Back To Close Out The Year.

<p>Can&#39;t believe its been 2 months since my last post. Its doesn&#39;t seem that long and at the same time it feels like forever. </p>
<p>The news of my demise is premature. In all actuality I&#39;ve been busy, too busy, handling some prior commitments and a lot of unexpected happenings. Before I pickup my regular habits again I thought a recap of what I&#39;ve been up to is in order. </p>
<p>Since August my wife and others have been dealing with <a href="/archives/000310.html">the abrupt closure of Elizabeth Seton Birth Center</a> and ensuing turmoil that followed. They&#39;ve also fought valiantly to raise awareness of skyrocketing insurance costs and the effect it is having on limiting women&#39;s health choice. I&#39;ve been happy to help however I could. From this has come two new ventures of which I am directly involved.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://birthcenter.typepad.com">group that rallied around the cause</a> has become the Friends of the Birth Center and are organizing themselves as a non-profit organization to bring a new free standing birth center back to Manhattan. I signed on as a board member and CIO. (I also like to refer to myself as the board token male and Mr. Kristen Stehle.) More to come on that as we research our options and get organized in addition to file all the necessary paper work. I&#39;ve also registered friendsofthebirthcenter.org. Look for that TypePad weblog to sprout in the coming weeks.</p>
<p>The other venture is that my wife has launched her own private health practice named <a href="http://www.chelseawellwoman.com/">Chelsea Well Woman Care</a>. Kristen was Elizabeth Seton Woman&#39;s Health Nurse Practitioner and had many patients that was looking for the same personalized care. You can see <a href="http://www.chelseawellwoman.com/">her website</a> for more. (Excuse the design by yours truly.) While starting her own practice was always in her plans, doing it so soon and with little preparation was not. That&#39;s made for all types of fun. (BTW: NEVER register a domain with one registrar if you may need to move it within the next 60 days.)</p>
<p>So the most obvious new development is that I got a proper domain for my weblog setup &#8212; timaoutloud.org is mine. I had every intention of doing so, but not under the circumstance that I did. </p>
<p>Right after Thanksgiving I got a note from the hoster that I and two of my clients were using would be closing its doors at the end of the month. (Today.) Given an overloaded work schedule, this made life interesting as I found new hosting for three different MT installations with different requirements and budgets. The kicker came yesterday when I got a rude (excuse the pun for those in the know) awakening to find that they shutdown their servers a day early. I had just gotten my second client off their server and was waiting for the change in MX records. They lost some mail server for a short time. My weblog here went dead as did my email. Some finishing touches and some abrupt DNS changes and by the end of the day I&#39;m back. I think I got everything and did a lot of house cleanng &#8211; fixing the templates and style sheets, reorganizing the filesystem and cleaning out a lot of cruft that had built up over the years. Still have some to go and some improvements planned once I get a bit of time.</p>
<p>While I was at it another client was informed by Rackspace that the version of RedHat Linux his server was running was no longer supported. They asked for it to be migrated immediately. I thereby declared the month of December <q>Server Emergency Month.</q> System Administration skills are remarkably improved after the month I had.</p>
<p>I also (finally) got around to releasing new and vastly improved versions of TikiText (<a href="http://search.cpan.org/~tima/Text-Tiki-0.72/Tiki.pm">Text::Tiki</a>) and <a href="http://search.cpan.org/~tima/XML-RSS-Parser-1/Parser.pm">XML::RSS::Parser</a> into CPAN. I have a lot of code I&#39;ve been meaning to document and release for some time. I have even more drawn up to be developed. The fact that I&#39;m writing about this and not releasing code is a source of great personal frustration. (I smell a News Years resolution.)</p>
<p>We now have his and hers Powerbooks in the house. We are preparing to move to Niantic, Connecticut in a month. (A subject of another post). I completed some C++ course work and getting a refresher on Java and strategic business that n August seemed like a good idea. It probably wasn&#39;t. Somewhere I fit in being a daddy and spending some time with my family over the holidays.</p>
<p>To cap off the year my Powerbook last night started to vibrate and hum. It then shut down and wouldn&#39;t boot up. (Further proof that I am cursed.) I had some backups, but with the things being the way they have I didn&#39;t have recent enough backups. I took it to the Apple Soho Store Genius Bar and it booted. We tried for 5 hours to get a backup to work to no avail so my baby is in the shop for the new year. Quite an interesting experience sitting there. That will be tomorrow&#39;s entry I suppose.</p>
<p>Right now I have to ring in the year. Happy new year all!</p>
<p><strong>UPDATE:</strong> We stayed home alone being the old worn out people that we are. Its a bit unnerving view out our apartment &#8211; half a dozen hovering helicopters with spotlights scanning the area, flashing lights of patrol boats in the Hudson and loud booms of fireworks across the river and the marina. We also thought we heard a peculiar roar of a jet that we couldn&#39;t see.</p>