DLBATES.COM

Hi All,

I know it’s been awhile but we sure have been busy around here. I have been hard at work securing websites for my side business as well as maintaining my current websites and of course the most important one rfmd.com So far I have several new sites mediabrewer.com, The Neal Tractor Museum, Frye Heating and Air, and Paul Milam. They are all in different stages of completion like mediabrewer is up but not with the right theme, the tractor museum is in design, as well as Frye heating and air, and Paul’s site will be managed by me with a third party doing the actual development. So this is an exciting time to see if I can really handle doing all of this without letting my home-life or my work slip. So far I have been able to handle it all but it does cause me to be very busy so well see.

Jess has been hard at work trying to get into the groove of now having two babies to care for. We recently had to switch formula from one labeled advanced to one labeled good start because baby Same has been very fussy and gassy. We also switched bottles so that we where sure to knock it out. He seems to be doing much better now. Daniel is taking to the new addition very well. There are times that he requires one of us while we are trying to take care of Sam but for the most part it all seems to click together. At least he hasn’t asked us to send him back .

So about this weekend we started off visiting my mom’s (me-maw) so that she could get her baby fix and then set off early Saturday for a trip to the mountains. This is the first LONG trip we have decided to undertake after having baby Sam. Steve one of his paw-paws or his great grandmother (Maw-Ri) had never seen him before so we hoped to have him all dressed up for the occasion. When Daniel this would not have been possible as he used to get very car sick on long trips. I must say the trip went very well. He was fussy sometimes but for the most part he just hung out and looked out the window. We found an awesome yard sale along the way and got a pack and play as well as a mirror for my car that mounts on the headrest all for under $10. We then visited with Steve and his Maw-Ri for awhile Daniel amused himself there by throwing bottles around and they never looked happier to see a new baby. We then visited Steve’s brother as they had just bought a house. We then took a beautiful trip through Floyd and then went to maw-maw and paw-paw’s for a visit and to relax a bit before the hour and half drive home. Daniel and the girls played really hard and Sam kept Jess and maw-maw very busy. She will surely blog about this trip as well on merryheartcrafts.com so there will be some really cute pictures on there. We had a lovely outdoor meal. it was so nice, cool, and serene up there I didn’t want to have to come home. I also got to fix Maw-Maw’s computer so she could post to her blog. We stayed as long as we could before driving home and the drive home was very nice, Jess and I always love to be able to spend so much time together we get to catch up on each others lives without interruptions for the most part.

Today we are going to try and pick up the house from the tornado called Daniel that came through it and then rest and relax before I have to go back to work.

Hope your weekend went as well as mine.
David Bates

Update: Maw-Maw must be slacking as I got this post up before she could… and she said I never updated my blog

Sorry I havn’t posted anything for a couple of weeks. I have both been busy at work and home. It almost seems like I have no time anymore. Let me catch you up real quick and hopefully I will be able to catch up on post so that you can read all the exciting news in depth.

I had a guest blogger as you can see from the previous post. This is a new area for me as I orginally intended this blog as a personal outlet. I now see that in the technology arena I am in sometimes it doesn’t hurt to bring in other folks and hear their ideas. The last post was a test of that. Since this site is getting a lot of hits from others besides my family I thought it wouldn’t hurt. Let me know if you liked his post or not and I will evaluate bringing in other talent again.

I went to Devconnections 2010 in Las Vegas last week… yeah I said VEGAS!! it was great I got to meet a lot of people in my industry which is rare and had time left over to take in Vegas and all of it’s wonderful sites. I had never been to Vegas as an adult so it was very exciting for me. I hope to go back again soon. DevConnections allowed me to learn a lot about web development, web services, and silverlight 4. You will be seeing my site switch from php/wordpress based to asp.net/silverlight based in the near future. I have secured serverspace with rackspace.com and am currently working the final stages of my own asp powered CMS. I will be selling this CMS as a value add to the customers that I already host to allow them a more robust system under their current hosting contracts. So those of you who host with me know an email is coming

Our new baby is coming soon as well 7 weeks and counting. My wife had me put up a be back banner on her page southernmama.com as well as create an e-invite platform for her babyshower coming May 8th. We have decided on the new baby’s name but I will not ruin the suprise here yet. Daniel keeps asking when “Baby ____ is going to come out and play” we can only laugh and reply soon.

Work is going well we are hiring new people and others are leaving. I will have my hands full soon, if I didn’t already, with training and managing. I am hoping that I will be able to do more managing and actual coding instead of data entry type stuff with the addition of new staff. We will see. I have been delving hard into sharepoint and want to switch our external site over to it but given our current constraints I don’t see that happening anytime soon. I have however been able to build a full youtube clone as well as a twitter-ish clone within sharepoint and I am working with SP webservices more. I just can’t get enough of this stuff even now I should be asleep but just can’t help myself researching and playing in tech. It is great to have your hobby also be your job

Well that’s all for now hopefully you are fast asleep or doing whatever is usual at this time in your timezone as for me I am going to search about CDN’s and silverlight smooth-streaming.

Thanks for reading
David Bates