Here in Portland, the market for Software Developers may still be sluggish, but most certainly not impossible. Back in August we had a very important seminar at PADNUG discussing the ins and outs of the business side of software dev.

At the time, someone brought up a very interesting question. So what is the going rate people should charge out for consulting here in Portland? Alot of us answered back by saying it has alot to do with what language skill is required for which ever project and the number of years experience with that language. To help with that point, an audience wide survey was done so folks could get an idea of what would generally be charged with a given language in Portland.

For anyone needing an idea of how this turned out, the spreadsheet results are available here. For folks needing a zipped version, that is available here. Much Thanks do to Rich and Howe for compiling this.

We just got back from London England Not long ago, and what a tremendous adventure it was! Our photograph collection is available for your inspection here. Have fun and don't forget to leave comments!

Yup, I was there when he won it at the PADNUG Business Side of Software Development Seminar...

Such luck, fantastic and congradulations!

I could see it now just as the plane pulls up into the London Airport:

An observer just happens to look upon our group disembarking a 747 just in from Seattle International Airport, “Sweet heart, who's that guy over there with the two quart tankard hanging from his belt, the fourteen megapixel camera around his neck, and the custom build Pocket PC on his other belt? I'll bet he's one of those traveling tourist nerds we've heard so much about!”

We any way, I hope we don't sick out (like a handful of soure thumbs) that much while we're in London, but I do hope to make a lasting on the people I meet of how much I love technology. Especially while being a tourist!

We'll be off this Saturday the 4th returning the 11th. Please take note every one, I hope to see all of you back to our site to comment on said photos that could very well be six megapixel or better! So visit now and often, and we'll see every one back here in the not so distant future.

For any one that has the time or the inclenation (without violating licensing) to try porting your group's own custom software package to your own hardware.

In the case of Owl Eval, that is exactly what I did! Over the last week I spent several says going through the process of porting the Owl Eval php/mysql web app running at the time on an Apache web server on top on Linux to my Windows box at home which is a Pentium 4 3.2Ghz 1Gig Ram running Windows XP Pro with IIS 5.1 web server with a PHP/MYSQL plugin.

I must say this was not a trivial matter! Fixing the broken link references form the old site was the most grueling espcially the documentation to say the least. But please check it out here, and tell me how well I ported things compared to the old site.

For our generation 9/11/2001 was truely an event no American will forget. This blog entry is dedicated to all the thoughts and events going on in our lives on that fateful day.

I implore any one reading this entry to reach back into your mind to that day. Where were you at the time, and what were you thinking when you first got the news?

For myself, I got a call from my wife about 7:45am exclaiming, “Quick, turn your radio to 820am!” The next thirty minutes completely stunned me. The rest of the that day was sent home from work, glued to the television...

Was Bush's reaction adequite? Did the 9/11 Comission correctly rule that this event had no one to blame other than Osama and Al-Qiada?

Scott Hanselman just got back from a vacation at Disneyland, CA and offers his perspective on visiting The Magic Kingdom. I must say I really got a kick out of it! Check it out here.

For the day or so, one of our computers at home was unable to use https or ftps secure server for a short while. As a result of googling on the subject, I've discovered that if you use internet explorer, there are exactly three critical settings that must be properly set to use SSL secure sockets through the internet explorer client browser:

Under the Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced Tab:

1. Use SSL 2.0
2. Use SSL 3.0
3. Use TSL 1.0

All must be checked. Time wasted trying to figure out why I couldn't fill out online orders, 34 minutes. I suppose I could've gone to Microsoft's Knowledge Base, although I didn't feel that becoming lost among the “man pages” unix style (but managable) support pages, settings tinkering seemed to be more on my side.

Hey there guys, as I'm sure you can well tell that Mateo's blog is finally up, running, and ready for your comments!

With senior project getting under way I have lots of questions so please visit often to my blog to help Mateo answer all kinds of questions regarding life, programming, .NET, and web services.

Extra kudos to Scott Hanselman, Rich Claussen, Jim Blizzard, Jay Bockelman, as well as all the OIT Staff for helping me to get this far with my programming career. With you all, none of this would be possible!

Thank you so much to you all, and please come visit often!