Happy New Year To All!

Hard to believe that another year has gone by, and it's just as hard to believe that it's been ten years since the big Y2K deal! God has been good to us this year as always, and we look forward to His continued blessings in this next year.

Notre Dame Football

Charlie Weis has left after another 6-6 year, and Brian Kelly from Cincinnati has been hired. A work trip took me to Cincinnati when all the speculation was going on the week before the big hiring announcement was made. I was wearing an ND jacket both on the plane and in restaurants and stores in Cincinnati, and it always was able to start conversations about football. One lady even asked me if I was a coach :o)

For us diehard ND football fans, it's always painful to watch the team lose as much as they do these days. What a deflated feeling to stand in the stadium for a game or two each year and to see the clock wind down to zero with the home team having the lower number on the scoreboard. From what I can tell, everyone is excited about Brian Kelly coming to coach.

It's also amusing to watch the sportcasters, particularly on ESPN, reporting on Notre Dame football as a top story. Even when we are down, we are the big story in the country. Some sports guys will wonder why we are still talking about Notre Dame these days when they are losing (they themselves are talking about ND by wondering why we're still talking about ND). ND will always be ND for some reason that I can't explain....it's a feeling, a place and an attitude that I grew up with.

I heard someone say that the three hardest jobs in the country are the president of the United States, the mayor of New York, and the head football coach at Notre Dame. As can be seen by the head coach turnover since Lou Holtz left in '96, it's not for everybody. We're both excited about the new coach, and we're excited to see what will happen in the fall of 2010!

2010

It reminds me of the movie, the sequel to "2001: A Space Odyssey". I wish that our space program would have had us out to some planet by 2001, much less a second trip in 2010. Space travel is still as fascinating to me today as it was back in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo days.

Joyce, Liesl and I wish you the best this New Years and in the new year to come!

20 Years In One Place

Now this is hard to believe: I have now been at my current position for twenty whole years! I moved to Fort Myers, FL in 1983, and I started with Coastal Computer Corporation (now dESCO, LLC) in January of 1990. Dean will remind you that I was hired in December of '89 but didn't start until January of 1990 because of some previously-scheduled Christmas trip to Indiana.

What have I done, and what do I do? I am a software trainer, programmer, web developer and technical writer. I travel and train new and existing customers in our software an average of once each month. (That's 12 per year times 20 years with a few extras in there, so that's just about 250 trips in the US and Canada over that period of time. Assuming four legs on each trip, that's 1000 plane rides).

Here's an article that appeared on our company website. Scroll down to the bottom of the page:
http://www.desco-soft.com/newsletters/2009december.html