JesseGriffis.Org A highly disorganized, one man organization.

Questionnaire: Do You Have Autistic Tendencies? - Researchers at the Cambridge University's Autism Research Centre developed this questionnaire to measure autistic traits in adults. Higher scores indicate greater autistic tendencies.(author unknown) [My Digg-Dotted links]

Scored a 31, above average, go figure. At least that'd give me a reason for being so strange.

Yep, I've started the new job now and all I can say is...WOW! I'm really digging it. I'm fitting right in with my co-workers and I'm getting right to work fixing their SMS environment. It shouldn't take too long to work out the bugs and have it chugging right along like it should be. I'm really happy about it and I hope I'll be an asset to the company regardless of what I'm working on.

Last week I decided it was time to move on from my current employer and accept a position elsewhere. It was a tough decision to make because I had been there a relatively short period of time and things were beginning to move in a positive direction.

Over all I've felt frustrated and incapable of affecting a positive change in the environment for some time now, but I was honest in my discussions with management and laid out my complaints and talked through possible solutions with them and I'm happy to see some good already being realized from it.

I'm staying on board long enough to finish the SMS infrastructure for them but I unfortunately will miss out on the BDD/OSD pieces of the project.

I'm excited about my new position however because I'll be supporting web services which is something I am very interested in but I've never really had an opportunity to do on a professional level.

I know this is a disjointed, run-on, stream of (un)consciousness kind of post but I'm tired and wanted to put a blurb up about this before I began my new job.

MMS 2K7 and San Diego have been fantastic. I've enjoyed spending soooo much quality time with sooooooo many technical people. It's been great to hear the presentations, key notes, lectures, and to do the hands on labs but it's also been good to compare real world notes with other folks and talk about each others plans and pain points. There has also been a few opportunities to interact with some of the "big names" in the SMS/MOM/System Center communities.

I had the odd circumstance of bumping into about 20 or so of my former coworkers but it was nice to hear that they'd like to have me back anytime and to just catch up with them.

I've posted some pictures but more will be forth coming once I'm done taking them.

It's been about two months since my last entry and I have no clue where the time has gone. Well that isn't exactly true, I know most of it has been spent at work and I assume I spent the rest of the time sleeping occassionally. I do have some exciting news though, I'm getting to attend MMS 2007 in San Diego, Ca this year. I'm very excited about it, not just because it'll be my first trip out of the South East US but because I'm a huge geek and that's what I do. That's about all I have for now, I'll check back in

I stumbled across an interesting site tonight called Prosper. Though more eloquently stated on their site the purpose of Prosper is to help individual lenders and borrowers meet on neutral ground and exchange debts/funds. It's a very interesting concept and even seems to be structured in a very fair and balanced format. To me it looks like a win-win situation for both parties, granted they both have to live up to their sides of the agreement. I may consider using this to help consolidate some outstanding debt in the near future but i'll need to do some more research first.

On a side note, Mom and Dad went for a ride on "The Polar Express" tonight with my 2 year old niece. This is a special train ride Heart of Dixie Railroad Museum puts on at Christmas time. The interesting part to me is that they got to ride in the same railroad car that was part of my Eagle Scout project in Boy Scouts. I may have to go brave the carolers and kiddies just for a chance to have a nostalgic moment. Mom and Dad said my restoration of the window sills in the car was pretty much already destroyed and rotting away in some places but it's been about 14 years since I did the work and there were some leaks around the windows that were probably never patched properly that caused the rotting to begin with. If I go I'll snap a few pics and post another entry documenting the experience.

Recently I've become enamored with Google Reader a RSS feed reader w/ajax for the web. I've always been a "power surfer", in the days of IE 3 I generally had between 15 - 20 windows open and active at any given moment. Heaven help my PC if I was actively searching for something. Firefox has helped remove some of the clutter from my typically over crowded desktop by placing all my windows into tabs but even now I find myself opening up a seperate window occasionally for lack of "space". Google Reader has further reduced the strain on my poor system by collecting all the sites I normally view into one page that ajaxically ^TM, yeah I invented that word, updating when the site itself updates. This condenses even more of my tabs into a format that also has the added benefit of allowing me to check on "my" sites when ever and where ever I am more efficiently.

All that is the background for my observation, Fedex and UPS need RSS feeds. I am one of those people that obsessively checks their tracking information no matter how reliable the shipper/shipping carrier/package value/package size/weather conditions/etc. involved. I just have to know where my package is NOW! If they had a RSS feed then I'd be able to see when there was an update in Reader and maybe I could spend more of my precious time refeshing some other site.