On the train again, 6:07am, 2 minutes before the doors close, 3 minutes before departure.  These last few weeks have been really nice in the sense of the commute.  I’ve been taking the Sounder back and forth in the morning and afternoon.  On the train they have relatively comfortable chairs, the standard smooth train ride, and the kicker is the wireless that is available on the 3x, 4x, and 1x series cars.  It’s been reliable at least 85% of the time.

The nice thing about having a commute like this is that I can really catch up on post work e-mails, work related tasks, and other things like that.  On the other hand, it does consume an additional 2.25 hours a day.  In other words, it is awesome for a short period of time but on a daily ongoing basis, that level of time consumption is purely idiotic.  There is no reason for an intelligent person to eat up an hour plus of time each way to and from work.  But I digress, next week I’ll be down to a reasonable 20 minute commute with the Portland Streetcar, 18 minute commute with the bus, 14 minute bicycle ride, or 25 minute walk each way.  In addition each of those trip options is by numerous coffee shops, diners, restaurants, and other great places where the commute times just don’t even matter when one can make use of the time.

All that makes for a nice business case against the long commute.  But with that I’m diving back in the trenches with the troops, and get some code locked and loaded.

I feel like I’ve gone blog entry crazy today.  I’ve just had a few of these entries all queued up and ready to go, just not 100% baked and ready to publish.

Recently I made a blog entry about specialization.  Actually it was a few weeks ago.  But I was going to elaborate on it to clarify my current focus.  It of course might seem to change every few weeks or months, but in reality I do have a focus, it just covers a lot of various technologies and pieces.  The following are my current focus points.

1. OLAP/SSIS/AMO and other Business Intelligence related technologies are currently my primary focus.  I have a decent bit of experience in the past with these pieces of technology.   With my new job coming up this has become more of a focus, instead of merely past experience and a spare time interest.  With a more business intelligence oriented career direction I am making a point to really focus and get specific detailed information into that brain of mine.
2. Teaching and Mentoring are two things that I enjoy doing.  Not just teaching, but working in a team or group to learn and expand the knowledge base for fellow techies.  It doesn’t matter if it is a classroom setting or a work environment.  Taking the effort to impart knowledge on others helps me as much as it helps them to expand all of our respective bases of knowledge.
3. Complete Website & E-Commerce Solutions from a full implementation vertical spectrum is also on my list of to do to expand bits of knowledge.  I’ve had several opportunities, and continue working on current opportunities to build out full vertical implementations of e-commerce and other related web sites.
4. Graphics, Video, and Photography are one of my interests, passing and possibly income earning, that I am also focused on.  Currently these focus points are efforts that I work on when time allows.  Some of these items include my recent endeavors with Camtasia, Photoshop, and other such tools, along with pending purchases of camera gear & even video equipment.
5. Blogging has become a more intense and expanding interest of mine.  I built a semi-working blog engine, threw that away and moved to Community Server, and am now making almost daily entries into the various blogs I publish.  I’ve even expanded my blogging to include Dogcaught.  Hopefully I’ll have some awesome photos to contribute to that site in the near future (see #4)!

Those are my primary concerns these days.  I hope to expand and become more specialized in each of these.  Possibly in the future operating some training classes or even mentoring sessions.

Here I am sitting at work, typing away at some code, and I took a short break to quickly read a blog entry, “Confessions of a Terrible Programmer“.  After checking out these confessions of a terrible programmer I was reading through the comments.  While reading through them I stumbled upon one that I had to post, just merely a quote, but a great quote at that.

“If I tell you I’m good, you would probably think I’m boasting. If I tell you I’m no good, you know I’m lying.” – Bruce Lee

I must say, truly a great one.

I’ve been carrying my gigantic 17″ Inspiron 1720 around in a messenger bag lately.  The bag is alright, it serves the purpose of carrying the laptop, but not much beyond just the laptop.  It doesn’t offer a whole ton of protection either.  With those issues to resolve, I set out to purchase a truly hard core backpack dedicated to protecting and carrying my laptop.  But I didn’t want just some backpack, I wanted a quality backpack!  So the search for the gigantic Insprion carrying backpack began.

I immediately dove right into a Google search.  I came back with a whole bunch of standard run of the mill futuristic and rugged looking backpacks.  “Looking” being the key word in the description.  I really wanted to see some good honest to goodness opinions on blogs and stuff like that though, so I kept digging.  I finally stumbled upon Nick Hodges blog and his “My New Laptop Backpack” entry.

In the entry he mentions what appears to be a really top notch, American Made, Seattle based company called Tom Bihn which is owned by Tom Bihn.  I’ve been staying at the Pioneer Hotel on 1st and Yesler, and this place isn’t far from there, so sometime this afternoon on my way back to the hotel, I’m going to attempt to check out their showroom sometime during my last week of work (next week).  The only catch is I have to figure out how to get there before their 4:00pm closing!  Argh!

So far, even if I don’t get to the showroom I might just purchase one anyway.  After a thorough review of their web site I honestly believe the products to extremely high quality.  Hopefully next week I’ll make a purchase and have a full write up of their products.

I’ve officially signed the paperwork this morning!  I can now announce that I will be joining WebTrends in downtown Portland on October the 15th!  I’ll be working as a business intelligence analyst and looking forward to working on their various involvements with a great deal of companies.  I will be significantly expanding my skills with business intelligence, but also with C#, SSIS, SSAS, and other such tools.

I came to this decision after a lot of research into WebTrends,  who they are working with these days (from Microsoft to airlines), and where I would fit into the WebTrends‘ Business.

Yeah!

So looking back and looking forward together I’ll be utilizing some OLAP, BI, and other related skills that I haven’t touched in 1-3 years.  It will be great to get back into the work that is done with these tools, and especially to get face time with clients and travel to see how and in which ways the various clients utilize the software tools.

Look out over the coming days, weeks, and months for my normal barrage of entries regarding C#, patterns, architecture, and related development topics, but also soon I will be posting a lot more material on OLAP, BI, SSIS, SSAS, cube development, MDX Query Language, and probably a LOT more that I haven’t even thought about yet!

As for the WebTrends Products, check them out;  WebTrends Visitor Intelligence, WebTrends MarketingLab, WebTrends Score, WebTrends Analytics, WebTrends Dynamic Search, and WebTrends Open Exchange which brings together various business partners for content management, CRM, campaign management, and other key industry tools and applications.