A couple of loyal readers have emailed to find out what I've been up to recently. I haven't posted much at all on Operation Gadget since we got home from The Bristol-Myers Squibb Tour of Hope, and there are some important reasons for this. Let me list a few of them here:

• Helping launch a new multi-author weblog: My friend Chris Nolan hired me to help build her new multi-author weblog called Spot-On which went live October 5. We're still tweaking the site to make it perfect, but this was an effort that demanded tremendous focus and intensity. [ If you need help building a state-of-the-art weblog, visit Weblog Improvement, my blog design consulting business. ]
• Restoring some websites that got knocked off-line: CTDATA had one of its three servers knocked off-line by an infrastructure failure at one of our ISPs. My partner and I decided to take this opportunity to move onto a LAMP platform three websites that still ran on Windows. This took significantly longer than I expected, and we're not quite done yet.
• Officiating lots of hockey games: I've officiated 13 hockey games in the last 18 days. That may not seem like much, but seven of them were ACHA college hockey games. ACHA games are three hours long and are often fifty or more miles away from my house. Officiating one of these games can take half a day including travel to and from the arena.
• Family issues: We've had a lot going on in our family over this period as well. I can't get into what's happening now, but I hope to have some news to share with Operation Gadget readers shortly.

Thanks for your interest and I hope to have more articles posted here shortly.