"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
My Boog Pages
Monday, August 29
The Great Delayed
Been a while, eh? I've been busy.
Went up to Boulder, Colorado, about a month ago, scouting the IBM facility for our upcoming disaster recovery exercise (yeah, I'm team lead AGAIN this year - no good deed goes unpunished). What a beautiful city, and much smaller than I thought. To the east, the plains roll away towards Kansas, while the Rockies jut up only a mile or two to the west. When I told my daughter this, she said, "What did the airplanes look like, daddy?" I'll be back at the end of September, when I hope to visit the High Crimes bookstore.
As soon as I got back, trouble started. I was on call that week and just had a hellish time of it. Server motherboards failing, memory failing, and worst of all, tons of trouble with the new version of our antivirus. Plus one of the guys was off that week, so I had to take over a branch server migration for him. I was out on a rare date with my wife when they called me, and I ended up having to go into the office at midnight. Plus I had to go in Saturday and Sunday.
That same week we had four contractors come on staff, and I had to find something for them to do. Plus I was in the middle of getting the disaster recovery test lab ready, testing our procedures, etc. etc. etc. So yeah, I've been busy.
And in the midst of all this, I got the Big Idea for my next programming project. I don't want to give too much away, because it will probably take a while to get everything together - but I think you'll like it.
While I was looking at what it would take to make the Big Idea happen, I got the Medium-Sized Idea, an idea for implementing some of the technical requirements. Now I enjoy writing, or course, but I rarely get excited about constructing the plot, unlike, say John Rickards. But I can understand where he's coming from, because I get pretty fired up when I think up a clever and elegant solution to a vexing problem. Watch this space for updates.
It's so good to be back.
Department of PS: Saw The Great Raid a couple of weeks ago, and it was pretty good. Old-fashioned storytelling, to be sure - this same movie could have been made fifty years ago. It's the story of a raid by a group on Army Rangers in the closing days of World War II. 500 survivors of the Bataan death march were being held in a prison camp. As the American forces closed in, the Japanese were preparing to deal with the prisoners... Could use a few laughs, though.
