Today was my last day on a project in which I wrote some XSLT and an XML Schema for this web service front end thingie for a large service information database. I’ve been doing this for six weeks, or about two months calendar time, and while it hasn’t been the most rewarding of projects in terms of intellectual challenge, I’ve had some fun in the process.

Today, on my last day, they changed the design of the whole application. No more XSLT, no schema. We won’t need them, thank you very much. Actually, no web service beyond an ftp service left masquerading as one, either, but I was never involved in any of the Java coding, so I don’t care about that. What I do care about is that I just spent six weeks of doing, it turns out, nothing.

This is what you live for when you’re a consultant. Usually, they won’t throw away what you’ve done until you’ve left, but it does happen, and it just did.

My Very First Blog…

Earlier tonight, my wife Karin and I drank some wine (well, I drank beer; she had the wine) while talking about the kind of stuff that people put in their blogs these days (ten years ago, this stuff ended up in unmoderated newsgroups like misc.writing where nobody seldom talked about writing per se). One short subject after another came up, excellent blogging material, all of them. So that’s what I said.

What’s a blog? Karin asked.

What better way to explain than to create one and start blogging? A quick Google search led me to blogger.com (that’s the kind of person I am; I need other people’s opinions for reassurance), and about fifteen minutes later (of which most was spent coming up with a user name and a prefix to the URL), here I am. With my very own blog.

Karin, of course, lost interest in the subject even before we finished the wine (well, the beer), but imagine the fun I’ll have, sending the URL to her first thing Monday morning. Cool.

So I hope you’ll enjoy reading this. And if not, well, too bad.