Merry Christmas, Happy New Year

Sorry for the long silence. Regular blogging should, I hope, resume soon.

Somewhat late, I hope all of you had a merry christmas (or a happy holiday, whatever holiday you choose to celebrate), and a happy new year (unless your new year is some other date, and then just hold the wishes for an appropriate date…)

Life has been good, but busy — the Christmas shopping season is the busy sales time (we’ve sold one or two iPods….), and the systems I manage have been running full tilt for the last few weeks helping people sell iPods and other stuff. We have been, as I kept telling people, not just running the hamsters three shifts, but with the left legs on one wheel and the right legs on another, and praying nobody trips.

Good news is, nobody tripped, and now we’re starting the wind-down to more normal operations again, and catching up on all of the stuff we deferred out to spare resources for crunch time. I’ve been spending my time switching between acting as a processing traffic cop trying to schedule out how to share the system resources to get things done and being a paranoid baby sitter convinced that if I stop watching the systems, they’ll fall over and die (murphy’s law of situational probabilities: computers never break when you’re ready and waiting).

As a really rough idea of just how busy we were, the beast I manage was originally built (a bit over two years ago) to handle a transaction volume of, oh, 10K quatloos a quarter. We long since left that behind and in October, we were transacting something around 30K quatloos, a new transaction record we were really proud of (and which beat our previous monthyl record by some 40%). So we turned around and as the holiday season geared up, we ramped even further, doing over 40K quatloos in November. Then, just because we’re insane idiots who don’t know any better, we threw out all reason, and matched that volume in the first 3 weeks of December.

It’s kept us (and me) busy. And when I took a break, I just didn’t feel like whacking at computers even more hours, so I’ve been spending free time offline (Terry Goodkindis an awesome writer, and I’m currently on book 4).

Christmas was good — a quick trip down to LA to celebrate with the parents and then back up here, were Laurie and I have been relaxing and trying to recharge the batteries. We spent New Years Eve with a good friend, dinner at Il Fornaio, after dinner treats from Santana Row’s Cocola, and lots of good, meaty discussion. And a good time was had by all…..

And now, it’s back to work, and maybe, back to normalcy. or whatever comes close to it these days….

And soon, a look back at 2004, and looking forward to 2005. I’m definitely looking forward to it, also, I see good things ahead, and good people to share them with.

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