Saturday, December 15, 2007

Another nap, another post

Well, Audrey is soundly sleeping (I hope), which gives me some time to write something. So, what's new... what's new....

Well, to start, you can start calling Audrey "Big Sister" cause there's a little one on the way! At this point, Julie is 12-weeks in, so there's still a lot of time - her due date is in late June. I'll have to scan the ultrasound pic so you can see the little guy/gal. It's obviously WAY too soon to tell what the sex of the new baby is, and once again, names are secret... so we'll be holding off on making that announcement.

So, this means that the house is about to get a lot smaller. Our spare bedroom will likely become another nursery. If it's a girl, there's a chance we'll just double up in Audrey's room, but I'm thinking regardless, we're losing the spare bedroom. This also means our plans on staying in our current home for another 5 years or so seems unlikely. So I guess it's time to at least start looking for possible future homes. Now, we haven't really discussed it too much, but I really want to more somewhere more centrally located. In a perfect world, the City schools would be the best in the world... so we could move into the City. But once you get past elementary school, the City schools kindof suck.

I'd really like to be in Brighton, Webster, Penfield, or Pittsford. I personally like Brighton because it's still nice and close to all our favorite City activities, and it's also near lots of good food, Pittsford Wegmans, both I-490 and I-590, and will be WAY more convenient for me - assuming that I'm still driving to Canandaigua for a few more years. In fact, even if I weren't, it's still more convenient.

So, what else is new? Well, business is going well. I picked up a very nice client in Pittsford who has lots of potential. And, they have space there, in case I ever needed any. I started a new business - BiSen Technologies, Inc. with a group of partners. We're commercializing a sensor technology from Infotonics that one of my partners invented while a contract scientist at Infotonics. We were developing it with some pre-seed funding from Cornell/Infotonics. The initial market-segment we're going after is the dairy industry, although there's the potential for the sensor to be used in apple juice/cider. The response from the farming community has been fantastic. In fact, if we had a working system right now, some of these guys would have bought systems right away. So, the big issue now is whether or not we can get a proof of concept, or even a working prototype. We've submitted a Phase I SBIR to the USDA, and this week we submit to another USDA program for a two-year R&D program, so hopefully one of those will pan out. What I really need is about $120K to get to a working prototype for detection of a single organism. In order to detect the array of things we want to, however, we're probably looking at a minimum of $480K and a maximum of $3 million. The $3 million would actually allow us to target two very high priority organisms - cryptosporidium and mycoplasma. If we can do that, then our technology has the potential to take off in the biomedical marketplace. In addition to BiSen, Javelin itself is doing quite well. Infotonics is really starting to pick up speed - and if the state of New York would just reimburse us on a reasonable schedule, we'd be in amazing shape.

So, otherwise, things are going pretty good. Here are some new pictures for your enjoyment... including our Christmas tree!





Sunday, December 09, 2007

Wow, it's been a long time!

And my brother apparently is annoyed every time he comes here and sees the same post time after time. So, here's my best attempt at updating the weblog while Audrey is sleeping and I have a few moments to myself. Julie is also home, but she had to work last night, so she's upstairs sleeping. I'm hoping she's up around 2pm, though, so that we can head over to Mary Maida's open house, and then go get a Christmas tree. I got the space all set up - it's going to be in the dining room, rather than the living room... I just hope it fits. If not, we'll just have to move things around a bit in the living room to make it work.

So, I'm going to write a little on what I've been up to recently, but before I get into that, I'm going to post what most people are probably interested in... baby pics! So, here we go...







OK... and since Blogger only lets you do 5 pics at a time... here's some more!







And last, but not least...




OK... so hopefully people will be happy with the pics.

So, what else is up? Tons of stuff! But unfortunately, uploading all those pics took up so much time that I don't have the time to really say everything. I'm going to really try to do it later tonight after our day is basically done... that way I might even be able to post a couple pics of the new tree. Cheers!