Jimmy Mancusi Dot Com

I haven't had much time to post anything over the last few days because my weekend was EXTREMELY busy.

I will get into each of these things in greater detail, but here is a quick recap of what happened since Friday:

1. Went sky diving with my sister in law as a surprise for her birthday.
2. Took a Limo into NYC for dinner at Tao with all my in laws for my sister in laws birthday.
3. Celebrated Emily's first birthday with 40 of our closest friends and family.

That all took place on Friday and Saturday so I spent all day Sunday trying to recoup.

Emily, my daughter, had her first birthday on June 26th, and we celebrated with a party this past Saturday (28th). We had the party at my brother and sister in law's house, which turned out to be a fantastic idea since it was over 90 degrees and they have a pool. Even though they have a very well heated pool (maybe I will get into that later, my brother in law thinks the pool is too cold if its under 88!) it was extremely refreshing and I spent most of the day in the pool. This was made possible simply because of my nieces, since watching them in the pool was considered helping I got away with this scott free!

We had a very good turn out, and most of my extended family made it down even though they had to drive an extra hour or so past my house, so thank you for making it out. I am still in the process of collecting pictures, we actually didn't get that many with our camera but my father and my mother in law were busy with their as always, so I will have more at a later date. For now you can head over to my flickr page and check out what we have. We even have a few pictures up there form the day after, enjoying some of the new toys Emily got.

Thanks again to everyone that came and to my in laws for letting us host the party at their place!

So at some point during Emily's party I started jumping into the pool with my niece Cady, at first mimicking the jumps that she would do and somehow it lead to me doing belly flops for the amusement of my family and friends. Last year I tried a couple of times to get the perfect picture right before impact on a belly flop and came up a bit short, so I figured I would try again. After 2 or 3 flops with my dad trying to snap a picture with his camera (I will add this pictures to flickr soon), I remembered that my camera had a multi-burst mode which takes 16 pictures in a couple of seconds. It was still really hard to get the perfect picture since it was normally to early or to late to get everything, but I think they came out pretty well. You can see in the picture above I had pretty good form on that one, unfortunately the 16 frames wasn't near enough.

Another picture after the break and a little more after math...

Over a year ago now I put up a site for the lacrosse team I play for every summer, Juiced Moose. The team was started almost 10 years ago now and I have played in the Glastonbury CT summer tournament every year. When I put up the site, I did so very quickly with intentions of making things prettier and more functional as I went along, but life has been so hectic lately that I really haven't had much time to do anything with it. Well finally I took the first step toward making it the site I want it to be. Thanks to Mabe, our fantastic designer at RustyBrick, the site got a much needed make over. If you had seen the site before you know it was UGLY. Now it actually looks like a real website.

I even left out a few of the touches that Mabe added, so as soon as I can add those the site will look even better. I wanted to get the information out there since the tournament is at the end of this month, so I had to rush a bit. I also have plans to redo the entire picture section (which I left out for this rush launch) and add a content management system so that I am not the only one with the ability to update the website.

Hopefully these changes will come over the next couple of weeks but between RustyBrick and a few side projects I am working on including JuicedMooseLax and a site I am building for the Edison Cares charity, I certainly do have my hands full.

Surprise!

This weekend we had a surprise birthday party for my sister in law Sheryl. The party went really well and we think she was surprised but I haven't heard the verdict on whether or not we really got her. I wont tell you how old Sheryl is, that wouldn't be nice, but if you were to say take 20 and double it, you would be on the money ;)

The surprise plan went off pretty seamlessly but I think she may have been onto something. One of her friends was suppose to get her out of the house around noon, and return around 2. We left our house with the intention of getting there to help set up around noon, but we ended up circling random neighborhoods in the area waiting for a text message letting us know she had left the house. As soon as she left the house we had to circle a bit more to make sure she passed us on her way out. This is when Amanda got a call from Sheryl asking what she was up to today. We found out later that she had placed a few of these calls to different friends trying to figure out what they were doing today/tonight, which is why I think she might have been onto us.

Even if she was onto us, I still think she was surprised. We had all the cars parked off site, and shuttled everyone to the house. So when she pulled up there were no cars. She opened the garage to park, and we were all standing there waiting for her. Either way we all had a blast so it was a success.

Happy Birthday Sheryl.

Lately work has been taking up most of my time. Thankfully I enjoy what I do, most of the time. For anyone that doesn't know I am a PHP and MySQL engineer. Say what? Just a fancy way to say I am a Web Developer, or a Web Programmer.

One great thing about my occupation is there is no need to be in a specific location to do work. Everything is done with computers, and therefore you can be anywhere as long as you have internet access. This also provides plenty of opportunities for side work, which is a great thing and a horrible thing all at the same time :)

For all of you who are loyal, die hard readers, you obviously noticed the new addition to the site since the last time you visited. OK, I am not fooling anyone I really don't have any die hard loyal fans.... yet :)

I just signed up for Plurk a couple of days ago because Barry wanted another friend sign up to help him get a red star in his profile. Anyway, after joining I figured I would give it a go for a little while to see if I could understand the fascination behind it. Applications like Plurk and Twitter have become very popular lately. For anyone who is unfamiliar with either of these services, they are basically away messages (think aol instant messanger) on steroids, or another way of thinking would be its like mini blogging. You can update what you are doing at any time during the day and other people see it comment on it and so on. Yet another form of communication to reach all of your friends that are sitting behind computers all day long.

Since most of my family and friends don't spend their entire day behind their computer, I don't have a lot of friends on Plurk yet, maybe I will make some new ones... But anyway, I figured I would add it here so that anyone is interested can see what random things I do or what random thoughts I have throughout the day. As long as I am plurking, might as well blog the plurks. Did anyone catch that?

Many of you that have known me for a long time know my father has had some heart issues over the past 6 years. For anyone who hasn't known this here is a quick recap of what has happened so far.

About 6 years ago (not exactly sure on dates) my dad wasn't feeling well and ended up going to the hospital. They ran tests and found out that there was bacteria growing on one of the valves in my father's heart. Since there was risk that the bacteria could break off and cause a major stroke, he needed open heart surgery the next day. Everything went well and we were out of the hospital and on to recovery. Then a year or so later they found that he had bacteria on another valve, so once again we were off to the hospital for a second open heart surgery.

My father has had a few issues or side effects from the two surgeries, including some memory problems and fatigue. The fatigue continues to get worse since one of the valves in his heart is leaking. This leak is a condition that normally only people who have multiple heart surgeries get, or as we like to call them, the lucky ones.