Where does it all go?

Time, that is. It’s crazy how it gets away from us. Tonight I came home to my oldest daughter, Abigail, wailing and moaning on the couch due to an ear infection. I have 3 girls and I think this is the first ear infection in our family.

Julie’s got all kinds of projects going on, which means that I’ve got all kinds of projects going on. The nesting instict has kicked itself into high gear a bit early this time around. We’ve moved Abigail into her own room and Lucy in with Grace. I just don’t know what to say about Lucy other than she’s a nut. She’s a happy nut. Remember that camera I bought that I was so excited about? Well I think she threw it away somewhere. Either that or it got stolen when Julie gave my sister Catherine a shower last week. And I’ve got to think the former . . .

Side projects are going very slow. I did officially begin the process of forming the LLC. It’s going to be BCE Solutions. Incredibly clever, I know.

I’m NOT an Oracle DBA

I really despise Oracle. It’s a great database and works ridiculously well, but it’s just entirely too complicated and difficult to get setup for most standard applications. I’ve got an application I’m trying to get running and it’s driving me crazy. I guess there’s a reason Oracle is often used with Java/J2EE applications.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to rewrite the application in Rails (and use a different database), but I’m not sure what the client will think. It needs to run on Apache, but apparently they run their webapps on Tomcat. It would be kind of fun to use Tapestry on a real, full-blown app, but I don’t really have the time for that right now. We’ll see. Maybe I could write it how I want it, host it myself, and go from there.

I guess I just needed somewhere to vent since this Oracle import is driving me crazy and it’s 12:22AM.

Adieu, Randy, till we meet again

Today was Randy’s funeral. It was a nice service. I was amazed at the turnout. People from the community he served, his brothers and sisters (whom I don’t think I’ve ever met), and people from all over. Abigail had a bit of a rough time during the viewing period, but overall did very well.

Randy’s family did a great job. I’m sure he’s proud of what they did. Overall, it was just a very nice service with lots of good memories. Brandon, Chris (both my cousins), and Dave (my cousin Jennifer’s husband) gave especially nice remarks. The support from folks at the church was nearly overwhelming. They put on quite a spread after the burial.

Now, of course, comes the hard part for Janene and her family.

Back to work, not quite reality

I went back to work today. I worked a couple of days last week, but it was pretty uneventful and, truth be told, pretty inefficient. I think that all of us there were thinking deep down that we were getting hosed for being there, so it was pretty kick back.

My Aunt Janene asked me to be a part of Randy’s dressing yesterday at the mortuary. That was a humbling and sobering experience. I was kind of surprised how good he looked, but I suppose that’s all relative at this point. He certainly looked at peace somehow.

Tomorrow is the funeral. It promises to be a roller coaster of a day. I can’t imagine what his children, and especially his wife, must be going through. Janene has asked that I help with the dedication of the grave. I told her that it would be an honor. We’ll see how it goes.

Grace started preschool yesterday. One of these days, I’m going to fix my Typo install here so that I can post pictures to this thing. I took a picture of her in front of her teacher’s house. She was pretty excited. I’m glad she’s back in school. She seems to need an outlet for some sort of creative energy that she has built up.

Abigail returns on Monday of next week (1/9 I think?). She’s been trying to tell us that she was supposed to go back today, but that wasn’t the case.

Lucy is still a nut. But a happy nut.

I’m trying to get an application running that I wrote in 2004. It just makes me realize how much I hate Oracle databases. I would much rather use most anything else. So I’m currently downloading release 9, with the hopes of replacing my more-recent 10g instance with the older one. I’m sure for 99% of those that read this stuff (99% of zero is . . . nevermind) this makes absolutely no sense. So I’ll stop there.