Movin' on wednesday

Packing up everything we having into cardboard boxes, taking down pictures didn't bring it all home as much as eating off paper plates tonight. We're backing up everything on wednesday, signing on thursday and moving in on friday. We'll be homeless for all of about 3 hours on wednesday.

Andover here we come.

Start at Acquia on Monday

I start my new job on Monday at Acquia in Andover, MA. 10 minutes from my house! The business is based on an open source collaboration management system called drupal. Very excited about getting back into open source again. The developer's name who started drupal just over 7 years ago is Dries Buytaert and he lives in Belgium. He also works for Acquia and he's a pretty great guy with lot's of things to say about open source and collaboration systems as such. I'm impressed with everyone I meet at Acquia, I'm looking forward to integrating in.

Being open source, I can get started w/o waiting to get access to the code base. I can ask questions on mailing lists w/o trying to hook up w/current Acquia employees, I can buy books from the book store on the product w/o rumaging through outdated word docs in a server folder somewhere. Should there be any other style of development other than OSS (Open Source Software)?

4th of July at the farm

07/01/07 9:20PM - Fourth of July week up here at the farm. Arrived yesterday at 2 pm. Saw a deer in the field and a bull moose in the river. Alex is eating Grandmom out of house and home. Happy as ever, I took some video footage of him laughing away. Grandmom and Granddad have a new electric four wheeler. I thought Aaron would be too young to ride it very well at just shy of 3 yrs old, but had very few troubles. I also have some video footage of him hitting a rock at about .001 mph.


Didn't really get much work done today, weather was crazy, rain clouds kept rolling in and in between beautiful sunshine. When it rained it rained sheets, Aaron and I were trapped in the barn as bee-bee sized hail came down.


We had Grandmom's famous Masardis ribs for dinner, hmmm good. Put the kids to bed, watched law and order and now I'm blogging in bed as Amy tries to catch some sleep early in hopes to get enough sleep to compensate for the cats keeping her up again tonight....Lucy is scrathing at the door right now...Amy has her ear plugs in, hopefully they do not give out before Lucy does. I'll be asleep in 5 minutes, barring any earthquakes that might make me stir.


07/04/07 - Weather turned out to be great. Better than yesterday which was supposed to be the better day. Speaking of yesterday, yesterday we took a picnic lunch up to the north branch forks. Aaron caught his first fish. It was all fun until the 5 inch "chub" came within 3 feet of the shore and Aaron started screaming. He declared he doesn't like fishing and wanted to throw rocks into the water instead. Anyway, we ate lunch with a nice man we met at the forks named "Peter". It started to down pour on my last few bites of steak and so the s'mores would have to wait until another day.


next day; today; the fourth of july. Lazy morning, then we headed up to a "fair grounds" in Portage. It was 4 creepy guys and a young kid running dinky little rides. I thought rather pricey, but Aaron only made it thru 3 rides so we bailed out of there rather fast. Went to portage lake and played on the playground, met a nice set of kids there, then came back here for lunch. Worked on ripping the old wall down on the hen house then relaxed with momma and a beer until Aaron got up. We went for a truck ride to fish in the river. Caught 4 chub and a pumpkinseed. Aaron seemed to like fishing much better. The whole time I was watching a moose was bathing 1000 yards down the stream.


Came back for burgers, dogs, fire and s'mores. Bath time and off to bed with the kids.

07/08/07 - Back home in Tewksbury. Weather is good, although momma is feeling under it. Yesterday (07/07/07) we went to the Ashland parade. Aaron rode with granddad on his old John Deer "L". It has a crank start and is really old. I took lot's of pictures, it was pretty cute. I had to walk alongside in case Aaron didn't last entire parade and sure enough, at two thirds of the way thru he wanted to get off and stay with mommy.

Storyland '07

Here we are in Conway, New Hampshire. we rented a house about 2000 yards north of Storyland. Cute little 4 bedroom chalet. We spent couple hours at storyland today but will hit there tomorrow again for another run. Whale ride with dadda, fish ride with momma, tractor ride with granddad and raft ride with Granddad and dadda, and aaron goes to sleep with a smile on his face, despite the little fever he's developed earlier today.

Alex is doing great, wanted daddy to play with back at the chalet. Both went to sleep by 7:15 and adults setteled down for lasagna.

Charlie and Noah are supposed to be in an hour, maybe I'll find the nintendo 64 and get some play time before Noah dominates it.

oh, and margaritas taste just as good in New Hampshire

Memorial Day at the Farm

Great long weekend at the Franklin Farm in Ashland, ME. Whole family was there including Charlie, Noah, Ed and Laurel. Bob bought a new DR brush http://www.drpower.com, worked great clearing the new growth that has come back bewteen the pine tree I've been clearing the last few years. Man am I soar.

Aaron had a ball on the electric gator http://www.rbflett.co.uk/acatalog/MCE40933X000.JPG, figured out the gas pedal, but not the steering, luckily Noah was there to help avoid too much damage sans the rhubarb patch and a small yew.

Speaking of rhubarb, Alex has a taste this weekend, he ate it along with anything else he could get his hands on.

Came back and only chore I was able to get done was to replace my router replaced. Last week my Linksys WRT54GL running OpenWRT was going in and out, so I got a Linksys BEFSR41 to replace it. I have a netgear access point was wasn't using so I was covered. I suspect the WRT is still ok, but I figured if I'm going to run experimental software on it, I should have a backup

Off to bed, long day driving back.

Leaving Pingtel ...

Just 2 more days at Pingtel. I decided to leave after 4 years at Pingtel. I started this long blog about why and what the next job offer has, but I quickly realized all the material was for my benefit that I'll never go back and read it, so I decided to spare you from a long and boring email about open source and standard corporate blah blah blah. I convinced myself 2 weeks ago and so that leads me to just 2 days left at Pingtel.

I plan to have withdrawls from the project I helped run called sipXconfig and my partner in crime Damian over the next few months. Working at Pingtel was quite a ride and working with Damian was spetacular. I have no doubt I made a life-long friend, I just wonder if he'll let me make a video call to him at the top of every hour to discuss topics such as: why bird watching is just like fishing, open source is the quintessential example agile programming and how mini vans really do drive like cars.

Traveling w/Nokia n800

Couple things of note when traveling w/n800.
- I need to have hotel in google maps so I can easily map directions from there to other places.
- I need to figure out Points of Interest in maemo-mapper because having a text file with addresses is too inconvienent. http://www.portsmouthnh.com was really helpful.
Some pre-mapped points of interest to:
o ice cream
o wifi hotspots
o coffee shops
o liquer/package/convienence stores.
o breakfast places
o movie theaters
o electronic stores.
- Sitting the sun might be warm, but I can't see squat on the screen.
- I need to have it more readily accessable. pulling in/out of backpack doesn't work
- wikipedia can be convenient place to start looking for info about a place.
- set of hyperlinks bookmarked
- menus to potential resturants
- local newspapers