Well I guess it has been a year. A lot has changed and a lot has remained the same. Time to give you all an update on what is going on in my life. First the biggest thing. I left my job at SYSCO Foods. Gave notice the first Tuesday of 2005. This way I get full payment of vacation for the year. Three full weeks paid. It all went into my car. Well $1800 of it anyway. Left to be a full-time web developer with Mindshare Mindshare Interactive Campaigns, a company based in D.C that creates web pages for non-profits (that is a very simplistic definition, sorry). Had to spend the last three weeks of Jan. 2005 in D.C for training. Along with the snow and cold. Was nice. Had to stay in a garage apartment of someone from the office. Seems the company could not afford a hotel for me for the entire time. I’ve grown to really like the job. At first I had conflict mainly because I was not as well versed on the technical support end and wanted to really concentrate on PHP development. Then got into support of some other sites not written in PHP. I guess maybe I’ve come to be more acceptable of the job over time. When I started in Jan there was only one other person in Austin, Bethany. We were together in an office downtown. We’ve since expanded to seven total in the Austin office. We had to move North out of downtown. It’s a drive in the morning with traffic but still better than my drive to Round Rock for SYSCO. And I do get to work with 6 very nice ladies. Oh, did I mention I was the only male in the office and expected to do the heavy lifting like change the Ozarks water bottle twice a week etc. Still not a bad place to work.

Still with Sondra. We are still talking about getting married. More on that later.

Have been working since April-May doing more and more contract work. It keeps me busy and I get to work at my pace using my techniques. Nothing too big. Not like for Mindshare. Most of these sites are small static content. Still I use PHP and some form of CMS. The most current site is Big World Photo Big World Photo. This has a full working shopping cart and integrates with Authorize net for credit card processing. I’m not taking any money from Lorri since this is giving me more experience.

Bought a MAC Powerbook 15″. I love it. Everyone (or I should say no one) thought I would finally do it. And most, like Sondra, thought I would hate it. But I have to say I only miss the MS Office and my Photoshop CS tools. I’m about to take a Flash class at ACC and will be able to re-purchase the Adobe and Macromedia products again at the discounted prices for the MAC. Though I do have a word for both the mentioned vendors. Why can the PC license not be transferred? Huh? I mean damn those are expensive packages to have to purchase dual copies.

I know I need to update this more. Was thinking about it back in July-August. Then realized it had almost been a year. Decided to just wait the full twelve months.

So there you go. A full year’s update in just a few paragraphs. Man I really need to get a life and provide you guys (all three of you) with more information. Check back later. I just might start hitting this more than once a week.