Chasing Nuts

It is only Wednesday and it sure has been an exciting week for me.  I am going to be speaking at two great Tech events about PostgreSQL.  My friends over at e-Mol are lining up eager customers for their amazing product. Lastly, I just had an interview with a really great company that went very well.
I have been evangelizing about PostgreSQL every chance I have for years.  Mostly I spend my energy evangelizing locally, local LUG or MUG meetings and of course Penguicon.  From time to time I get the wonderful opportunity to speak about PostgreSQL  at a tech event more than a simple car drive away.  I recently found out that I am traveling and speaking at TWO great Tech events!  First I will be speaking at PGCon 2008 coming this May 22-23 at University of Ottawa.  Next I will be flying the other side of the continent and presenting at OSCON 2008 happening July 21-25 in Portland Oregon.  It will be my first time to a PostgreSQL only event and I am looking forward to learning lots from the other people there.  I will be presenting at OSCON for my second time and there too I will be sucking up information and knowledge like a sponge.
At both events my presentation will be “This is your PostgreSQL on drugs”.

PostgreSQL is known to be a powerful open source relational database with many uses. One such use is warehousing EMRs (Electronic Medical Records) from oncology practices across the country. PostgreSQL, Perl, Apache, Ubuntu Linux and OpenBSD are all used for their strengths to deliver information to pharmaceutical companies to see what their drugs are doing for individuals in real world scenarios. Do you have a large amount of data that needs to be searchable, aggregated and extremely secure at the same time? See many of the creative solutions that have been deployed to help facilitate how we put PostgreSQL to the task of drugs.

The talk is mainly about what my genius friend Brian has been building, with a bit of help from yours truly, for the last year: a simple way to manage and data mine medical records for HUGE numbers of people.  The end goal is to make healthcare better for everyone and the best part is that this week he has two large customers clamoring to work with him!
If all that was not enough to make excited I just finished an interview that went very well.  I have to say that I am not a huge fan of formal interviews.  You know the ones, where they ask you to explain a time when you worked in a group and there was a conflict and you helped resolve it.  My interview today was with people high up but was more of a conversation.  They asked some questions, we talked about some things and then I asked some questions.  I feel it went well and I think I will be seeing them again the next round of speaking with the company.

With all that has been going well I think it is time to run out and buy a lotto ticket.

For those that may not have known, I was not as happy as I could have been at my work situation the last few months.  That is the reason I am leaving my position at Autoweb Communications in two weeks.  I did tell my managers at the company a few weeks ago however my last two weeks starts this Monday.  Working for Autoweb has been a wonderful experience. I have grown there in many ways and will always remember the opportunities provided for me by Autoweb.

What may seem a little unusual is that I am leaving Autoweb without a new job all lined up.  Part of the reason is that I do not feel it would be totally fair to be working for one company while taking time and energy to look for another position; perhaps I am too nice a guy.  Fortunately I have been very diligent at saving up money and know that I am well prepared to deal with any gap in employment that I will have.  The great news is that in the few short days that I have been talking to people about looking for a new position many amazing and exciting opportunities have fallen in my lap.

I am a little scared but more excited than anything about this next chapter in my life.

Last weekend I decided to spend some time in the kitchen baking with my crappy oven and made a four layer German Chocolate Cake. 

I do most all my baking with directions from Cooks Illustrated and if you are up for the work, as a Cooks Illustrated recipes are work, you must try their  German Chocolate Cake with Coconut-Pecan Filling.  It was pretty much heaven on a plate.

I typically prefer to read the book before I go to the film version of a story and this is the case with The Golden Compass. It all started out innocently enough; I decided to read the book and once finished planned to see the move. I read the book and was totally sucked in! I did see the movie after completing the first book and I was disappointed.

The movie would have been better if they had tried to cut more of the story out or had made a 2+ hour film. The problem was that they tried hard to jam as much as they could in the 113 minutes they had. The scenes were too short and the story seemed jumpy, it was hard to follow even with my short attention span. The end result was a movie that had a lot of eye candy but a story line that disappointed. Another bad decision that got me a little wound up was the fact that they cut the whole last chapter out of the movie. This was a great setup for the next book and I believe it should have been in the movie. Maybe they knew there would not be a second movie???

Fortunately for me the movie letdown did not end things. I jumped right into the second book, The Subtle Knife and hardly put in down. I completed Book Two Superbowl Sunday and just got my hands on the third book, The Amber Spyglass. I am going to dive into Book Three tonight and will not be surprised if I complete it this weekend.

Philip Pullman’s whole trilogy His Dark Materials trilogy is just fun to read and I recommend it to anyone who likes a fun book but be warned, it will suck you in too.

This weekend I had the pleasure of attending and running High Voltage ConFusion. This year I was on the convention committee and responsible for running registration. I lined up two great staff helping me and the experience was so enjoyable that I intend to run registration again in 2009. Everything went smooth however there were a few lessons learned for next year.

• Make a special badge for Kids-In-Tow
• Make a special badge for KidFusion
• Make sure we track on a separate sheet at the door KidFusion registrations
• Use 24pt font and a high contrast background on the badge.
• Have a couple volunteers to do nothing but data entry over the weekend.
• Never attack Russia in the winter while fighting a war on two fronts.

One highlight of the weekend was Sunday night when I was able to spend time with our author guests of honor Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbalestier. The two of them totally rock and I have a new goal in life, try and become a crazed fan of Justine’s.