The past few months have been quite hectic. We decided we’d had enough of living in the middle of the state and moved back to the western side. I’m able to have a highway free commute which I love. We’re now closer to the parks we like to hike and bike at. All in all it was a good decision. The implementation should have been smooth but it got crazy with stitches for Craig, a few car related incidents, 3 loaner cars and getting to know a collision repair center very well. At some point I’ll post pics of our new place, preferably after the snow has receded.

I’ve been sorely neglecting my design work in favor of sleep and brain candy. Which I might add, I love Dexter. I’ve been focused on being re-inspired and making a point to get out and visit with others in the field. I’ve been attending the Hartford Build Guild meet-ups, as well as attending Drupal Camp Western Massachusetts in January. Along with all of that fun, Stephanie and I have been meeting up for coffee to give support and share knowledge. Steph has been a great source of books. Borders and Amazon have been enjoying my ordering. I picked up copies of CSS Mastery, Head First PHP & MySQL, Drupal’s Building Blocks, and lastly Objective C for Dummies. Of course I need to find a few spare weeks of my life to read these and implement what I learned.

I also checked out Lullabot’s, Drupalize.me site with training videos. I highly recommend their tutorials if you’re new to Drupal. I should be pro at this point, but I have yet to truly focus on a Drupal project without being distracted onto another project. Currently my primary focus is building a Lemonstand App eCommerce site for a client. It’s taking a bit of wrapping my head around their API, but it is going well. I’m looking forward to posting the link to the site in a week or so.

I’m hoping with the return of warmer weather to exercise more as well as get back to shooting photos. Is anyone living this hectic of a life the past few months?

I came across this while searching for the documentation on my PowerBook G4 which we are selling. A flood of memories come back for me when I saw this packet. In August 2001, I made the investment in a PowerMac G4 Tower (QuickSilver Edition) and it came with OS X 10.0 preloaded in dual boot mode. I fell in love with OS X. I used it as much as I could with the few apps I had that would run under it.

In October 2001, I went job hunting in the Fairfax County area of Virginia and stayed with family while sending out resumés. While down in the area, we were next to only the second Apple Store in the country. The store in Alexandria was the only one to open after the one in San Francisco. Craig and I drove over to the mall where it was located and checked it out. When we walked in they were handing these out for free. I couldn’t wait to get back to my family’s place to install the upgrade.

I kept this trend going for a while. Craig and I attended the release of Tiger at the Apple SOHO store. My friend got down there early to snag a spot in line. We drove down after work and Craig won a door prize of an Apple iPod Shuffle. Later when Danbury got an Apple Store we lined up for the release of Leopard. That’s as far as we went, now we just wait for our Apple or Amazon order to arrive. They certainly were fun to attend.

Another fun night at the Build Guild Hartford meet up. Through twitter contact @kerusdotorg I found out about the Build Guild meet ups. He and I had shared a mutual interest to have a local CT meet up for those in the web design field without feeling pressured to have an agenda. The Build Guild seemed to be a perfect fit. It’s an evening for those in the field to chat, vent and share stories. So far I’ve been very impressed by the people attending, there’s some very talented people doing great work in the state.

Hopefully this will continue and attract others to come share in the fun.