End of year Wrapup

2008 draws near a close. It has been a fantastic year, full of new friends, learning and fresh experiences. 2008 had its challenges of course, but I honestly couldn't ask for a better year.

Involved in a ton of projects right now. Still refining my SharePoint skills for the new day job; also getting familiar with Microsoft Dynamics/CRM. I'm getting a serious Hyper-V setup going on in the home office, for dev/test/play purposes.

We're working to rebuild the Change Round-Up website and webservice API from the ground up; I'm getting ready to deploy the first piece of the new framework to production sometime in January. Various Higher Efficiency projects include work on an IVR+.NET webservices project, PHP/MySQL work for a Moodle module, and a complete overhaul of the Higher Efficiency website to boot.

Together with Griff Townshend and TVUG, I'm working on Tech Valley Code Camp 2009.1 -- we've settled on a March date, though we haven't picked a weekend yet. Details to follow of course; website in the process of being put up again, the host paved it with a default Plesk install after TVCC 2008.

Personally, I'm getting up to speed on Azure and SDS, as well as continuing Python explorations with Google App Engine (GAE) and BigTable. Starting to do some work with Amazon Web Service's (AWS) SimpleDB as well -- I hope to be able to present a session comparing these horizontal data offerings sometime in the spring.

Hoping everyone has safe and happy holidays, and here's to an even more awesome 2009!

Big happenings this week?

Rumors are running rampant about renewed Microhoo talks. Scoble is also proclaiming Microsoft's intent, per John Furrier, to buy Facebook outright, and close it up, turning this from "Facebook vs. Google" to "Microsoft vs. the Web".

What will this mean? To most of us, not much. Digital natives, however, I'm sure wait with bated breath. If Microsoft consolidated a position in search, and landed a major (the premier?) social networking asset, will it open a cloud computing platform a la Google App Engine to fill that gap in its offerings? As an integrated whole, and speaking as a .NET-head, that would be one SWEET setup. Speaking as an advocate for openness, transparency, portability and competition, however, I'd have to note some concerns.

Now if only Windows Mobile could be made a true competitor, outside the enterprise sector.

Meanwhile, Twitter continues to pique interest, peak traffic, and make news.