Well,
I'm not sure if I ever really gained any "followers" of this blog last year. I figure I posted some decent reference material but probably not frequently enough for anyone to subscribe to the feed. So what the heck have I been doing since my last post in June of 2008?
Well, the short answer is that I've been building a house! The contract was placed for the sale of our old house in June of 2008. Since that time, it's been a tornado of events that lead me to today where I type this from my brand new office (I can still smell the new paint!) in the loft of our new home! We sold the old place, moved into an apartment (didn't want 2 house payments!), started a construction loan, dug a big hole, watched hurricane Ike fill it with water, pumped it out, poured the basement, and then watched my general orchestrate a symphony of subcontractors as they built us a beautiful home!
Anyway, so that explains the haiatus! In the mean time, I had to pay the bills, so I have to once again sing the praises of KnowledgeLake. They graciously helped me by giving me content migrations to work on for a group of customers. The benefit to that was that I was working alone, usually from home, where my schedule could be extremely flexible. When they dug the hole and struck water, I could go out to decide how deep the basement would be (and give up my walk-out). When one of the concrete walls in the basement came out a bit too far, I could help decide where the new stair placement would be and how it would affect my other walls. When the master bath shower ended up sticking out into the middle of the room, I was there to change the plans so that it didn't.
Anyway, to make a long story short, KnowledgeLake totally rocks. There have been seasons where I worked my tail off for them to dream up some creative solution or to pull a customer engagement out of the fire. The last 6 – 8 months was a season that had me working just 8 hours a day, no more, no less and often in a very hit and miss schedule. They let this be a season that I could focus more on my personal life than my job. Thanks KL. That type of employer loyalty is hard to find and I don't take it for granted. It just makes me want to work all the harder this year!
So there it is. I've been off doing migrations and building a house. Not much interesting technically. But it's a new season now. And in my next post, I'll be talking about what will be driving more blog posts in the near future!
Russ Houberg