For those of you who don't read my blog at http://romsteady.blogspot.com/, I begin work at Ritual Entertainment a week from today.

I'm no longer writing my journal entries here.

Instead, I'm updating my domain, http://www.romsteady.net/, on a regular basis. I'm also blogging at http://romsteady.blogspot.com/.

That way, people who are philosophically opposed to coming to Slashdot won't have to come here.

Two small items.

1. There will be an updated version of my whitespace article next week on Code Project.

2. I will also be submitting an article on auto-updating applications to Code Project next week.

I have taken a side job as a contractor, and I'm debating as to whether or not to keep it.

When I was working at Microsoft, I knew the project intimately and I could work on anything and use as much time as needed as long as it advanced the project.

Now, I'm working for Layton City, and I've got 30 projects on my plate. I can work on any of them at any time, although I'll usually focus on one or two for a couple of weeks to advance them quite a ways or even finish them.

With this contracting gig, I was told to work on a shipping module for an ASP.NET E-commerce web site. He told me that some of his customers needed to restrict shipping options based off of mileage. That was the extent of the direction I was given.

I decided to take on the distance module first. I spent a few hours getting used to his code base, then wrote the distance module. I used a binary search algorithm after splitting it based off of the first digit of their ZIP code. Got it down to an average of 4 comparisons. Not bad.

Then, I decided to work on USPS Priority Mail. It took me about 4 1/2 hours to develop the PriMail interface. It uses two internal LUT's that need to be updated when there are new postal rates and zones, but because of the way I developed it, it is one of the fastest shipping modules for USPS out there.

Immediately after finishing each module and the test harness for the module, I delivered it. UPS and FedEx don't have open code for searching, so I hadn't started work on those yet.

Last night, I got an E-mail saying he was going to buy a component rather than use mine. Evidently, paying $270 for 18 total hours of meetings, design work, and coding specific to his site was too much.

Well, we've rolled out the first major project from our small development team (here).

Now, I'm rewriting our business licensing program. Joy of joys.

Since when is commenting on "opt-out" instead of "opt-in" when referring to a telemarketing bill "Offtopic"? I've only done Offtopic mods *once*, and that was when the post was not only Offtopic, but severely offensive.

Mods, save your points. Moderate up the posts that are hidden gems, and moderate down the posts that are complete crap. Leave the middle posts alone.

I'd say that's one way to reduce/eliminate the annoying "First Post" crew, but it makes it a bit annoying to have to wait, especially when you think you have something useful to say.

Oh, well. It was a throw-away post that I posted that made fun of the idea of building your own Apple by talking about making your own apple (the fruit).

What is happening in the world when someone who accepts Microsoft is getting decent mods?