there. One of the best features of the house is the landlord. The guy recently moved out of the home and down to Miami with his family so that he would be closer to his job. We are the first rental folks that he’s going to have in the house, so he’s not jaded with having bad renters. It’s the exact type of person that we were looking to rent from.

We were supposed to get the keys yesterday, as that was the 1st of July, but there was some painting that needed to be done and some cleaning that had to be finished before we moved in, so we decided to put it off until next week. I finagled working from home next week, so we’ll be able to take our time moving in. Right now, we have stuff spread out all over Melissa’s mother’s house and in storage. I am just happy that we don’t have an entire house to pack up right now, as I don’t think I have the motivation to go through that again any time soon.

Anyway, it’s almost time to button things up around here and head to the airport.