Recently in Announcements Category

My Hockey Season is Over

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I officiated the Great Northeast Collegiate Hockey Conference championship game between New Jersey Institute of Technology and Muhlenberg College on February 27. That was my last game of the 2010-2011 hockey season.

I had the opportunity to officiate several other important games before and after that, but turned most of them down since the beginning of February because I was too busy at work to take the time off.

I hope to be able to officiate more games, more often next season than I did at the end of this season. But I have no way of knowing how After6's business will evolve, and what our staffing options will be at that time.

From Zero iPads to Two

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Jimmy, Peter, and Kathleen with our new iPads

Kathleen and I had wanted an iPad for a long time.  I hadn't purchased one at Christmas because I knew that the original iPad was late in its product life.

When the iPad 2 release was imminent, I was on a business trip to Western Canada. This was the first business trip I had taken for my full-time job since before Jimmy was born, so Kathleen and I did what we could to keep the family in touch with each other with daily Skype and FaceTime calls.

On a red-eye flight from Seattle the night before the iPad 2 was released, I considered what would happen if I bought an iPad and took it with me on another overnight business trip. Jimmy would be heartbroken and would want me to leave the iPad at home. At that point I knew that I would have to buy two iPads so that one would always be home no matter where I was.

Having two iPads feels extravagant to me, but the total cost of purchasing two iPads is less than what I would spend on a notebook computer for my business use. The value proposition of this version of the iPad made the decision to buy two a fairly easy one for me to make.

Introducing After6 Services LLC

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After6 Services LLC logo

After two years working at Six Apart, I was offered the opportunity to take over Movable Type Pro support for the world outside of Japan if I created an independent company.  So with a great deal of support and assistance from Kathleen, I started After6 Services LLC.

After6 was soft-launched in the softest way possible.  For technical reasons associated with several contracts on which the business was initially based, I was unable to form the company until January 11, 2011.  However, I began working on the business that became After6 on November 1, 2010 when I left Six Apart.

The business has really taken off in the past few months, and we are very optimistic that it will turn out to be a good investment of our time and resources.

The 89th Annual Bucks County Firemen's Parade was hosted by the Newtown Fire Association. The entire parade literally passed in front of our house. So I tried to take a photo of every group and piece of aparatus as they went by.

The parade took almost 90 minutes to pass our house. Over 200 trucks passed by, from hand pumpers from the early 1800s to Newtown's Ladder 45 truck that went into service in 2008. You have no idea how happy my son Jimmy was.

You can see all of the photos in my 2009 Bucks County Firemen's Parade set on Flickr.


The first major change I implemented to DaveAiello.com is the integration of Action Streams into the home page. Action Streams is a Movable Type plugin that Six Apart released over a year ago. It lets me pull in the information I post on Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Vimeo, and other social networking sites that I use and display it along with the blog posts that live on this site.

I'm implementing Action Streams now because I've wanted to provide a more complete picture of what I'm doing on the Internet to people who aren't on following me on Facebook or Twitter.

Let me know what you think of these changes by dropping me an email at dave [at] daveaiello.com. I haven't turned on comments or trackbacks on this site yet (and I'm not sure I will) , so email or direct messages on Twitter are probably the best way to give me feedback.


I want DaveAiello.com, my personal website, to be more interesting. On the evening of Memorial Day I made some administrative changes to the site to make it easier to upgrade.

The first step is a realignment of sorts. I separated DaveAiello.com from CTDATA.com for the first time. These two sites aren't supposed to have much in common, so they probably shouldn't share the same hosting account.

My goal is to give both sites a clear purpose and to make them both more interesting. I'll be working on changes to DaveAiello.com first.


Peter is Eight Weeks Old Today

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Peter is eight weeks old today, so I thought that now was a good time for a quick update.

Peter is a very strong baby who has already rolled over in both directions on more than one occasion. He doesn't yet sleep through the night, but he has a very regular sleeping and feeding schedule, which makes life a lot easier for his parents.

Now that the weather has started to get warmer and Kathleen is able to begin driving again, Peter and Jimmy are getting out more and more. This has helped life around the house immeasurably.

More photos of Peter, Jimmy, and the rest of the family are on my Flickr account or on Kathleen's Facebook or my Facebook accounts. If you want to see the Facebook photos, please friend us.


Happy Birthday, Peter!

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Peter Aiello was born on Wednesday morning, January 21 in a nearby hospital. He was 7 pounds 15 ounces and 20.5 inches long at birth. Peter did fine at the hospital and since he has been home.

Although both Peter's and our older son Jimmy's births were via caesarian section, they couldn't have been more different. The c-section for Peter was scheduled, but there were some significant complications for my wife as a result of the surgery.

Kathleen experienced heart failure as a result of peripartum cardiomyopathy and ended up spending five days in the cardiac care unit of a major Philadelphia hospital.

That experience wasn't fun, but Kathleen has made a tremendous recovery and is close to getting back to her old self. The doctors, nurses, and technicians that treated Kathleen did a great job.

Kathleen has been home since Monday night, January 26. We've been very fortunate to have tremendous support from our families and friends, and a very cooperative little baby who sleeps a lot. Jimmy (who is 2 1/2 years old) loves his little brother, and is getting as much attention as we can give him.


Introducing HockeyRefCast

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I've just launched HockeyRefCast, a webcast about ice hockey officiating. Episode 1 is now posted and available for listening. It includes:

  • An introduction to the webcast,
  • Hockey officiating news from the Summer of 2008,
  • An interview with special guest, Referee Ian Walsh from the National Hockey League.
HockeyRefCast has been accepted into the iTunes Store Podcast Directory. You can subscribe to HockeyRefCast by following this link.

Weblog Improvement is a consulting service that specializes in designing, developing, and supporting Movable Type and TypePad-based publishing systems. I started it in 2004.

WeblogImprovement.com
Weblog Improvement website as
shown on Flickr.

I relaunched WeblogImprovement.com over the weekend by adopting a design based on the Universal Template Set from the Movable Type 4 Professional Pack.

I wanted to use as few plugins as possible in this design, so I could show the out-of-the-box power of Movable Type 4. I used Custom Fields to designate screen shots from my Flickr photostream that represent each site that I've worked on recently. Each client website is represented as a single blog entry.

About This Archive

This page is a archive of recent entries in the Announcements category.

Portfolio is the next category.

DaveAiello.com is Dave Aiello's personal site, with links to everything he does on the Internet.

Who is Dave Aiello?

Dave Dave is CEO of After6 Services, a provider of Movable Type technical support and consulting services. He's also the creator of Operation Gadget, RinkAtlas, and Weblog Improvement. He was a software developer at Six Apart, Ltd. and founded CTDATA.

Dave is an experienced LAMP stack software developer and Internet application architect with over 10 years of Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, and PHP experience.

There’s a more detailed bio or a résumé available if you’re interested. You can send him an email for more information.

Dave Aiello on the Web

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