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Or what I did on my summer vacation. So, it’s been a while since I last posted anything of meaning here. The summer has been pretty good so far. I have enjoyed having my Saturdays to myself, free from the troubles obligations of grad school. I’ve also enjoyed many Sundays watching NASCAR and IndyCar races regularly for the first time ever.

Speaking of TV, let me start by saying that I have now picked up a few series over the past two months. The biggest series I’ve been watching all summer is NCIS. With USA airing 3 reruns back-to-back-to-back every weekday, I started watching the show with Chris when I would get home from work. We’ve completed the first season thanks to Netflix. I’ve even gone so far as to create episode lists in Evernote to check off episodes as I’ve watched them. I have also gotten hooked on Burn Notice, Big Love and True Blood. I don’t know that I will get very far into these shows before I kiss my free time goodbye, but they certainly are entertaining me until then.

At the end of June, Chris and I flew out to DC for NECC 2009, an educational technology conference. While I had my trip paid for by work, we had to pay for Chris to attend the conference out of our pocket. The conference was pretty good, and we got to see a little more of DC once again. If you’re in DC, I would recommend Matchbox – not for their mediocre pizza, but for their delicious mini burgers. While we were out there, we also saw the Independence Day fireworks on the National Mall. I was disappointed, especially when compared to the Taste of Chicago fireworks. Hell, I think even the Septemberfest fireworks were better, even with the historic surroundings of DC. You can check out my Flickr photo set to see what I mean.

Shortly after returning from DC, we spent a weekend downtown at the Omni Hotel for our anniversary. Over the past few years I have stayed at all sorts of hotels, and I was very impressed with the Omni Chicago. For starters, @OmniHotels was quick to welcome us after I tweeted that we were heading to the hotel for the weekend. When we were at dinner the first night, Jennifer Avellana, the Loyalty Ambassador, surprised us with a bottle of champagne and a slice of chocolate cake for our anniversary.

The day of our anniversary, we had a couples massage at Asha Salon Spa at the James Hotel. It was very relaxing, getting us ready for our anniversary dinner. That night, we went to dinner at Smith & Wollensky, with a great view of the Chicago River. Since it was our anniversary, we went all out, of course. We split a bottle of wine recommended by the somelier. The wine was a perfect pairing with Chris’s rib eye and with my fillet mignon and lobster. We passed on dessert because we had stuffed ourselves. Later that night, while watching a movie, we ordered ice cream from room service. The lavishness of the day brought us back five years to our honeymoon cruise.

As summer is starting to wind down, I am playing catch up with several things I want to accomplish before the fall. For example, I am still slowly cleaning my office, a painstaking task that is three years old. I am also prepping my computers for OS upgrades. Outside of my office, I am trying to be social, helping out with Normal Moments publicity (want to buy a raffle ticket for The Little Things in Life walk?), and just enjoying what’s left of my free time. The other day I spent most of the day downtown with Herschell and Liana, seeing the sights, taking some photographs (which I promise will be posted soon). I’m hoping I will have some more days like that before classes start up, because I’m sure that I will once again have zero free time.

Anyway, my rambles have gone on long enough. After I finish assisting Chris with an Access project for RtI, I’m heading to bed.

Between tasks, I decided to join in on the fun this morning. So, here is my gratuitous picture of myself at work (with TweetDeck on my laptop – follow me @markomni):

Yeah, it’s not a good picture, but it certainly is gratuitous.

Also, no more javascript injection on my blog

With changing school districts, I need to export my 1.5+ GB of e-mail out of Lotus Notes and into something useful to me. Since I have been working on consolidating my many e-mail accounts into just a few Gmail-enabled accounts, Gmail seemed like the natural choice for the export. After all, both Gmail and Lotus Notes support IMAP with SSL. It can’t be that hard, can it?

It was. After about an hour of trying to configure IMAP connections to Gmail using two versions of Lotus Notes, I was finally able to get a connection to work with Lotus Notes 8. Here is what you have to do to get it to work.

One bit of news has been known to me for a week now, but I have hesitated to post about it because it has not been finalized. Another bit of news I found out about yesterday. We’ll start with the freshest news: I was accepted into the Northwestern MSIT Program for the Fall of 2008.

The NU MSIT Program is a two-year cohort that is a unique blend (at least in the Chicago area) of business and information technology. The program is also not cheap, at almost $29k for the 2008-2009 academic year. I’ll be looking at student loans to help cover the cost. At the end of the two years, I will have a Master of Science in Information Technology, along with the Northwestern alumni network. I hope that this program will pay off by helping me achieve my career goals, but I won’t know until I go through with it.

The second bit of news, which is actually the first bit that I mentioned above, is that I interviewed for and was offered a job at another school district. If I’ve talked to you about it, then you already know as much as I do. As the details are finalized, I’ll try to remember to follow up this post with more. For now, I’ll leave you with that much information.

Yesterday I attended the Network World ITRoadmap Conference & Expo in Rosemont. At the expo, I sat in on the Web 2.0 in the Enterprise session, where Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research and Alex Petrov of Whirlpool Canada talked about Web 2.0. I’m going to be blunt here: Lazar’s presentation was almost worthless if you had already been following Web 2.0 in any way over the past year. All he talked about for 90 minutes was Web 2.0 itself, only dipping his toe into Web 2.0′s actual use in the enterprise. There is more content in the first sentence of each section of the Wikipedia entry for Web 2.0 than in Lazar’s entire presentation! No joke.