First Post!!!111111
I own the T-shirt, but I always wanted an excuse to be lame and post it online somewhere.
I'm in a weird place right now. I'm working as a contractor, getting the bling and soul searching my way to a happy place in terms of career. Aside from my aspirations of writing a screenplay, I've got my hand in a lot of “stuff” right now.
First off, I launched <uber:ASP.NET> about a month ago. So far it has been fairly well received. My goal with the site is to have a mid-level resource for developers. As Joel Semeniuk mentions in his blog, there isn't enough out there for that sector. I mean, people don't just jump from learning the basics to being a .NET ninja. A lot of the people I consult for are stuck at that lower level because they don't have the object-oriented training and experience to build more complex apps. It leads unnecessary growing pains for them.
I'm trying to sell a book proposal along those lines, and I've been through one editorial review from a hot publisher, but nothing concrete. Everyone has been enthusiastic about it, but I'm not exactly getting contracts in the mail. No worries I suppose. I started my career in radio so I'm familiar with rejection!
I also maintain POP Forums, an open-source forum app for ASP.NET. Back in the ASP.OLD days I was able to sell the product and make a nice buck (and in retrospect it really wasn't very good), but since MS released their forum for free and there are a number of free PHP boards out there, I decided it was just time to get give it away. The fact that some folks helped squash some bugs and another guy wrote an Access provider for it is more gratifying than getting paid for it.
The other thing is that, in my frequently less than humble or popular opinion, the official MS www.asp.net forums are needlessly complex. There's a lot to pick out of them that's useful, but in terms of doing your own UI, I thought it was too much. I wanted a nice simple class library that I could do a minimal or massive amount of UI against, and that's how my forum was born.
I plan to use this blog to talk a lot about the development of the next version, which naturally will be Whidbey-based (and I would have already started if I could get my hands on the bits).
So my current day job doesn't feed the soul, but all of this other stuff does, and that's the stuff of narcissistic rambling you'll find here!