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A week from now my family and I will be collecting our baggage at the Seattle Tacoma airport after a one way flight from Atlanta. That’s right, we are moving. This was decided back in October. Among the reasons is a strong desire to be closer to family. Seeing family now includes lots of time off work and some expensive plane tickets.

I am looking forward to living in Seattle. Some of my coworkers here think the rain is going to be too much to handle. I don’t think so. I plan to outdoors as much as possible, especially mountain biking. I think it will be a very positive change.

Getting ready to move has been crazy, especially with a newborn. We would have waited longer, but a great job opened up that I decided I should jump on. One of the challenges has been managing all of the tasks that have to be done, and by whom. It all started to feel like a hectic project that was falling behind. Oh, wait… that is exactly what it was!

That is when I realized I should treat the move like the project.  We setup a free personal Basecamp project to help us track the milestones and tasks. It has been great. It works especially well for us because we are both at our computers so much during the day. Now we have a handle on just how behind we actually are.

My notebook dual boots Ubuntu and Windows.  Sharing files between the two systems has historically been an issue.

I just upgraded to version 7.04 - Feisty Fawn.  While opening a file in The Gimp, I noticed an extra hard drive listed in the dialog.  It was my Windows NTFS partition.  Sweet!  The file system mounts read only by default, but write support can be enabled.  More information can be found here. 

Dan Pritchett, a Technical Fellow at eBay, has written an excellent article published over at InfoQ entitled “The Challenges of Latency”. It focuses on geographically distributed applications, but has application to the design of any high capacity system. The discussions on asynchronous operations, ACID versus BASE, and the CAP Therom are fascinating.