I can’t believe it’s been a few months since I wrote a post here!  Especially after promising to try and keep the blog up to date.

The only excuse I can come up with is that in the past 6 months my wife and I have gone from renting childless couple to home-owning family of three.  Needless to say it’s been a lot of work.

We’ve moved up to Sonoma County, just north of San Francisco.  If you’ve never been here (or only been to its more popular neighbor Nappa) I highly recommend it.  I’d love to say I am sitting on a deck sipping Sonoma wine, but alas, the deck needs a lot of work, the grounds need re-landscaping and the house is in dire need of a make-over.  Yes, we bought a project.

Which is fine.  It’s a long-term project.  And it feels really good to finally have a house where I can drill holes in the walls without needing permission from the landowner!

Here’s a view from our front window.  You can just make out a vineyard across the road.  Pretty cool!

View from front window

I’ve got a ton of posts in my head right now so I will try and get some of those down on ‘paper’.  I might mix up the length a bit as well.  Part of the problem in keeping a blog going is the mental work in writing long posts.  I like it, but it’s taxing.  Some shorter ones might help remove the mental roadblock.

Hope everyone reading this is doing well!

When life and work conspire to consume all your available time, something has to give and blogging just happened to be in the firing line.

We’re actually rolling out the first large (400+ user) site for our company.  More detail on how that went down the road.  It’s been an interesting journey.

I’ll try to post a few more times over the Holidays as things tend to quiet down a bit.

Thanks for everyone who checks this feed!

Happy Holidays to my US readers.

I know, it’s been a while, but I have finally sorted out my new blog site.  It’s www.insightbydesign.biz.  

Yes, it’s bland.  I deliberately chose the blandest theme I could.  I am thinking of it as a blank slate at the moment - one I can edit and update as I go.  

I am going to be joint posting here and on the new site for a while.  Just to give everyone some time to change over RSS feeds, links etc.  Please do.  I would hate to lose any of my cherished readers!  

It has been a hectic couple of months.  Very busy on the work front; scrambling to find long-term accommodation in San Francisco; and wife frantically looking for a new job after the move from out East.  Happily, we now have accommodation and the wife is gainfully employed.  A heavy weight off our shoulders - especially in this economy.

So with everything calming down and me finally getting a more permanent office space, I will be back blogging!  

To be honest, it has been a good break.   For a while there I was struggling to come up with things to write about.  I ended up feeling compelled to update for update’s sake.  Which is not the best way to write a blog.

I’m feeling a lot more energized now.

Hope everyone is well.  

A belated Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends!

So we have made it to half-way on our trek across country. We’re currently in North Platte - a smallish town in the center of Nebraska.

Unbeknownst to me, North Platte is home to the largest railway sorting yard in the world - the Bailey Yard. I never even knew trains needed sorting, go figure.

It really is an impressive site though. Thousands of trains come and go every day and all sorts of goods pass through the yard. The picture above was taken from a tower created specifically for viewing the yard. It’s 8 miles long so you kind of need a vantage point to take it all in.

It has been a surprisingly easy trip so far. We’ve had some great weather though - so knock on wood that continues.

I might get one more update in before we hit San Francisco. Then the travel posts will stop - I promise :).

Well, we finally got on the road to San Francisco. My wife and I are moving out there for good and we left last Friday for a 12 day vacation road-trip across this great country.

I’m in a hotel in Des Moines as I write this post, having just traversed half way across Iowa. Before that we had a day in Chicago, and before that a night on Lake Erie.

We passed through Ohio on the way.

There is a lot of corn out here. Vast landscapes filled with corn fields - as far as the eye can see. No, literally, as far as you can see. It’s corn all the way to the horizon.

I have friends who are from this neck of the States and until now, I never quite appreciated what it would be like living out here. Everything seems dwarfed by the sheer scale of the agricultural architecture. The mid-west is one huge farm dotted with occasional cities.

The people are nice though and the drivers are excruciatingly polite - after driving around NY/NJ for 5 years, you come to rely on a certain level of rudeness to grease the wheels.

We have a lot of driving ahead of us though. I will try and update the blog a few more times as we go.

San Fran still seems like a long way off…

Just got back from a lovely vacation in Nova Scotia. Saw lots of Moose. Which, surprising as it may seem, was one of the main reasons we went. My wife loves wild-life photography.

It’s been a hectic week so this is just a short post to say that I am still alive and committed to updating the blog with a lot of interesting and thought provoking material!

As soon as I get sorting through Moose pictures.

Also, I have finally decided to move blog locations. I will be transferring this blog to WordPress and will have a dedicated url and new feeds. The new blog site isn’t quite finished yet but should be soon. I will mirror posts for a while until most of the traffic has shifted.

The emphasis of the blog will change a little as well. I am going to get more technology focused. Not in a massively geeky way, just moving firmly to the intersection of Marketing, technology and information design.

There’s a revolution happening there. Interesting things are afoot.