Webthoughts

If you are interested in becoming part of a standing testing team for a SearchWare Solutions product, be sure to check out the SearchWare Solutions test products page in the next couple of days. I'll be posting some information there regarding the status of a couple projects as well as what you can do to become part of a standing testing team.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I'm looking for some people who are interested in becoming part of some standing testing teams for future versions of my stuff.

I now have a way for you to actually apply.

Sorry it took so long to get his up. It's not been a good week...

Just a quick update on what's happening with the next major versions of iHam on iRye and Print Window.

Sorry for the lack of updates as of late. Things at work have been crazy and, in my free time, I've been feverishly trying to get things ready for the Print Window 3.0 release.

You should probably see Print Window 3.0 become officially available early next week. Response to the Print Window 3.0 Public Beta has been very positive, so I'm pretty excited. Hopefully, the final release will continue that trend.

The other big thing I've been working on, along-side the Print Window release, is a major revamp of the SearchWare Solutions website. The new design is a lot simpler and, hopefully, easier to navigate around. This should appear along with the Print Window release.

After the release of Print Window and the new website, I'll turn my attention back to the update to iHam on iRye. I'll also finally be able to spend more of my time working on this blog as well.

Instead, life threw me not one, not two, but three knuckle-balls that really made me step back and look at things a little differently.

My family has had this misfortune this year of dealing with three deaths, one of which was completely unexpected. In April, an uncle of mine (on my mother's side) passed away unexpectedly of heart failure. He was only 53. This occurred shortly after I went incommunicado on this weblog. In May, my grandfather (on my father's side) passed away after a thankfully brief battle with pancreatic cancer. Then, in August, my other grandfather (on my mother's size) passed away.

I was pretty close with both my grandfathers (but, of course, as is often the case, not as close as I wanted to be). So, even though we pretty much knew that the deaths were coming, they still hit me pretty hard.

To add to the fire, I was thrown into some really unexpected situations with my job that were very, very stressful. Because of some of these changes, I ended up working 50-60 hour weeks for several months in a row. Although the paychecks were very nice (I'm not salaried), the continuous long hours were something that I ended up wishing I didn't have to deal with.

As all this has happened, it has really caused me to re-examine priorities in my life. I tried to mentally step back from everything I was doing and figure out exactly what I should be doing with my time.

Family is very important in my life. I realized that I hadn't spent enough time with either of my grandfathers despite the fact that it would not have been all that hard for me to do so. Yes, I realize that this is a common regret that people feel when a loved-one passes away. But, for example, despite the fact that one of my grandfathers lived maybe five minutes away during his last year of life, I saw him maybe 10 times during that period. Something else always came up. I was working late, was exhausted after work, needed to work on my software, etc.

Family was not prioritized where it really should have been. Even spending time with my wife was something that was getting pushed down the list at times.

So, I've decided to make some adjustments. Family, of course, is prioritized much higher now. This doesn't mean that I'm always going to drop everything for family all the time. But, my intent is to remember that family should remain much higher that it was.

I've also decided that I'm spending way to much time at one of my various computers. Working on my software, reading my e-mail, browsing the web, etc. was tying up way to much of my time. I sacrificed much time that I could have spent outdoors working on my lawn (something I love to do), riding my bike, taking walks with my wife, etc.

I've realized that the computer isn't all that I'm about. I have other interests as well that I need to spend time on. But, I will also admit that I over-compensated during these last several months and worked to spend as little time at the computers as possible. Because of this, new versions of iHam on iRye and Print Window are long overdue.

So, although I won't be spending the huge amount of my free-time working at my computers as I was, in favor of other priorities, I will be setting aside a good amount of time every week to work on my software and other SearchWare Solutions-related items. You should be seeing new versions of iHam on iRye and Print Window soon.

Really, I'm trying to re-budget my time in a way that will allow me to focus on each of my interests and loves, but giving none of them short-shrift. Hopefully, I'll be successful at this. I've ignored to much and too many people for too long. By doing this, I hope to be able to greatly reduce the stress in my life. It should be interesting to see what comes out of this.

My wife and I are off to close up the lake house for the year this weekend.

It's always a sad event when it comes time to pull the dock and boat out of the lake and close the cabin down for the year. Then, it seems like it takes forever for the following May to arrive when we head out to the lake to open everything up again. That's one bad thing about living in the area of the country that I do--the lake house is just not a year-round place.

Anyhoo, I'll be "off the grid" for the weekend, so if there are any support requests or registrations over the weekend, they will be handled on Monday evening when I return.

Have a great Labor Day weekend everyone!

Last night at some point, the Searchware Solutions mail server went down (actually, it experienced an...incorrect configuration--it really amounts to the same thing). Because of this, messages being sent to any address in the searchwaresolutions.com domain bounced until early afternoon today.

If you attempted to send a message to a searchwaresolutions.com e-mail address and received a bounce message, please try doing so again. The problem has obviously been fixed and hopefully won't happen again.

As has been somewhat obvious around here, I've been developing the next major version of Print Window. This version has taken a lot longer than I originally anticipated to get it to where I want to be, for a wide variety of reasons which I shall not go into here. However, as I mentioned previously, it's finally getting toward the finish and that brings some definite excitement.

At any rate, the reason for this post is to let you all know that I'm actively looking for testers for this next version of Print Window. Currently, the major new features have been implemented, so I'm looking for people who are interested in trying out pre-release versions of the new features of this next version of Print Window and find bugs and possibly make usability suggestions. Once this version gets out the door, testers are welcome to stick around to provide input into what changes should be made for the following updates to Print Window.

If you are interested, visit the Searchware Solutions Testing webpage for more information on what I'm looking for and how to sign up.

In case you've been having problems accessing the Searchware Solutions website today, I just thought I'd let you know that it's been down most of the day due to hardware failure with my hosting provider.

As of 9:30 p.m. CST, things are starting to get back to normal, but it could still be a little white before all the glitches are worked out.

Thank you for your patience!