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Well, the summer is winding up and I have managed to go through the whole thing job free thanks to the support of my wonderful wife and the money we saved up while I was working. It is now time that I get back into the spirit of working. To do this I am undertaking a project to upgrade the software that drives my hobby site indietorrents.com. This is a huge undertaking but when it is done it should create a stable, feature rich, template based bittorrent tracker system that others can use. I am still in the process of determining whether I rewrite the source completely or base my version off a stable branch of the most popular tracker software.

After this I intend to take a project I started while i was working and make it into a commercial project management software product I can sell to construction firms. This will be the real test of my programming abilities but it should also be a fun project and I am going to employ the help of a few of my friends to complete it. For this project I will be using Cake PHP a very nice PHP framework for web development.

I also plan on riding the annual Sequatchie Valley Century in October. I want to do the entire 100 mile distance but that depends on how much training I get in between now and then. There is one nasty (for me) mountain climb

I am back at work thinking about how much I would like to be on an endless vacation. Belize was amazing and I had so much fun Scuba Diving I am already starting to think about my next trip. Unfortunately my vacation days are done and I need to build up some new ones before I can do this.

During my vacation we stayed at the Tides Beach Resort and Patojo’s Dive Shop. They suffered some dock damage from Hurricane Dean but they had the dock rebuilt by the 3rd day or our visit. The dive masters at Patojo’s were super cool and took great care of us and I would recommend them to anybody who want to dive in Belize. Pretty soon they should have a big boat they are working on ready to make the long trips to the Blue Hole and Turneffe Istands which is where the best scuba was. If you dive in Belize make sure you do not miss these two dive locations. For our trips there we used the Amigos Del Mar and Aqua Divers to get us there and both of these outfits were very professional and planned excellent trips for us. I would like to thank them both.

After our stay on San Perdo we spent a few days in Belize City. I would not recommend this as a destination. It was not a very nice place and you would be better off finding another place to stay while on the mainland like Belmopan or Corozal. There is lots to do on the mainland and I would recommend it as part of your trip just stay out of Belize City unless you are going there to catch the water taxi to San Pedro or another of the Cayes.

I should be posting some photos of my trip soon in the photo gallery and when I do I will post a blog entry with a link. Please send me any comments or questions about you may have about planning your own trip to Belize.

Despite numerous delays, foul ups and false promises my new friend and co-worker Chris and I delivered on a volunteer project to provide streaming video of the Red Wolves at the Chattanooga Nature Center. This all came about after a call from another person who works at the Nature Center called looking for information on how they could provide streaming video of the Red Wolves and their puppies similar to the live feed they have at the Tennessee Aquarium for the penguin exhibit.

A long story short the company I work for volunteered to provide the media server portion of this project and 3 weeks ago we began the saga the ended today. The nature center was to provide the video cameras (they already had those), a video device to capture the video from and an encoding server to compress the raw video into a stream suitable for broadcasting to many people. They got all of this up and running the first of the week and it was up to us to finish the rest. We finally got it working today with 5 minutes to spare before the official work day ended.

Yes, this was very last minute and looks very unprofessional but it did get done and will be much smoother from here on in. If you would like to check out my handiwork take a look. During the day is the best time because the wolves may actually be doing something. At night they are generally sleeping which makes for a pretty boring scene.