Chris Page – Software Engineer

I’m a father!

The day it started, I wasn’t particularly busy – which was great – and was testing video conferencing solutions with Matt O’Donnell, a long time mentor, colleague, and friend.  Amber called a little concerned, but calm, and said “I’m in the elevator coming up to the office… I think something’s wrong”.  Matt & Christina had a baby just one week before, so Matt was working from home, and Christina and baby Morgan were hanging out on cam chatting along with us.

Amber had already left a message with the doctor, a return call didn’t take long.  We were instructed to go ahead and come in, the sooner the better.  For fear of missing out on the epidural, we soon headed for the hospital!

After an hour of medical student surveys, and some cafeteria food ( which is awesome at Ruby Memorial ), the doctor came in and said “admit this girl – she’s in labor!”.  Friends and family drove in from long distances to support us with laughs and smiles – Doctors poked and prodded… we waited.  At 6 a.m., she was in full labor!  I’m pleased to announce that at ( exactly ONE minute from Amber’s prediction… which is a little spooky accurate in itself since we took bets on the date over a month before ) 9:46 am, May 7th, 2009 – The Page Family welcomed it’s first born, Gabriella Noelle Page!

Gabriella has been in great health the entire time and progressing well, Mommy is recovering like a champ, and Daddy couldn’t be happier!  Much gratitude goes to our family, friends, and the amazing staff at Ruby Memorial – we couldn’t have gotten here without all of you!  Now the real fun has begun!

So I haven’t updated this blog in at least 6 months, and it’s been a very busy time indeed.

Snapped a shot along the Shenendoah in the fall

So first things first, I got married May 23rd to the beautiful Amber Ellifritz, now known as the beautiful Mrs. Amber Page ( us on the right ). It’s been a wild and wonderful ride. We are now expecting! She’s 4 1/2 months at this point. We find out the gender in 2 days, then I plan on throwing a Baby Blue Victory party between now and Christmas

It’s clear I want a boy.

Shortly after we married, we moved to Charles Town, WV. From there, I picked up remote work and since have churned out FirstString.com – a social network for high school athletes. This has been an exciting project, we started it in Typhoon PHP, the www.shockwavelabs.com Framework, and a good 80% of it is still written in that framework, we are now writing new components in Ruby on Rails, which I’ve grown to adore. It’s not perfect, but it is feature rich and gets the job done.

Speaking of Ruby, it presented a learning curve. The below image depicts said curve:

Studying Ruby on Rails

As you can see. It was easy. I recommend everybody give it a shot.

[ ... ok my break is up, I need to go back to some projects, but I'll finish writing on this post at a later time ]

It’s been a hectic few weeks, and I’ve hardly had extra time to keep up with my blog. While I’m supposed to be taking a Saturday away from the computer, I couldn’t help myself this evening.

This afternoon I decided it was time to upgrade my phone. I’ve had the same phone for almost 5 years now. Needless to say, the upgrade was *free* — it would have been completely free, but I tossed in the 2 year warranty, which scored me a nifty belt strap-able case and blue tooth ear piece to boot.

I went with Sprint’s Rumor by LG. I didn’t go all out like you’d expect a technology buff to do, but I’m satisfied with it. It’s a sleek little phone with a 1.3 mega pixel camera/video recorder, a slide out keyboard, a nice interface and some pretty lights.

I also went to Matt O’Donnell’s wedding, which was absolutely beautiful! I picked up my wonderful girlfriend, Amber, in PA, drove god knows how many hours to Virginia Beach, then spent 3 amazing days at a beach house drinking it up with the guests and man/woman of honor. The only downside was the driving… on the way home we got a bit lost in D.C., which was a nightmare to get out of — though we saw an amazing hotel that we’re definitely going to make a trip to sometime.

Final report is I picked up a second part time job. It’s another startup! You know me! I feel they have a GREAT idea and the fact that they have some venture capital to back it really helps. So, now I’m officially a lead architect for 3 web based startups, hence the long delays in between blog posts… What do you think? 6 figure income, 1 year? 2? Wish me luck!

More to come, stay tuned kiddos.