Inspired by this post by @writetoreach, I have decided to do monthly “personal” wrap-up posts. I’ve long struggled with how to integrate more personal posts with all the tech tips and other geeky type of posts on this blog, and a monthly summary seems to be a good way to do this. So without further delay, here’s what was going on in my world in February.
So that happened
As you may recall, my wife and I had a long and difficult infertility journey getting pregnant with Henry and Joey. So it was quite a shock and pleasant surprise when we discovered that these two guys are going to be big brothers.
We don’t know the gender yet, but the due date is 9/9/2011. Of course, if it turns out to be a girl, we’ll have to update strattonboys.com to “strattonkids.com”. These are the things I think about – my wife, on the other hand, is more practical, and is more concerned with things like “we need a minivan now” or “we’ll be having three under two”.
Work stuff
I don’t blog much about work, but I’m sure you all would love to know more about my professional endeavors. And if you don’t, that’s just too bad. For those of you who don’t know, I am the Manager of IT Operations for Apartments.com, which is just about the coolest and most awesome dot com in Chicago (okay, fine, Groupon and Grubhub are pretty cool too). We’ve been super busy in Apartments-land.
Going live…soon!
We’re on the home stretch to release our massive site redesign to the public. We’ve been in beta since last year, and this project has taken over a year of effort from our entire tech department. In addition to a cool new look and feel, we’ve done major changes and improvements to our back end, including a best-of-breed search engine, cutting-edge database technology, and super awesome infrastructure overhauls. Like any major change, the last “mile” is always the toughest, but I know that once we finish, it’s going to blow everyone anyway. I’ll let you all know when we go live for real, but for now, if you visit https://apartments.com, you have a pretty good chance of hitting our beta (if your URL starts with ww1 or ww2 you are on the beta site).
Administrative stuff
Last fall, I hired a rock-star sys admin intern…and unfortunately, he just gave me his two weeks last week – because he found a permanent, full-time position, which I can’t offer right now. I’m super bummed, since my team is working to the max right now, and it’s not a great time to be down a head (or a half). If you know any college students in the Chicago area who are looking for a sys admin type internship, let me know – the position should officially be posted again shortly.
SharePoint
I’m starting to get some real adoption within the business for the new SharePoint 2010 infrastructure I put in place last year. It’s exciting to me to see folks getting jazzed about what we can do with the collaboration tools, and what it will do to make everyone within our vertical more efficient and effective. Plus, my work with SharePoint has proven to be one of the biggest draws to this blog, with my post about configuring SharePoint 2010 search in a one-way trust environment. Geekery ahoy!
Blogging
It’s no secret that 2010 was a sloooow year for me, blog-wise, With the exception of February (when I attempted to post every day), most of 2010 I was pretty much absent when it came to posting. I’m trying to rev this up some more now (as this post makes evident).
I am almost done with a fun side project, which is designing and coding for my friend’s new parenting blog, It Builds Character. I’ve been able to flex my Thesis muscles on this one, and have created some kind of neat behind the scenes hacking to build some of the customizations required. Once it’s done, I plan to write up a post detailing how I configured it and the lessons learned.
Fitness
Similar to my blogging story, I’ve fallen off when it comes to dieting and working out. I did start up P90X again this morning, and I will be writing up a weekly update on my results (planning this for every Friday). Not sure what I’m going to do, diet-wise, yet, but the good news is I haven’t really gained any weight since October (when I stopped P90X last time). However, my muscle has gone down, so I have some composition work to do, for sure.
So that was my update! Now that I think about it, there was definitely more going on in February, but I figure it’s good to just get this out there for now. Maybe in the March update I’ll get more personal, but baby steps, my friends. Baby steps.