Humm… now that I have this fancy, schmancy blog, I probably should be more proactive towards actually using it. Here’s the honest truth about me, though – Hi, I’m Michael and I’m a work-a-holic (group: Hi, Michael). Yes sir, I loves me some good old fashion work-a-hol.

Cloris Leachman? Get out of my blog post!!!

By day, I am a mild-mannered developer at BMW FS in Hilliard, OH working on anything from C# WinForm applications, to long running SQL Server procs and jobs, Web Services, and (my favorite) import/export/conversion SSIS Packages.

Life has been good thus far. I have been at my post now for roughly four years strong, fighting for Truth, Justice, and the BMW way of software development. I joined up fresh out of college and wide eyed to the wonders of real world programming. Through it all, I’ve seen the good and I’ve see the bad, you take them both and there you have… the facts of life.

By night, however, I have started to branch out. I’ve let my hair down and embraced a love that dare not speak it’s name. Her name is… the web. I remember fondly a time in college when the web and I use to play together. It was a time for trying new things and experimentation. It was a time when I wasn’t bogged down with “requirements” or “deadlines” or “users.” It was a free time… a beautiful time….a….

Whoa whoa whoa... dude... no....

Actually, that bit about having no users wasn’t true. I did work for my College’s School of Art (I always read that as “School of Fart”… tee hee hee) and so my users were the administrators and faculty. This was my first venture in making a product for someone as oppose to doing it for an assignment or for myself. This was a great stepping stone because people in the graphic design world are… meticulous… to say the least. They were the perfect group of people to indirectly mold me into the person I am today.

At this time (2005-2006), Mozilla was doing their thing by reinventing web standards with Firefox and Internet Explorer 5.5 still existed on Apple computers. This meant that my first task, which was to give their existing sites a face lift and bring them into “web 2.0″ standards, would need to work on all browsers. How I accomplished this task is god damn black magic, I swear. I’ve long since drank away those painful memories. Of course, my time there wasn’t bad at all. I created a functioning CMS in ColdFusion, a product I will never again use in my life, though it provided invaluable lessons in server side languages.  I also put into practice lessons learned in my database courses, namely normalization (of an Access database).

I’m not exactly sure what brought me to rant about past experiences. I guess the fingers started typing and it felt good to put thoughts into ascii text on the screen. Back to work-a-hol, here’s my upcoming list of tasks:

1. Attain CAPM certification
2. Continued trench warfare at the BMW environment.
3. Wrap up two websites – one traditional ASP.NET and the other MVC2
4. Adventure to Athens, OH to see Mr. Ben Folds (again… this will be sighting number 6).
5. Azure Boot Camp
6. Zend Framework workshop
7. Muay Thai, Soccer, and Snowboarding… sprinkled somewhere onto that mix.
8. Planning for *future* events. *Special* events. *wink*…. *nudge*…………… *sigh*

Oh yeah, for those who are fans of the Olde Souls, the guys are finishing up the full length album. Hope to get it mastered and sent off for packaging in the next month or so. I’ll probably do a special post for that.

Until next time! (I’ll try to keep the rants shorter and the images funnier)