I'm not dead.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I'm getting better.
I’ve not posted anything in quite a while, but I’m not dead. Just very busy.
First, I’ve been going through a busy and stressful time at work. My employer’s company was recently acquired by another company, and there’s all the normal stress and extra work that comes along with such situations. Admittedly, most of it was self inflicted, but I still found myself unusually busy.
Then there was the change over to this site. I’ve had the site for a while now, but needed to get it up and running. I went with Orchard as the engine to drive the site, which saved me from having to do a lot of development. However, I didn’t want to go live with a canned theme. One of the reasons for going with a self hosting site was to have complete control over it, and it seems to me like it would be cheating to then treat it like a canned blog site. I’m not a web developer by trade, nor am I a designer. I’ve had to do a bit of both in my profession, but I’d consider myself no better than an amateur at either. So I hope the end result works for everyone. At any rate, I like it. I also was able to play with some new toys while working on this, so I’ve got some ideas for some future posts here.
Next up was the normal family commitments. I’ve got two young sons, both of whom are very active in various extracurricular endeavors that require more and more time as they get older. There’s just not enough hours in the day for both work and family, let alone side projects.
Finally, my wife has started a new business. This meant there was plenty to do with my non-existent time helping her and watching the kids while she’s on a photo-shoot. In addition I wound up spending a lot of time getting her web site up and running as well. Remember what I said about being an amateur at best? Yeah, I spent plenty of sleepless nights getting her site up and running and looking as professional as I could. Luckily, her photographs do much of the work, and do so quite well if I do say so myself. I’m very excited for her in this new endeavor.
Despite all of this, I’ve not given up on my two OpenSource projects: Specificity and Onyx. I’ve got plans for both, and have some of these plans well underway. Among other things, I’m going to move both projects to using Nupack for deployment and both are moving to Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. Specificity is becoming more fluent and gaining some new assertions along the way, while Onyx is moving towards a ViewModel first design. I’ll blog more about these changes as they progress.
So, I’m not dead. I just feel that way right now :).
