The focus of my team has expanded to include our TMS product as well. We are just getting into LTL carriers currently, but it’s just a matter of time before we’ll be dealing with full truckload carriers as well. This is exciting given I believe we’ll be the first team within Consulting Services to have experience across our WMS, TMS, and Parcel products. In the past you were either a WMS or TMS engineer where Parcel was a secondary focus for a select few WMS engineers.

We are also beginning to build more and more custom Parcel carriers. These are carriers (or variants thereof) that we currently don’t support natively. The specifications from carrier to carrier vary drastically and these can be major efforts with grueling certification phases. I love this work and feel invigorated. This work allows me to do what I love: design and develop complex systems. I get to architect a solution and in some scenarios write the logic required to implement it. In the future, I’ll be handing off my approved design to the members of my team and mentoring them all along the way.

My schedule has relaxed a bit for now and I’m enjoying my home time. I’ve been working closely with our Parcel product (e.g. package manifesting system that integrates with UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc…). It is built on top of our Transportation Management System software which is very different architecturally from the WM software I’ve spent the past three years mastering. I’m enjoying the challenge and learning something new everyday again.

My family is doing great. In fact, my oldest daughter is going into ninth grade this year (where does the time go) and she’s been home this summer. She keeps busy by babysitting for a handful of families, cross country, and softball. My six year old daughter just started first grade and doing quite well with her reading and spelling (when she is not talking out of turn). Finally, my little man at nearly three years old is quite the tough guy; he spends his days playing with a little boy my wife watches in the mornings and playing with his super hero action figures. I’m truly blessed and love my family.

As of late, I’ve been tinkering with Android software development. I got the Droid last November (the first day it came out) and have been wanting to develop something it. I bought the recently released third addition of Hello, Android on Amazon, read it in a couple of days, and started tinkering. I decided to write another clone of Minesweeper to get started. I say “another” because I also wrote one in college as an assignment for a then brand new Java course. Suffice it to say, I knew the logic very well and it gave me something well defined to complete.

I am eagerly awaiting to see how the incumbent wireless carriers react to this news. I for one can not wait to escape the shackles of my current wireless provider’s draconian contract. All hail Google… please continue to not be evil!

After reading it I feel much better about the plan. Not that I didn’t already support it; it’s just that he uses percentages to drive home how realistic this plan is in terms of funding dollars. In terms of what we as Americans spend in a year for health care now, the proposed funding is insignificant. We stand to profit immensely if it succeeds.

I think of programming as more of a craft than an art; the programmer is the modern equivalent of a blacksmith or a clockmaker. As with these crafts, it is possible to get the job done badly. Anyone can make a door hinge, or a mechanical clock, but a door hinge that opens smoothly and never squeaks or sticks, or a clock that keeps good time is much harder. In both cases, it requires an in-depth understanding of the materials you are working with.

Ultimately, I don’t think it will matter much as I have a definite advantage at the moment as all results (but that one) are related to me specifically. I’m taking the proper actions now to secure my advantage as well by claiming my identity at all of the lame "identity" sites that litter my search results such as: zoominfo, naymz, and congoo.

I’ve had so much happen that I could have shared, but was just too lazy to get around to it.  My third child, Cooper, was born just after I moved to Raleigh in July 2008.  I didn’t realize it then, but he was the missing piece in my life.  He’s coming up on two years old in August and he is a spitting image of me at that age… right down to the tantrums he throws.

With the move to Raleigh brought a need to rely on our friends as we no longer had any family close by to help out in a pinch.  Today, I’m glad to say, we have several friends that have stepped up and become our extended family.  We have awesome neighbors that look out for us and are willing to take care of our pets when we going on vacation (more on that below)… and vice versa.  My wife has made many friends as a result of joining a Mom’s Club when we first moved down.  The women in that club have helped us out on many occasions and I’m very happy we have met them and their families.

Our kids have done well down here; that was the most important item on our “Do we move?” checklist.  Along with better career potential for myself and my wife, Michelle, we wanted our kids to have more opportunities as well.  This area of North Carolina has many great colleges/universities to choose from and the tuition of most of them is much more affordable than the options available back in Pennsylvania.  The weather hasn’t hurt either… you have to love the fact that almost everyday brings beautiful blue skies as opposed to a constant barrage of overcast skies.  In the end we hope our kids will be able to make a life here so they don’t feel the need to move away when they grow up like we had to… leaving our entire family was a very difficult thing to do.

Aliyah, Abygail, and Cooper

Abygail (our oldest child) has done exceptionally well; she acclimated to the huge increase in students at her middle school very well and has really started to turn into a well-rounded young lady.  She plays softball, volunteers at our church, and tutors other kids in her grade.  She has even made me feel out-of-touch technically on more than one occasion when she has shown ME how to use a feature within my cellphone.

Aliyah is going to start Kindergarten in July and excited to meet new people while upset she is leaving many of her preschool friends.  She is so very much like me in regards to her wacky sense of humor: her stories are outlandish and every bit as realistic to her as mine were to me at that age.  I hope she never loses that… my imagination is still quite vivid so I think she will be safe there.

Cooper is quite the little tough guy; he studies me intently all day and loves to copy my every move.  It is painfully clear I have some bad habits when it comes to how I play with him as he doesn’t understand that it’s okay to hit me when play but not okay to hit everyone else.  He has my temper as well; I used to throw myself and bang my head at that age when I was frustrated and he seems to have inherited that trait as well.  He talks so much… it is amazing!  I don’t remember Aliyah talking quite so much at this age, but it’s been long enough now that I could be mistaken.

I would have to say the one drawback to living down here is how we tend to spend our “vacations”.  We didn’t take many when we lived in Pennsylvania, but when we did we tended to enjoy them more.  Now we “vacation” up north by bouncing around from night to night with different family members (e.g. most nights we stay at my father-in-law’s house).  In short, we love seeing family, but we almost always feel we need another “vacation” to recover from the one we just experienced.  We never have enough time to see everyone we want to and we almost always get at least one guilt trip from a friend or relative about how we didn’t get to see them (or spend enought time with them).

I love my job as well.  While I don’t enjoy the politics involved sometimes, the technical aspect is interesting and I am always working on something new.  The particular aspect of the company I work within (e.g. Implemenation Services for the Warehouse Management System) is quite broad in scope and I learn something new about it everyday.  I enjoy working with like minded people that truly understand the engineering requirements for delivering a large, complex software product.

I just logged in last night to polish my resume by restricting my desired locations even further and to place “RALEIGH AREA ONLY!” into my resumes title. This apparently doesn’t work either.

I can not stomach Monster… and I am going to remove my account (if at all possible).

Update: I called their 800 number after digging through their FAQ for about 5 minutes. I was connected to someone I could barely understand, but the process was semi-painless and I am now no longer a member of Monster.