New Year

Hello and Happy New Year 2008!

That's right - I'm back and ready to make a balance of these few months of blogging.
Seems no one ever visited me, due in part to my prolonged absence between posts, and the fact I'm not advertising this blog at all. Maybe this year it will change...

About my day job: our huge travel agency project just went down the toilet, project which was one of the reasons I was hired. But my job isn't in peril. In fact I got renewed in December.
Why the project went down?
In part, because our client just kept adding more and more requests to the application. In part, because one of our (now fired) programmers just looked at porn and newspapers all day. In part, because the application consisted in a Windows app, two separate web apps (suppliers and agencies), a bunchful of webservices, an SQL database and the plans were to create two or more travel agency websites from there.
Pretty big project, only two programmers. The last three weeks, since my colleague was fired, the project management was my responsability, along with teaching a fellow colleague some real-world programming (he went straight from college). Pretty nightmare.
Besides, many and I mean MANY assumptions during the project two years of life went crashing down on us like a deck of cards. Imagine having to go from the last part of the process almost all the way to the start, realizing it was all wrong.
We needed to filter some hotel rooms based on user preferences, but we couldn't because the underlying filter was flawed. Why? The filter was done on a database table which was flawed. Why? Because the contracting window was flawed. Why? The products page was flawed. Why? Because the product families was flawed. Pretty neat huh?
So in the end the client terminated our contract, we were happy (both as programmers and as company) because the project was long past due and draining precious resources (me ;) and so all ended that way. It's a lesson on how NOT manage a project.

On my personal note, my own project has come with ups and downs through the weeks. I feel a need to gather some extra money online, which until now it's been all spending on the ISP. Sometimes I have grand ideas, sometimes small, and sometimes I feel no will whatsoever to enter Visual Studio and start programming.
I even tried a webservice approach but gave me no flexibility on what I wanted to achieve.
I'm confident that in this new year I will restart full-force and focused and manage to do a pretty darn thing and start earning my well-deserved money.

My girl and I are great, the families joined yesterday for the first time ever to pass a New Year's Eve and all went well. Hope to repeat next year.
My Star Trek amalgama of CDs, DVDs and cross-mixed-series-seasons are now reunited in a 75Gb partition, ready to begin being ordered and labeled correctly and then saved to DVD with nice DVD covers.
Im also trying to work up a bunch of old PC's here and do a Linux Media Center box. Even bought a USB remote controller for it.

About 2008:

I expect 2008 to be a changing year the way the last half of 2006 and all of 2007 were.
2006 for starting with my current girlfriend, 2006 for finally ending my small software firm for not being able to make money out of it, 2006 for getting a job as a door-to-door salesman and succeeding at it, 2006/2007 for living apart from daddys home in a different city for nine months, 2007 for getting a new job on the 2nd January, 2007 for getting my current job at this small software firm and getting with it until now, along many other stuff.

For 2008 my wish list is:

- Get together with my girlfriend in our own home
- Become a better, more responsible and more independent person
- Become better arranjed on my way of dress
- Brush my teeth more often. Maybe twice daily.
- Stop looking at SO MUCH porn online. I guess 20 DVD's are more that enough. ;)
- Make the most out of my daily time to run errands, go shopping, make chores and all
- Get a part time online home business to earn that extra cash I much need
- Make repairs to my car's three bumped doors, clean it often and maintenanted.
- Write in my blog more often
- Pay all my dues, my taxes and my social security

That's it for January 1st, 2008
Cya!