filed under: business, motorcycle, truist.com

Posted 51 days ago

Well, truist.com still looks like it’s just parked. But www.truist.com has something more interesting :) I wonder if they realize that they forgot about the non-www version?

So, I was right, and they were quick – they announced the new company (and the website) on Monday. Here’s a brief article about it, also. It’s strange to see the word “truist” used in a corporate setting, and have it mean something different than “me”. Huh.

In other news, though, I plan to buy a (used) Kawasaki KLR650 as soon as I can find one for sale nearby :)

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filed under: dogs, pictures

Posted 56 days ago

I created a new album specifically for pictures of Sophia & Kodiak, and uploaded everything I’ve taken so far :) The first 6 pictures are from right after we got them. The rest were taken just a few days ago.

You can see other puppy pictures (from right after we got them) in April’s album of pictures from Kristina’s birthday party.

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filed under: business, links, rainskit.com, truist.com

Posted 59 days ago

As of this afternoon, truist.com is no longer mine. I had it for 8 years, 4 months, and I find that I’m very sad to see it go :-(

But as Drew says: “think of the motorcycles” – and that is helping :)

So now that the sale is actually done, here’s the story:

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filed under: rainskit.com, truist.com, tru_tags

Posted 62 days ago

Today marks the beginning of rainskit.com – welcome! It looks a lot like that other site, truist.com… but actually, it’s totally different. See, you have to type R-A-I-N-S-K-I-T now instead of T-R-U-I-S-T. I keep getting that all wrong. I’m sure I’ll get used to it eventually.

I think everything has been moved over – email, web, other sites I host, other email addresses, redirects, telling every company on the planet not to use my old email address, etc. If you spot something that still says “truist.com” and looks like it’s an accident, please let me know. (Note that I left the truist.com tag on a few posts, intentionally.)

If you are following the RSS feed and/or are subscribed to the email list – you need to update your URLs and/or resubscribe to the emails. I’ve made the email service much more reliable and much easier to use, by hosting it myself. Just wander over to the sidebar, find the section titled “Subscribe” with the text field that says “email” and type your email address in. Hit enter. That’s it, you’re subscribed. I still need to work out a few improvements to the email service, but for now, that will ensure that you hear about each new post. The best way to follow this blog, though, is still through the RSS or Atom feeds.

The planned transfer of truist.com to its new owner will be Tuesday evening (-ish). It looks like google has already recognized rainskit and is starting to find the new home of tru_tags, but it’s lagging a little behind on finding the new home of Nathan Arthur. Hopefully they will figure it all out before Tuesday :)

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filed under: rainskit.com, truist.com

Posted 66 days ago

Heads up! I’m selling truist.com and moving this entire site over to rainskit.com. As of next Tuesday (July 8th), truist.com will no longer work.

My email address(es) (and Kristina’s) are changing; in fact, they have already changed. You can now reach me “@rainskit.com” instead of “@truist.com”. Anything sent to truist.com after the 8th will go to somebody else :)

As of this writing, rainskit.com doesn’t look like much, but that will be changing as soon as possible, to give the search engines as much time as possible to figure it out. As soon as I make the switch, http://www.truist.com/ will automatically forward to http://www.rainskit.com/... until the 8th, that is. After the 8th, you’ll have to go straight to rainskit.com.

Those of you following this blog through the RSS or Atom feeds will need to update your readers, once the switch is made. I’m not sure what will happen during this interim period. The best thing to do is to manually switch over in a few days. This will also be true for the gallery RSS feed.

Those of you following this blog through email will have to re-subscribe on the new website, once it is up. Sorry :-(

And I’m sure you’re all wondering “why RainSkit.com???” Well, I chose it because it was available, short, easy to remember, easy to spell, and had very few hits on Google. I found it by taking anagrams of words that had meaning to me. I’ll leave it to you to figure out the source word :)

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filed under: dogs, kristina, life, pictures, truist.com

Posted 75 days ago

Two posts ago, I mentioned how we were stirring our lives up, in a number of specific ways:

• new job
• new car
• new house
• new dogs
• birthday party
• uncertain motorcycle

And I forgot to mention that Kristina would be starting an internship at Franklin Park Conservatory.

So, all that stuff happened. I have the new job (in Cleveland, so I’m traveling there 50% of the time), we have the new car (described previously), we found a house in Harrisburg (Ohio), we have two new Great Pyrenees puppies (details below), the birthday party went well, Kristina started her internship, and the motorcycle is still uncertain.

Yeah, it’s been stressful.

I don’t have pictures of the birthday party, although some of the guests will probably send me some of theirs. I also don’t have pictures of the puppies because the camera is still in a box somewhere, but you can see a picture of Kodiak (the 11-week-old) on this page (with the little blond girl on the right side of the page) and Sophia (the 11-*month*-old) on this page.

As you can imagine, we’re pretty much stressed out, especially Kristina who did everything I did, plus started the internship, plus had to be home a few days with the dogs without me. But we’re getting through it.

Oh yeah – and some guy called me and offered to buy truist.com. I think I’m going to sell it to him (he offered a lot of money). I’ll post about that soon, but for now – I need a replacement domain name, and I’m running low on ideas. If you have any, please email me or post them here as comments.

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filed under: programming, rainskit.com, tagging, tru_tags, usability

Posted 93 days ago

I’m working on the next version of tru_tags and one of its major features is the ability to create a tag-based archive page, like this one. After implementing the feature, I tried it out, and I liked it so much that I decided to use it on this site. Specifically, I removed the old “About” page, merged some of that content into the “Links” page (and generally edited that page), and put the “Archive” page in where the About page used to be.

This should all make sense if you look at the menu links at the top of the site. For those of you reading this via the feed – click here to see it.

It’s a really interesting page to browse through – I find it strangely fascinating to see so clearly all the articles I’ve written, and how they clump together. I’ve also used it a few times as a faster way to get to a specific page. It’s somehow more powerful than the normal tag cloud, functionally and emotionally, and that surprises me.

Or maybe it’s just late :)

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filed under: business, dogs, family, kristina, life, travel

Posted 133 days ago

Four weeks ago, life was pretty simple: I was comfortable (but not really happy) in my job, we had a nice apartment, our expenses were low, we had a fairly stable plan for the future, and I was planning on buying a motorcycle. Now, though, everything is different: today was my last day at NetJets, we just bought a car, we’re looking for a new place to live, the future is very uncertain, and it’s not clear if I’ll be getting a motorcycle.

And yet, still, I think today is better than four weeks ago. Crazy, huh?

The story goes something like this: Five weeks ago (to the day), I finally realized (after much prodding from my wife) what I wanted my next career move to be. I wanted to be a Product Manager for a software company, much like I was back before I left Noteworthy Medical Systems, four years ago. I realized how important it is for me to have my hands on real problems that I get to solve myself, and how important it is for me to be on the front lines rather than in an IT department (“in the business, not serving the business”). Nothing against NetJets – they have a truly amazing IT department! – but having tasted life in a software company, I wanted to get back to that. The problem was (five weeks ago) that it’s extremely difficult to get a job as a product manager in a software company, especially in Ohio, so I essentially put that plan on hold for “someday”.

So then four weeks ago (to the day), an old friend/coworker from Noteworthy called me up and basically said “we need you to come back and be a product manager – are you interested?”. Huh, funny how these things happen. I told her I was maybe interested, and spent the next week talking to her, going to Cleveland for interviews, and trying to figure out what had changed since I left. After about a week of this, I was convinced that Noteworthy was in good shape, and that this was a legitimate opportunity, and that I’d really love going back into the product manager job.

So it was easy for me to say yes to the offer – except that Noteworthy is in Cleveland, and we live in Columbus, and Kristina is very happy as a student at OSU. So I was going to have to travel to Cleveland for this job, leaving her in Columbus, and we both know that we don’t do well with full-time travel. So I managed to work out a deal with Noteworthy to travel half-time, working from home the other half, and after much discussion we decided that we could handle that, and I said yes to the offer.

That was two weeks ago (to the day).

So I put in my notice, and we started making plans for how to make this all work. First, obviously, we needed a second car. We’ve never had a second car – our lifestyle just never demanded it, and a car is a huge expense. The question was, which car?

Well, that gets to the next decision, which was to get a dog. As part of agreeing to the travel, Kristina and I made an agreement with each other that we’d get a dog for her, to help keep her company while I’m gone. Well… she wants a big dog. And I think that it’s always better to have two dogs, because they keep each other happy and healthy. And we happen to know of a breeder who has Great Pyrenees puppies for sale, and that happens to be the particular breed of very large dog that we had our eye on… so the plan is to get two huge puppies. Oh, the changes…

So back to the car. Between the two new dogs, and the fact that Kristina is a horticulture student who regularly carries plant stuff around, we decided that we needed a car with lots of space and that’s easy to clean. Minivans were right out, jeeps weren’t big enough, and SUVs are generally a waste of money, so that left the Honda Element – a perfect car for this situation, and one that we really liked. But then that got tough – we were trying to keep the cost low (so we needed a used car), but we like having convenience features (power mirrors) and a nice stereo, and we both like driving stick-shift cars, and we didn’t want one with a ton of miles on it. It is possible to get an Element that meets all these criteria, but we couldn’t find one in Columbus. So we went to Pittsburgh (Monday night) to buy one that we found there, and so far we love it. It took a lot of work to finally settle on that car, and to get the financing sorted out (without having a used car dealer screw us), and get a price negotiated, but it was worth it.

But wait, there’s another consequence to getting these dogs: our current apartment doesn’t let us have pets. (And I wouldn’t put two huge dogs into our place anyway.) So we have to find a new place, preferably a house with a large fenced yard. And we need to rent it because we’ll probably move in two years when Kristina graduates. And our current rent is quite low, and we don’t pay our gas bill, so our housing expenses are about to go way up. And we’re probably not going to find something close to campus with a large fenced yard in a safe neighborhood that’s not too expensive. So that search will continue :)

And finally, all these increased expenses may mean that I can’t get a motorcycle. I have my license (took the class last fall) and a helmet (birthday present, a week ago) and a riding jacket (another birthday present), but no motorcycle. More on this as events unfold.

So, to summarize: new job, new travel lifestyle, new car, new house, new dogs, maybe no motorcycle. Oh, and Kristina’s 30th birthday is in June, so I need to plan that. So yeah, things are a little stirred up around here :) But they’re good.

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filed under: food, vegetarian

Posted 165 days ago

(Continued from Vegetarian updates)

Well, yesterday was decision time. It came on me somewhat suddenly, when I heard on Saturday that Lent actually ended Friday. After some careful reading I decided that it really ended at sundown on Saturday, or maybe sunup on Sunday, so I just waited until Sunday as I had originally planned. Even then, I wasn’t really ready to decide – I had become comfortable as a vegetarian.

That’s not to say that there aren’t a bunch of downsides to vegetarianism! It’s just that there are also some upsides, so it becomes more of a balanced choice, rather than a restriction. I had acclimated to the vegetarian lifestyle, and I just didn’t feel like I really needed to change.

Without discussing the final decision, the preceding paragraph helps explain why I give up something for Lent each year – it’s an opportunity for me to jump a hurdle and see what is on the other side. Often it isn’t what I expect.

But back to the issue at hand…

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filed under: food, vegetarian

Posted 170 days ago

(This article continues the earlier thread.)

A few updates, with only 4 days left until Lent is over and I have to choose whether to remain vegetarian.

First, I went to London and Lisbon last week for work, and had a few new vegetarian experiences, none of them particularly exciting:

• In the airport I realized that I hadn’t set my food preferences to vegetarian when I made the reservation. I asked at the counter about it, and the ever-so-kind woman told me that it was too late to change it. Crap. It turned out, though, that I was flying business class, so I was able to choose the vegetarian option off the menu. (It was acceptable, but that’s the best I can say about it.) Close call!
• In London, I was surprised at how many vegetarian options there were. We were only there for two days, but it was fairly easy to eat both days. I did miss a few great options at dinner, though.
• In Lisbon, I lived on a diet of eggs (breakfast), salad (lunch), and steamed vegetables (dinner). Portugal just isn’t designed to make life easy on vegetarians. The food for non-vegetarians is fantastic (as I know from earlier experience), which made it all the harder to watch my coworkers eat.
  • When Kristina joined me on a trip back in December, we were able to find places for her to eat, but we had to plan ahead to make it work. On this trip, I just ate with the rest of the team, and had to make do with whatever was available, which was often “please have the chef make something for me.” None of it was inspiring.

Second, I weighed myself again yesterday and discovered that my earlier weight loss has reversed by a few pounds. I’m still down a few pounds from my starting weight, but it doesn’t look like the weight loss will be a continuing trend. Crap.

Finally, I gave blood earlier today, and the little test they do to see if I have enough iron in my blood came up positive (I had enough iron). That’s a good sign that I’m eating right, which is reassuring. I’ve been going to bed early the last few nights and that had me worried, but I think it’s just because I overtaxed myself on the trip to Europe, and haven’t really given my body time to recover.

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