Today marks one year and one day since I began blogging.  It's been an interesting experience.  I've fancied myself as a writer for quite some time, but knew that I'd never do much writing professionally.  After about 12 months of writing imagistic poetry in high school, I lost the knack (if I ever had it) of writing anything that a decent sized audience would find interesting.

12 months ago I was working on working for a software company a fair distance from here.  I was also in school working on finishing my degree.  The insane amount of snow that had fallen around Christmas and New Year's was finally melting allowing me to see the 25 saplings that I'd planted a few months earlier.

Today I'm working for a transportation services company headquartered in my own town.  I'm still schooling and hoping I don't burn out between now and a little after this time next year when I should be finished.  The sapling were uprooted (along with everything else in my yard) to lay the sod that now greets me each day as I return from work.  I'm reading Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and am planning to read Kenneth Pollack's The Persian Puzzle in the near future.

12 months from now, I'll likely still be working for Flying J and will likely still be in school (though nearing graduation).  My sod will probably be leveled out and have had a spring and summer of mowing.  I just might be an agile developer and write test harnesses before implementing design specs.  I'd like to get into TDD or XP, 2005 just might be the year.

I was reading something last week (I think it was on a class newsgroup) how Windows was incapable of hardcore and secure computing.  Such things as online banking and financial processing were far beyond its reach.  Hmm.

I was quite delighted to catch a link to this from Scott Hanselman today.  The article is a case study of Corillian - a company that writes Windows based financial software.  Also of note is the use of SQL Server and the .NET Framework.  Just perhaps, my classmate (assuming that post came from class) was a tad mistaken.

From the article..

Currently, more than 19 million end users—or about 25 percent of U.S. online banking customers—use Corillian technology when they use their institution's online services for transactions such as checking balances, paying bills, and transferring funds between accounts.

These include brand-name institutions such as JP Morgan Chase & Co., BankOne, SunTrust, and Commerce Bank, as well as large credit unions such as the State Employees' Credit Union and the Boeing Employees Credit Union.

I tend to participate a lot at school.  I've got seven posts and one assignment waiting in my outbox for UoP's servers to get back up and running.  Our classroom newsgroup server (I think an Exchange 5.5 box) just went red (up from orange) on the server status page.  I think that means - the poor box is down and has been for some time (around 15 minutes, I'd guess).