RED SOX WIN WOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Red sox win in a world series sweep!!!

I arrived yesterday here in Raleigh at about 6pm.  For this week I’m staying with a fraternity brother from the UNC chapter of Phi Mu Alpha.  His name is Neil and he and his wife Sarah live close to where I work so they extended their offering of letting me stay with them until I can find a place for Caitlin and Dominic to move into.

Today Neil and I went and played flag football for about 2.5 hours with a bunch of college guys and let me tell you - I’m completely worn out.  I haven’t excercised like that in who knows how long.  Lately my excercise regime has consisted of:  get out of cart, hit ball, walk to cart, drive to ball, repeat.  Good news is though I didn’t break two fingers from sticking them down some dude’s pants trying to pull the flag.

Tommorow I start my first day of work so I’ll let you all know how that turns out.

Edit:  Red Sox are going to the World Series!

Big news everyone, big news.

First order of business: the bad news.  We would have posted about it earlier but there was no reason to cause alarm and a big stir.  About 3 weeks ago I was “laid off” from my company here in Atlanta because of some company restructuring which I’m really not at liberty to speak about in a public forum such as this.  Basically, I knew it was coming for a few months and I’ve been passively sending my resume out for about 2 months before that, but not knocking on doors to find a new job.  Three weeks ago I had a meeting with my boss knowing some restructuring was going on and it kind of ended with me saying, “Well, Doug, I know that in about 1 month you can’t afford me anymore.  Would you mind if I started looking very agressively for a new job?”

To which he replied, “Yes, you should probably start looking”.  This effectively gave me a paycheck for the next month.

I’ve spent a year at Computer Troubleshooters and I’ve honestly gained about 7-10 years worth of knowledge that the average person gets in I.T. in this one jam packed intensive year.  Every once in a while you have a job role that pushes you to your absolute edge, and this one has been it for me every single day.  I’ve consecutively put in 60 hour weeks for the past 9 months, and I know that it has been hard on our family life.  Thanks to having such an understanding wife and her knowing the benefit of me working so incredibly hard during my early years of my career, it has been bearable.

Now for the good news.

After much deliberation and discussion Caitlin and I have accepted a new job in Raleigh, NC.  I’ll be working for Computer Service Partners (don’t mind their website, apparently that’s one of the first roles upon entering the organization).  They have recruited me pretty heavily over the past month - taking care of my trip up to Raleigh to visit with them for an all day interview and discussing with me at length about their business model and ideals.  I’ll be coming into the company to transform their managed services business model and delivery.  This is an area that I’m highly specialized in and jobs like these come very few and far in between.  They have seen the work I’ve done with my previous company in this arena and were very agressive in their procurement of me.  I start next Monday there.

Caitlin and I have discussed all the ups and downs of moving and there were a few major factors that have guided our decision:

1. I’m always traveling for my company.  Always.  Mostly by car from client to client to interface with executies about certain things, and living in Atlanta has made me incredibly bitter about the traffic situation.  Atlanta was just recently rated the 2nd worst traffic city in the nation, just behind Los Angeles.  I am waisting not only valuable time on the road away from my family, but it is driving me absolutely insane sitting hours upon hours in traffic downtown.  Even if I took another position here in Atlanta, it would only continually get worse as time passes because my job role is -not- going to change, therefore the traffic will just get worse over time.
2. Cost of living in Atlanta.  The cost of living in Atlanta is extremely high in order to break into the nicer parts of town.  I would literally have to be making about twice as much as I do now to afford something that both Caitlin and I would consider buying a home as our permanent address.  We -could- afford something that we’re looking for, but you’re talking about at least a 1 hour commute into downtown each day, which is where I’d have to work and is once again just completely unacceptable.
3. Cost of living in Raleigh.  Is much, much lower.  Raleigh is the city that Atlanta was 20 years ago.  It still has the urban feel, yet the cost of living is much lower.  Looking for homes that we can call a permanent address is much more appealing.  Homes such as these  start at $350,000+ (that’s 250% more in case you weren’t paying attention) in Atlanta, but in Raleigh are completely and very very affordable for us (especially with a new salary).
4. Lifestyle.  Raleigh is an upper-class 5 university laden research center for the east coast.  We’ll have the ability for Caitlin to go back to school whenever she wants and she will have great diversity to choose from when she does decide to go.  As well as having great university opportunities, the city offers the exact area of specialty that I’m in - law and medical.  Sure, you can find that in any city, but the city is specifically notorious for dealing with these two fields.  It’s a win-win situation for our family.

There are many other reasons we’re moving that are escaping me at the moment.  I know it’s big news but we’ll update soon with some other details when I’m not tired of typing.

Well, the website is back up and running but oh boy was it a mess.  I’m actually pretty proud of myself considering I had only about 12 hours of real downtime with such complicated troubleshooting involved.

Apparently my new host wouldn’t allow me to install phpMyadmin on the server because I had mysql database limitations, so migrating simply by blowing over all the content didn’t work.  Thinking something like this might happen, I did make .sql backups of all my databases before transfering.  Worst case scenario did happen, I wasn’t able to just simply copy the data over, so I was forced on a new install of Wordpress and then restore from backups the mysql databases, which worked.  It also gave me the opportunity to upgrade to the newest version of Wordpress in the process.

By the way, didn’t you notice how this site FINALLY LOADS IN LESS THAN 1 SECOND?  I know it was slow before, taking an average of a 6.5 second load time.  I’ve been meaning to cut to a new host for a year  lately because I know it’s been painfully slow.  Anyways, we’re down to a 1 second load time now

At a couple of points I was ready to give Wordpress the finger and move over to Joomla! but I decided I didn’t have the time to invest right now to develop all my content and css files for this site to be converted over to Joomla.  That’s ok though, when I get some time (which is like, never) I’ll update this site to the spankingly good awesomeness of a new platform.