A new year

.. a time to look forward

Image via Wikipedia

Now 2009 is officially on its way and it is passed the day for sending best wishes I will give a quick update on what I am upto in the coming time.

Currently I am involved in some projects at work (both insourced and outsourced) and personally I am doing a bit of a project as well. Let me tell you some things about these.

Work projects

Normal working hours

Image via Wikipedia

Working as a consultant I am since May last year working on a huge project for the Dutch Taxes. I was hired out to Getronics PinkRoccade, which was taken over by Capgemini. It's an interesting project. I think that's a nice way of putting it. My main activities are in programming parts of the Intranet site using things like C#, ASP.NET, WCF, HTML, CSS, SQL Server, SharePoint MOSS. All in a nice Team System environment on a virtual machine.

The funny thing is that my first ever job orientation I did was with Capgemini (I declined, finding it did not fit me). The first ever real job interview was at the Dutch Taxes. I completely flunked that as I had no idea what a job interview was. There were seven (!) people sitting across the table and that completely got me confused.

Other moments of the day

That project is not enough apparently and we are working on some in-house side projects. One of those is a Saas application we are devleoping. It's an online version of Microsoft team Foundation Server. Currently we are busy setting up the service. The accompanying site is getting close to full launch. The actual service is (still) in alpha testing and we expect soon to start with the first beta tests. All in all really exciting.

Coming soon

If that still does not seem enough there already running plans for a next in-house project. This is at the moment still hush-hush. But we intend to outsource some of the coding and also make use of our own Online TFS service. Can be really exciting as well.

Is there still time left?

Well, hardly any time left. But time enough to squeeze in a little project of myself. I am writing a small Silverlight application. To learn that environment, but also because I am need a tool to draw the excercises I use in my field hockey trainings. Usually I just jots some lines and arrows on piece of paper and that's it. But I want to go one step further and have something readable for others.

I have looked around the web and found some tools / sites. These are either big downloads and cost a little or a lot of money. But they all lack some of the things I want. I want to be able to share my excercises and let others use them as inspiration to create even better excercises. Very Web 2.0, very social app.

So, I am trying to set all these things up and have chosen Silverlight as the rich UI element for drawing the excercises.

Enough to keep me busy?

It seems I have a family as well and a hockey team and a dog and a cat.

Better get to work and than quick to get back again and be socially responsible.

Pictures

.. of silly things

In the past week I took some pictures with my phone which I would like to share with you. The pictures have in common that they both brought a smile to my face and a wrinkle on my forehead.

These pictures just make me wonder if there are people out there that just do stupid things out of good intentions.

Inspirational poster

For the past couple of months I have been involved at a project at Getronics PinkRoccade. That was recently taken over by CapGemini. On the 1st of December things got really going. We had coffee cups with the CapGemini logo and there were pens (the whole familiy now uses those) and peppermint and all things wow!

The same day the logo was taken of the building and replaced. Also posters appeared throughout the building. Including the one above.

So, now we are invited to "do what we want". I don't think that will do the progress of the current project much good. On the other hand I ahve now more time to do one or the other blog post.

Parking lot

Then this weekend I visited a restaurant in the NH Hotel just outside of Kaatsheuvel, The Netherlands and spotted this sign.

The parking lot was slightly wider. I measured it and found that this was four steps wide and the others were three steps wide. So, the parking lot was conceived by someone with the conception that women need more space to park their cars in. That must have been a man. A male chauvinist pig with a tiny brain. Every right thinking man knows that women drive in smaller cars so they do not need extra space to park in.

Thinking back I wish I had spotted the sign before I parked my own car. If I had seen it earlier I probably would have parked like an asshole square across at least two parkings spaces. But then again I would have needed a big SUV for that.

Probably

Probably both these have been created by someone with good intentions, but they have both failed completely in my opinion. But still they failed with success.