changes

Quite a bit has happened in the recently mentioned interlude.  I doubt there are many people reading this who don’t already know most of this either from meatspace communications or other sources, but here’s a quick overview (in order from big and old news through to the smaller and more recent):

• The startup I’ve called my day job (and often my night and weekend job, too) since co-founding it over a decade ago got acquired around the start of the year.  I now work for the acquiring company, in what I am still optimistic will be a good arrangement.
• Our family has grown by 33% — the new arrival (Nora) is adorable, and rapidly approaching 3 months of age
• Ben (kid #1) is awesome.  He’s still a toddler, so sometimes that awesomeness is hidden under, well, toddler-ness.   Seeing him turn into a big person and seeing Nora start (in Ben’s words: "she’s like a little person!") gives me this motivation and perspective that makes pretty much anything else OK.
• After years of using the now-defunct otto, and about a year of having no viable whole-house digital music solution, I’ve switched to ampache, and so far am quite pleased.
• I’m consolidating home computing resources.  The main file-server here now has over 1TB of useable raid-5, and everything that can be a virtual machine is.
• It’s springtime, and my bonsai are gradually coming out of dormancy.  We had a strange winter here, weather wise, with some very warm followed by insanely cold.  I’m a bit concerned that there may be some fallout, in terms of tree-death, though it’s still too soon to tell.  Particularly troubling right now is the maple forest I planted just last year — out of 8 trees (2 planting groups), 2 have swelling buds, 6 don’t.  On a bonsai note, I realized a few months ago that a server crash over the summer resulted in the loss of quite a few notes I’d written in the form of an internal (to the home network) bonsai blog.  Bummer.
• I have, for reasons not interesting enough to go into, switched my primary desktop computing environment to a windows system for the first time since windows for workgroups in 1994.  This is much more a reflection of the realities of the microsoft-opoly in the business world than any sort of negative commentary on the mac.  All other things being neutral, I’d still prefer a mac desktop / linux backend world, though I think I really am OS agnostic at this point (I’m even trying to get an ancient laptop wirelessly net-booting FreeBSD for a dining-room kiosk).
• I’m hoping to take the day off today, and am planning on un-wiring / re-wiring some trees, taking a bide ride with Ben, going to gym with the whole family, and starting what I hope will be a relaxing long weekend.

ttyl.