I just checked and I have been blogging now for 5 years. Hopefully you have been enjoying the posts and the information that I have written about. I know that I have. I am looking forward to the next few years as there is a lot of exciting technology coming out. That means a lot of learning for me but I enjoy that. I have been thinking lately about my original vision for grokdev.com where I would create sample applications and write up how I did them. While I am still busy I am thinking about trying to carve out a few hours each week to do something like that.

Thank you so much for reading my blog. Even though I post for me I can see that there is a regular following and I appreciate that I need to keep it interesting for you.

I ran across an application at http://wordle.net that will allow you to paste in a bunch of text, the URL to a RSS or ATOM feed, or a del.icio.us user name and it will read the text, remove common words, and then create a word cloud. I created one for my blog.

The most surprising part of this word cloud to me is that the largest words don't necessarily match with the tags that I have defined. I think I will have to rethink my tagging system to make sure that content is easy to find.

It has been almost a month since I posted last. Part of it has been that I have been busy but the biggest part was that the computer that I was hosting my blog on decided to die. I am still not 100% sure what the problem is but the machine would only boot about 1 in 4 times and then would tell me that it couldn't find a core Windows Server file. After spending a couple of days trying to fix the problem I decided that now is the time to upgrade the hardware (I had been contemplating it for a while). I ordered the hardware but between shipping problems and my travel schedule I didn't have a lot of time to work on the new machine. Unfortunately remote access doesn't help me add memory or hard drives to a case. I got a new machine with dual processors, mirrored system disks, and 4 GB RAM. I also got to upgrade to the latest version of dasBlog" target="_blank">dasBlog.

I installed Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V and have started setting up virtual machines for things like my domain controller, this web server, etc. That will hopefully allow me to not have another month long crash and even if something that is not redundant in the machine dies I can start up the virtual machines that I really need on another machine to get it up and running quickly. I will also have the ability to create virtual machines to check out new technologies.

While I was down a lot of interesting things happened but the one that sticks out most in my mind is the Release To Manufacturing (RTM) of SQL Server 2008 last week. I am looking forward to learning more in the months and years ahead.