How it's been a Banner year! In both senses of the word 'Banner'. We get through with the Banner 5.0 upgrade, nice and smooth. I produced a 90-minute video that I'm happy to say we shared with other Banner schools (I hate to do that much work and not spread the benefit around a bit). The upgrade was done by the end of June -- I think we were one of the first few schools to upgrade to Banner 5.

July turned out to be busier still. We've been putting up a SAN (Storage Area Network), we put up a FrontPage ASP database server in less than a week, I've been creating NetTracker web stat reports that'll be shared with the whole campus in a few weeks, and now a slew of Banner 5.2 releases are out, and I'm back in the thick of producing six new videos, with several more slated for production as soon as these are done.

The trick with these videos is that they have to be done quickly or the information in them is stale. And the development files are so big they don't fit on a zip disk so I can't bring things home easily.

Home life is just as busy. We joined the neighborhood pool. It's just two blocks away, and we try to get down there most nights right after dinner. All of this leaves Jean and me with little time for each other, or ourselves. But it's all good.

Tonight after dinner we went out into the front yard, where I turned on the sprinkler. Colette is less afraid of it than she's ever been, and we stood under it long enough for us all to get soaked.

At bedtime we play "five little piggies" every night, and I get to make up what the third little piggy gets on each hand and foot. Tonight it was jello, popcorn, pizza and strawberries.

Now if I can just find a way to devote a little more time to work and a little more time to home without losing any more sleep.

back | finishing the hat | next