Antarctica Service Medal

Not too much technical content tonight. I spent most of the afternoon trying to get OSGi working from a Java Webstart application without much luck. It may be something that I revisit down the road, but for the time being distributing a zip with a set of shell scripts should work. As part of the process, I also learned how to sign a Jar file, which will be useful in an upcoming project.

This morning I pushed out the first update to the Grails app I have in production. Just before performing the actual update, I remembered to double check that my production DataSource was set to 'update' instead of 'create' or 'create-drop' the database. It was lucky I checked because it was set to 'create' from when I was wrangling with MySQL. I had already made a dump of the database, so I wouldn't have lost any data, but I was glad that I checked.

On the non-technical front, I received an Antarctica Service Medal in the mail for the time I spent in Antarctica:


I probably won't have too many occasions to actually wear it, but the medal is a nice memento of my time down there.

And the countdown has begun: 9 days until I'm in the Bahamas for my wedding and honeymoon. Pretty crazy!

And the match is...

Minneapolis. We were pretty sure Elizabeth would match here since it is a big program and she had strong recommendations from a lot of the doctors in the program but it was still a little stressful. With that hurdle out of the way, I'm off to Boston next week for the NSTA national meeting. I'm just there helping out with the ANDRILL booth, so hopefully I can find plenty of time to work as things are shaping up to be a death march until I leave for the wedding on the 17th. We're rolling out a new sample request management system on April 1, revamping the whole ANDRILL website right around then, and preparing for the SMS post-drilling workshop at the end of April. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to spending a week on the beach in the Bahamas.

Wedding Update

Our wedding plans are progressing nicely. The actual wedding is on April 19th in the Bahamas (Euleuthera Island). It's going to be small; only a few family and friends. We're all flying down there on Thursday, the 17th. We'll have Thursday afternoon, all day Friday, and most of the day Saturday to relax and hang out. The actual wedding ceremony is going to be pretty low key. We're going to be married on the beach in late afternoon on Saturday. For the honeymoon, Elizabeth and I have rented a little house on a private beach for the following week. We return to the real world on the 27th, and a couple weeks after that, on May 16th, we're going to have a reception in St. Paul.