January 2013 – Winter decided to show up….. harumpf

Did I spell "harumpf" correctly?

January, my first month with almost no Tortuga related business in quite a while.  New years eve was pretty fun.  Had my traditional new year's party with lots of friends over.  All in all it was a laid back affair, but it was still great to have them all there.

Unfortunately I came down with a pretty nasty cold very soon after that.  So I had to miss the Whipple's annual 12th night party.  They throw it every year and invite pretty much every rennie inside a 200 mile radius.  It's a lot of fun.  And for photo whores such as myself it's a good occasion because there's always 3 or 4 professional photographers in the group.  They always set up a makeshift photo studio in the garage and go crazy.  I'll be between all of them they take 5,000 pictures in one evening.

My other exciting news is kinda geeky.  A Memory of Light, the final book in the Wheel of Time series came out.  I have been reading this series since about 1994.  14 books, many of them over a thousand pages.  It has been a long, long time coming.  The original author even died.  Fortunately he left enough notes that his wife and editor choose a new author to finish the series.  And oh god was it worth it.  And the best part of the book?

I'm in it!

That's right!  A year ago the author had held a fundraising campaign for a couple non-profits.  If you donated $10 your name went into a hat.  As he would need names during the writing of the final book, he'd pull them out of the hat.  Imagine my surprise when I'm reading and stumble across a borderlander named "Ragon."  Made My Month!

I also enjoyed a visit from the lovely Kat.  She was nice enough to put me up for a few days during Hurricane Sandy.  I figure the least I could do was let her visit North Carolina for a bit and escape the snowy North East.  Why would anyone want to live where you have to shovel snow?  Crazy talk!

Work has been going well, this month we've been installing some large EMC AVAMAR arrays.  Hoping to be able to move completely away from tape backups.  Which will make my life much better.

Guess what guys?  Tampa is just around the corner?  Bay Area Renaissance Festival, here we come!