You wouldn’t know it by the paucity (look it up) of posts here, but I have been somewhat busy at home (along with at work).

I’ve been re-employed at a local county government agency in the IT dept (where else). Working on a new Content Management System that is a replacement for their existing system. My part is to take care of the hosting environment (servers, setup, etc). My responsibilities also include the web infrastructure (servers, IIS, etc) for all of their web sites, along with some other related tasks. That keeps me mostly busy. I just passed the one-year mark there, and the yearly review was very positive. I enjoy the work, the commute is much easier than in CA (although more miles, it’s usually at ‘freeway speeds’ on the freeway part). And it keeps me out of the house (much to the delight of Pam).

Besides the one-year anniversary at work, Pam and I celebrated our 36th wedding anniversary. That’s pretty significant. I’m a lucky guy.

After work hours, I have been working on several web-related projects. One is the redesign of Dr. Jerry Pournelle’s web site (www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor), which was started last April and went live in June. Things have settled down there, so it’s mostly monitoring things and performing updates as needed. I’ve also been involved in helping out with converting some of his science fiction books to ebook (Kindle and Nook) format. You can find a list of his ebooks on his site (one of my favorites is “Lucifer’s Hammer”).

This last month I have been working on converting the Manufactured Homeowners Association domain to WordPress-based format. That one just went live today (www.mhoaa.org ).

Then there is the rewrite of the FileHurl site (www.filehurl.com ) to PHP from ColdFusion. (FileHurl is a way to send files to someone else without the limitations of email attachment limits. It’s totally free to use, and pretty easy to use.) The site was hosted by GoDaddy, but they are discontinuing ColdFusion support, so that required a total rewrite of the code into PHP/MySQL. That is almost done, some minor code work needed to finish that up. That site should be ready to go live by next weekend. (The www.filehurl.com link is still live, running under the old ColdFusion code.)

A new site was created as a response to Dr. Jerry Pournelle’s detailing of some of the silly things that our government spends my money one. Did you know that the FDA has regulations and licensing requirements for people that raise rabbits for use by magicians? It’s true! So, I created the Bunny Inspectors site (www.bunnyinspectors.com ) where that silliness can be documented. You look at the items on that site, and then you understand why the federal budget is so screwed up. (Although some states are just as bad.) The site name amused me, the domain name was available, so off I went to register and create the site.

That happens a lot. I get a silly idea, and a web site usually results. There’s “Mad Because” (www.madbecause.com ) and the companion “Glad Because” (www.gladbecause.com ). The Pragmatica site to help inspire greatness (www.thepragmatica.com ).

And then the BBQ/Food related sites, starting with “The BBQ Grail” site for my friend Larry Gaian (www.thebbqgrail.com ) – who is the inventor of “MOINK Balls” (a great BBQ appetizer, BTW). The FoodieFeeds site (www.foodiefeeds.com ), which is a way to find the latest posts from various food-related sites. And others.

Not all the sites are successful – they do get visitors, some more than others, but I am still waiting for the one that will go viral. Maybe it will be the next site I am thinking about.

But all of them keep me entertained.