So where ya been?

So where ya been? That's the question that has literally been tearing up my email and phone lines. Yep, it's been a while. But I've been a busy beaver. Here are just a few things that I've been involved with since Thanksgiving:

1. My dad got very sick and had to go to the hospital. Heart stuff. My mom was certain he was gone. So I've been a little distracted there. But thank God, he's at home and doing great.
2. Work has been crazy. Been working on trying to lob out the first Windows Forms application this place has produced. I was brought in late to the game, so much (if not all) the "design" had been done. Or rather, most of the code was done and there was never any design. So I've been trying to cope with that.
3. Work has also been wacky. We are in the process of make a fairly significant paradigm shift, and I've been an agent of change. The new boss is planning to impose a strict "all Java" rule on all new development. That means all ASP pages will now have to be JSP. All middle tier code will be Java, J2EE to be exact, living in JBoss. All internally served applications will be SWT. Every developer will be using Eclipse. Fairly radical stuff for this shop. Major learning curve for this Microsoft moron.
4. Coaching basketball has taken more energy than I thought. Early morning practices, evening games, it's been crazy. And we're 0 - 3! Just imagine if we were really serious. Actually our girls have responded well and are improving, but it's a slow process.
5. My desire to make an impression in basketball transferred over into one those "great" ideas. How cool would it be to have a web site that accumulated all the stats of every girl by game, so you could look at the game stats or the player stats? And wouldn't it be sweet to be able to view the shots graphically, again both by player or game? Check out My Blue Coat, my latest site. A little short on the design for now, but it's working. All PHP & MySQL. It was fun to do.
6. Because of this web stuff, I decided that I should host this site from my basement. So that's right, I've fired up my web server and My Blue Coat is served from a basement in Littleton, Colorado.
7. Read a couple of great books. First, "Coder To Developer" by Mike Gunderloy. Yep, it's a geek book, but a good one. Then I read "5 People You Meet in Heaven" by Mitch Albom. Nice light read, but also a good one. Now I'm almost done with "J2EE Design and Development" by Rod Johnson. Pure geekfest. And a pretty good one at that.
8. Daughter's school work: we've had a huge book report, a science fair project, a report and model of George Washington and a big paper on war and how God feels about it due in the last couple of weeks, and that's just 8th grade. 7th grade has been just as grueling.
9. Gave up caffeine. Not coffee (done that before), not soda (I'm off the wagon again) but caffeine as a food group. No more. That's it. Wow, it's tough.

So that's what I've been up to. Plus painting bedrooms. Getting ready for Christmas. Trying nap more often. Spend time with my lovely wife. I'm going to hit each of these topics a little more individually.