It was two weeks ago I hopped in the car and drove from Crestwood, KY out to Seattle, WA. With 2400 miles, a bajillion hotels & one week at Microsoft under my belt, I’ve got plenty to share.

But first, a gracious thanks for all of your messages. Most of my access to the internet has been at work, which inhibits me from responding to them at my leisure. But I sincerely appreciate them and hope you might keep them coming :D

The trip itself was incredible. Pops road shotgun, and we toured ten states of three and a half days. A net 34 hours of driving time. Along the way, we stopped at lots of roadside diners, attractions, and landmarks. We saw things I’d probably never make the time to see, otherwise. Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, some ideal fishing spots for road trips later to come. I experienced just how much this country changes a few hundred miles up the road. The scenery is so different from where I’ve lived in the Southeast; absolutey gorgeous. I’ll post some photos once I get my machine up and running.

Last Thursday, we arrived in Seattle. We toured the city by car, and took a ferry across Puget Sound to get a glimpse of the city from the water. Such a lovely town. Everything is surrounded by dense forests of evergreens. Lakes, mountains everywhere. It’s cooler weather, for sure, but I’ve always been a cold-blooded animal. It’s been mostly sunny out, despite all the rumors of rainy days. But I’m sure that will change come October. People in this area seem so personable. There’s this awesome sense of community to this town that I love. People are friendly and helpful, but not really in that cheery, all smiles sort of way.

Living situations have sucked. I’ve been living out of hotels for about two weeks now. They’ve mostly been very nice, but having all of your worldly posessions in the back of your car has been irritating. Later this afternoon, I’ll be moving into my place downtown. It will make for a longer commute to work (Redmond is across the lake, up to 45-60 mins depending traffic), but I’m told the busses come packed with free Wi-Fi. More reason to finally buy a laptop, right?

Work has been absolutely grand. My team members are all talented and intelligent, and have lots of wisdom to bring to the table. Our team lead is a visionary, and very passionate about what he does. Everyone works long hours not out of obligation, but out of a creative desire to build more and do bigger and better things with our project. My first week was fairly light; I came in toward the end of this development cycle, so I’ve bigger tasks ahead on the horizon. The Microsoft environment (Visual Studio, C#, Volta, Silverlight, etc) has taken some time to adjust to, but I’m growing comfortable with it. Most of my work avoids the inner programming guts, anyhow.

For now, it’s time for me to move in and get settled, finally. I’ll be posting more once I get service to my apartment.

It was looking awful grim there, gang. This time, two weeks ago, the job hunt wasn’t going so smoothly. I had leads on jobs. Jobs I wanted in places that weren’t Louisville. Or Louisville-based jobs that weren’t for me. More emails to write, contacts to make, things to look into. Lots of maybes, not as many in the ‘yes’ column as a fresh college graduate might’ve been hoping for.

Until just this past Wednesday. I was offered a job at one of the biggest companies on the planet. They’ve summoned me out to their lab in Redmond, WA to help build their next generation web app (psst.. it’s even got a codename). I’ll be doing front-end development under the super sweet title Web Developer III, my voice booming like The Wizard of Oz.

Upon receiving this news, I jumped up and down until my heels began to swell. Never before have I made screaming expletives into such a jubilant spectacle. I am overcome with a feeling so terrifyingly exciting; a Molotov cocktail of adrenaline (which would be a stellar name for an energy drink, bro).

First day of work at Microsoft is on June 16th. My plan, then, is to skip town next Monday or Tuesday for a good ol’ fashioned road trip. Twenty-four hundred miles, split up by lots of stops and sights, and good conversation with hospitable strangers. Time to load up my portable media player of choice!

It’s a twelve-month contract gig. After that, well… we’ll see if any Louisville companies decide to take a chance on a guy with no .NET experience.

Pardon the dramatic pause; it seems there’s always more details to be worked out.

(more…)

I am OFFICIALLY an Auburn University Alumnus — ain’t no way they’re ripping that diploma out of my hands now.

More importantly, big decision bout the future coming down by Tuesday. Watch this space, and try not to pee yourself with anticipation.

I recently switched to auto-pay with my ISP, Charter. Beloved Charter Communications sends me a letter, notifying me of my balance, and that it will be automatically paid out on the 28th. Perfect.

Two days later, I get a letter in the mail alerting me that my account has a balance due, and that I should pay to avoid service interruption. No worries, I’m slated for auto-pay; the letter even says so. Perfect.

Two days later, I receive a phone call from Charter Communcations. “No worries!” I crow, “I’m slated for auto-pay!” The kind lady responds, “Oh, perfect! I’ll mark your account for auto-pay!” Perfect.

Two days later I get another letter making mention of interrupted service if this thing doesn’t get paid. No worries; auto-pay! “Total Due via Auto EFTS:” it even says. Perfect?

Two days later — twenty minutes ago — my internet service is cut.

It’s not a huge deal. I spoke with Jack at Charter and he got it all squared away quickly. But it’s things like this that make me want to go into consulting. “It’s all automated by computers,” Jack explains. And it’s true that computers never make mistakes, per sé. But if we could expend just a little more effort here and there in telling computers exactly what to do, computers could better communicate with those of us who do have souls, reasoning skills, et cetera. Charter could save lots of money in wasted phone calls, paper, postage, billing, customer service…

And I could be at work, saving the world from other such tragedies.

I find it so difficult to do easy things. Never was particularly good at them. I always skipped the first chapter or two of my programming books. My mind’s hungry, folks. I’m not here for tapas, give me your 32oz sirloin.

Want to see me shine? Give me a challenge. Set Everest in front of me and ask me to move it six inches to the left. Better yet, tell me I can’t do it. I am ready to do incredible things — particularly if that first step involves learning how.

And logically of course, it can’t all be so glamorous. Heck, at least half of being a true web dude extraordinarie is quite the opposite. Mundane updates, maintenance on things you created months, if not years ago. Updating contact information of now former employees, catering to the design compulsions of nit picky clients, ‘fixing’ beautiful, clean code to work in broken browsers, or vice-versa.

But who wants to do that? There’s oceans, far away lands… worlds out there to explore. I can’t be bothered with this boring every day life you speak of. Momma said shoot for the stars, so I dreamed of being an astronaut. Now where’s my rocket ship?

I suppose the important lesson here is, keep dreaming. Goals are everything in life. Make absolutely sure that what you’re doing now is a) what you want to be doing, and b) going to get you where you want to be later on down the road.

Lately I’ve been refining those rough sketches of the future into something more detailed. And actionable. I had to say no to an incredible opportunity several months back, because it wasn’t aligned with what I want to do in life. My friends laugh, call me insane. My parents still joke about how sheepish I’ll be feeling if this or that doesn’t work out… I scratch my head now and again, but I have no regrets about it.

I’ll confess, this whole post came from me trying to justify studying for this silly little exam in the morning. Fighting those urges to focus on those big, shiny challenges in the sky. Sometimes the biggest battles are those small, painfully necessary bridges to cross, right in front of your face.

I worked at Jefferson National several winters and summers during school breaks in the past couple years. Recently, JeffNat launched their tax deferral comparison calculator — and just in time, too. A week ago, The Courier-Journal ran a great article on the company’s recent success.

I spent a lot of time on this project during my tenure at JeffNat. My efforts here were mostly in design and the business side of development. Originally, the calculator was presented to me as an elaborate Excel file, which needed to be translated into something more web- and user-friendly. Once these plans were laid, it was presentation time: Powerpoints and conference calls abound. Lucky me, the higher-ups would instantly recognize greatness when they see it.

From there, I crafted the inputs page to be intuitive and easy-to-use. I added a healthy dose of DOM-savvy JavaScript to validate the user’s data client-side. Try changing Portfolio Type to Custom, and enter some of your own numbers, you’ll see what I mean.

This is the second tier of Monument Advisor Xpress, the first being their annuity comparison tool. I contributed a good bit to this project as well, but also borrowed lots of elements of it for the tax deferral tool.

Admittedly, my work stands on the shoulders of giants: the Oracle & ColdFusion brilliance of Frank Wheatley and the gorgeous styles and copy by notorious ladies man Mark Forman. While it was me that coded other nice features, like the Print/Edit/Email buttons, it was entirely Mark’s genius thinking and Frank’s coding methodology that enabled such. Generous tip of the hat in their direction.

And uh.. I am no financial adviser, but from what I hear, Monument Advisor ain’t too shabby if you’re in the market for a nice annuity ;D

On the side, apologies to my visitors for the recent blankouts on here. Somewhere I’ve got a bug in my PHP that causes WordPress to run to the corner and cry. Perfect timing, too, after I’ve been showering it with praises for the past week. Talk about misbehaving in front of guests…

It’s time. It’s long been time.

I installed MovableType long ago to try something different. WordPress was something I’d used several times in the past, and generally happy with, but eager to really be wowed by something else. Plenty of sites I read use MT. Perhaps the old, more established Perl engine knew a thing or two WordPress didn’t.

Reminds me of the age old argument of Linux over Windows — XP Professional still runs on my primary computer if that tells you anything.

And it was fairly powerful, but sometimes easy things seemed more difficult than they had to be. Adding elements to the sidebar. Disabling your stylesheet for a day. It felt like MT was capable of much more than I cared to learn how to do.

So I dumped it to try out the new WordPress. Man. Talk about having power at your fingertips. Most everything has a template tag making it easy-yet-customizable to do your every bidding. Simple, semantic tags like wp_get_posts() make templating a breeze. The recent facelift for the Administrative Panel smoothed a lot of the sometimes awkward edges in running your site.

I’m also glad to be coding Brilla in PHP again. I still consider this site something of a hobby rather than a professional portfolio (though that’s slated to change before too long). So being able to learn so much in a “fun” environment provokes challenge and curiosity, rather than stress in deadlines and just getting it done. I can then take this knowledge and apply it to my jobs and gigs. We’ve installed WP on a number of sites at work, and I’m never looking back.

The layout could use some work, but it will suffice for now. Other recent additions to this site include sIFR, Twitter integration, and some other knick-knacks on the way.

Two weeks til finals! Oh man.. I’ll be home this weekend, Louisville.

Do not adjust your browser: today we celebrate CSS Naked Day (Yeah I know; I just got the memo earlier today, myself. Tip of the hat to the Baconator). We shed our stylesheets and show there’s some utilitiarian beauty beneath that stylish hood we all love to gawk at. Mine is currently Movable Type; I’ll be switching to the new WordPress 2.5 soon.

Beauty and brains. Excellent.

The mere fact that this holiday exists is a sign of a great victory for web standards. 2008 being its third year running is certainly cause for celebration.

Yay for standards. Thank you, Mr. Zeldman.

Dear <$name>,

I will be out of my office from Friday, March 14th until next Saturday, the 22nd. I’ll be spending my spring break on the gorgeous white beaches of the Gulf Coast.

Your email has been forwarded to no one. I don’t have a Blackberry. In case of emergency, you may reach me by mobile phone if it isn’t buried under twelve feet of sand.

If it seems like I’ve been on vacay for a while now, it’s because blogging has been shifted to the backburner. I’ve been busy hatching little PHP minions at the foundry, and finding gainful employment to occupy my time after graduation. These times are becoming more stressful than busy, per se which should be remedied by some time away from my LCD screen.

I’ve built lots and hope to share it with the world soon. See you on the other side of the ides of March!

Jon