ace’s blog

The last few weeks have been a very difficult time for everybody in my family. Meri and I have decided not to get a divorce, at least not yet.

My mom lives in Jacksonville, which is about 2 hours away. We just recently star started speaking again, after a 3 year hiatus. So since I don’t have a support system down here in Orlando, Meri really wants to take the boys to Massachusetts. She is from there and has a lot of family around that would help with child care if one of us needed it.

My parents were divorced. my brother and I stayed with my mom and since my dad was in the Navy, he was all over the place. He was mostly in California and we were in Florida. I know all too well what it is like to grow up without a father around. I don’t want that for my boys. I don’t want to be several states away. I don’t want to be an occasional phone call and a random card in the mail. I don’t want to be that kind of dad.
I’ve discussed my situation with my IT Director at work and asked if I could work out of the Massachusetts branch. He told me that it was no problem at all and that I won’t really need to go into the branch at all and that I could just work from home. That was a major relief!! I didn’t really want to have to find another job up there.

We’ve decided that we aren’t going to get a divorce right away. We are going to get separated and see how that “works” for us, for approximately a year or so. If both of us feel that we want to remain together, then we’ll get a divorce. We are going to live in separate places. The boys will stay with both of us half of the time. We aren’t going to be so rigid about that schedule – we won’t force the kids to go to either place if they won’t want to.

We don’t want to jump right into getting divorced. Neither of us can say that we are 100% sure that we don’t want to be together.

This weekend, we’re going to list our house on the market as a short sale. We have a realtor friend that is going to discuss the ramifications of short selling our home, on our individual credit reports and on us financially.

I’m already feeling very sad that my family is going to be broken up. Hopefully, after our separation period, we’ll both decide that we really want to remain together and we can stay married.

Ah, funny how true this one is!

We’re leaving for our cruise to the Bahama’s this Thursday! It’s a short cruise, only four days and three nights but it will be very nice to get away. Meri’s parents are flying in Wednesday and they are going to watch Aaron and Eli while we are gone. It’s super nice that they are able to help us out like that because otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to go on the cruise.

In other family news, Eli has been sick all weekend. He woke up vomitting around 4:30 Saturday morning. He thew up six times in the following 90 minutes. We were going to take him to the ER around 9am or 10am if he continued vomitting but he stopped after the initial 90 minutes. Whenever we give him solid food, he’s thrown it up (we’ve only tried twice all weekend). He is holding down milk just fine so we’re sticking to that for a little while.

Aaron has started lying more and more lately. He has generally been lying about things that he will be embarrassed about – pooping or peeing on himself mostly, hurting Eli sometimes. We’re not sure how to deal with it, other than to continue the beatings (that’s a joke, seriously; NOTE: we do not beat our kids). We’ll need to do some more research but our initial thoughts are to reward the times when he does not have an accident, rather than make a big deal about the times that he does have an accident. This is something that I’ll have to work on more than Meri.

Lost in the busyness of Aaron’s surgery, I resigned from my current employer, effective next Friday (July 25th). I will start my career as an independent consultant with a new client.

I’m excited to start a new chapter in my career, although I’m a bit nervous about having to find new contracts when current ones end. This is a very big deal for my family.

I will be doing 100% development, instead of the 5-10% I’m doing at my current employer. I’m always looking forward to learning new things and helping with the knowledge that I possess.

I had an interview yesterday for a 6 month contract. I really liked the facility and the work environment seemed very clean and nice. The people I interviewed with were very nice. The only problem I have with it, is the length of the contract. My biggest worry is about not being extended. Both of the people I spoke with spoke long-term so that made me feel a bit better, I just can’t shake the worry though. I thought I’d make a list of pro’s and con’s of my current and prospective contracts.

Current company pros

• Relatively stable – current contract expires in Sept 2008 but there is an extension in the hands of the client’s legal department awaiting approval that would expire in Sept 2010.
• I am allowed to work from home one day a week.
• Pay is good, benefits are decent and fairly inexpensive

Current company cons

• I’m fucking miserable here!
• I’m writing code about 10% of the time, the other 90% is spent analyzing production data and modifying it since it’s been screwed up by the system – basically, I feel like I work on a help desk.
• Being on-call. I have a pager that I have to “man” once every 10 days (approximately speaking); every 5th weekend, I’m on-call and basically can’t leave my house.
• I now how 3 time sheets to fill out! One of them, the newest, easily takes about 30mins/day to fill out.
• I’m not learning anything new here since I’m barely writing any code.
• I have to commute 62 miles (round trip) and spend about 45 minutes on I4 (with smooth traffic, no accidents).

Contract position pros

• Major pay increase, 66% from my current hourly rate – dollar for dollar, not including how much my benefits cost. Meri would pick up the benefits from working part-time at her job.
• 20 mile round trip from my house to client site.
• I would be writing code again!
• No more on-call support (and therefore no more feeling like I work on a help desk).

Contract position cons

• Only a guaranteed 6 month contract. The company has a very strong history of extending their contractors and eventually offering them full-time positions, but that is not guaranteed. The only guarantee is that I’ll have a paycheck for 6 months.

If the client decided not to renew the contract at the end of the 6 month period, they would have to let me know 45 days prior to the end of contract and vice versa if I decided not to stay with them either. If the contract expired in 6 months and was not renewed, we would be able to live on the “extra” money that I made from the hourly increase for about 4 months after the contract was over. That would give me 4 months to either look for another job or find another contract. If I was unable to find another full-time position somewhere else in Orlando. Moving out of Orlando is not an option. If I did have to start working other contracts, then I would potentially have to travel a lot.

So basically, I’m not sure what to do. Any ideas?

So this week at work, I was a lucky participant in the Disaster Recovery (DR) exercise. My involvement in the DR exercise this year (it is performed yearly) was that I sat in an un-cooled room with a lot of other lucky participants and we all did some things and everything generally went well.

Here is the DR in a nutshell – if primary server goes down, the users still need to be able to access the system and do their work with minimum downtime. This is accomplished (in very basic terms) by switching the IPs of the DNS entries of the servers. We were tasked with simulating a production failure and falling back to the backup servers.

That started Tuesday (6/3/2008) and I was on property overnight from 11pm Tuesday to 11am Wednesday. After that was completed and it was given the thumbs up, it was time to undo it – now we have to be back on the production server. That started at 11pm Wednesday night and lasted until 4am Thursday morning.

Now my sleep cycle is screwed up. Here’s to hoping that I won’t be here next year to experience that again!

Also, I have a phone interview for a contract job here in Orlando that I most likely won’t accept even if it’s offered to me. With the economy the way it is, I can’t put my family’s well-being at risk by taking a 6 month contract versus staying with my company with a 2 year contract. The money is a lot better but in taking the 6 month contract but what would I do in 6 months if the project actually completed on-time or the client just decided to cancel my contract? I’d be putting my family at risk if I couldn’t find another job or contract quickly.

If I am offered the contract, I’ll have to talk to Meri more about it.

I was on-call this weekend and my router (WRT54GX4) died Sunday afternoon! I called Martin to ask if I should have Julie take over (since she was my backup) and he said that he would take over.

I talked to Brighthouse to see if my cable modem was down and it wasn’t. I headed over to Linksys livechat and spoke with some people there and after 4 hours, I’ve got a new router on the way since this one is still under warranty! I was astonished since the router is at least 3 1/2 years old and I don’t even remember registering it.

It appears that all of the ports on the back of the router went bad. I could still configure the router via a wireless connection but not from a wired one.

That saves us approximately $150 and I’m very pleased about that!

We got back from our trip to mass. on Tuesday. The trip was like our
normal trips, some fighting, some fun, more uncomfortable than anything
really. We had Aaron’s birthday party on sunday, in mass. He had a lot
of fun and got quite a few gifts. We had to mail ourselves a box full of presents even after we filled up the extra bag that we brought to fly some presents back with us! When we got home, we gave Aaron the presents that we got for him: a slushy maker and a fish tank! Meri took him to the pet store and got him a couple of small fish. He named them “grapey” and “orange”. He gets really excited when it’s time to feed them.

We got back Tuesday and I went to the 2008 LANSA User Conference here in Orlando. I got to talk to a few people I worked with at Terminix and attended some of the WAM sessions. Those were great! I found the AJAX lab to be a bit lacking and the speaker wasn’t that good in my opinion.

I worked from home yesterday and now it is Friday and I am back at the office. I haven’t been here for a week! I must’ve saved a ton of money on gas (well, like $60). Now I’m on-call for the weekend.

Yesterday, when I was working from home, I took a break for lunch (which is unusual for me), I sat with Eli for a bit and I was playing with him on the couch. I started making some weird noises and poking around his mouth to try and get him to smile at me. Normally, it’s difficult for me to get him to smile but he smiled at me for about 20 minutes! It was awesome! I loved it when Aaron first started smiling at me and I love it now that Eli is doing the same. I can’t wait until Eli is walking and talking as well.

Of course I mean my interest in my current job.  It seems I can’t stand to stay at a place for over a year (check my linkedin.com profile).  There are a few LANSA contracts in central Florida but with the economy behaving the way it is, I think I’m too nervous to take that step and work for myself. Meri can tell when I’m fed up with my jobs and last night, she told me that she would be OK renting the house and moving again. That’s the last thing I want to do. We’ve moved 4 times since I graduated from college and I’m sick of packing up all my junk and moving it around. I’d rather stay in central Florida as long as possible. I thought about maybe going to school to get a masters degree in something from UCF but I don’t think now is the time for that. Meri and I were talking and she’s very interested in going back to school to be a teacher. Right now, she’s looking at getting a master’s degree for herself. She’s looking to be finished in about two years.  That’s not a whole lot of time and we’ll be more than comfortable living on my income alone. We’ve been doing it for the past couple of months and we haven’t HAD to slow down our spending; we have cut back but not out of need, I just want to start putting a lot more away for retirement. I’ve also become very interested in getting back into web development. Basically, I’d like to do what I was doing at my last job, just with a stable company this time!

In other, less pleasant news, we’re flying up to Massachusetts to visit the in-laws and yes, we’re flying with both of our kids! In more pleasant news, we’re going to celebrate Aaron’s 4th birthday birthday while we are up there and and also let the rest of the family meet Eli for the first time. Aaron’s birthday is next Tuesday, May 6th.

I think that’s enough rambling for now. I have another blog that I’ve been posting short posts to, it’s at dfktv.com. Also, if you have any idea what Twitter is, follow me!  I can be found here.  Twitter is pretty damned addictive, especially if you use it in conjunction with twhirl!

Eli is eight days old. After having him with us, I can’t help but wonder…why didn’t we do this sooner?! Seriously, this is great. Eli sleeps through the night (mostly, he might wake up twice), cries softly and is adorable too! It is wonderful to see Aaron interacting with him. Oh! Eli takes a pacifier! Do you know/understand how wonderful that is?! Is he crying? Give him the pacifier? Still crying? Feed him. These two things quiet 90% of the crying that Eli does, it’s amazing!

I’m glad we had Aaron first and learned how to deal with his needs (there were lots). Eli’s baby phase is night and day with Aaron’s baby phase. Aaron had us both on our toes; Eli makes us forget we have toes.

Meri’s aunt came down from Massachussettes to help us for 10 days. She handled Aaron and all of his needs/wants and Meri and I handled Eli, not that there needed to be two of us doing that; he is so easy-going. Having her here was great! Aaron loved doing anything and everything with her.

The only bad thing that happened while she was here was that she got into a car accident when taking Aaron to Sea World this past Monday. Poor Aaron, he’s been in two accidents in about 3 years! It was Meri’s aunt’s fault. Nobody was hurt, the girl that got hit might even start watching Eli a couple of days during the week at our house when/if Meri decides to go back to work. She worked with tutoring kids for three years and is an Elementary Education major. So this might have turned out to be a “good accident”. So the bad part of the accident? $6900 worth of damage (at first glance anyway, could be more) and we’re without Meri’s car for a month, minimum! We are getting a rental car and Meri’s aunt is paying for most of that plus our insurance deductible. That was very admirable of her and it takes us out of a pinch, since we really didn’t have that kind of money to fork out since Meri just stopped working. We are picking up the car next monday and I’ll drive that thing to and from work.

Having a newborn home and Meri not having a car did present an awesome opportunity for me though. I am working from home four days this week! I really like working from home. I can wake up and come to my computer and just start working! No more commuting for an hour in the morning and then an hour at night. I just start working at 7 or 8 am and then just stop around 4 or 5.

Even with the accident while she was here, it was a huge help having Meri’s aunt here. It gave us some transition time with the two kids and an opportunity to attempt a new schedule with two kids. Aaron had tons of fun helping her cook (and she cooked A LOT!).