Falling down and down

It’s the end of a great day. This was the first day of Fall and Austin had some very mild weather. The humidity was low and I spent a few hours this morning on the deck. Sondra got into a tiff with the backyard neighbor over the bushes growing through the fence into his yard. Seems the bushed (vines) were coming through the fence slats. He didn’t like the way the looked so decided to just start chopping. Sondra quickly ran outside to advise him this will kill out plants. She took over the process of weeding the plants from our side of the fence. Glad it was so nice out. Did I help? Not much. I helped by staying out of her way.

So checking my posts I’ve somehow slipped through the summer without any posts. Last post appears to be June 3. Well there is a reason for this. I became so frustrated with my job at Mindshare I just spent all my free time hunting for ways to get out. Had some good leads for similar agencies. I pretty much decided if I were going to make a move I wanted to end up with more control on what I work on. It really burned me the company was moving into Microsoft technologies. It’s just not my preference this it not an comment on the technology.

So as of August 21, a little over a month ago, I became self employed. To pay the bills I’m currently working on various projects for Brian K from Low Fat Designs. It’s great work since it’s 99% WordPress related work. You know I love that. But more important I’ve traded the 8 to 5 drudge (not including commute time) into a low stress career where I call the shots, work when and where I want. I just want to hold out until the first of the year then reevaluate things to see if my level of income can sustain me.

Update after a long post drought

I’ve been very busy this month, and yes sadly too busy to post, sorry. Work is taking more and more of my time. Seems the title ‘Engineer’ means I work harder. Actually that is not true. I’m actually working just as hard as before, when I was just a lowly Developer.

What’s this about being an Engineer? Yeah, boss called back in June. Seems I’ve been promoted to the class of Engineer. It’s the next tier of the ladder. Not that I’m ambitious and really want to climb the ladder. I’ve had my turn when I was younger climbing the ladder, stepping on people as you go up. You really have no choice and whether you want to believe it or not you step on folks. Not directly, but when you climb there are always other left behind. People you were friends with at one time and even some who you went out after work with. But as you move up and become their supervisor the relationship changes. You are no longer on the inside. Instead you are on the outside wondering what changed. Really I just want to write code and write code well!

Also I started playing with a new FireFox plugin, StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/). This is totally addicting. You install the plugin, create an account, select your categories and just keep hitting the Stumble button. You get random pages. It’s totally taken over my surfing experience. I of course checked all category boxes. From Religion to Art to Games. All I can say is “What took me so long to discover this”. It’s my own fault I’m sure. I don’t spent as much time surfing for FF extensions as I used to. Not enough time on my hands.

Missed Feb…and March

Well seems two whole months have gone by without any updates to this blog. So let’s see if I can recap things.

Worked first part of Jan on the Mindshare site redesign. Take a look www.mindshare.net. This would turn out to be my 6th WordPress site. Using WordPress is so easy. It’s pretty much PHP functions underneath. No special template tags to work with.

Been working a lot of hours these last few weeks on a client project. Can’t say here who the client is. But they’ve seems to really been booking my time lately. It’s been all custom PHP work. This client uses a system I build back in August 2005. There are no less than 26 forms in use on this site. No add an online survey as well.

Just this past weekend I upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2 from 1.5.2 which was the version I initially loaded here back during Thanksgiving. Thanks again Matt for a great product. PhotoMatt

Have been playing around with DOMScripting these last few months also. I don’t refer to it as AJAX. I’m just funny that way. Maybe because many of my co workers and peers are all on the AJAX bandwagon. Getting me back into JavaScript development. Though I have been working on development of a file viewer with tree-view. The inspiration came from a DHTML book I was reading from SitePoint.com. I’ve added more functionality but have not had tome to get back to it. I do want to release version 0.01 soon.

Attended SXSW this March 2006. I do enjoy the 4 days of fellow geeks being huddled together to converse and get our geek on. Good times. Met many more people and old friends from last year. I pretty much attended a trac of sessions on Accessibility and Web Standards.

Spoke to a good friend Armando from Houston a few weeks back. He and I worked together at SYSCO Foods. Great guy, and great programmer. I miss just being in his shadow.

Look for more posts early this week. I’ve got some comments and question in my head I need to get out on paper.