One of the things I find really helpful at the start of a semester is to make a list of professional & educational goals…I try to envision where I want to be a few years from now and then use that to determine the steps I can take now to get me there in the future…well, one of my goals for this semester is to establish an INETA group here at the University of Alabama. One of the challenges though, is making sure the content is in line with the audience – since .NET isn’t something that is really taught in classes much around here and there aren’t many companies in the area that use .NET, this would be a great way to expand awareness and build a community here that just doesn’t exist right now. One thing I’m struggling with though is making sure the topic is such that professional developers would want to visit the group and not be turned off by the topics while at the same time getting those that might not even be familiar with .NET up to speed. Have any of you particapated in a local INETA chapter at your school? If so, I’d love to hear how things run there or any advice you might have on this subject (either in the comments here or at my e-mail address abyram (at) gmail (dot) com).
August 2005
theSpoke v2
Wow, I must say I’m pretty impressed with the new theSpoke! I really like the fact that you can browse posts by category now and that the archive links are there…before, any blog on the site was not indexable by a search engine since the only way to get to old posts was via the calendar and that was all done via postbacks / javascript…but now, the days on the calendar are regular links and the archive links are regular links so previous blog posts are going to be indexable now just by pointing google / msn / whatever at your blog’s home page. I like the new color scheme too. The only thing I haven’t figured out yet is the “Who Bar”…I think I get the concept there, but I’m not sure why we have that… Very neat overall though.
127.0.0.1
Well, summer is over and I’m back home now…classes start back today…well, meetings about classes start at least. The internship experience I had over the past few months was great and I am really looking forward to using the new knowledge this semester – especially with the MIS project team (I’ll post more about this in a day or so). It looks like this semester classes are just going to be on Tues & Thurs which is great…granted, that means Tues & Thurs are pretty much shot for the whole semester, but I’d rather do that than have one or two classes every day of the week (except Friday – the business school doesn’t have classes on Friday…every other part of campus does, but somehow the business classes always work around that.) This semester should have some pretty interesting challenges in several different areas. I’m hoping to be able to get INETA started here this semester, get more visitors to my ticket exchange website (www.bamatrader.com – if you’re looking for Alabama tickets, check it out 😉 ), and then a couple of little side projects that I’ll talk about in the future…in addition to the regular course load. Anyway, time for the first meeting of the day…more to come.