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'm not a sci-fi guy or a fantasy guy.  If I read, I'm typically reading about religious stuff or code.  A few years ago, for some unknown reason, I picked up Ender's Shadow and read the back cover.  About 28 hours later (yes, I did sleep...I think), I finished it.  I did likewise with Ender's Game, Shadow of the Hegemon, and Shadow Puppets.  Tonight, I happily discovered that Orson Scott Card has finished the last (I think) in the Shadow series - Shadow of the Giant.  The first three chapters are available on the site.

I've been playing with Money for a few days.  Overall, I'm happy with it, but there are some annoying items.

• A good deal of text is not selectable.  I should be able to select any text (especially account info, amounts, payee names, etc.) and copy it elsewhere.
• If you select "Online Registration" from the About dialog, you can't close it without registering.  There's no "x" to close it.  There's no cancel button.  Not even alt+F4 works.
• It includes items that a common person wouldn't consider as income as income items.  I'd guess that if I make a credit card payment, that most people wouldn't consider the credit of that payment to my account as income.  I realize that it is from an accounting perspective, but I'm not interested in GAAP here.  I just want to know how much money I have coming in from work (e.g. what regular people consider income).

On the upside, they fixed a huge bug that previous version had (the last version I used was 2002).  If you have more than one account with a financial institution, Money is OK with that now.  In the past, I had to play games to make Money happy because I had two cards from one lender.

I've finally been able to get back to web dev lately.  I started using XSLT in fall 2000 and every few months I find a project where it's a good fit.  I'm thinking of doing up a starter guide to XSLT.  I found that a lot of developers don't seem to know too much about it.  I'm hopeful that in doing the guide, I'll learn it better myself.

Wow.  I upgraded my blog to dasBlog 1.7 last night.  All went rather smoothly.  It involved a bit more effort than previous drag and drop upgrades, but I think it was worth it.  Kudos to Scott, Omar, and whomever else was involved with the effort.

I just wrote to a friend of mine that I'm going to school fooltime.  I wonder if my subconscious is trying to tell me something.