Its past time that I can spill the beans as to what this was all about. I’ve been promoted to Technical Product Manager for the product I’ve been selling for the past four years. Now I get to do something about all those product enhancement requests I’ve submitted over the years: I get to decide which ones to implement!

There’s a lot for me to learn about the role, but I’ve certainly got the right background and experience to take it on. I know the product better than most anyone. I’ve got a unique insight into the market – having done hundreds of sales calls over the years. I’ve got a solid IT background which provides me familiarity with the problems our customers are trying to solve. Lastly, I am known and respected (I think – heh) by our development staff so interacting with them should be productive and fun.

I officially began my new role last week, and knew about it sooner as my earlier post indicated, but I didn’t announce it here because I was waiting for an official announcement. Since I am the primary person for posting announcements on the company’s internal blog, few of my coworkers could post about it there (and I can’t announce my own promotion to the rest of the company – it wouldn’t be right).

Oh, and I won’t be traveling nearly as frequently as I used to, which is a big plus. I’m still the primary contact for product training, though, so there will be occasional trips here and there. Certainly much saner than the kind I’ve been doing.

Wish me luck on my new role!

We had a pretty good weekend at Chez Turner. Our good friends John and Marne brought their daughters over and shared wine and pizza with us Friday evening. It is always good to see them and as usual the time flew by.

Saturday morning, Kelly left us early to do her volunteering at WalkAmerica. I took Hallie and Travis over to Pump It Up for the birthday party of one of Hallie’s friends. Hallie had a blast on the inflated slides and such while Travis was clearly intimidated by their size and hissing noises. In spite of his best friend clearly having a ball on them, Travis could not be convinced.

Sunday morning we all hopped on our bikes and took a long ride thorugh Durant Nature Park. It was the first time the kids had been mountain biking – they clearly loved it! Both were whining about having to come home, in fact. We made it a little easier by stopping by the local ice cream place on the way home. I always feel good after biking but pulling an extra 50 pounds up long grades really built some muscles. Hallie’s big enough now that she can pedal the Trail-A-Bike and keep us both going. Pretty cool.

After lunch and naps, I geeked out with my MacMini before getting the lawn mowed. Then it was time for a quick shower before going to Pullen Park to meet friends from our childbirth education class from five years ago. The park was packed on this stunningly beautiful day and it was good to see people and kids I hadn’t seen in years.

I got a note from my shipmate Matt, pointing me to a social networking site for veterans called TogetherWeServed.Com. I quickly found a number of my former shipmates, some of which I had lost track of long ago. It was a blast from the past! I look forward to spending more time checking it out.

K and I watched the movie Bobby before bed. It was pretty good.

All in all, a good, sunny weekend.

Note to self: when traveling, always take your laptop power supply with you!

I got back last night from a whirlwind business trip to Indianapolis,IN and Columbus, OH. Found out how frustrating it can be not to get online. Even the crummy hotel I stayed in at Columbus had no business center and thus no PC.

Driving from Indianapolis to Columbus, I could not help but detour to Dayton just to see where my heroes Orville and Wilber Wright launched the aircraft revolution (that is, really launched the aircraft revolution, as opposed to what we North Carolinians like to consider). I arrived at their home and shop right before dusk and walked around them, fascinated. Of course, the actual buildings are no longer there after Henry Ford had them carted over to his museum, Greenfield Village. I don’t know what Orville Wright or the city of Dayton were thinking when they allowed that to happen. Might be just as well, as the cops slowly rolling by in an unmarked car and the shifty characters on the streetcorners led me to believe it isn’t just the Wrights’ house that isn’t the same in the old neighborhood. At least as long as the Wrights’ house is at Greenvield Village no one will be smoking crack in it.

The rest of my trip was mostly uneventful. I barely made my flight home (typical) and was too late to say goodnight to the kids. The good news is that this was the last trip on my calendar for the forseesable future.

Chez Turner was the proverbial Napping House Where No One Is Sleeping.

At 11:30, our weather radio sounded an alarm, slowly waking me (and Travis, unfortunately) from a deep slumber. I had bought it a few years ago after the tornado raced by our house, but I’m still not used to hearing it at night.

Severe weather was on the way, said the announcement. I looked at the radar to see a nasty squall line marching east towards us. Not being in a mood sleep at that point, I waited until the squall line passed by, which was mostly with a whimper as far as we were concerned. It was back to bed for me.

Around 2:15 the radio sounded again: another severe weather watch. How coould there could be anything left after that nasty-looking line earlier? I was in a daze so I simply silenced the alarm and returned to bed.

Near 4 AM the alarm sounded yet again. I don’t remember the message but I soon took it seriously as all hell began to break loose outside. Strong winds and rain pounded us for 20 minutes. Then, as suddenly as it had arrived it vanished. Calm once again reigned supreme.

That’s when the train decided to make its southerly run. At 4:15. Ouch. We don’t usually have late-night trains but the past two weeks or so have had plenty.

They say tornadoes sound like freight trains, and I might have been worried here. This train, though, had a horn that was all too apparent at 4 in the morning. We’ve trained the train drivers so well to honk at us that they always say hello when they pass by. Sometimes they forget what time it is, though, and their usually-friendly honking is not as welcome at such an early hour! The engineer gave a sharp honk right next to us before continuing down the track. After cringing at the horn (our neighbors must love us), I settled back to sleep.

There were not enough snoozes available this mornoing to make up for all the early-morning fun. I hope I can keep my eyes open today.

For those weather geeks out there, you can see the storm’s progresion nicely on my weather station’s barometric graphs.

It was a fun, if chilly, Easter weekend. K and the kids spent the end of the week visiting K’s parents and didn’t get back until Saturday afternoon, leaving me time to get a few things done around the house.

Saturday morning I woke up a little later than normal (almost 8!), not taking much advantage of the quiet house. I spent the morning reinstalling Ubuntu on my Thinkpad, with an eye for encrypting my home directory using dm-crypt, the encryption piece built right into the Linux kernel.

After chasing down one or two minor bugs, I succeeded in getting it configured. Now when Ubuntu boots it asks for a passphrase and a key file before mounting my home directory. It was incredibly simple and offers a lot of peace of mind. I hope to do the same on my work laptop so that in the unlikely event I lose my laptop I won’t be losing company secrets.

Once that was done, I went to the garage to see what I could straighten up. I settled on the lumber in the corner, which was meant for an attic project I never began. The project was to build a box over the pull-down attic stairs to better insulate them. For an hour I wrestled the boards into a box-like shape, nailing them together nicely.

Once I put them on top of the stairs, however, I conceded that the obstacles surrounding the stairs could not easily be avoided. The box would add enough height to the stairs (already confined due to their position in the joists) to make it difficult to climb on and off of them. I pulled the boards apart and decided to someday tackle that problem with insulation only.

The 2×6 boards were too useful to retire, though, so I used them for another project I’d been dreaming up: a stand for working on our sailboat’s outboard motor. The engine had been lying horizontally on the garage floor ever since November and I needed an easy way to get it fixed up without putting it on the boat itself. I was reminded of the stands we used in my high school shop classes to work on similar engines, so that’s what I built. After another hour (and one blistered knuckle), I had a 40″ stand, tall enough to put the engine on and still have room for a trash can filled with water: the perfect engine test environment!

The engine tests I subsequently ran showed me for the first time how much electricity the engine’s alternator provides: anywhere between 6 and 30 volts depending on RPMs. This voltage is meant to charge the sailboat’s batteries but the power cable from the engine is tattered and terminates in bare wires. An upcoming project (made possible by the new stand) is to replace the tattered cable with a new, coiled one with some sort of plug on the end. That should make it easy to charge the batteries the next time we’re out.

The family got home about that time, so the rest of the day was spent catching up. K and I retired to our beds and read until late.

We were greeted at 7:30 this morning by the sound of the kids gleefully bellowing at each other from across the hall. After we ate the pancakes K generously cooked for us, we got dressed and headed over to my parents’ house for an Easter lunch (and egg hunt).

The kids had the best time with their cousins, chasing each other around the house. I helped Dad wire a light fixture. We marveled at their newly remodeled kitchen and then put it to use with a tasty lunch of ham, green bean casserole, potato salad and fruit salad, followed by apple pie a la mode and washed down with sweet tea. It was quite good!

It was also good to see my brothers and their families. My brother Allen was the talk of the day with his new job at SAS. It’s only the best company around to work for. He seems quite happy there so far. I think he’ll stay that way, but then again he’s a happy guy.

Once the day had warmed into the mid-50s, my brothers and I hid Easter eggs in the front yard and watched as the kids snapped them up in seconds. This was the third hunt for Hallie and Travis over the Easter holidays, so they’re old pros by now. Try as we might, though, we couldn’t get a decent picture of all the kids. Oh well.

Once home and the kids were down for their naps, I took a short one myself and then did some work on my taxes. I also did a backup of our important files and tuned in NASA TV to check up on the current space tourist (and MS Word author) Charles Simonyi. I didn’t see Charles but the kids and I had fun watching NASA films about Apollo 13, which blasted off 37 years ago this month.

After more tax work I once again went out in the cold to bundle up the plants for what I hope to be the last time this season. For the crepe myrtles it might be too late but it doesn’t hurt to try ’em. I hope we can get the warm weather back for good but next Sunday might be cold again, too.

After this blog entry, I will write some more in my dream journal and then commence to dreaming. Tomorrow promises to be an interesting day, work-wise. I hope it is for you, too.

I’m getting a slow start this morning due to my long day of travel courtesy of U.S. Airways. The plane landed at 11:15 PM, I wasn’t home until 11:45 and didn’t get to bed until 1 AM since I had to cover outside plants against this morning’s freezing temperatures.

Google Maps tells me I could have driven here in less time. Ah, the wonders of the age of jet travel!

Useless Airways has lived up to its nickname today. I flew to the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton “International” airport today for a morning of work at a client in Exeter. Since Exeter is in the middle of Nowhere, PA, I thought it would save time if I could fly here rather than fly Southwest into Philadelphia and then driving here.

Big mistake. Getting to Wilkes Barre was easy enough this morning but the problem is getting home. I got done with my work about 15 minutes too late to catch an earlier, 3:20 PM flight to Philly and then RDU. As I killed some time at the truly beautiful, brand new Wilkes Barre airport terminal, an announcement was made that the incoming plane was grounded in State College, PA due to maintenance issues. We’d be bused from there to Philadelphia.

Thus, the thousand dollar bus ride. I paid almost $1000 so that U.S. Airways could put me on a bus to Philadelphia.

Now I’m in Philly I learn my flight has been delayed an hour due to the plane departing late from Toronto. Miraculously, the gate sign lists my flight as being “On Time.” U.S. Airways simply changed the time it was departing to an hour later than it should have left. Sneaky bastards.

This will teach me not to fly Southwest. This would never happen with them.

I’m in Spanish Fort, Alabama tonight for a day of training tomorrow. It feels good to be back to a place where I once lived 30 years ago.

I’ve written about my old homes here before, so some of y’all will be familiar with it. On my last trip I hoped to take pictures of my old homes. Unfortunately, the dime-store film camera I bought for the job didn’t offer enough firepower for the fading light of day. This time, though, I packed my Nikon D50 and got some successful shots tonight, more of which I hope to get in the morning.

The flight from RDU to PNS on AirTran was really a gamble. I was initially booked for a late-night arrival to Pensacola (actually arriving about now), but I figured I’d try my luck at an earlier flight. The gamble is that everyone at the airline told me the last leg was oversold with a 5-person waiting list and there was no way I would get here early. The flight out of Raleigh at 2PM was a breeze to get on and arrived at Atlanta over 30 minutes early. I simply had to walk down a few gates, present myself at the Pensacola gate, and boom, I got a seat. That’s how I managed to get to Spanish Fort before the sun went down.

I don’t fly AirTran too often, but I do like the XM Satellite Radio at every seat. I don’t really like the seats themselves, however. My backside was actually feeling sore after the flights. They could use more padding in the seat cushions. The pilots didn’t help matters, either, since both landings were a little harsher than I’m used to. Even the Chinese pilots of Air China flew far better than this: smoothly kissing the runway to the point I couldn’t even tell we had touched down.

Speaking of China, I’m in the Spanish Fort Holiday Inn Express now and found it funny that the last Holiday Inn I was in was in Beijing. Its a long way from there to here.

The Forbidden City in Beijing has its own Starbucks, hidden from view but definitely detectable from all the coffee cups being waved around. Spanish Fort, however, does not yet have its own Starbucks…yet! Its getting its first soon at the mall across the street, joining Bed Bath And Beyond, Best Buy, Ross, World Market, and a handful of other Cary-like stores. I find it easier to believe Starbucks is in the Forbidden City than I do Spanish Fort.

I sat next to a pleasant older woman on the plane to Pensacola with whom I exchanged some friendly words. As I waited for my bag, she walked by arm-in-arm with her husband. This guy turned my head because he was the spitting image of my long-deceased maternal grandfather: same height, same gait, same hair pattern.Same facial features, even. If he’d been wearing glasses it would’ve been perfect. As if being in Florida again (even briefly) wasn’t enough to make me miss my grandparents, that certainly did.

This place just makes me want to write. I don’t know why that is. Perhaps its the colorful reminders of the history here. My old neighborhood is filled with street names like Cavalry Charge, Smuggler’s Gap, Southern Way, Confederate Boulevard: names that fire a young boy’s imagination. Even thirty years later there’s a sense of mystery here.

Ah well. I’ve got a good book to read, Bill Bryson’s The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid, so I’ll cut short my own reminiscing in favor of Bill’s. Good night!

Monday I had the mixed blessing be the top Google search result for the query “Jason Ray UNC.” I was pleased to get lots of visitors but was sad that the reason they visited was because Jason died.

When I noticed the hit count for my first entry about Jason, I thought it prudent to update the post with information on where donations could be sent. I hope people took advantage of that.

That first post instantly became the most-read MT.Net post ever, with close to 3000 views. I only wish the circumstances were a little better. I think Jason posted a lot to the walled-off, so-called “social networking” sites like Facebook and Myspace but because Google doesn’t venture there few results came back for his own pages.