Changes

Looks like I'll only be posting twice for the entire month of May. Believe it or not, I have a very good reason for my absence. About two weeks ago I received a call from a company based in Washington, D.C. that wanted to interview me. What attracted them to my skillset was my time in the healthcare industry and my hands-on experience with Ruby on Rails. I did the necessary interviews and lo and behold, they offered me a job which I eventually accepted.

So after less than a year at Health First Health Plans I find myself packing up my cube to move to a different company. I've enjoyed the time I've spent with the company and value the friends I have made. On a larger scale, I'm going to miss the friends that I've made here in Melbourne, Florida. It is nearly four years to the day that I started work at Harris and embarked down my career path of web application development. It has had its ups and downs but overall I'm satisfied with the direction it has taken.

The next time I post here, it will be from the heart of our nation's capitol. In the words of Douglas Adams, so long and thanks for all the fish!

Is Blogger the right choice for me?

Several weeks ago I attempted to put up a blog about how one could easily make form buttons that look like the buttons standard in Windows XP. That is, they have gentle curves, a pleasing color palette and in general are damned good looking. Windows XP users will get these buttons standard if a web developer doesn't fool around too much with the underlying CSS on their form buttons but everybody else will just get the standard grey squares. Anyways, I spent nearly two hours battling with Blogger's idiot-proof composer before I finally gave up. The raw HTML code that I spent so much time crafting was no match for Blogger's voracious parser which chewed up my work and spit out something barely resembling the original.

I have decided to keep blogging here despite Blogger's limitations, at least for the short-term. Long-term though, I am considering a move to put the blog on my own site where I can control all aspects of it. And considering the amount of work I've been doing lately in Rails, I would probably convert my site to use that instead and run Typo. I'd also have to find some new software for my galleries but that ought not be a problem considering Rails' ever-increasing popularity.