Obviously this has been a strange and incredible week. It really has been one of those kind of bridge weeks, moving from the old to the new. It started with my web site being down, transferring everything over here, (more on that later) I picked up some addition duties at my day job that have me doing both audio and video work. It looks like there is enough of that to keep me busy for some time to come so I am pretty excited about that. It gives me a chance to do something I do out the outside and now get paid for it so that is really very cool. And then yesterday, oh my goodness yesterday, we got a new Pope.
What I do what to talk about that relates to this topic and sort of relates to the Living in the future post from Tuesday. I had been listening to Father Roderick of SQPN for the last couple of days. He said early yesterday that he thought yesterday would be the day (It turned out he was right) so I was watching all the social media channels pretty closely. 
I had my phone sitting on my desk waiting for Pope Alarm to send me a text, and it was still my wife that got to me first. I got an IM from her saying that there was white smoke. Then I saw the literally thousands of people saying the same thing on social Media. Pope Alarm was about 6 minutes late, but I did get a text message from them in time to see the white smoke still billowing out of the chimney. In all Fairness Pope Alarm did say that they were totally overwhelmed by the response they got.
As cool as all the technology was, what I found great about it was the number of ways that were would experience the moment. When my wife IM-ed me she turned on EWTN, my eldest son was streaming it to his laptop (I don’t know what stream he was watching probably the same one as his mother and the younger kids but being that he is 15 he has to try to be a little different.) As soon as I heard about it, I found a link to the Vatican’s live feed on YouTube and watched it there, and I know that I could have streamed it though any of the major media outlets. This morning I downloaded Father Roderick’s podcast version. He was in the square and had been watching the smoke each and every time it went up, and just continued to record all through the whole thing. I will be honest, when I listened to this on my way in to work this morning I got all choked up listening to people completely jubilant at the news and announcement. And there were tons of other options of watching it live or hearing the reactions from the crowd and just in general all day long and even today there is new stuff coming out. I suspect that it will still be coming out several days from now. I just find the whole thing totally amazing. I will say it again, I love living in the future.
So on with the other news of the week. I don’t talk about my day job a lot. Part of it is because it really is not all that interesting, and part of it is because I don’t really want to mix what I do outside work and what I do inside work. That might start to change, at least some. I work as an IT guy by day. How many times have I said that. For years now it really has not been the truth. I have not worked in the official IT department for over 10 years now. I to work in technology, but the description of my job is so complicate that I usually just say the IT group so that I don’t have to spend ten minutes explaining what it is that I do. 
For a while now I have been trying to get away from the work that I was actually hired to do and into more of a training / out reach / social media type role. I have been so close in a couple of times in the last few years that I could almost taste it only to have the rug pulled out from underneath me. I am not really holding my breath but, they have given me space to work on audio and video production, I actually have the software loaded on my machine and a clear goal ahead of me. On top of all that my boss said the other day, Wow you know there is enough here to make a full time job. (I have been saying that for years.) So I am pretty excited about it. I just hope it lasts.
Last, let’s talk about the website move. I still have some issues to work out. If you have scrolled down through some of my older posts you will notice that, there is a big gap between March and January. Those posts are only on my other site. I am working on recovering them but the other host is still down. You might also notice that some of the images are missing from those older posts. 
That is because while I was posting things I was kind of lazy. I was linking the images from one site to the other. This is really a bad practice, don’t do it. Why? well when one site goes down your back up site looks silly with a lot of the images missing. I am still hopeful that the other site will be recoverable. Or at least that I can get some of the data from it. If however, it gets to this time next week and things have not returned to normal over there, I will give it up as a lost cause and just repost the pictures from my archives here.
This has been an incredible week. It is not over yet, but even if it was I would have to call it a success. All I can say now, it hang on. If this week was like this, wait until next week.
The Great Hites 