[if(is_geek)…]

It would appear that the major theme on my blog is me apologizing for not posting to the blog more often. Things in the past few months have been incredibly busy, beyond all possible compare. I will try to outline a few of the things that have been keeping me busy and touch on a few things that I am planning for this blog as I try my best to get back into the swing of things.

First, foremost and definitely tops of the life-altering list: Lindsay and I are expecting our first baby in August! We found out in early December of last year and have been trying to control who we tell. We didn’t want to tell too many people too quickly but we very quickly failed. Our original thought was to tell our parents at Christmas but, instead, we told them within two days of finding out. This is alternating between very exciting and very scary. It is becoming quite a bit more real now that Lindsay is starting to show. She has a little baby belly! We are going for an Ultrasound appointment on March 5th and we will hopefully learn if we are having a little boy or a little girl. Sorry, we won’t be telling anyone until the baby actually arrives!

Precipitated by the impending arrival, we started to take a look around our house to determine all that we need to have done before the fateful day arrives. The list was decently long. One of the reasons we liked the house we bought was that there was a lot we could do to it, but nothing we needed to do. With a baby on the way, the list of needed changes started to grow. Then we hit on a better idea: why upgrade the existing house when we could just get a brand new one? It turns out that this is a great time for such things – the housing market in Saskatoon is really starting to take off. It is really reaching the point where if we don’t take the chance to upgrade now, we might not get another for a long time. We have a place picked out and even have a deposit placed on it. It is all a matter of getting the financing squared away – a prospect which seems quite nice as it appears that we’ll have a couple of banks competing for our business. I’ll post more on the house, with some pictures later, after we get all the numbers sorted out.

Finally, things at work have really been heating up. I posted already about my trip to New Orleans (and I will probably post again). The reason for this trip was that the company I work for Cover-All Building Systems is in the process of implementing a whole new software infrastructure consisting of Intuitive ERP and DriveWorks. Basically, the iERP side of things is just replacing the in-house ERP system we have with something slicker, smoother and more functional. There will be a significant amount of improvement to the way things are done in the company, particularly on the manufacturing side of things. I find the DriveWorks side of the implementation to be a great deal more exciting!

Of course, in the interests of full-disclosure, I am excited about the project because I am in charge of the DriveWorks side of things. Aside from that, it is really very exciting for our company. It represents a major shift in how we operate. We have an amazing group of people working on getting our orders processed, planned, manufactured and shipped. So amazing, in fact, that we can often have a building on-site in before our competitors could even start manufacturing. One problem has always been our ordering process. Orders have always been entered through a web form and the information being entered was almost always incomplete. Between the time it would take our Order Management department to get full details of orders and the time it would take to get drawings and other outputs for the buildings it would often take twice as long to process the order as it should have taken to get the building on-site. Once the DriveWorks implementation is complete, much of this pain will go away and we’ll be able to have our buildings to the customer before a competitor could finish taking their order!

Finally, a bit of a plan for what I intend for this blog ongoing. I am definitely going to try to post more regularly. With updates on the baby and the house, I should not have any trouble finding topics. I also plan on getting some more pictures uploaded. Finally, I am going to start posting more tutorials. I use Visual Studio and the .NET Framework a great deal at work and there is a lot that I could be sharing on that front, so I will try not to be such a Linux snob! One of the first things I might add is a .NET library which acts as a wrapper around the database functionality built in. Personally, I like the way things work in the _pg module of python. Give me a db object and let me use db.query() to grab what I want. It will also contain some helper classes for authenticating against and Active Directory, streaming a binary file directly into the database and for outputting a Crystal Report as a pdf which is then streamed right into the database. Fun stuff!

That’s all for now…busy weekend ahead!