We are happy to welcome this new little guy into our family. His official name is “Sunpiper’s Prince of Scotland” but his call name is simply Malcolm. Malcolm is, in fact, the Prince of Scotland in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and we were trying to stick with our Shakespeare naming theme. Right now he is a bundle of fluff and quite the handful. He is generally very well behaved, extremely smart (knows some basic commands and has pretty much house-broken himself) and a little shy. Both his parents are champion dogs and we had the chance to watch his mother compete in an agility competition in Western Mass a couple of weeks ago.

Last night I had the opportunity to attended the monthly Web Innovators Group at the Royal Sonesta in Cambridge. In short this is a place for people working in, or looking to join, Internet and mobile technology. The scene was basically this: 3 main presenters called the “main dishes” and 8-10 other companies scattered around the hall called “side dishes.” The main pdishes were given 5 minutes to present their technology and at the end everyone was given the chance to text/vote on their favorite. The place was packed; 500 or so techies were out and you could feel the geek rush over the Royal Sonesta. There were more iPhones, Blackberries, texting, and twittering then you could count and the conversations ranged from a) where do you work? to b) where do you work? I met some nice people, however, and it was great to see such cool technology. Yeah, some of the stuff will never see the light of day but it was cool nonetheless. Here are some of my technology hight lights:

Snipd (snipd.com) - Think super granular Digg. Allows a user to “snip” out content from a page and share just that content. Lets say, for instance, I see a quote on a blog somewhere that I think is really good, rather than send a link to the entire page to my group of friends (or Digg or Del.icio.us) I can simply snip the quote and send that. Snipd allows you to mash-up all sorts of content in this same manner including video and pictures. A link to the referenced site is always included so the authors needn’t worry about not getting credit. Still in private beta but they promised to give me an account so I’ll post more after I test it. snipd.com.

Webnotes - A main Dish. Webnotes is like it sounds. It functions primarily as a browser plugin (both IE and FF) and allows you to highlights text in a page and create sticky notes on that page. It saves that information to their servers to be displayed on-demand either on your customized Webnotes page or in a browser sidebar. What’s very cool about this is that it allows plugin-free sharing, meaning that I can highlight text and create stickies and share it with you and you do NOT need to have the plugin installed. For a test of this check out this article in boston.com. Still in beta but sign up is allowed. webnotes.net

I’ll never complain about summer. For the amount of time I spend cursing the winter and all the grayness, coldness, snowiness and other unpleasantness that winter thrusts upon us it should be beyond me to ever utter a negative word about all the pleasantness that summer brings to all of us. Except I am. You see it’s humid where I sit. If you live in easter Massachusetts I’m betting it’s humid where you sit too. Humidness is nones friend, besides maybe a few displaced amazonian plants or two, and it is certainly not my friend. Hot and sticky is just no way to live and, if you live in a cape-style house then humidness is compounded by the stale heat that capes are fond of accumulating. Walking into my house at the end of the day is a refreshing jaunt into Sub-Saharan Africa without all the rigged elections. We talk often (especially tonight) about getting central air retrofitted into our house. We actually had a guy come over to give us an estimate on what it would take and, it turned out, it would take roughly $14,000 (!!!!!) and the loss of some of much needed closet space. $14K versus sticky. If I had the cash sitting front in front of me now I can think of a no finer way to stimulate the economy. Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of $14K’s sitting around the house so central air is just a pipe dream unless,of course, a certain floundering behemoth buys an even more floundering behemoth. However like every other sane person we are not without God’s gift to civilization: Behold the Kenmore 8000. It will chill the downstairs of my house in two minutes flat to a temperature that makes even me think about putting a sweater on and if you happen to be sitting in front of it when it decides a good cooling is needed then the smallish icicles that form on the back of your head are to be expected. All of this intense cold goodness comes at a cost however. Besides it sounding like a medium size lawn-mower running up in my living room, I believe I can actually hear my electric meter spin faster and the earth gasping for air as my carbon footprint becomes “shaq-esque.” So between not being able to hear when the unit is on and the threat of frost bite if you’re unlucky to stand in the direct air path of the 8000 there are nights (such as tonight) that we simply suck it up and pretend that feeling “moist” is comfortable. So if this post smells of fresh sweat please forgive me.

As I am about to sit down and beat my wife at a relaxing game of Mario Party 8 on the wii I wanted to give folks a quick weekend update:
*The dreaded (but much needed) sanding of the counters was upon us. Lots of sanding, plenty of dusk and just generally a pain in the butt. However the counters look great now that they’re done.
*July 4th has come and gone and once again it seemed like we were the only people that had not escaped to their summer house. In fact, it seems like during the during the summer in Winchester we’re the only ones that don’t have a summer house. It gets kind of lonely when I’m all alone at the dump by myself. On the plus side I get the “swap shop” all to myself. We spent the 4th in beautiful Providence, RI which, ironically, had to cancel their fireworks display because previous displays had caught some houses on fire. Opps. In any event we headed down to Dave & Buster’s. We had never been to Dave & Buster’s before so it seemed like we were in for some good old fashioned trailer park fun. We were right but it turned into a very fun night. Dave & Buster’s seems like what casinos *should* be - more fun games and less seventy-year-olds-smoking-Newports-with-oxygen-tanks. In any event, we ate some seriously crappy food and played $100 worth of Skeeball and in the end earned 583 coupons which got us a beautiful stuffed Snoopy doll which our dog promptly shred into a hundred pieces.
*Today we went and saw the new Indiana Jones movie. I thought it was great and Vanessa thought it was good for a movie about archaeologists,spys,Peruvian Gods,aliens, and communists. It will probably earn an Academy Award in those categories.

Hope everyone is having a good long weekend!

*My company was purchased by Yahoo! Maybe you’ve heard of them?
*Summer has arrived. I can finally put away my snow blower.
*Wes got engaged. He’s not getting any younger.
*I built a deck. It rocks. It’s 90% complete which, in my book, means it’s done.
*I got a wii - I rule my Austin in bowling despite his lies
*I celebrated my 8 year anniversary. 8 years, who woulda thunk it?

Saw this site that launched yesterday by Ebay called MicroPlace. What a cool culmination of good ideas!

So last night (still “this” night now me) was the 1st annual student exhibit at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts @ BU (Click here for their site). As many of you know V has just completed her first year at CDIA. The program is broken up into two parts; the first year is graphic design and the second year is web design.

The event was held at the school’s main campus at Waltham and in total there were ~ 60 pieces being exhibited. V had four pieces selected for inclusion. It was very fun to watch people mill about and inspect her work. I wanted to talk to each person that spent more than 5 seconds in front of her exhibits and ask them exactly what they thought, etc. But the most fun was that each person was asked to vote on their favorite piece and the winners would be read later in the night during a formal presentation. Well, long story short my darling wife won the “best in show” award!!! Out of all the pieces she took home the top prize. Not to bad, huh?

Very proud.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog. For those that actually check in here for breaking news about my life you’ve been sorely disappointed. A combination of an incredibly stressful work life leading to a non-existent social life and my seer laziness have both been to blame for me not writing anything. It’s donned on me recently that writing a couple of sentences is simply not the hardest thing to do and it helps assure family and friends that I haven’t died (true, I have not died, been kidnapped, lost my hands, or any of the other things that people have recently accused me of).

But as I said work has been stressful. Work has been set some sort of new record for a) hours demanded b) stress induced. These things are a function of the fact that we are a small company that has been growing very quickly. We are in a excellent market right now and we are signing a huge number of customers (SonyBMG, Fox News, Scripps Networks to name a few) and rolling out new software at a break neck speed. Hopefully things stabilize in the short term and life returns to relative normality.

On the life front really not much is new. The only really exciting thing we have going on is that we are hosting the “Mother of All Halloween Parties” on October 27th. If I haven’t sent you an invitation please consider yourself invited. The only requirement is that you MUST be in a costume! We have already purchased the smoke machines and this weekend I will be busy making tombstones for the front yard. I will also be doing some testing this weekend on how best to make a punch bowl emit smoke.

More to come soon….