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Monday, May 07, 2007

I Just Titled This Post in May 2009...and Me...

What a time, people...Lemme tell ya...

So first of all, I haven't posted since February. A tiny re-cap: Joey and I trying to move back East. We sold our house in December, right about when I "finished" a .NET project for my (ex-) work that sync'd an old optical reader Scantron machine to a SQL 2005 database server for student evaluations AND created web front-ends for the evaluations and online reporting AND the database design and tuning. Meanwhile I was also trying to move a state contract over from Access to said SQL 2005 server, as well as assist with 10+ (mis-) managed servers and many many classroom labs having new setups seeming to occur on a bi-monthly basis. Also snuck in teaching the 2541 ADO.NET class (this was actually interesting, as the curriculum was new and delivered as Virtual PC files; too large and memory-gobbling for the classroom we were using, so I pulled them out of the VPC images using RIS...mind you, it worked pretty damn well.)

So we actually make it out of the house to my momma's, and as Joey and I are planning our next step, they tell me at (ex-) work that they no longer want the Scantron evaluations thing on the SQL 2005 server using ASP.NET, etc. They want it open source. PHP. MySQL. Linux. And they want it all done before I leave.

Little did they know in my spare time I'd (thank dear God and baby Jesus) been playing around with BSD on Virtual PC. I could get all the basics set up fine (basically just using the ports), but trying to do things like get MonoDevelop and a few others built (much less working) on there taught a LOT. So I told them, Otay, but I can't be dicking around with these classroom loads et al. I was slated to leave in February. That'd give me Christmas break (which I worked solidly on it through) through to beginning February to get it "done" and test it for maybe two weeks before fleeing.

My (ex-) job was a state job working at a community college. I have never met greater slackers in my entire life. These fucking people would literally come in, play Solitaire for 8 hrs and go home. Not a second longer, but perhaps 30 min to a hour shorter. That left anyone who at least enjoyed working on computers stuck with all their work, too. Then, we were a school. You'd think there'd be SOME pride in trying to give our students a quality product. Oh no. There, you were ENTITLED to your job. Bunch of lame fucks...

Sorry about that. Anyway, I barely managed to get all that done, plus handle getting a rental trailer, get my taxes done, purge most of our shite, etc. We went down I-5 to Sacramento, then down I-99, then along I-40 to the Grand Canyon. Grand Canyon = amazing, BTW. Stayed there for three days camping, then continued on I-40 to Tucumcari, New Mexico, where we angled up I-54 through Wichita and connected with I-70, through St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Columbus, to here: Pittsburgh, PA. (I will be editing this area later on to add pictures, etc. so if you're interested in this shtuff, visit my blog often for constant updates [right...]).

I am now living in Pittsburgh, PA on the South Side and working as a Contractor / Developer for an inventory logistics company doing a butt-load of C#. Oh my God am I happy as a clam. No more managing servers while building complex classrooms while doing database, web, and applications development all at the same time with no one prioritizing any of these tasks but myself (and getting in trouble for any way I organized them). Now just coding. Have had to gobble up CodeSmith / NetTiers, NUnit, MS Enterprise Library and Composite UI / Smart Client in the last two and a half weeks, but at least my focus is in one area. Plus a big grin for the extra $$$. As a gift to myself for all this change, I got myself this bad boy:



Working in the public sector's for chumps...


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