Moving to OSS

Well, I've successfully made the move to open source software for my email, web browser (I moved that a while ago), calendar, and RSS Reader.  I moved to Mozilla products for everything but the RSS Reader, I'm using Thunderbird for email, Firefox for browser, and Sunbird for calendar and tasks.  I was using Thunderbird's built-in news and RSS reader, but on the last side job I've been working on I've been modifiying RSS Bandit, and it has a great many more features than Thunderbird does, so I've just switched over to that.  I'm looking into moving to Eclipse for my development environment, but I'm going to need a VB.Net plugin for that, and I haven't seen one out there.  There is a C# one, but I do some stuff in VB as well as C#, so I'm going to have to keep VS.Net around for a while longer I think.  I already use NAnt to build, NUnit for unit tests, and I'm looking at NCover for unit test coverage.  The only thing I really miss is the Journal feature in Outlook, I used to use that as a timer for projects I was working on, but I'll find something for that, tho I wish it was built in to Sunbird.  Maybe I'll look into writing a plugin for it.  I was starting a calendar app on sourceforge, but I could never get CVS to work to connect to them.

On the home front we had an un-birthday party for the older 3 kids on the 14th.  We rented a moon-bounce, cotton candy machine, and sno-cone machine.  We had about 20 kids over, they had a great time.  This weekend my Great-Aunt Donna came in from Michigan.  One of her grandchildren is turning 13 and is having his bar-mitzvah today.  We're going to be doing stuff with them tomorrow and Monday.  Brenna got accepted to the TAG program for next year at her school.

I've been negotiating with NTelos about my job requirements, I gave them a deadline of June 6th to either have my offer ready, or to provide a 6 month contract extension at $55/hour.  One of the supervisors at the contracting company I'm working for them through went there on Friday to talk about the contract.  He invited me to go to lunch with them, but I had already planned on taking the day off, so I couldn't go.

Rent A Coder

Got my first bid from Rent-A-Coder last week!  It was pretty easy, setting up an RSS feed for a site that already had their articles being stored in SQL server, so all I had to do is create the query and format the results to XML RSS 2.0.  Didn't make much off of that, but the guy that I did the work for is giving me more work.  Also gave me a 10 rating on RAC, so that should help toward getting more work off the site.  Still have a long way to go in that department though, I think.

Have a deadline for RMS of end of the month, but I am pretty much done with all the back-end work on it.  I have all the security and classroom page stuff set up, just need to get some schematics from the guys at BigOak and put that together and it will be done.  We did add a couple of minor things for the issue of having students in the database.  We're going to allow the parents to add their children to the site if they choose to do so, that way the issue is in their hands on whether or not their kid shows up on the site.