Having said that, I came across this moving piece by my friend Rob Bushway and figured I would share it. The Bushways are a great example of a close knit family and his is a story of perseverance, no matter what your faith is.

RobBushway.com

via A Little Bit About Me.

• A second desk for the occasional pair programming session
• A couch/table for a mini “reception” area
• A conference table

But I don’t want it to be too crowded or too sparse. The couch would be a nice place for me to lounge and read books (can’t do this upstairs in the living room with a 2 year old and wife) but a conference table in my basement would be so cool.

Of course there’s the issue of how to pay for it all. We have so far resisted the urge to put anything on our credit cards and everything we’ve bought has been with cash, so we don’t have a lot of extra spending money right now.

EBay has some good deals…. hmm…

But anyway I’m super pumped because I’m finally all moved into my new house. I think we got a great deal on it. It’s about 2 years old and the previous owners lived here about a year before losing the house to foreclosure. Fortunately they didn’t trash the place because it’s in brand new condition and we got a great deal on it.

While I hate to see anybody lose their house, it was pretty clear to me a few years ago that the prices of homes were way out of control and despite enormous pressure from friends and relatives and a screaming 2 year old, I held my ground and we lived in our little condo in Deptford until I was pretty sure of 2 things:

1. I was in a stable work environment that didn’t depend on sales of TEO or the next potential consulting gig.
2. The housing market had bottomed out and I was going to get a really good deal on someone else’s miscalculation.

In fact, I was even offered a job at Microsoft about 2 years ago that I would have loved to accept, but the prices of homes out there were, (and to an extent still are) ridiculous. The house I am living in now for under $300,000 would have easily cost me $700,000 or more out there.

Right now I’m holed up underground in an undisclosed location that I have claimed as my "command center". I will post some more pictures up soon but this basement freakin rocks. There is a divided space that is about the size of my living room and a half which I am reserving for my office. And since Office Depot is closing their doors, I got some nice new furniture and office supplies on the cheap.

Now the trick is staying employed. I’ve been working my ass off at the job, but if money tightens up, none of that matters. So hopefully they find ways to prosper in the shrinking economy and hopefully our fearless leader will find ways to work across the aisle in Washington so that we can pull out of this slump soon.

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Heather has been constantly sick but hopefully that will subside soon.

Of course this changes things for the wedding, and we’ll probably have to do it sooner than expected. We’re thinking about doing it in Vegas with immediate family present then having a reception back home. Who knows. Need to get TEO 3 out first.

I’m really happy to be starting a family with her. I can’t wait until "D day"!

Heather is a great woman and I am very lucky to have her. I don’t think things will be too much different since we already live together but now I can feel better about us working on a family which is the next step.

So I am always glad to hear good news about Maggie, Rob’s daughter who has (had actually…) brain cancer and has been on a really brave and inspirational road to recovery. A few months ago she was declared “cancer-free” after several risky procedures and now she’s making great progress in getting back to her normal self. Go read Rob’s post about it because I can’t really capture the relief and joy he must be feeling.

Read Rob Bushway’s Blog
Stay up to date with Maggie’s progress

Made a ton of progress last night (thanks, Stacker 2) but I’m still having some trouble with DynamicRenderer.Refresh(). It’s just an annoying visual glitch right now. But anyway, the new window management is completed and working and TEO forms are loading much faster in 3.0. I had to scrap the standard XP-themed tab control (again) because it does not paint quickly when using transparent controls. Since there’s a lot of tab switching going on, there’s a lot of paint operations. So I’m back with SandDock again.

All of you who have asked for larger input areas will get your wish! But those of you with ultra portables, don’t worry there is a special layout manager for smaller screens that will optimize the UI for your display.

Why? Cause the guy is just too naive. He really thinks he’s a kid. He’s done so many great things for charities and kids with terminal illness and it makes me sick to my stomach to think that most of the country would turn on him just because some fat ass lying bitch who has a track record of screwing people over for money made some allegations that she knew would be easy to convince people were true.

The only child abuse going on is the way that woman is corrupting her son. I’m glad the jury looked at this case from a technical perspective and did not let their emotions or the sweeping waves of popular opinion taint their verdict.

And don’t write me saying "Oh I guess you think OJ is innocent too." I am sick of people comparing this case to the OJ Simpson trial. They have nothing to do with each other. There was tons of evidence pointing to OJ and the jury in that case was affected by fears of how the public would react (cough… Rodney King… cough…) but in this case there was no evidence except the inconsistent testimony of the accuser’s family who has a history of lying and cheating, and the testimony of a bunch of former employees that tried to sue MJ before and lost the counter suit.

Okay I’m glad I got all that off my chest. Though I wish he would have moon walked out of the courtroom. That would have been such an awesome finish.

If Barbie makes you want to puke, and memories of your childhood being forced to play with Barbie dolls induces nightmares, we have the cure. Introducing Trailer Trash Talkin’ Turleen. Yes that’s right, a burping, beer drinking, cigarette smoking, 12 inch tall doll, the exemplifies true American White Trash. Press her belly, (it’s big because she’s got one in the oven) and she will share some pearls of wisdom with the sophistication and style that makes her family and third grade teacher proud.

"..Pour me a double, I’m drinking for two..."
- Turleen

A little biography about Turleen:

She didn’t just fall off of the turnip truck! Turleen is a sophisticated and patriotic American and a model working mother. After hours of hard work gathering carts at the Honk & Holler and waitressing at the elegant Bowlarama, she still finds time to spend quality time with her kids. With seven children and one on the way, she recently won the Mother of the Year Award from the Pink Flamingo Trailer Park Homeowners Association! This special trophy sits proudly on the kitchen window sill in her luxurious double-wide next to her six first place Little Miss Guzzler Awards from the county fair! Yes this honey has grown up! She’s got a bun in the oven and she’s ready to hit the town! Just push her belly button and Trash Talkin’ Turleen will share some pearls of wisdom with the sophistication and style that makes her family and third grade teacher proud.

so one day, the goldfish foolishly decided to make his move
he swam with all his might to the surface and flew out of the water and over the edge

for about 2 seconds he felt as free as a bird and the world was his

but then the goldfish realized that he had made a foolish mistake
he realized he could not survive outside of the aquarium he had left behind
and he wanted badly to go back, but he couldn’t

as he lay there on the carpet, gasping for breath, flapping around helplessly,
he looked back up inside the glass walls and knew he could never go back

I’ve always been very optimistic when it comes to my future. I’ve always pretty much assumed that eventually I would get a big break and make big money. So far that hasn’t happened yet, but I’m still 25 years old. I’ve got about 3/4 of my life left (assuming life expectancy continues to grow the way it has in the past).

So alright lets assume that I sell enough copies of TEO, or TCS, or DotOffice, or whatever and I find myself sitting on a couple hundred million dollars. Is my life complete? Well sort of. What I am about to talk about is pretty shocking and some people might take it the wrong way. Hear me out.

Once I make that kind of money and I am sure that my family is properly taken care of and my responsibilities have been handled, I am going to kill myself. Yes that’s right I am going to commit suicide.

Now before you go running to the telephones to dial the suicide prevention hotline, continue reading the rest of the entry.

All my life I have been fascinated by outer space. When I was a young kid in the elementary school at which my father taught, I used to sit in the library after school waiting for him to finish his work and I would read through volumes of encyclopedias about the planets, comets, the sun, galaxies, etc. This was back in the mid to late 80s and we (as humans) have really come a long way since then. We have a permanent home in space, we have launched a probe that continues to travel far outside our solar system toward uncharted territory, we have landed surveyors on planets and moons millions of miles away.

The thing I have been most fascinated by lately is the work we’ve done on Mars. I want you to sit and think for a minute about just what this means. We have two robots driving around on a completely different planet sending back data and they’ve been doing it for a year. That is really amazing. It really goes to show just how unlimited the potential of the human race is.

However if you step back and look at it from a broader perspective, you’d probably agree that back in the 1960s-1980s space exploration accomplished much more in a shorter period of time. Unfortunately, most of that was fueled by the fact that we were struggling with another country for the capability of blowing each other to smithereens if the need arose. But it’s interesting nonetheless that human kind’s greatest flaw drove human kind’s greatest accomplishments.

So as it seemed, when the Cold War ended and we were no longer in competition for global supremacy, we slowed down a bit on the space exploration. It really makes me wonder where we’d be today if there was as much public and government interest in space as there used to be.

Anyway I am starting to get off topic. I’m sure you want to know why and how I plan to kill myself.

I am extremely frustrated by the fact that Mars is so close yet so far away. It’s right within our grasp but numerous technical and political problems make it highly unlikely that I will ever experience the feeling of being so far from home as the surface of Mars.

That is why I have decided that the day that I have enough money to do so, I am going to complete my life by ending it — on the surface of the red planet. Sounds crazy right? It’s really not. We’ve already proven that we can land equipment safely on the surface. In fact we’ve done it several times. It’s getting to be old hat.

Most of the problems regarding a human mission to Mars are in the fact that we currently don’t have any good ideas for getting back. Carrying as much fuel as required to escape Mars would be too heavy to carry. Also food and the water shield (for radiation protection) required for such a mission make it a very heavy ship. There are plans underway for a lunar base or space elevator that would greatly assist in such a task, but these are long term plans and I’ll never get to take part in any of that.

So by spending my own money on a privately funded one way trip to Mars, I could be the first person to visit (and die) on the red planet. As morbid as it sounds, I think it would be the greatest thing in the world. I’d probably not last more than a few hours or days on the surface depending on how I prepared, but that’s ok. I would be able to write down my experience, my thoughts, etc and upload them to Earth (from my Tablet PC of course :) ) and I would finally be able to leave my mark on the pages of history books everywhere.

Of course I need the money first so if you want to help fund a human trip to Mars, better go buy TEO.

If you don’t know what UTC is (come on is there really anybody that doesn’t?) it is a universally accepted “global time” for Earth based in Greenwich, England. The various time zones on the Earth are expressed in offsets from UTC. For example, in my former time zone, EST/EDT the time right now would be 7:14PM/8:14 PM in standard and daylight savings time respectively. The offsets are -5:00/-4:00 respectively.

Daylight savings time and time zones make life difficult for programmers, TV networks, people with alarm clocks, travelers, airlines, etc. The whole world would be better off if we all agreed on UTC. Sure, this means I’d go to bed around 06:00 (1:00 AM EST) typically and wake up around 15:00 (10:00 AM EST) but I could get used to that quickly. People in other parts of the world would go to bed and wake up at much different times, but if I wanted to schedule an interstate meeting over the internet, I could say it’s at 17:00 and no matter where on the globe you were, you’d know when I was talking about.

So anyway, I’ve adjusted my phone and my computers over to UTC and we’ll see how difficult my life becomes. It’ll be a pain cause I’m still dealing with people in time zones but maybe I can adjust.

So all day Sunday the pain persisted and worsened despite all attempts at pain relief or acid reduction. As if my Eagles party wasn’t bad enough with them getting massacred by the Steelers, I was unable to really do anything.

Monday morning at 4 am the pain was so bad that I had to go to Kennedy Hospital. After hours of blood work, cat scans, and examinations, they confirmed what I knew all along… appendicitis.

So I had to stay in the ER until 6:00 PM or so because the rooms were booked. They finally got me a room but the operating room was booked until 11:00 PM or so.

They took out my appendix at 11:00 PM and all day Tuesday I was in and out of consciousness because I hadn’t slept much before.

So now I’m in a ton of pain and recovering. It’s hard to move and the pain meds aren’t that good.

So I’m sorry to all if I’ve been late responding to your calls or emails.

By the way, Tara was really great to me while I was there. She stayed with me in the ER almost the whole time until I made her go home. My dad, mom, and step dad also visited.

I didn’t want to post anything until it was confirmed and today it was confirmed! I will be going to Microsoft to meet the Tablet PC team and Office team from May 11-15th. I am very excited to have been invited. As most of you know, I am a huge Microsoft fan and I have devoted most of my life to mastering Microsoft platforms and technologies. I’ll be sure to post detailed accounts of my visit. Special thanks to Arin Goldberg for inviting me!