Author Archives: Peter

Congratulations!

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Jeremy and Angela

This is a couple of days late, but we wanted to congratulate our friends Jeremy and Angela on their recent engagement! Jeremy gave us a call on Tuesday night to let us know the good news. We have been very lucky to have them as friends and we are glad to see them taking this next step together!

For those who don’t know the back-story, Jeremy and I met at Gordon College and were roommates senior year. After we graduated, we looked for an apartment together, along with Art Lawry. We found an apartment in Woburn, and I lived there until August 2002, just before Becky and I got married. At around that point, Jeremy started dating Angela, who was living on Cape Cod. Jeremy continued to live up in Woburn and make the trek down to see Angela. Jeremy was my Best Man at our wedding, and Angela was there with him (which is where that photo is from). Since then, Jeremy has moved down to Hyannis on the Cape so that he could spend more time with Angela… but we do occasionally have the chance to get together. Jeremy has been a great friend and I’m so happy to see things coming together for him and Angela.

Congratulations!!

‘Tis The Season

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This week at ***work|http://www.christianbook.com/*** is considered “peak” week. Generally speaking, the months of November and December are “peak” months, since everyone is gearing up to do their Christmas shopping. But this week, we get the largest spike in sales.

This period of time is affectionately known as “The Season” around here, and lots of seasonal changes take place. We hire lots of extra help for the warehouse and for the customer service call center. Also, employees from other parts of the company are drafted to help out in the warehouse and call center. That includes me and my fellow developers. This season, I am spending about 8 of my 40 hours per week in a “picking” zone. The boxes for customer orders are routed around our warehouse automatically on conveyor belts, and they make stops in “zones” where they are filled with the appropriate products. I’m in what’s called a “fast pick” zone, which contains some of CBD’s most popular items in easy-to-reach shelves. I take the printed invoice out of a box as it rolls off the conveyor belt, look for the items that are in my zone, fetch them, and put them in the box. Repeat as needed. As the name implies, “fast pick” zones are fast-paced – I am constantly moving to grab boxes, products, etc. Here are some of the more popular products located in my zone:

***Veggie Tales Ultimate Silly Song Sing-Along|http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product?item_no=27895&netp_id=248583***
***2004 Wall Calendar, Painter of Light|http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product?item_no=418119&netp_id=302217***
***The Littlest Angel, Video|http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product?item_no=85861&netp_id=162947***
***God’s Promises For Women|http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product?item_no=5620X&netp_id=196855***
***The Prayer of Jabez For Teens|http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product?item_no=38159&netp_id=248933***

To get an inside peek at how our warehouse works, check out our ***tour of how an order gets processed|http://www.christianbook.com/html/Offshoot/tourpage1.html***. Some of the photos and screenshots are slightly out of date, but overall it will give you a pretty good idea of how things work!

Nor’easter by the numbers

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Boston.com ran a great little article today called ***A northeaster by the numbers|http://www.boston.com/news/weather/articles/2003/12/08/a_northeaster_by_the_numbers_from_videos_to_pizza/***.

Our parking lot still wasn’t plowed out this morning, so I walked to the train station, took the train in one stop to Salem, and caught a ride in to work from there with my colleagues Win and Simon. I ended up getting in to work just 30 minutes late.

Nor’easter Gallery

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Just a little note: I’ve reorganized the Nor’easter gallery into sub-albums, broken down by day and time, so that you can see how the snow progressed!

***Nor’easter Gallery|http://gallery.prwdot.org/noreaster***

As of 8 p.m., the snow has stopped. Beverly and several other North Shore communities have declared states of emergency, and everyone’s trying to dig out to get ready for a regular work day tomorrow. The street leading to our apartment building seems to have been plowed, but as yet nobody has plowed out our parking lot, so we can’t get our cars out. Hopefully they’ll be able to plow it some time tonight or early tomorrow morning, so that folks can get where they need to go… but if not, I guess it could be a late morning at work!

Another Venture

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Becky and I ventured forth yet again this afternoon to see the impact this Nor’easter has had on the city of Beverly. Photos of today’s adventure start about halfway down the ***fourth page of the Nor’easter gallery|http://gallery.prwdot.org/noreaster?page=4***.

As far as we could see, the following businesses were open today:

Dunkin Donuts
Bell’s Market
Borah’s Market
Family Dollar

I’m sure a few more were open, but we didn’t get that far down Cabot Street.

The plan for the rest of the day is to hole up in the apartment! Supposedly things will be tapering off this evening, and everyone will be getting back to work on Monday…

Even More!

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The snow continues! We must have had just under two feet here in Beverly. Haven’t heard any exact, updated readings yet, but there is a lot of it out there. I took a few more photos out of the doors and windows today, and added them to the ***Nor’easter|http://gallery.prwdot.org/noreaster?page=3*** gallery.

There’s supposed to be several more inches falling today… bring it on!

Blackout!

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So not only was it a Nor’easter today, but we also had a blackout, from around 8:30 to 10:30 p.m.! Becky and I ventured out into the darkened city of Beverly to have a look-see, and if you jump to ***page two of our Nor’easter gallery|http://gallery.prwdot.org/noreaster?page=2***, you can see what there was to see! It was way cool walking around outside… it was so windy and stormy. Cabot Street was fairly dead, but there were a lot of people in cars trying to make their way down Rantoul Street… and having a fairly difficult time of it. The news tonight said that 13,000 North Shore Mass Electric subscribers were without power, and I know that Beverly has over 30,000 residents, so I’m guessing it was mostly us, and probably a few other communities too. It was fun for us while it lasted, but I hope nobody had any serious problems. At least the outages and the snowstorm are happening on the weekend…. the impact isn’t as much as it would be on a weekday.

In weather news, the snow still continues… our pastor called on the phone and let us know that church is cancelled for tomorrow. We also have a party we were scheduled to attend in the afternoon, but we will need to see what the driving is like tomorrow before we make that venture.

That’s all for now… more later from the Nor’east. 🙂

Snow…

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Today was the much-anticipated first big snowstorm of the season, a proper Nor’easter. Becky and I took a walk down to the ocean today, and I ***took some photos|http://gallery.prwdot.org/noreaster***.

I also shot a ***short video|http://prwdot.org/mov/ocean_snow.avi*** at the beach – it’s 11.7 megs and in AVI format, so I’d only try watching it if you’re on a fairly quick connection. The waves and the sound of the surf are awesome during a storm like this!

Tweaks

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Made a few tweaks to the site recently:

* Home page will now show the last 10 blog entries instead of just the last 5.
* Individual Entry Archives (which you can get to by clicking on the time at the end of each blog entry) are now displayed correctly. An error in their layout was causing the pages to look jumbled.

Also, if you have been looking for particular photos in the photo gallery, and have not been able to find what you were looking for, please contact me and let me know what specifically you are trying to find. I’ll do my best to make sure you can see the photos you need to see.