Man, I have been so busy lately. It seems like so much has happened with the new job and other things.

First, the job. I have been on board The TerraStar since July 5. I call it "The TerraStar" instead of its actual name "TerraStar International, Inc." because "The TerraStar" sounds like a ship in the fleet of space ships from Battlestar Galactica. It also sounds like a seedy strip bar or greasy diner in the middle of the desert. I mentioned this to a friend of mine and he said it would probably be shortened to "The T-Star" if it were a greasy diner in the middle of the desert.

Anyway- I'm the systems administrator. That's not really an accurate title given what I've been doing the last couple of weeks. A more accurate job title would probably be Deity of Technology.

The title is appropriate because I'm really the only person who can do things like set up network services, configure e-mail servers, and design websites. Other people are doing things like sales, accounting, and answering the phones. Any time there's a computer or technology issue, I'm the one who gets called.

(In actuality, the office is so small, nobody needs to call me. They just call out my name.)

We're currently doing EDI testing or setting up EDI services with some big national retailers and distributors. EDI is one thing that falls under my umbrella. Coming onto the job, I had basic understanding of how EDI works, but not a detailed understanding. Confident I could pick up the details in a relatively short amount of time, I accept ed the job and the EDI responsibilities.

EDI is, well, stuck in the past. I wish everything was being done with XML now. I don't know how many years it will be until XML is being used for most transactions traditionally used for EDI, but when that happens, most of the debugging and troubleshooting EDI managers currently have to do will be a thing of the past.

Last week, my family was invited to the University of Utah Huntsman Cancer Research Center to participate in some Familial Colon Cancer Research. My brother has had some genetic testing and they found he has a gene mutation which they suspect may be linked to a condition which may lead to colon cancer.

To make a long story short, they collected a lot of data on our family history to find out how various people died, they took blood samples to run various tests on, and they performed colonoscopies on those of us who had not had a colonoscopy in the last two years. I, along with my sister and my mother, fit into that criteria.

All in all, it was very educational and I felt kind of important helping to contribute to cancer research by donating my genes for study. I hope they can find something useful.