Come Adventuring

It’s been over a year that I’ve made any blog posts, either on here or Tech Raving. Most of that has been due to losing my passion for programming because of more managerial duties. Another part has to deal with how little time I found myself with, an hour commute each way tends to do that.

Almost two years ago I accepted a contract that was well out of my willing to contract range and for a rate that could have been made much closer. I took it because it was an opportunity to gain skills in business model patterns and I was excited to have that experience.  I walked into a pilot application where Java programmers were learning Ruby On Rails while the application was being built. I was a complete mess. Besides having to clean up the application I was also tasked with working with the network operations center for how the application would be deployed and used in production.

Since this particular company didn’t emphasis that departments should work together it was nothing more than a huge fight to get anything done, or the app breaks because another department changed something without telling us. Only for me to go in and try to figure out what went wrong. On top of this the hour commute each way made for long days.

After about six months of this nightmare and unresolved promises of learning business patterns I found that coming home and programming was lost to me. I had completely lost my passion for programming. To fill the time I fell into the World of Warcraft.

When I say fell I mean it, you couldn’t drag me away from the computer and I was always playing. During the weekday it is normal to find me at the computer, but weekends I usually did things around the house. Especially on Sundays when I cleaned. Not anymore as WOW had me.

The inevitable result of the contract is that it ended rather abruptly because of office politics. I won’t say I was happy about it since the reason for dropping the contract was totally bullshit. That however is the contractors life.

The four months I was out of work was filled with 20 hour days of WoW. Sure I was looking for other contracts but offers weren’t coming in often and most of those would make me reside elsewhere. Things started to get bleak as money ran out. Luckily the landlord was willing to work out payments (which included utitlities) and several other of our liabilities worked with us. Cable, internet, and WoW were no longer available.

Just before we hit rock bottom a recruiter came through. I am now contracting at Disney Parks and Resorts Online. WDPro is just down the street from the other contract but the rate is far better than what you would find in this area. Although I find myself directing the India team more than I like, I’m not managing programmers and even get to write some myself.

Reconnection

I don’t know what exactly it was, most likely the WDPro contract, but certainly disconnecting from the grid had something to do with it. We’ve paid up our promises and soon to be back in the black money wise. I’ve re-activated my WoW account but couldn’t play for more than 5 minutes because I feel like it’s a time black hole and I have so much to do.

I’ve reconnected with my programming passion again! In doing so I redesigned Tech Raving to support my contracting and so far I’ve gotten several inquires a day and for this time of year that’s amazing. So Tech Raving is were you will find my technical posts, but here you will find me speaking my mind.

Since I haven’t been active on Twitter now for about a month I went ahead and deleted my account. It was nice and all for a while then all of a sudden people I followed started to spam. Those that didn’t spam got lost in the sea of spam.

So for those that were wondering and looking for me, I’m here. Feel free to contact me at any time.

Yesterday turned out to be really busy, more so than usual Sunday’s. Started off with cleaning out websites and doing back-ups. Then whole house cleaning. Followed by grilling.

Naturally I was up way early and wanted to work on the project I was on. Thinking about it as I drank my first cup of coffee I decided that I really needed to shutdown great back links, remove advertising from all my sites, and do back ups.

Shutting down Great Back Links came about because I just do not have the time anymore to review each link submission. The amount of paid links has never really caught on. The whole reason for starting Great Back Links was for affiliate advertising anyhow.

Which was the other problem, I had no time to keep up with the advertising campaigns. I n’t removing old campaigns and adding new ones fast enough to really target the traffic on all the sites.

So Great Back Links is no longer. All advertising has been removed from all my sites. All sites updated to their current versions of software, and they are all backed up.

Kel’s room particularly needed cleaning due to the bunnies running around. Started there first with a total clean of her floors and mopping them. Takes a bit since the bunny pen takes a bit of floor space.

Rest of the house next. Kitchen, bathrooms, etc. All mopped and clean!

While we were cleaning, (Rai helped) I mentioned that when I get a job we are so getting a grill. Surprisingly she said go get one. I explained that it would be upwards of $300.00 dollars to get one with gas. She was fine with it.

A quick trip to Lowe’s and I was back with a four burner grill and a side burner! We barbequed chicken that night. I so love to grill! Plus no more crappy, greasy skillet burgers! I love my grill, have you figured that out.

After dinner my attention drew to three little details that really needed cleaning. The bunnies. Bathing them is something you really don’t do, but they needed it and with the warm weather coming a flea dip as well.

Kel helped me with the toweling and the flea spray, but after all three I looked like I was caught in a blender. The bunnies really didn’t like the water and having to hold them to my chest to dry them off, well let’s say they didn’t like that either.