It’s official. Mel-High class of 1990 will meet for our 20 year reunion on June 25th – 26th, 2010.

I’m getting old.

Not much new to report, just trying to get re-acclimated to the oppressive heat during the Georgia Summer while watching Maddie grow up.

• Madeline has pretty much given up crawling and is now walking almost full time!
• Apple just announced the new iPhone 3G Sis set for release on June 17th – looking over the hardware changes … meh, I’ll keep my 3G and not worry about it. I don’t need a better camera, I don’t need more memory, I don’t need a compass and I really don’t care too much about voice control. It’ll be interesting to see what the performance differences are though.
• In conjunction with the new hardware platform, the 3.0 software set launches on the same day. This is what I’ve really been waiting on.
• Melissa’s birthday is coming up fast!
• I really like the Luminox 3000 Navy SEAL dive series but I like the Traser H3 P 6500 Type 6even better. (Traser happens to license the P 6500 design directly to Luminox)

After several weeks of holding herself up, she final starting taking hesitant steps on her own. Everyday, she gets a little more confident and walks a little bit further. I have a feeling it won’t be long before she’s running around full speed.

Windows Media Player (higher quality): Madeline Walking

My Brother turned me on to this site. Mostly guy stuff. Apparently the site owners filter over 1000 different tech sites and pick out only the stuff they think is cool.

And yes, it is awesome.

Well it finally happened. I just received an email from a company using the “swine flu pandemic scare” in a desperate attempt to drum up business. The pitch:

Ryan,
I have received numerous calls over the last seven days from SunGard clients and prospective clients about the Swine flu and how SunGard can assist in planning for a potential disaster of this nature. I have outlined this critical information on SunGard’s Pandemic Response Plan and Pandemic Incident Management Plan.

The Pandemic Response Plan provides a proactive means for our client to outline decisions and actions that should be performed as a response to an influenza situation that may escalate to the point of disrupting normal business processes. This is a customized service that will assess risks, identify business priorities, and will develop enterprise pandemic scenario and response templates.

The Pandemic Incident Management Plan will guide each client’s Executive Management and Incident Management teams in an enterprise-wide response to a pandemic related incident. This includes action-oriented procedures, checklists of decision points, required activities, explanation of roles, and definition of resources and a summary of potential exposures.

SunGard has setup a Pandemic Planning Web Page. This page provide our clients with various resources to help prepare for the unique risks posed by a global or regional epidemic (i.e., SunGard’s Pandemic Response Checklist, Three Keys to Pandemic Preparedness, and our “Precaution and not Panic: Mitigating the Risks of a Pandemic” white paper).

I hope this information helps in your planning to address a potential pandemic episode. And please let me know if you are interested in additional information on SunGard’s Pandemic Response plan and Pandemic Incident Management Plan and how we can help your organization. Please email me directly or contact us if you want to discuss specific items.

I don’t have an issue with disaster preparation but it should be something that is for the most part, universal. You either have enough staff to continue running your business or you don’t. You either have off-site backups/standby hardware or you don’t – you get my point. The cause of the “disaster” doesn’t really matter (it affects long term recovery but not the short term). So I rate global pandemics right up there with meteors hitting the earth and Conficker viruses destroying the Internet – for the most part, it’s all media driven hype.