Yesterday I switched my .forward on my Ibiblio account to point to my Gmail address. Poof! About 99% of the spam I was getting moved with it.
If my Ibiblio account wasn’t so useful or Ibiblio’s mission so important, I’d have probably axed it a long time ago, simply for the amount spam it generates.
One unforgettable event of 2007 was my trip to China in early March. I spent ten days between Beijing and Shanghai and had a wonderful time in this most unusual country. I was there for training but got a little sightseeing in, too, including the obligatory trip to the Great Wall, though few can probably boast of sliding down the Great Wall on their keister the way I did.
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A dozen years ago I was a young IT manager at a Raleigh software company. I had just ordered new Gateway 2000 PCs for our developers but something was terribly wrong. After just six months of service, the Western Digital hard drives in the new PCs all failed, taking a lot of work with them and adding a lot of work for me to rebuild the systems. I swore I would never buy another Western Digital hard drive.
Time moves on and the anger subsides. WD did the right thing by replacing all the defective drives. Quality improved. I dared purchase more WD stuff.
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It was a great honor to welcome our newest nephew into the world when Benjamin Kaelin Turner was born to my brother Allen and his wife, Tanya. As typical for Allen and Tanya’s children, Benjamin was born while we were on vacation. So we didn’t get to meet him until we returned, at which point he already weighed 205 pounds and had a mean fadeaway jumper. Dang, but Turner kids grow up fast.
Benjamin is almost certainly the last Turner niece or nephew we’ll have. Now that makes me feel old.
Kelly and I typically don’t splurge on stuff. We’ve got a modest house and reliable cars and generally spend money wisely. One luxury we do enjoy, however, is travel. I’d live in a shoebox if it meant I could see new places (and I did just that when I called the USS Elliot home for three years).
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Time to reset the counters on MT.Net’s weather station. Here are the records for the year:
Highest temperature: 111.9 F on August 9th, 12:54 PM
Lowest temperature: 16.9 F on February 6th, 6:45 AM
Lowest humidity: 10% on March 3rd, 6 PM
Highest dew point: 86 F on July 11th, 4:03 PM
Highest wind gust: SSW at 15.4 MPH on December 23rd, 1:09 PM (wow, that’s recent)
Lowest wind chill: -9 F on January 24th, 6:09 PM
Total rainfall: 31.38 inches
No review of 2007 could go without mention of the extreme weather Raleigh experienced this year. It was an extremely dry year thanks to a Bermuda high pressure system that baked and dried Raleigh out. This year’s heat set a record with the most days with temperatures above 90 degrees F. November was Raleigh’s driest November on record, and August was Raleigh’s hottest month ever recorded.
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Today is the first day of 2008. It promises to be a very interesting year!
May everyone enjoy a safe, peaceful, and prosperous new year!
This year had an interesting number of job changes. I spent ten days in China for Raritan, during which I had a day that I recently wrote was the highlight of my career. Yet, I was getting a little tired of repeating the same spiel every day for four years when I did product demos. I decided to explore other opportunities and so talked to Zenoss on a friend’s suggestion. I was fortunate to receive an offer, one that I strongly considered for over a week.
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This year was the twenty-year reunion of the Herndon High School Class of 1987. It was held at a Reston hotel fairly close to the high school.
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