Up until the a couple of weeks ago, I’d been assigned to several projects at once and the resulting travel was chaotic, frequent, tiring, and unsatisfying. It brought up memories of working for IBM – back when I was on the road every week.

This travel “binge”, however, seemed worse to me. I think it was worse because I was never in the same place twice and was therefore always feeling uprooted and unable to form a workable routine. My workout routine practically died, and I gained some of my weight back. I was always tired and unable to focus on anything but work.

This trip, though, isn’t about the customer: it’s about me. That make a big difference. I’m here for training, which while work related, means that I’m here to learn and take in instead of “give out” and I need some of that now.

I’ve finished one rather unsatisfying project, and worked myself out of another, so I’m down to a single, primary project and that takes a lot of stress off of my shoulders.

After a week at home to rest up a bit, going on this trip with Laura feels almost like a vacation – even though I’ll be spending my days learning things.

Oh: and I get to add a new airport to my list as well…

I’ve been going from place to place so much, that I’ve been so tired and emotionally drained that I haven’t had the will to sit down and type.

In fact, I don’t really have it now, but I felt that I needed to put something down.

In the last month, I’ve been to Fayetteville, NC, spent the weekend in DC for Photoshop World, spent a day in Laramie, WY, a day in Breckenridge, CO, and a week in Denver, CO. Then, I just returned from Burlington, VT last night. Next week, I’ll be in Fayetteville again, followed by a weekend jaunt to go plant trees in Pennsylvania. Then I should have a break… for a week or so. Then, Laura and I will be headed to San Diego, CA. I’ll be there for a conference for most of the time, but we’ll be extending a couple of days to celebrate our 9th anniversary. This will, of course, add another airport to my airport list. Again. Just like Burlington did.

I’ll try to post more later when I have some time about the places I’ve been over the last few weeks.

Maybe I’ll even feel up to it.

All was well once I had Elephant Drive running. Then, after two years of great service, the hammer fell.

They wanted to raise prices and eliminate the unlimited package. This meant I would have to pay almost $200/month for my near 1TB of data that I was backing up. That was quite a price jump, so I ditched them and have been without back up… until now.

I found a new company called CrashPlan which has great plans, even family backup plans, and a client that works on Windows Server. I’m now back to backing up!

I’ll soon be backed up again in the “cloud”. Soon meaning about a month due to the vast amounts of data that will be going up.

The last run I did, which was 4.35 miles, really put my poor feet close to some large blisters. The shoes I was using worked very well for me up until lately once I started running again. Now that I’m running more, the age and mileage on the shoes began to chafe a bit.

So, I bought a new pair today. I’ve got to break them in, so I think I’ll be doing a few short runs during the week next week before I hit the 4 mile mark next Saturday.

Go, shoes, go!

Move along.

The last post said I was happy about the Blu-Ray player, but that’s not quite true. Watching a few Blu-Ray disks has revealed a problem with playback: stuttering. Occasionally, the disk would pause or hesitate, or just generally not play smoothly.

Now, ArcSoft has release an update to Total Media Theater that is supposed to solve a whole host of issues. Of course, I think my problem was broader than just that and related to hardware and drive issues with the drive itself. Funny thing: the manufacturer of the drive just released a firmware update relating to “smoothness of play”.

Hmmm… Maybe I wasn’t the only one having issues?

I haven’t watched a disk yet with both updates, but I’ll have to do that soon.

What I’ve done is actually migrate [finally] all my sites/blogs/galleries to a single server. I’ve eliminated the old photo gallery server that was an “interim” box and moved that function to the main server. I’ve removed all instances of MySQL and am instead utilizing a single Microsoft SQL Server 2008 instance, which will soon be upgraded to SQL Server 2008 R2 for those that care.

This was harder to do than to write about and much pain and link adjustment/correction was required after migration to make sure everything was working.

In the past, running WordPress required MySQL since the Microsoft database was considered “enterprise” and not “open source”. However, in recent months, some enterprising individuals wrote a WordPress plugin that allows a connection directly to MS SQL instead of MySQL.

Now, all my blog are belong to MSSQL. [Grammatical incorrectness intentional for those not “in the know”, and if you don’t know where that reference comes from, I’m not explaining it to you.]

I’ll post more later, but I wanted to get this one up.

We had intended to combine a beach vacation with Laura’s mother and a dive trip entailing several days of diving 4 for me, and 3 for Laura, only the Sunday I was supposed to start diving, I get a phone call at the room telling me the port is closed due to high water. Fortunately, I wasn’t really “feeling it” that morning and was in need of more vacation rest. Back to bed I went with no regret.

The next day, Laura and I made the taxi ride to the dive shop only to be turned down again by the port captain for high water. Even so, I was still not upset at not getting to dive – a miracle in itself. Tuesday, we called ahead and were told that all was good.

Once we arrived, we got on the boat – a very SMALL boat for our dives. Laura, at this point, is becoming very concerned due to the size of the boat both for the now-obvious method of water entry [the back roll, which she doesn’t like] and the relative size of the waves in comparison to the boat. Not to be deterred, we board and head out to the reef. After struggling to hold on to the boat for a while we squeeze into our gear and back-flop into the water. What we saw, I think, wasn’t worth the effort. The first dive was only moderately clear, maybe 30ft visibility. We did see two very large spotted eagle rays and two stingrays, but after a while it was time to come up. It was a passable dive.

Once on the boat, we began to feel queasy. For Laura, this was kind of expected with the water being so rough. What was not expected and far from normal was me, leaning over the side and tossing out the chorizo I had for breakfast. After that, we all felt better and decided on one more dive. We might have been better just heading back. Visibility was even worse and the current was now very strong. It was one of the most unsatisfactory dives I’ve had. We finally got back to shore and decided that we’d had enough diving for the trip. We had lunch at a great little restaurant in town and then headed back to the hotel where we were much more interested in lounging by the beach and pool and a couple of snorkeling outings.

We did have Thanksgiving dinner on Cozumel island and Pepe’s Grill. And yes, there was lobster on my plate.