Another catchup post

As another few months have passed since I last blogged on blurg.net I thought I would do a another of my famous catch up posts. I haven’t forgot the site is here as someone emailed me, but rather have been so busy its not been a priority.

Since Christmas lots has happened, I have been busy posting over at my other site, epmsource.com, which covers stuff I tend to do on a daily basis. The site is doing extremely well, with visitor numbers climbing steadily and some great feedback from the community. I am aiming for one to two original posts a week, which is pretty hard to achieve. It’s quite easy to repost other stuff, but it’s the originality that is the killer. As well as the site, I also have been spending a heap of time getting the EPM 2010 message out there either in person or in the forums.

In April I was lucky enough to be awarded a Microsoft MVP award for Project. When I first found out I was nominated I was blown away, then to receive the award a few weeks later put me into orbit. It certainly is humbling to think my colleagues and the community feel that my knowledge in Project was sufficient to be recognised.

Whilst talking about Project, I have also been involved in a heap of public speaking engagements, including:

• Numerous Microsoft Project User Group (MPUG) meetings
• The Office, SharePoint and Project Server 2010 community launch event
• The Australian SharePoint Conference

As well as bending anyone’s ear I can find at the monthly MOSSIG meetings.

On a more personal note, my folks came out on holiday for a few weeks at the beginning of the year which was awesome. The kids loved spending time with their grandparents and getting to see there is more to them than an hour a week on skype. I have also been trying to spend more quality time with the family over the weekends, and as a family we have been making sure we use the weekend time wisely. We have had some great times out at the museum, in the city, cinema and generally hanging out and having fun. We’ve also managed to squeeze a number of birthdays and parties into the mix, both kids starting kinder as well as building what felt like the worlds biggest cubby house, dancing concerts and a wedding to boot.

So there you go, as you can see it’s been a busy time, hopefully it will ease up over the next few months so I can get some nerdy posts out… in fact I have one I am working on now.

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First post of 2009

Well 5 days into the year I have finally gotten off my arse to right a blog post. I was going to do one of those blog post reviews of the past year and setting goals for the next year, but Andy and the Wookie seem to have nailed that already. In fact, Andrew has also beaten me too.

At the moment I am enjoying a nice three week break from work and spending some amazing time with my family. We went up to the Gold Coast last week and took the kids to enjoy the sun, beaches and Wiggles World. Thanks to a suggestion by a colleague we stayed in Broadbeach and it was awesome, the place had a great family buzz, was well located and had a fantastic pool (well four in fact). Whilst travelling with young kids can be difficult it is also very rewarding. Seeing our youngest run up and hug the life size version of the dinosaur he uses as a teddy was fantastic. I have certainly come to appreciate how lucky I am to have such a fantastic wife and children.

As I write I have one week left before I return to work and am starting to ease back into all things nerdy (like Twitter and Google Reader) and eagerly awaiting the Windows 7 beta to kick off in the next week or so.

I am expecting 2009 to be a very big year personally and professionally and whilst I said I wasn’t going to set goals in a blog post, I have indeed set some, which will make 2009 very very exciting.

New water feature

In my two weeks off I have been busy in the garden and finally finished my new water feature, like it? I have modelled it after a Jawa’s Sand Crawler from Star Wars.

In reality the picture above was taken on a day trip to Cranbourne’s Botanical Gardens earlier in the week with my parents. I have to admit I have driven past the signpost to it for several years and never thought about going in. It’s in Cranbourne so it can’t be good, right? Wrong. I was totally blown away by the place.

The panoramic photo’s were taken with my trusty Canon Ixus 750 and then stitched together with Microsoft’s excellent Windows Live Photo Gallery panoramic functionality.

 

On Holiday

The last few months have been really full on at work trying to get a project out of the door that I have been involved in since starting at SDM two and half years ago. Over the weekend of the 28th & 29th July the project went live and so far seems to be working a treat.

The pressures of those last few months have been enormous both on the team but our families as well, as such I decided that it was time for a holiday and turned my mobile off on Wednesday evening last week and left my laptop at work for a long overdue rebuild.

I have to say that the last few days have been fabulous. I have realised I have a family once again and have been loving spending time with my wife, daughter & son doing what would seem to be the most mundane tasks life supermarket shopping, but loving every minute of it. This is the first real chunk of time I have had with Jack since he was born (I worked half time to make sure the project went in).

So why am I telling you all this? Well mainly as I owe my family an apology for neglecting them the past few months, and to let it be known in the words of Bob Dylan that ‘time they are a changing….’