This blog did something silly whilst I've been living my life and ignoring it. Evidently, my rant against NetSuite was used as source material against them for fraud and shitty business practices. I was actually contacted at one point to be alerted it might be used in a class-action lawsuit, although I never responded nor took the time to validate this.
The last two years of my life have been pretty good. In September of 2008, Lily and I moved into the track home we built with McMillin. I did a bunch of customizations like adding a patio, kitchen island, upgrading my counters to granite, pre-wiring surround sound and CAT-6 gigabit, and a built-in entertainment cabinet. I have some minor issues with the build quality (there's some A/C vents skewed, and I had to get some tiles re-glued in my kitchen) but overall I'm quite happy with the house. Ultimately, the maintenance is irrelevant when I remind myself that I bought a home at 23, and have never missed a payment. Ex-girlfriends and enemies of my high school days: suck it.
2009 kinda whizzed past for me, as I was pretty heavily involved in my work and wakeboarding. Through a coworker, I met this guy Alex who is an amazing wakeboarder, and also happens to be the business development manager for Topless Blonde Ale. In late 2009, Lily went to Mercy Ministries for 6 months. Without getting into the theological/ideological issues, I'd like to simply state that she seems to have grown up quite a bit in the program, and that has been a good thing for us.
While working at Ramsgate/ProGauge, I've been given tremendous room to innovate. Rather than just sticking to what I know (Java, PHP + MySQL, C#), I've been able to expand to working with ActionScript, PostgreSQL, jQuery + jQueryUI, and recently took up an interest in playing with Node.js. Since I started in 2008, I've been building an analytical tool called ProGauge Prime, which is my primary work. Sometime in 2009, Dustin and Brent joined on. As a team, we created a new piece of technology called an ICP (which we apparently do a terrible job of marketing, because I cannot find anything about it on our own site). Actually, this article on ProSoft's website does a pretty good job of depicting our integration with PXP, although it grossly overstates ProSoft's involvement (they sold 3 radios, we engineered and actively monitor the entire SCADA system).
I'm going to close this elongated status update with a piece of advice, since information about programming was pretty scarce when I was a kid. For those aspiring coders/hackers/"software engineers": do not overlook the energy or automation industries. They are in immense need of philosophical and technological modernization. Some examples: closed, proprietary protocol, closed, proprietary protocol, grossly-overpriced archaic technology, bloatware, grossly-overpriced archaic technology, grossly-overpriced behemoth software.
