News From the Front, Social Networking, Navel Gazing

Hi. It's been a while. Things have been a bit hectic.

In the category of things I want to blog about, there's my quitting the day job this Friday. I'm resuming my consulting career and am looking forward to making things that people use again. I think I have about a month's work lined up. That gives me time to hustle the next thing and so the pattern starts.

I'm really really really looking forward to this.

I'm working at home this time; that's new. I think last time we did good things and the income was good, but I lost control of expenses. This time, I'll be more tight fisted with the money, while still having fun with the toys. :-) It's one thing to blow $300 on a Treo. It's fatal to be spending $50K a year on office lease.

The emphasis is data base design and development using tools I'm familiar with and tools that I hope to get better at. My name is on the door this time; that's a bit more incentive on my part to do a good job. Geography is no concern; let me know if you know someone that needs a database.

I'm playing quite a bit with the social networking apps. I'm signed up with:

• LinkedIn - a business contact directory. It's mostly sport for me now (this is true for all of them actually, but this one has the pretense of a business purpose.) I have a friend who claims to have leveraged this for business purposes. I'm eager to hear how.
• FaceBook - originally a college network site, it's slightly more 'mature' than MySpace, but it's in the same space. Sort of. The idea is you can see what your buds are up to. You get updates on all the people you marked as friends. I don't think you can see my profile unless you're a member.
• Twitter - Blogging for those with short attention spans. This is fun. You're limited 160 characters and you're supposed to answer the question "What Are You Doing". Using desktop apps like Twitterific, you can be interrupted all day by the smart remarks of your friends. It has programming hooks, so folks have written add-ons that let you 'chat' with your calendar, for example, and set an appointment by using Twitter.
• Pownce - Like Twitter it encourages short posts to a select group of friends. Unlike Twitter it has built in support for file transfer, links and calendar postings in addition to text posts. I'm unsure on this one; it's too close to Twitter and I've not had much use for the additional feature set. I am enamored of the technology it's built on, however.
• Plaxo - The newest and coolest, imho. Address Book, Calendar and Tasks/Notes all on the web, all synchronized with your desktop. Really handy if you're going back and forth from home to work and want the info in both places (yes, less of an issue starting on Monday....) As of Monday, this week, it also supports developing a friends network. All God's Children want to be in the Social Networking space... :-)