Category Archives: personal

Buying a house

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Never imagined how busy I would be when buying a house. Especially when the closing date of my condo and of the house we are buying are both on September 30th.

There are lots of details to keep up on. All of the real estate and mortgage related paperwork. Inspections, appraisals, the waiting game for answers to questions. Making a list of utilities, accounts, etc. that will need address changes or signups for. Thinking of what stuff we want to bring over to the house or get rid of. Praying that nothing like a hurricane or earthquake suddenly throws a curve ball.

It is very odd creating wishlists on various sites for various things I haven’t used in years that suddenly become a necessity when owning a house. Like a lawn mower and a snow blower.

On top of this, the fast pace life of working for an awesome company of course always keeps me on my toes. Wouldn’t have it any other way though, this is what I am born to do. Work hard, play hard.

Enjoying vacation

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Those of you who know me realize that I work a lot and that is probably an understatement. I rarely leave my desk at work for breaks, I am constantly thinking about it (especially since I am on-call 4 days a week), and it is really hard to hit the off switch. The reason why it is hard to hit that off switch is simple: because myself (and the rest of my colleagues) love what we do so much.

On Friday, I finished up my day and officially entered vacation mode for a week.

I don’t think I have ever looked forward to a vacation more than this one. The mental relaxation you get simply from turning off my work e-mail (and Boxcar notifications for our status page) is quite amazing. My aim is to totally recharge the batteries this week.

Saturday my wife and I visited my brother Justin in Burlington and helped him purchase his first new car. Wonderful time, although very sick of driving (three hours each way).

Sunday our nephews and my sister-in-law visited in the morning. My wife and I then went out and did some scouting of possible houses in the Manchester area that we are interested in.

Today my dad and I are going hiking somewhere in the White Mountains. First time we have done something like this together in a long time, maybe years. All I know is that it is supposedly an “easy” hike. His definition of easy is quite different from mine. We will see!

The rest of the week, I am most likely doing lots of genealogy research and working on fixing some things in our condo so we can put it on the market.

Taking advantage of New Hampshire

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Living in the small state of New Hampshire all 28 years of my life, I just realized how little of the state I really have visited.

Outside of a couple of youth hockey games when I was 7 or 8 in Berlin, I never been north of the White Mountains. Never been in the Great North Woods, never been to Pittsburg, NH. Along the same lines, outside of visiting Keene every year or two, I have no idea what towns are around that city and what is in them. I don’t recall ever being in the Rochester area either.

Until four years ago, I had never been at the top of Mount Washington. Tomorrow, I am returning via a trip on the Cog Railroad, which once again I have never been on before. Afterwards we are going to the Mount Washington Hotel to have a late lunch. Only a few weeks ago did I see the hotel for the first time.

Updates

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A few updates since I last wrote a couple of months ago:

  • Been extremely busy at work.
  • Site is now running on Dreamhost again (but of course still using DynDNS Custom for DNS) after about a year and a half on my own server. This site should be much faster now and have fewer quirks. I have learned that maintaining an web server is a lot tougher than it looks. Time to leave the server and backend stuff to the experts. I will stick with what I know now, which is running WordPress and configuring my own DNS.
  • Reloading my server so it can be a test instance of BIND for me.

The plan to move to Gonyea.com

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A few months ago I acquired Gonyea.com from a domain squatter. I haven’t done much with the domain due to time restraints, but I am edging closer to at least begin working on moving over my online presence to it. Here are my initial plan:

I have signed up for Google Apps for the domain. The free version does everything I need, whether it is e-mail, calendar, contacts, etc. I do not need to worry about running a mail server and I can use Google Apps on any device I own.

In one sense, moving e-mail over to Google Apps would be easy. Setup a filter on Gmail to do all of the hard work and that is it. Yet it really isn’t that easy. The perfectionist in me would require that every online account I own be immediately switched over, which will take hours to do all of the updates. Then again, do I really want a bunch of web sites to know about my new e-mail address?

My calendar right now is just hosted on my home computer and isn’t synced in the cloud. I will use this opportunity to move everything over to Google Calendar.

I plan on configuring my iPhone and my iPad to both use Gmail & Google Calendar via the Google Sync feature. Instantly I will have over the air calendar and contact updates, plus push e-mail.

I am almost certain I will just 301 redirect chrisgonyea.com to chris.gonyea.com. I just have to setup the proper .htaaccess rules and setup WordPress on chris.gonyea.com.