Just feeling a little CraZZy

A little wisdom for a Friday, Many thanks to Olivia!

Looking for a break from the documentation I have been working on lately I decided to take a few minutes and have a browse on You Tube for any interesting or funny video's. If you have heard about the new Microsoft Surface (very cool) then someone has created a very funny Parody video that is awesome!

Well it has been a little while since my last blog posting and as always it primarily been because I feel like I have a little too busy to have the time to blog. It's a shame really, I like to blog, as I find it to release just a little of the days stress hammering out my thoughts onto the keyboard.

So I'm not going to keep this long but I thought I might provide some updates:

The House

Olivia and I have been living with my parents for a few months to save a few dollars while we wait for the construction of our new place to be completed. While overall it's cheaper living with my parents both of us are having issue adjusting to not having our own space. It's difficult having most of your own furniture in storage, very limited Internet (well for me at least) and no real food to call our own.

On the other hand our new house is coming along quite nicely. This week the roof goes on and hopefully the electrical work will commence next week along with the brickwork. Overall Olivia and I are quietly hopefully that we can be in the house at the beginning of September, if we are then we are going to be having a nice big housewarming / my birthday bash. If not then, well we will see...

Brisbane SharePoint Users Group

The Brisbane SharePoint Users Group keep going from strength to strength. It feels like everyone is interested in SharePoint technology at the moment. Being the Owner of the group I am seeing some really interesting solutions and people come through the group and it's also great to see some new up and comers that are passionate about the technology.

Joshua House

Joshua House is the Young Adults arm of Vineyard Pine Rivers that Olivia and I look after, unfortunately I really haven't been in a position over the course of this year to give J-House all the TLC that it really needs. We have a great program and we're visiting some really interesting places for coffee but Liv and I are really struggling to keep it going. We're thinking it might become a little easier once we're into the new place as then we'll have a central meeting place if we need it!

V-LAN

V-LAN, this is my passion, what I love to do. See people connecting forming relationships and getting some great game time in. This is a hard slog though. Getting people to V-LAN is hard, while I know it's not the program there are a certain amount of people needed to make it work and once I get people their they can see the value. One thing I do know is that as V-LAN grows this is just going to keep getting better!

Avanade

As I have mentioned previously taking the Avanade job was an interesting move from the contracting I was doing before as it had been a number of years since I have been a full-time employee but I think the move was a good one and after almost 3 months of now working at Avanade I am feeling like I am beginning to settle in. I've completed my first project, working on documentation for the second at the moment and I'm seeing some interesting opportunities in the far away future.

So while I'm sure I could come up with some more interesting discussion topics that where we are at the moment. Hopefully my next post will be a little sooner in the future than this one was compared to my last post...

I'm close to finishing off my afternoon and heading home and while I was waiting for one of my servers to reboot I thought I would head out and check out a little bit of the news around World of Warcraft. I haven't had much time to sit down and play games lately and what time I have had I have spent playing other neglected games. My thinking this afternoon was that I would check out some of the news and potentially log onto WoW for an hour or so and grind for a while. Well logging onto Worldofwar.net I was immediately drawn to the article on the topic of Is World of Warcraft killing LAN's. As the co-ordinator of a young (but slowing growing) community LAN this article had me nodding my head in agreement. WoW has really taken something away from our LAN's, I know that at V-LAN we are about to implement a no WoW policy, so that we encourage everyone to play the same games and interact with people in the room, not people in a different country.

In response, personally I don't think that WoW is the death of LAN's, I think it has hurt our little local LAN's a little bit. But at the same time I think that WoW is now on it's downwards spiral. I think that people are starting to look to other genres of games again for a renewed thrill. WoW will always be around but over the next six months people might just be willing to brave connecting with people at a little local LAN (like V-LAN) and once again make some physical friends.

I look forward to it, greater competition at my LAN and every now and then (maybe) just a little time in WoW...

What a weekend, things are moving so fast at the moment. This weekend gone and this coming week are such big weeks for Olivia and I. Here is the run down in point form!

• Fixed and Serviced the mower
• Mowed the front and back jungles (yard)
• Picked up 2 42u server racks for the new house (thanks Neal!)
• Spent a few hours at Raw War LAN (playing CS as cannon fodder)
• Had two lots of people through the house
• Got an offer on the house
• Negotiated the offer on the house
• Accepted and signed contracts for an offer on the house
• Installed a single server rack in my study
• Ran our first Joshua House Sunday night service

So that being my weekend this week I'm busy with the following:

• Completing my contract with Sunsuper
• Starting work with Avanade
• Building a Web Design brief for the Joshua House and V-LAN web sites

So yeah, stay tuned!