Since most of our customers are, or at one point were, teachers, many of them have assigned a “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essay. I must be a bad student, because here it is, November 3rd, and I am just now turning in my essay.
The busiest summer of my life really started this spring when BlueChalk’s server in North Carolina went down. In about 24 hours, we had a mirror site up and running for our customers, but the rest of the summer was spent dealing with server issues. The hosting company said they fixed old server and would ship it to us. Several weeks later still no server. When we finally received the server, it had not been fixed, just boxed and shipped. We ended up hiring a local guy to fix the server.
In the mean time, our temporary server had been running slowly. We found that the cause was a lag time between the SQL Server and our temp server. To compensate, we re-wrote most of the .NET code to compensate for the lag time (this is where I learned that I am no longer able to pull all-nighters without becoming a real pain to everyone around me).
My brother Scott was building a data center in Cape Girardeau, MO and when it was finished, we moved the rebuilt server there. It is nice to be within driving distance of our servers; it makes me a lot more comfortable.
While this was going on, my wife and I found out that we are going to be parents for the first time. In December, we will have a baby boy! Suddenly the small house that had been so perfect for me and my dog started to seem cramped, cluttered, and dangerous for a baby. Like any panicked parents to be, my wife and I started a small remodel. We were just going to de-clutter and fix up a nursery. Anyone that has started a small remodel can tell you what happened next: utter, complete, frantic chaos.
We rented a storage unit and moved everything out of the home office, which would now be the nursery. I ripped the carpet out and found a beautiful hardwood floor just waiting to be refinished. A friend and I started sanding and refinishing. The fumes from the varnish were making Cara sick, so we stayed at my mother’s house for a few days.
Floor done, we paint, put up new baseboards, and decide, hey, let’s redo all the floors throughout the house. Let’s paint all the rooms. It’s silly to pay for storage every month, let’s build a shed in the back yard. While the inside of the house’s remodel started to snowball, the shed started to grow. If you are going to have storage space, you might as well make it big enough to put the treadmill and weights in. If you are going to work out in there, you need music or television, might as well put in electric. Before we put down the concrete, might as well put in pipes for plumbing. Long story short, I have “might as well-ed” myself so much that I now have a small house in my backyard. The “shed” has electricity, toilet and sink, heat and air, telephone, satellite TV, and a high speed internet connection. Don’t get me wrong, I love the shed, but it snowballed and can continue to do so. A friend asked me the other day why I didn’t put a shower in there (exact words he used were, “Might as well have a shower in there.”)
So that is how I spent my summer vacation. I’ll soon have a son which is the greatest thing ever (it's the bomb, as my nephew says). BlueChalk is in the best position it has ever been due to our relocation and the programming updates we did over the summer. Our house project is almost over. If you need me, I’ll be in the shed.