Grrr Blogger

Stupid mail in blogging is really starting to piss me off.  I got back reject messages for every mail I sent in with subject :RMS and Patternfall.com.  So I go to my blog site today, and what to I see?  The stupid thing had posted once for every time I sent it in.  I hope they get the mail thing fixed soon.  On the plus side, I got the host for RMS to create an application out of the directory I needed to get the UIP to work properly.  Also had to somewhat kludge it though, as I now need the bin folder both in that directory and under the root.  No biggie though, doesn’t take up much space, just have to remember now to make sure to update both locations.  The one under the root is almost exclusively for the calendar, at some point I will pare down the dll’s in there to only what it needs.  Now I need to go in and sync up the tables and stored procs that are supporting all this new functionality.  Going to do that tomorrow, my connection from home is just too slow for it.

RMS and Patternfall.com

Well, I had a relatively productive weekend finishing up the development work on Classroom pages.  I now have all functionality completed for them, only piece left is to integrate it with the security model.  All was going well until I deployed it up to the production web server.  For some reason, the UIP doesn’t appear to like the application running out of the root of the web site.  I would get screwy results where it would either send me to http://<path to the view>, or if I put the entire path to the view in the config file, I would get stuck in an endless redirect loop.  Talked to one of the guys at Amentra today, said that it had something to do with the UIP doing a string compare to “/”.   Going to have to go dig through the UIP source to see WTF is up with that.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get it fixed tonight.

 

On a plus note, Patternfall.com domain FINALLY came open to purchase, after it had been expired for about 90 days.  I bought it, then had trouble with DYNDNS already having it in their database under someone else’s account, but they took care of that pretty quickly.  I pointed my MX records over to brinkster (where the website and mail is actually hosted), but am getting an error that it doesn’t relay for that address.  The live-support guy told me to wait a while for servers to update.  I personally don’t think that’s the issue, but we’ll see tomorrow morning.

Whitlock Reunion

I went to a reunion last night of a bunch of people that formerly worked at Whitlock EBS.  It was pretty cool seeing the group again, but a number of people that I wanted to see there didn’t show up.  No great loss for me, cuz I see them semi-regularly anyway.  I may have made a couple of business contacts, so might get a little more side work shortly, don’t know how that will turn out.

 

RMS site is coming along, a little more behind than I’d like, but it’s getting there.  I have the GUI for everything that needs to be done on the classroom pages, now I just need to finish the back end of it, saving to the database and all, and it will be done! J Yay!  Once that is done I will put it up on the site so they can take a look at it.  I’m going to need to work on security in that area, as to who is allowed to edit the site, but I don’t think that will be much problem, I think I just need to limit it to who the group “leader” is (in this case the teachers of the class).

FW: Working Out

I’m trying a different workout this week, based on research that I read saying that spending more time at the gym strength training doesn’t get you additional benefits.  I was doing a 3-set circuit of the gym, I am cutting that to 1-set based on the research, we’ll see how it goes.  I’m using the time saved to do some Yoga in the morning, mostly stretching hamstring and glutes.  Haven’t been following my diet too well this week, did ok Monday and Tuesday, but not so good yesterday.  I seem to have the most difficulty when I’m at home all day, and in the evenings.  I think I’d do better if the food just wasn’t available, but since it’s there, I eat it.  Argh.

 

Haven’t had much time to spend on RMS this week, hopefully I’ll get it done this weekend, but I’ve a feeling that will depend on whether the weather is nice or not.  I don’t think I’ll get a lot done if it is a nice weekend, probably be out with my parents and the kids.

 

One of my cousins from Michigan is coming down (over?) on May 26^th and staying through the 31^st.  She has 3 kids, about the same ages as my oldest 3.  We had a good time with them the last time they came down, met them in PA and spent the day there, went to Hershey park, some garden near there, then headed to my parents.   They are coming down for one of my other cousins child’s Bar Mitzvah.  I didn’t even know they were Jewish, probably because I wasn’t much of a religious person myself, though I am starting to change my mind somewhat in that area, but that could be a book into itself.

Weekend

Well, had a nice weekend, the weather here was perfect, upper 60’s to lower 70’s all weekend (a bit windy on Saturday though).  Went to my parents’ house with the kids Friday night for dinner, then we went to Goochland County Park with them on Saturday and had a picnic lunch.  After that we went to the YMCA to swim for a while.  We got back home around 5:00.  We took a break from outside then and watched Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.  We had watched Episodes IV-VI the prior weekend, and they enjoyed it quite a bit.  Sunday the kids played outside for a couple hours before lunch, then we had lunch on the back deck, then went downstairs to watch a movie while the twins took a nap.  Sarah laid down on the couch next to me and fell asleep for about 2 hours also!

 

I didn’t get to work on RMS over the weekend as I wanted to, but I did something much more productive and fun.  I have about 1/3 of the admin part done for the classroom pages, just need to be able to add new controls and change the ordering of them.  Hopefully I’ll have that done by the weekend, and I can upload it to the production server then.  Once that’s done I’m going to work on getting some documentation put together for RMS, then I’ll work on any reports that they’d like to have.

House, Yay!

Finally starting to get somewhere on the house!  I spent yesterday morning wandering through Louisa, first talking to a real estate attorney so I had some clue as to what needed to be done for the land transfer.  Then I contacted a surveyor to come out and to the survey and make the new plats.  That is supposed to take about 4-6 weeks.  Once that is done we’ll be able to have them start building, so I’d say we’ll be breaking ground mid May to early June.

 

Not much else going on at the moment, getting close to completing the next phase of the RMS project, which will include the customizable pages for each classroom.  I’m shooting for having it done end of this week.

 

Getting a little bit of work from Harmony-Web again, QA work.  The Lockup has been saying that they are getting email errors.  Somebody turned off the error logging feature at some point though, so I had nothing to go on.  I turned it back on, and haven’t seen anything going to the log.

 

Wow, as I said that I checked the log, and lo and behold, there was a sendemail error!  W00t, now I have something to work with.

 

What a weekend

Ugh, last weekend has to be up for one of our worst.  Meagan had stomach flu or something on Thursday, lasted about a day for her, and she felt better on Friday and went to school.  Deanna gets a call about 10:30 from the school that Sarah has thrown up, so goes to get her.  Then another call at 2:30 that Brenna has thrown up, so she picks her and Meagan up, since school is over at that point anyway.  Then Riley and Eryn start with it.  Then Deanna gets it Friday evening.   What a lovely time I had cleaning up after 5 women with diarrhea and vomiting…

 

So I get it Saturday afternoon, thankfully it only lasted maybe 4 hours for me, Deanna was feeling somewhat better by that time, so I got to sleep through it.  Sunday everyone felt somewhat better.  This morning Meagan says she doesn’t feel good again, and then starts vomiting again.  Ugh.

 

So I actually needed to do some work this weekend on RMS, as I have training to do on Wednesday, and I’d like to have at least one of the admin wizards set up and working to show them how it’s going to look.  I think I might still make it, not sure though.  I’m reading through the UIP application block at the moment to get it to work for me.

More RMS

I got the solution completely restructured now, and I have all the layers defined, and a couple of functions working in each layer, right now centered on updating/creating new users for the site.  Now that the base stuff is complete, adding new functionality to it is easy, and I hope to have all the functionality they initially wanted complete by next weekend.  The only issue I can see taking much time is security on the pages, as that isn’t part of the framework that was constructed.  I’m going to have to look at incorporating that into the framework at some point, but right now I have another framework that I can use, it just won’t be as easy to use or maintain at the moment.  I’d go ahead and incorporate it, but that will take considerably more time than the kluge way, and I want to get the initially functionality out there ASAP.  I’ll have time to go back and retrofit it later.  Hopefully it won’t be too much data conversion involved, if any at all.

Still really busy at NTelos during the day, their rollout to production is scheduled for 3/31, and there is quite a bit to go before we’re ready for that, especially considering that we have to leave time for the ICMS (an AS/400 program) people to go through and check to make sure the stuff we’re putting into their databases looks correct, and make that billing cycles run.

School was out on Friday due to snow.  Once it had stopped, we all went out and played in it, the kids loved it, and the snow was just about perfect, just the right amount of wet to make great snowballs and snowmen, but not too wet to get you soaked and freezing.  We stayed out in it for about an hour before they got cold and ready to go in.  That was only the 2^nd real snow we’ve had this year, which is a little low for us.  Don’t get me started on global warming though, the fact that these morons pushing that the earth is warming up just drives me up the wall!  The fact that they have maybe 100 to 150 years worth of data, and the Earth’s climate probably changes in cycles that are at least thousands of years long doesn’t deter them from screaming that people are causing the planet to heat up dramatically.  This kind of politicized “science” drives me up the wall.  Oh well, I have bigger fish to fry than that for now.  Have to choose my battles, or I’ll have no time for any of them.

RMS

I’ve gotten a lot of work done on the RMS project I’ve been working on since June(?).  I have restructured the solution to incorporate all the parts that I purchased/obtained(open source) into something of a whole, still have a little bit of work to do there, but it is coming along quite nicely.  I am incorporating a lot of what I have learned from the Amentra team that has been mentoring the NTelos people.  The framework they have set up is quite nice to work with, and makes things very easy to maintain, and easily extensible.  This should go well with the project, as we are planning on customizing/extending it as necessary for different types of clients we plan on selling it to (schools, churches, sports teams, etc).

 

My contact at Harmony Web has sent me some info on a .Net project he may be getting, supposed to be hearing back from them soon, which would be nice as opposed to the VB6 work he normally has.  The guy from Derivia that I did some report work for sends me this nasty email the other day after I email him 3 different times about the bill that he hasn’t paid that is over 60 days late.  Says the quality of the work was poor.  I felt like writing back that if he actually gave me some requirements, and definitions to work with, and MAYBE if he actually paid his bills, well, then I may have been more inclined to do the work, but I restrained myself.  I just consoled myself by re-depositing the first check he wrote (90 days past due), since it was returned NSF.  In his defense he did send a cashier’s check, but my kids managed to get hold of it somehow, so he had to put a stop payment on it.  Supposedly his bank waits 90 days before they put the funds back.  I waited exactly 90 days from when he said he put the stop payment on it.  That was about 5 days ago, bastard better have the money in the account.  Ah well.

 

I found out about another DUG, this one in Charlottesville.  The organizer is a professor of technology at UVA, Eric Meier.  Mike was going to speak there tonight, but I don’t have time this week.  Hopefully I’ll be able to go to some of these meetings soon and make some contacts, I’d like to get some more contract work going.

untitled

Well, Deanna had a bad day yesterday.  She had a migraine pretty much all day.  Nothing seems to be working for them anymore.  I told her to tell her doctor about it when she goes in for her diabetes test.  She is supposed to call today to get in sometime this week for the test, her blood sugar levels spike whenever she eats something with sugar in it, so she may be pre-diabetic.  She has been doing the low-carb Atkins diet for a while, so that has probably kept it in check.  She also just had her thyroid checked by her gynecologist (although why he would be checking it I don't know), and had blood work done for that, and it checked out normal.  She is also doing a store bought test for pre-menopause, but you're supposed to test twice, about 2 weeks apart, she has another week to wait for that one.  She's trying to figure out why she has been feeling exhausted all the time.  The first test from the pre-menopause kit said she was normal.  I hope something is found soon, the constant exhaustion is driving me up the wall, because it makes her moody and bitchy.  I'm sure it's not pleasant for her either.

 

The three older kids all got their report cards recently, they are all doing excellent in school.  It's been relatively warm here recently, so I've been taking them outside when I get home in the evening.  I need to get a bigger swing-set for them, the one we have only has 3 swings on it, and it is pretty short.  I may do something like my dad did, and put a board up between a couple of trees to hang the swings from.  I want to get them some of the nice playground equipment that parks have, or some of the tube things that are in the fast-food restaurants.  We are planning an un-birthday party for them on May 14^th, we're going to rent an inflatable moon bounce, an snow-cone machine, and a cotton candy machine.  Deanna also bought a bunch of prizes to give out to them.  We're going to let them invite 5 friends each (not including siblings of friends, who can come as well), and any kids from the family that want to come as well, so there will probably be 25-30 kids there.  Hope to get my parents, Kim, and some of the other kids parents to stay and help keep them corralled.  They're going to love it, I'm sure.

 

 

Aging

I just joined the Methuselah 300 group.  Check out the web site: www.mprize.org.  You should also join up, give as much as you can, it's a worthy cause, aging is a disease no one has survived yet. Maybe soon that won't be the case.

 

 

---

I have yet to have my meeting with the person at NTelos who is supposed to be hiring me.  My contract is up on the 28th, I hate when people leave something like this until the last minute.  I have a feeling that I'm not going to be particularly happy with what they offer me, but thankfully I have 3 other irons in the fire, so I don't have to take it if I don't want to.  I hope it works out though, I do like it there.  I've been doing a lot of updating of my links this week, I just discovered the virtues RSS news readers, and have been moving a lot of stuff I just had bookmarked into a RSS reader, hopefully that will save me some time reading, as I don't have to visit the sites now to know if there is something new on them.

 

Just got my corporate taxes paid, wasn't too bad, the dates said that corporate taxes weren't due until March 15, but I haven't been paying estimated taxes, so I don't know if I owe late penalties or not.  I'll try to talk to my accountant about it at some point, but I'm not too worried about it, I didn't owe that much anyway.

 

The house is still moving along at a snails pace.  I did find out today that the guy across the street is willing to deed us driveway access through his land to the road, so that will help out.  Now I just have to get the in-laws moving on deeding the piece of land we are going to build the house on to us.  That seems to be the sticking place at this point.

Busy

Whew, been a while since my last blog. Been Reeeeeaaallly busy at my day job, with a deadline last Friday. We almost even made it :P. I'm supposed to talk with the boss there start of Feb. about going full-time with them. I've got an interview process going on at company in Charlottesville as a backup in case they try to screw with me. I hope they don't, I like it there, however I am somewhat concerned about the resources they are going to have available. The full-time team on my project is going to be me and 2 other people, and the PM. One of the other people is still learning OOP, so they aren't going to be a whole lot of good for a while. I talked with the PM from Amentra, he says he's been voicing this concern for a while now, but doesn't get much response to it. They say they're planning on slowing development on the project, but the Amentra PM says they've been getting a ton of enhancement requests on the project already, and doesn't think the customers are going to take slowing down.

I also found out that the jerks who own the little piece of land between the one we're going to build on won't sell, and won't allow us driveway access. They were real jackasses about it too. Not sure why they're acting that way, its less than half an acre, and they don't have anything built on it, and you couldn't really build on it anyway.

The family has been doing well, we all got sick with a cold, and 2 of the kids got ear infections from it, but they did pretty well with it. The 3 oldest are still taking skating lessons, and are enjoying them. I'm glad they're doing that, keeps them somewhat active during the winter. I hope to be in our own house this summer. Would be nice to have a fenced yard that they can all go play in.

I finished up my MCSD.Net certification near the end of December, and I bought a Universal Subscription to MSDN. That one hurt the bank account :P Should come in handy though. Hopefully I'll have the RMS project completed soon, going to try to have all the parents put in the database this week, then get the kids in next weekend. Need to create a couple reports for them, but that shouldn't take long. Then I can start on what Big Oak wants to have done in order to sell the thing, and I can start refactoring to make it easier sell it in pieces and customize it. Also need to start working on a project for SunJester Studios. Haven't done much for Harmony Web lately, have to check in with them and see how things are going. I'd like to see something come out of Linked-In, but I don't know that I ever will. I'm going to have to give Rent-A-Coder another try, see if I can get something going there. I'd really like to be able to stay at home and work. My car is starting to give up the ghost, I'm looking to get something like an Altima, and we need to get a new van also, something that will carry 8 or that the passenger airbag can be turned off.

GOVERNMENT SCHOOL IDIOCY

boortz.com: GOVERNMENT SCHOOL IDIOCY
I just can't stand this kind of idiocy. If this were my child, I'd be suing over something this incredibly stupid. I'm probably going to wind up facing something like this at some point, having 5 kids. I just hope I'll be able to afford the attorneys fee's. Hopefully this zero-tolerance nonsense will go away before I have to deal with it, but I will do my part if I have to. I think a lot of this crap has to do with the tendancies for school administrators to be liberal leaning, hence a push toward communal thinking, so if you don't fit into the commune, you get the boot. This type of thinking is going to end up hurting the truly intelligent kids out there, as they will be taught that thinking "outside the box" is bad, and they will all learn to be good little sheep.

If I didn't live out in the middle of nowhere, I'd be pushing Deanna hard to home school the kids. I want them to have the interaction with other kids tho, and I think that would still be somewhat difficult to do in my area. I have heard about home schooling groups that get together once a week or more to get the kids together and go on field trips and such. I'll have to look into that and see if there are any in my area.

boortz.com: Nealz Nuze Today's Nuze

boortz.com: THE AARP DECLARES WAR ON YOUNGER AMERICANS:

"The solution? Privatization! If you own your own account it can't be taken from you or your family and given to some stranger living in a retirement community in Palm Desert, California. If you have the misfortune to die before the law allows you to start withdrawing retirement benefits from your account the money goes to your family. Isn't that the way you would want it? Wouldn't you want that money to be spent to make your spouse or children rather than someone you didn't know and who might not have even given you the time of day if you had known them during life?

This is absurd, folks. We're supposed to be living in free country that recognizes property rights. You own you, not the government. You work for you, not for some stranger. In a free country your government should not seize your money by force and put it into a phony 'retirement' fund that earns you a sub-par rate of return and to which you have no legal right beyond what politicians are willing to grant. When you die the money you earned during life shouldn't be seized by government to be transferred to another individual you don't know while your family scrambles about looking for a way to keep their home and pay for your funeral, but that's exactly what the AARP is fighting for."

This boggles the mind. This is basically a form of slavery, where you as the worker are coerced into giving up part of your time to the government to cover social security for people who are retired. As Boortz has said before, if any other company were run the way social security were run, it would be considered an illegal pyramid scheme (which is exactly what it is), but since the government runs it, there is nothing you can do about it, except write to your congressperson. Please, anyone that reads this, write to your congressperson and let them know that you want social security reform to go through, preferably with all of it privatized, but we take what we can get. Also, any retiree with a conscience should tell the AARP that they also want social security privatized, it's just not going to work the way it is.

MCSD
Still slacking on the studying, my goal is to get my final test taken this month, I gotta get on that.

RMS
Got a couple quick things pushed out this morning, administering the important message, and cleaned up the login control.

No child left unmedicated

No child left unmedicated
I've seen a lot of articles on this piece of legislation, and I can't believe that President Bush, supposedly a man for "less government" is having anything to do with this. I've sent multiple letters to my congressmen urging them not to support this, and I hope you will do the same. This is one of the most disturbing pieces of legislation I have seen in a long time.

RMS

Finally got the Calender portion of RMS site integrated with Yaf.net's security mechanism. Wasn't too bad once I figured out how the authentication scheme works, and it was definitly knowlegede I'll be using again, esp. seeing how I'm planning on taking the security test for my final MCSD exam. Speaking of which, I've been slacking on my studying for that, but I did do some today. What I learned from the Calendar was in some of the questions on the practice test I bought ($22 well spent), so I definitely feel it was time well spent figuring that stuff out.

Caught up on looking at my Deviant Art watch list, only 250 things I had to go thru...What I get for leaving it for so long. I definitly need to get a new digital camera, and start using it. Or at least start using the old one.

Deanna had to go to WV yesterday to help her dad go thru her grandfather's stuff. Her brothers girlfriend just had to go along and see what she could grab. I was hoping Frank would tell her not to go, but oh well. They brought home a bunch of stuff, some furniture, pictures, china, crystal, etc. I know that must have been hard to do, going through someones things after they die. I'm going to have to go look at some of the stuff my Mom and Kenny saved of grandma's sometime, just to look through it. That will be hard tho, even though it's been over 2 years. I try to do that kind of stuff in small steps, I'm not good at it.

Thanksgiving coming up, that should be good. We're doing lunch at Debra's house at noon, and Kim is doing something at 4pm. My mom said she doesn't know if she's going to that or not, and doesn't want to come to Debra's (I think because of someone's girlfriend, the same one that pushed herself to WV). If she doesn't go to Kim's, we will at least go by there that afternoon to see them. If she goes to Kim's, we'll drop by as well. I'll try to talk with Chuck about his artiste web application he wants to get done.

I went by Chuck's house last Friday to secure his wireless network (was wide open). Played some X-box while I was there, kicked his butt on some fighting game, it was pretty cool. David said he was going to get us one of those for Xmas, as well as the gamecube Debra is getting us for the kids. Should be fun :)

Well, still haven't been able to talk to the people down the road about buying their little piece of land that is between the property we want and the road. I need to get moving on the house building, we have been here way longer than we thought, and haven't even started yet. I think I will call the builder today and find out what the next step we need to do is, I think we can safely say that we will get the land, but even if we don't, that only affects the driveway, which I'm not worried about all that much.

Work is going ok, nTelos stuff is coming along, but slowly. Takes a while to figure out where (and if) the data I need to send to the mainframe is being kept in the web objects.

Home business is going well also, The Lockup is doing a "soft launch" (not my words) of the site this weekend with part of the functionality we have developed. Supposed to do testing and complete implementation of it next week. Thus I have been spending most of my time doing stuff for Harmony Web, and haven't been able to do much for RMS last week. I may try to get some work done on that today, all I really need to do at this point is get the security for the calendar and yaf integrated, hopefully not too difficult.

Nealz Nuze Today's Nuze - FairTax

FAIR TAX UPDATE
Boortz is trying to push the FairTax plan with a book, I hope it works. It'd be wonderful to actually keep the money I earn. That, along with being able to control at least part of my social security pyramid scheme would put Bush down as one of the greats in my book.

Business is going ok, Harmony Web is having issues with the service provider that The LockUp is using to provide them with web services. Sombody keeps screwing them up. There was supposed to be a soft launch of the new services at TLU this weekend, hopefully that will still go, but unknown at this point.

I put part of RMS's stuff live for them last Friday, now I have to work on plugging into yaf.net's security system so the calendaring piece will have some, right now anyone that knows the URL can do anything to the calendar, but it's not exposed on the web site anywhere. Dunno about the way YAF is doing security, wish they had used something standard for it, but they are rolling their own. Hopefully I won't have to make changes on that side, hate to do that and then not be able to upgraded in pieces.

Haven't visited DeviantArt in a while, probably have a couple hundred messages to look at. Ugh.

Thanksgiving is looking good. Going to be having lunch at Debra's at 12, then dinner at Kim's at 4, so will get to see both families.

Debra got basically laid off this week, the are making her an as needed employee, I think in some effort to not have to pay unemployment. Whatever, stupid people don't realize she can still collect reduction of hours to 0 benefits. She'll probably look for something part-time locally, maybe the Wal-Mart in C'ville or something like that. She also now has a reason to push on making Kris either buy the house, or get out so she can sell it. Kris has been screwing with them on that for some time.

I gotta get my ass moving on the building process, I looked up a lawyer in Louisa yesterday, hope to call him today and find out what I need to do next. Also need to talk with Dr. Burton about getting my taxes done for my business, and how I should structure that.

MCSD

Well, I've started studying for the last test I need to take to get my MCSD.Net certification. I've taken everything but an elective, I've deceided to take the 70-330 exam (Security for VB.Net). I've always had a thing for security, so I thought I'd put it to the test. I did a couple of gigs for Whitlock on penetration testing of web sites; not quite the same as developing secure applications, but I think the same pricipals apply.

Business has slowed down, Derivia seems to be doing stuff themselves, which is ok with me for now, I have a lot to do for RMS, and still getting some work from Harmony Web. I really like the guy I've been doing work for from Harmony Web, seems really nice, and very understanding. Just had his second child about 2 months ago. If I ever go out to Chicago (doubtful), I'll have to drop by for a visit. Still haven't taken any time to try and make more contacts through LinkedIn, I will probably do that once I get a good chunk of RMS done, don't want to run out of work.

Kids are doing well, they have started roller-skating lessons, my parents are taking them on Saturday. This is a good thing, they will be getting some needed exercise. They don't get much chance to go outside now, they only have an hour before it gets dark when they get home from school. I'm going to try to get them involved in some sports this spring, depending on how things go with nTelos, and what hours I'm working, etc. Hopefully I'll be working full time for nTelos, and have pretty flexable about when I work, as long as I get at least 40/week in. Sometimes I wish for times like when I was a kid, and we could wander all over the neighborhood without worrying about getting kidnapped or worse. Times sure have changed. I sound like an old man :P

Voting

Bush won! Yay! I went to vote early in the morning, and noticed that there was really nothing to prevent someone from just walking in and voting. They had the person there checking to see if you were registered, but they didn't give you a ticket to give to the person standing at the polling machine, so all you would have had to do is just get in line. Kinda worrisome.

Almost finished with the calendar and messaging part of RMS web site. I need to look to find a better way of doing role-based security than what I am doing. I am somewhat limited as to what I can do tho, as I am integrating 2 pre-written pieces. Using the roles from YAF message board, and a calendar I got from someone I used to work with. Once I get something out and working for RMS, I'm going to take a look at Microsoft's Authorization and Profile application block to see what I can do with that.

I need to get back on Linked-in and try to get some more customer contacts. I have about 15 people, but none have any work. Not sure how linked-in is going to pan out on stuff like that. I should also pay more attention to the neon guild mailing list to see if there is anything there that might lead to some business.

The nTelos project is going ok, but I have found that we are more behind schedule than I thought we were at the beginning of October. There is a piece at the end of the process that builds a string to send to a middleware product that executes the commands in the string on the mainframe, and I have found that there is a lot that is only stubbed out in the intermediary steps to get to that point. I have learned quite a bit about Microsoft's UIP application block (a MVS implementation), which is good. Seems to be a good framework for anything that needs to follow a series of steps. Will have to look at RMS to see if there will be any part of their site that can use something like that.