I started working at my current job with Take Charge America a little over a year ago. Now it is time for this to come to an end so that a new chapter in my professional career can begin. I really love the fact that I have nothing bad to say about my current employer, they have been awesome to me and I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

So if my job is so great why change? Mostly because the new opportunity presents three key factors that I just couldn’t pass up. Growth, freedom and compensation. I will be working on a new project from the ground up, literally we will be putting together the development/test/source control environments in the coming weeks. Also it will be done in C#/ASP.NET which is my strongest skill set right now. Further it keeps with my strong belief in web applications. We will be creating a web app to replace a desktop application that is currently installed in 4 different states. I have always believed in the zero footprint nature of web applications and will be working for a company that feels the same way. Freedom, once all the initial planning and design process has taken place I will be able to work remotely a large percentage of the time which will also allow me to travel while working. Compensation, it never hurts when there are more digits in your paycheck

So wish me luck, there is incredible risk in the move I am making but with that comes great possibilities!

“We rest here while we can, but we hear the ocean calling in our dreams, And we know by the morning, the wind will fill our sails to test the seams, The calm is on the water and part of us would linger by the shore, For ships are safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.”

As the snooze button kept reappearing in my life every 5 minutes 5:30 quickly became 6:05.

I could hear the Matrix in my head "get up trinity, GET UP!" At this point I had turned my thoughts of running this morning into thoughts of taking a nice relaxing walk. At least I would be doing some physical activity that would make the rest of my day more productive. In a zombie like state I proceeded to put on my workout gear, grab my iPod and get this thing going. I started queuing up the iPod to the audio book I have been listening to, however the audio books I listen to tend to require full attention so I decided to throw on some music as I continued getting ready. Then I remembered I made some new playlists last night of some of my older techno/trance albums. DJ John Kelly – Funky Desert Breaks 2 was my selection today. Fully intending on putting the audio book on once I got outside, I let the gradual start to the album guide me.

I exited the house and decided to finish the song I was on, forgetting that it was 80 minutes worth of non-stop tracks. Then it happened [insert epiphany here]. My body began locomotion all by itself. The music was powering my soul and suddenly I started running, in an awkward Forest Gump kinda way. Continuing down the street I seemed to forget about the audio book, my foot didn’t seem to hurt anymore and the soreness in my legs was waning. My heart and lungs seemed to be in a perfect symbiotic relationship giving my body the oxygen it needed.

While not the fastest run I ever did, it was very rewarding. I never did turn the audio book on and then I realized that maybe sometimes all life needs is a good soundtrack, what is your soundtrack today?

Video Link

Also this is my first real use of the new video feature in the BlackBerry Curve 4.5 OS. Sweet!

Blogs have also become part of my ritual, and hence RSS feeds. Now we have a match made in heaven. I took the LinkedIn updates RSS feeds and plugged it into my Google RSS reader account.

What makes this really cool is that now when any of my ‘connections’ has an update, I get little snippets in my RSS reader.

So what is an update?

Usually a change of any of the following:

• Profile picture
• Job status
• Bio update
• New connections (really cool)

All of these let you stay connected with changes to your network. And it just fits with my daily workflow without cluttering up my email box with summary emails.

So stay linked in and use your favorite RSS reader.

• Save time when deploying – in the past when I would post my little hobby projects to the web I would sometimes get errors and spend hours trying to figure out why.
• Improve my skill set in the full system – building web pages and code files is all fine and dandy in a development environment but if you don’t understand the full system then finding problems in a production environment can take much longer.
• Had a problem when deploying locally – My project was working on my local IIS but when deployed to a real server 2003 running IIS6 it only showed a yellow screen of death.
• Local IIS and dev web server close but not the same – while visual studio provides a built-in development server and vista includes a local IIS this are still limited and do not exactly function like a real production system. In short these mock servers are good for rapid development but your code still needs to be tested in a production environment

How my environment is setup

• Recently I upgraded – My home computer is now a Quad-Core, 4gb Ram, Vista Ultimate x64, which I have been pleasantly satisfied with. This was a huge step up from my 7 year old 2ghz Pentium 4, 512mb, XP pro system…huge difference.
• Vmware workstation – I have been playing with virtual machines for the last 8 months but since I got my new system it has gone into overdrive. This allows me to setup all different types of environments in a virtual setup.
• Microsoft Dreamspark – through this program I was able to get free copies of Windows Server 2003, Visual Studio 2008 and Vista Business. Thank you!
• Modify hosts file – this is a tiny text file hidden in all windows systems that is looked at first before any other DNS information. With this I am able to point internet domain names to my local server to mock a real environment.

How I applied this

• Referenced MSDN article – I had heard of remote debugging but was not aware how it really worked. This document got me pointed in the right direction.
• Installed service on the server – I used remote desktop to login to my server and installed the service that allows remote debugging. This was found with the install files that came with Visual Studio 2008. After installing I just had to start the service
• Attached to process from inside of VS2008 – While Visual Studio is running on my development machine I opened a file system website that was located in my network on a Windows Server 2003 machine. In order to debug on a remote machine the source code needed to be located on my local machine and I needed to attach to the w3wp.exe process on the remote server. At this point I had to hit pause on the debugger to break all threads and then hit continue. At this point I was able to set break points anywhere in my code. With this I would go back to my internet browser and hit the page on the website that would hit the break point, which further allowed me to step through the code as it ran on the remote server. Caution if this is a real production server that others have access to it will halt all website operation!

What I learned

• This is a powerful tool – the ability to hook directly into a production server and step through the code is very powerful, sometimes there are unknown environment variables that only come into play when you are in a production environment
• Don’t forget the basics – The instructions for deployment of this open source project stated that the asp.net process needed to have write access to a directory – duh! So in reality I didn’t need to step through my source code just to view the error that stated the write of a log file failed because the asp.net process did not have permission to write to a directory.
• I know have a new tool in my arsenal – I have another tool in my bag of tricks to troubleshoot problems. And it turns out the environment I setup at home is extremely close to the development server at work…a virtualized Windows Server 2003. So I could do this same thing at work if needed.

I can remember it vividly. I was waking up to go in to work and my alarm clock at the time was set to play the radio to wake me up. I started to piece together that an airplane had hit one of the world trade center towers. There was much confusion about what had happened and why. On my way into work I listened to talk radio, as I commonly do, and could hear the distress in the voices of those hosting the show as well as the callers. Something just wasn’t right. By the time I made it into work everybody was crowded around a tv in our waiting room, and we watched the replay of the second plane hitting the other tower at the WTC. By now it was all very clear, this was no accident.

During this time I worked at a car dealership in Vegas and was close to a smaller hotel/casino that had lots of meeting space and we were relatively close to the airport. Needless to say there were lots of business travelers that frequented the hotel. As the planes were being grounded all across the nation the skies became eerily quiet and still. Many of the business travelers were showing up looking for rental cars to drive back home, many of them several states away, knowing that travel by plane was out of the question anytime soon. Almost all of my appointments for the day never showed up, and the people who did show up usually cancelled any major service work and were in and out quickly.

For the days and weeks following the attacks of 9/11 there was a somber but patriotic tone about my co-workers and customers. I no longer had any of them complaining about the little things because we were all focused on the bigger picture. I was in charge of our service menus that were handed out with every scheduled maintenance, as of September 12th, 2001 I changed the header to the image you see below. I don’t remember how long we left it that way but we got comments of praise for it all the time.

Several months after all of this occurred we had our friend from Germany visit and she was thinking, Wow! Americans are so patriotic with their American flags on cars, houses, shirts and just about anyplace else you could think of. We informed her that it was the events of 9/11 that spurred this outpouring of patriotism. While many have pushed it to the back of their mind, I still have not forgotten.

Our New Plates ! GO USA

The Good:

• IT Department 
  • I am finally in an IT department and not a Sales department. This is a big plus that utilizes my business/technical skills and not my sales skills. I am not discounting the need for skills with selling, but the daily grind of trying to get people to buy something just wears on a guy.
• Upper Management
  • I talk daily with the VP of Software development and every few days with the CIO, both of which have  an open door policy, which I haven’t exercised yet, but feel I comfortable that I can. In all my previous jobs there was very strict chain of command that had to be followed. I never felt like I was part of a team just a producer
  • I have met a few other executives from other business areas and they seem to be committed to helping people and following the vision and mission statements (you mean those things are for real??)

• Acceptance
  • I have not had one negative comment from any person that I have come in contact with in the business.
  • On my forth day at work I was invited to a planning meeting for a new external portal site for our clients. I was there with my supervisor, VP of software development and two other VP level executives that deal with operations. Not only was I invited but some of my ideas were incorporated into the new site. Further I felt welcome to challenge and further shoot down some of the ideas that others had. Very productive meeting, never really dealt with this kind of stuff except in theory
• The Facility
  • Not to long ago the business purchased land and built a custom facility to house the operations of the business. They spared no expense on fixtures, window coverings, landscaping, the big American flag out front and countless other nicetys that really make a person feel good about walking thru the front doors every day. I have been at countless other businesses that had to cut corners due to one reason or another, and it showed
• Mind over muscle
  • Actually using my brain and not just my ability to endure is awesome. In past jobs I would spend any idle second doing non-work related items just to clear my head, at my new job I find that I don’t have any interest in surfing the net, text messaging or personal phone calls. I am actually interested in what I do for work and truly enjoy it.
• Drive time
  • I have been downloading podcasts for quite a few months now and they seem to pile up faster than I can consume them. In the last week I have been sucking up podcasts of my interests like a sponge. This has really given me a chance to focus on my interests and have some time away from the keyboard and TV to really enrich my mind. 

The Bad:

• Drive time
  • I was aware of the commute when I agreed to work at my new job, but that does not discount that fact that I use Google maps (traffic data) to plan my route to and from work each day. And no matter which way you slice or dice it I am spending 1 hour to work and 1 hour to home each day. This is not a long term plan but for now it is not a big issue
• Did I mention the drive time…
• Smaller Company
  • The company is just over 400 people, which isn’t super small but it is not like they have regional or international offices that I can transfer to. My ultimate goal is to move from Arizona to a different/better climate. While this isn’t a huge issue it will require me to get a new job to move out of town with a new company, as opposed to just a transfer.

So if you can read between the lines I am really happy with my new position at Take Charge America. I think they are providing a needed service and genuinely care about their customers. Further I am coming on board at the start of a new project so it will be awesome to see it through fruition (borrowed word from Angry Joe).

The biggest hurdle was the base application was built in VB.net, not C#.  So I spent the next few days learning the suttle differences between the two languages, knowing that they are both object oriented and would be able to basically do the same thing. So after plugging away and making slow steps I have found a mindset that works with VB.net, but wait what is this website and why is it free??

Telerik Converter

This tool is amazing I actually took some VB code I found on the web and converted it to C# and back again. Seems to work great. I still need to check the code to make sure it is still performing what I need it to perform, but come on what a time saver. Especially when my new job has some older applications in VB.net and is moving to C#

I will be doing techie stuff for a non-profit based here in Phoenix called

Take Charge America . They are a credit counseling agency that helps people get out of debt. I have done a lot of research on them and read several transcripts from the founder in front of congress, he handles himself pretty well. For the first time in my whole life I will not be selling something or working directly with customers. It is also the first job that I got with my educational background. Don’t get me wrong a lot of the work I did for our business and the countless hours I have spent practicing ‘geek’ stuff on my own prepared me for the interview and what I will be doing.

What exactly is it that I will be doing? Well to start with they work on lots of numbers (duh), and in doing so the need to run a lot of reports. Some of this is paraphrased from the interview prep email. I will be  working on a small team to develop a working Report Console that is based on MOSS 2007, SQL Reporting Services, SQL 2005, and .Net. The current work is in the area of the console itself and creating the necessary web part functionality to securely serve reports to stakeholders within TCA. The next effort will include enhancements to an existing .Net extranet site – specifically, dashboard and user functionality to present data that will enable clients to check account status, conduct ‘what-if’ scenarios, and to view graphical representations. So like I said lots of techie stuff. The two guys I interviewed with were very laid back and the job site is very professional feeling. Also I have seen lots of good reviews on them.

What are the drawbacks? Well, first this means less free time  . But no worries I don’t have any more school homework, and no group home business to take up my free time. Also it is on the other side of the world from my house (I-17 & 101). But I have a strong feeling that once I get settled in I might be able to do some telecommuting or compressed work weeks?

I am very excited to get back to work and start building up some real experience and references on my resume. Also it won’t hurt to have more income everybody needs more toys, right?

My start date is July 28th. This coming Monday….wish me luck