First he followed me to San Francisco last year, and now to New York!  Our Thanksgiving friend is baaaaack...

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My house has sold, and I have bought another - on the fancy east side of Indianola no less.  At least everyone keeps telling me it's fancy.  It is in a new development and near a bike path, and it's very close to the Balloon Field, all of which are pluses.  And it's definitely more space than I'm used to at 2100+ finished square feet.  Feel free and send over some housewarming gifts!  ;)  Moving day is January 8th or so, so I'll have some pictures of the new digs up shortly after.

Yesterday was my last day with Lighthouse Communications following the sale of Consumer Internet to Iowa Telecom.  No Consumer Internet = no need for a Director of Consumer Internet.

This is a good thing, though, as I've been yearning to be my own boss again for some time.

So now I am officially an independant, working for JCross Enterprises, Inc.  For those of you who are CrossPaths or FBX members, never fear as I believe that Iowa Telecom will be a great home for you, plus I am doing ISP / Special Project consulting for them, so I'll be in a good position to make sure you're well taken care of.

We moved the servers from Lighthouse's data center in Des Moines to Iowa Telecom's in Grinnell overnight Thursday.  The entire process went from 10p to 10a - a long night!  So long in fact that I opted not to go to bed until Friday night so my sleep schedule wouldn't be too out of whack.  I did, however, almost fall asleep at the intersection of SW 9th and Army Post yesterday on the way back to work from home.  The fear of potential death was pretty effective at jolting me back awake after a split second, where I found some kids in the car next to me laughing.

And with a 12 hour overnight maintenance window, we only had a handful of customer calls.  We've been pretty good over the past couple years making enough fail overs and redundancy that to most people, other than some issues with our web sites, they didn't even know we were down, as connecting and email were completely unaffected.

Tonight I went to see the Will Ferrell movie Elf with the Dvorak clan.  For those who know Jessica, this will come as a surprise akin to finding bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster and Gandhi playing tennis at Wimbledon.  And winning.

Jess was down from the Twin Cities, and we were all eating Godfathers Pizza, when Connie started talking about wanting to see Elf.  Jessica looked chagrined because it's a Will Farrell movie (there's only one type of American comedian she seems to like, and Will Ferrell just isn't the right complexion), but Emil and I wanted to go as well.  So Jessica formed a plan.  She said that she would go if Connie and Emil went too, and because Connie and Emil have been to one movie in the past ten years - The Santa Clause 2 of all things - she didn't think she'd have to live up to the bargain.

Four movie passes later, Jessica was looking mighty embarassed to be there.

I thought the movie was pretty funny and had a great heart.  Plus it had Zooey Deschanel, so I had no choice but to succumb.  And a talking snowman - I mean, hey, with a minor part including a talking snowman, how can it go wrong?  So if you're feeling in the early Christmas spirit, go see Elf.  The bit where the elves are learning how to make high-speed next-generation 3D graphic accelerator chips is awesome.

HTML humor and my favorite comic - does it get better?

This morning I attended the 8am premiere of The Matrix Revolutions at Indianola's Paramount theatre.  While I will resist heartily going to work at 8am, I will get up early to see a movie.  Plus I figured the timing was good to not have to deal with school kids and crowds.  Of course, crowds are rarely a problem at the Indianola theatre, where opening night of movies that sell out 10 miles away can have a quarter of the theatre empty in I-town.

So what did I think?  Without being too spoilerish, I enjoyed the movie and loved some of the intense action sequences.  I need a little more time to process it overall to get a feel for how much I liked it or the ending, but I can say that I found it satisfying.  While not answering all the questions one might have about The Matrix, its history, components and denizens, it still had a good conclusion for the series and didn't take it quite where I expected.