Welcome!

Greets! I am excited to have finally gotten started in the whole blogging world. This has all happened at the bequest of a certain blogger I met just today. (Robin Meuré) I say met, but actually, I just IM'd with him. He asked me if I had a blog. I had to admit reluctantly that I had not taken that step as yet. His is glorix.blogspot.com.

I will be posting on different topics on this blog. Topics will include my professional life and skills I have developed, as well as important issues to me (like family life).

My professional life has given me the opportunity to grow in many different areas, but not excel enough to be a guru in any area. I have been doing HTML since 1997, a skill I picked up while killing time at the University of Central Arkansas' Computer Science Unix Lab. In 1998, I started an internship with Acxiom Corp (http://www.acxiom.com/) working on their Y2k intranet. In 1999, I started full time with them in an R&D group, doing VBScript (ASP) and Javascript to provision a site for their much-touted Acxiom Data Network. While working, I picked up some T-SQL skills, and SQLServer skills, but not enough to succeed at being a DBA. (Which just happened to be my next gig.) In 2003, I moved on to work for a 1-man shop doing T-SQL, DTS Packages, and batch scripts for automation as a consultant with Alltel. After 6 months of this, I moved on to a small company in the area who shut their doors after I worked for them for 2 weeks. I then moved on to work as a consultant for the state as an area coordinator. While doing this work, I maintained the web site and database. I stuck with this consultancy role far too long. I ended up being hired by the state in 2005 to fill a role that was not IT related. I just considered all my IT skills a bonus. So did the director. In total, I filled that role for a year and a half. During that time, I was able to attend an ASP.Net training class at Complete Computing (http://www.complete.com/). I left this role for the opportunity to be a consultant for this division, but according to the lawyers, a state employee may not leave the employ of the state and subsequently enter into a consultancy until after a 12 month time period has passed. So, I moved on to my next gig; working for a school district's IT department, doing ASP, ASP.Net, T-SQL, Javascript, HTML, and heavy DHTML. I moved on after 6 months of fun. Since 2006, I've been with a company serving as a Solutions Developer, working on VBA, VB.Net, ASP.Net, DotNetNuke, T-SQL, DTS Packages, SQLServer 2000 and 2005, as well as my HTML/DHTML and Javascript.

That's enough about work. Now for a little about my family. I've been married to my wife since 1995, and we have 2 boys who are 9 and 6. We also have a daughter who is 17. She is mine, but many people say she looks enough like my wife that folks cannot tell. All of my family currently live in Arkansas. My Mom lives a bit more than an hour away in North Central Arkansas. My Dad lives in Conway, my sister and her family live in Conway, and my younger brother and his family live in Conway. My older brother and his family live west of Little Rock. So I can visit any of my family within about an hour drive. We are a very close family, and we celebrate our closeness as often as we can. We enjoy food. Can I say that again? We enjoy putting a feed on! I may end up posting some of our favorite recipies here, too! (Not too many, though!) This is a guy's blog, after all.

Enough of the introductions. I'll post some more later.
Thanks for visiting!