Quite a bit has happened since I've moved from South Carolina to the dying metropolis of Fond du Lac, WI. So much in fact, that I haven't even bothered to write anything. Alright, maybe not really, but still... Here's a quick update on the projects I've been working on and the things I've been up to.

It's with a partially sad demeanor that I'll be leaving South Carolina in just 15 days. It's been a long — very long — three and a half years here. Had some experiences, did a lot of lazing around, but now I'm off back to the frozen north and couldn't be more excited.

There's been a lot of "Top Lists" around the internet lately. And their completely random like "Top 53 new websites for designers", or "Top 18 reasons to dance on your head". Keeping with that, I've composed not one, but two top lists.

Recently I got involved with a volleyball group in Myrtle Beach, SC. It's a bunch of B-level people of all ages getting together 2-3 times a week playing some semi-competitive ball. We play in the sand, on the beach, on the grass, and in the gym. There are even times when we have some tournaments.

A few of us decided that we need a website to communicate when and where to play, links to volleyball equipment, and all around camaraderie. We tossed a quick site up using Weebly and actually got some traffic to it!

I was told not too long ago by someone that the year 2007 brought about a rather large change to the working masses. That change was that the number of service-based jobs out numbered that of production jobs. Now whether this is due to robots from the Robotic Uprising of the Late 90's, or that the majority of the population is too busy or too rich to worry about learning how to do things themselves isn't quite known. But no matter how you answer that question, an even larger one comes up, "Is the customer always right?" I'm sure everyone's heard that expression before — probably from working in retail or for some older gentleman when they were young — "The customer is always right, even when he's not." But in today's society of extreme specialization, can we still opperate productively by that same principle? Can we trust that the consumer (or client) isn't out to just get a superior service for an inferior price? And once we do believe the consumer/client isn't out to just get a deal, do we push for their education through our experience and expertise or simply give them that for which they are asking?

It's been a long haul, but my latest and greatest project is ready to go live. I've joined up with a great friend from college (follow her twitter feed @lynndro) to start a full-service interactive business that focuses on young company branding.

We both decided that the typical 8am-5pm lifestyle was not in our best interest and we could make a better impact on the world by being our own bosses. Sure, that's easier said than done, but we've taken that first step and have become a recognized business in Houghton County, Michigan

I'm pretty new still when it comes to cakePHP, but there's a few things that I've noticed in my limited exposure that screams a developer created this. Throughout my job I learned that my foremost expectations of "web developers" is completely not true. I was under the impression that everyone in web development (whether they focused on design or development) could build a fully dynamic website. Sure, people focusing in development may make some odd design and layout issues, but he/she would still get the job done.

Ever had the need to move blog data from one platform to another? If you've ever worked with clients or more than one blog before, you're sure to have your own favorite blogging platform. Maybe it's MovableType, Blogger, Wordpress, or maybe even BlogCFC. If you're lucky enough, maybe you'll be moving from one platform to another that's made by the same company. Six Apart at least at sometime owned or operated MovableType, Blogger, Vox, and LiveJournal, and typically have a really easy way of porting data from one to the other. Wordpress has a couple of nice tools to importing from other platforms as well. But what I have noticed is that many of these platforms lack one major import tool. And that's the one from what was the only ColdFusion Markup Language blog, BlogCFC.

Over on Jesus is my Sword this weekend was a post wondering if websites should be thought of as software and free updates should be expected. It felt to me like he was saying that they should be expected. I don't think that same way. I'm much more under the opinion that a website servers a specific purpose now and that anything other than potential security issues should not be "given" as a free upgrade.

This last weekend at cf.objective(), Joe Reinhart gave a presentation about what's new and upcoming in Model-Glue 3 (gesture) and then announced its alpha release. That night I downloaded it and got it running with the 6 4-bit Coldfusion 8.0.1 with Apache 2.2 on OS X leopard in no time at all. However, on my test machine running Fedora Core 9 I had a few problems.

Recently the company I work for made a decision to make a decision to choose a content management system (CMS) to use for most of our clients. In all, it sounds like a great idea for us programmers as the workload from designer to programmer would hopefully move from 30%-70% to closer to 50%-50%. But by being able to lessen our work load, do we essentially loose our marketability for the future?