From Here to There

As you can tell from our Website, we support our troops. As part of my routine check around the web for military news, I ran across the book, From Here to There (PDF download or paperback) from Holly Aho and purchased it. Holly is a Soldier's Angel. The description from the site says, "A book of inspirational true short stories of support for our troops. Filled with letters from troops in Iraq to stories of supporting our troops from the states, you'll laugh out loud and shed a few tears as you share in the joys and sorrows of supporting our brave heroes."

I've thoroughly enjoyed the first couple stories and just wanted to make a hearty recommendation after wiping away some tears this morning. Very touching and motivating, to say the least.

Thanks to Holly for making these stories available. And even more thanks to our men and women serving in our military for making these stories available.

Mike Schienle

Arriving in Chicago

My wife, Rhonda, and I are now in our new apartment in Chicago, about 1/2 mile from Sears Tower. Rhonda is especially thrilled to be living in a large city and is really enjoying all the things to do out here. I suspect Chicago will eventually return to normal once Rhonda settles in :-)

What's left of our furniture arrives from Colorado tomorrow, so this is the last night of staring at the walls. We decided to sell off a lot of the furniture prior to the move and purchase new stuff on this end. The main reason was that we had a much bigger place in Colorado and will need smaller/fewer items in an apartment. The large dresser, armoire, desks, couches, chaise, etc., are being replaced with their condensed equivalents. No doubt this will be an interesting change for us.

Spearfish, SD

My wife and I recently drove from Loveland, CO to Chicago, IL as part of our relocation for a new job with Citadel Investment Group in Chicago. The shortest route appeared to be taking Interstate 80 through Nebraska and Iowa for the West to East portion of the trip. Instead, we took Interstate 90 through South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

We lived in South Dakota from late 1996 to mid 1998 and wanted to drop by the little town we lived in to see how it had changed. We also wanted to go through the Deadwood area of South Dakota again, where we visited a very nice B&B in 1997, and thoroughly enjoyed the area. As soon as we hit Spearfish, we knew we would be living in South Dakota again some how, some way.

While traveling through Spearfish we knew why we loved the area so much. From the moment we were in South Dakota, there were several herds of deer along the highway, the scenery is second to none and the overall peacefulness just makes you want to stay in the area.

We're in the beginning stages of selling our house to some close friends of our neighbor and it is essentially a property swap. They are buying our house and we're buying their mobile home. The plan is to purchase their mobile home with proceeds from the sell of our house and move the mobile home to South Dakota. We'll keep the mobile home in its current location until we find a piece of property we can purchase in South Dakota, then move the mobile home. This would basically be our retirement location. We'll probably keep the mobile home on the lot for several years, then build a house. Even if we never get to the house portion, we know we'll have a mobile home that we can always enjoy. We're just learning about moving a mobile home, so we're sure there will be some gotchas along the way.

Going permanent

Last Monday I became a permanent employee for Citadel Investment Group in Chicago, IL. A year ago, going permanent for a company was one of the last things I expected to do. I was firmly committed to keeping my status as a contractor and consultant. I took a Perl and Sybase development contract for Citadel in June, 2004 with Citadel, expecting to work for six months. Much to my surprise I enjoyed the work enough to accept an extension, then a permanent position.

Citadel went out of their way to treat me much better as a contractor than I expected. I was given all the resources I needed from the start to do my job. I was given increasing responsibility for tasks very quickly. Their contractor offer was excellent in both pay and extras such as a corporate apartment and regular flights back to my wife and home in Colorado. When the time came to choose to go permanent, they had proven themselves to be a great company to work for and I was anxious to join them on a long-term basis.

My wife and I are very excited about this opportunity. We put a deposit on an apartment in downtown Chicago last weekend and the house in Colorado goes up for sale in a couple weeks.

Military Donations

As everyone is certainly aware, our military is very busy in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a variety of other places throughout the world. As you can see on the NewsTicker on the main page of our site, we respect and admire our military and the men and women who serve our country. Both my wife and I have relatives throughout our family who have served in our armed forces.

In an effort to show our support beyond talk and words, we've made the majority of our business and personal donations to military charities this year. We've received some very nice correspondence from these organizations, particularly from Gerard M. Kelly of the Wounded Warrior Project and from General Paul Vallely (Retired) of the Scott Vallely Soldiers Memorial Fund. We'd like to encourage everyone to visit these sites and others and consider donating.

We want all of our military to stay safe and to know they are loved, respected and honored. Our prayers and blessings are always with you. Hurry home to your friends and family and thanks once more for your service to your country.

We'd like to thank our customers and clients for giving Custom Visuals, LLC the opportunity to donate to our military personnel and veterans this year. 2004 was a great year for us and we feel truly blessed that we are able to show our appreciation this way.

Away from home

As I recently wrote, I'm working a contract in Chicago, IL. Unfortunately, that's 1000 miles away from home, which is in Loveland, CO. Working away from home isn't anything new for me. My wife, Rhonda, and I decided to embrace this lifestyle in 1998.

I had done some contracting work for a year in 1995-1996, then moved from California to South Dakota for a permanent position. Sadly, the position I was hired for never came about. I was hired to do image processing using IDL for the Landsat 7 satellite, but ended up doing user interfaces. After a year, it was clear there was no change in the horizon. My wife and I decided to move back to CA, but we had a house to sell before that could take place.

I ended up with a couple contracts in the process, one offsite in AZ and one onsite in CA. That allowed us to afford two homes (one in CA which was renting for less than our monthly payment, and the one in SD) and an apartment for me at the onsite contract. The house in SD sold and we moved into the one in CA that we were renting out. Unfortunately, that was still 130 miles from my onsite contract, so I had to stay in a hotel a few nights a week. We've had other similar situations: living in Lompoc, CA and working in Ventura, CA (100 miles) and San Jose, CA (250 miles), and living in Loveland, CO and working in Anchorage, AK (3500 miles) and now Chicago, IL (1000 miles).

The toughest part about being away from each other is the little maintenance things. I feel bad that Rhonda has to mow the lawn, though she doesn't complain about it. We had to have our air-conditioner serviced a couple weeks ago, and my truck needed some maintenance this week. Those are all the things I would normally do, but she's having to manage that now. The worst part was hearing that she got sick last week and I wasn't there to help out with the daily things, such as feeding the cats, taking out the trash, etc.

One thing that is making this easier is newer technology. My wife and I both have cable modems in our respective parts of the world. We recently started using Apple's iChat (similar to AOL) to talk every day. This is saving us a bundle on cell phone usage. iChat is about 90% as good as being on a cell phone. My wife also has a webcam on her end, so I can see her and our cats when we chat. This really makes things a lot better and we'll probably get an iSight camera on my end some time in the future.

New contract

I started a new contract last month. I'm working for a financial consulting firm in the heart of downtown Chicago. These folks are doing a ton of Perl DBI development, using SyBase as the database of choice on Linux. They are transitioning from Solaris, which I have a lot more experience on than Linux. These folks have been doing the Perl/DBI thing for quite a while, and so have I. It's great to exchange some ideas and code with the other developers. I'm certainly learning a few things and passing along what I know as we go.

I'm still trying to get everything nailed down as far as which databases are accessed for which purposes, the various download, extract and load templates available, etc., but there is a definite ramping up in the complexity of task assignments. With the transition from Solaris to Linux is a chance to rewrite a lot of older programs and move to some newer design ideas. Some of the things are replacing repeated select/insert/do statements with their prepare and execute counterparts using placeholders. One of the changes last week ended up helping the task to run 6x faster.

I'll get into the details on that at a later time. Suffice it to say, if you're hitting the limits of your hardware performance, this is an easy area to regain some time.

First blog
This is my first entry using Blosxom, a weblog program written by Rael Dornfest. I had heard of Blosxom before, but have never really pursued weblogs in general. When Rael asked to publish an article I wrote for O'Reilly's MacDevCenter in his MacOS X Panther Hacks book, I was definitely happy to oblige. Somewhere along the line I realized Rael's name in the Blosxom title and that's all it took to get me started using it. About 10 minutes later, I had this first entry in place, and about 15 minutes after that, I had it wrapped in the usual adornments of my site. So, a double thanks to Rael, first for asking to include my article in MacOS X Panther Hacks (Hack #45), and second for developing Blosxom.

Mike Schienle