Maybe it's the uber-caffiene injection (quad venti no-whip mocha, thankyouverymuch) mixed with the quick availability of book learnin' - especially since the entrepreneurship books are damn near always one row over from the coding section - but every time I hit the Barnes & Noble in Huntersville I get hit with the classic entrepreneurial seizure.

This happens every time, no matter what my current station in life is.  The first time it happened, I was underemployed, working at Target and Blockbuster to make ends meet - it was easy to know then that I could do better.  Next, I worked for medium-size tobacco as their sr. developer (thanks to the experience I had with help from the VS support guys I worked next to at MS during the .Net 1.0 beta days).  It was a job, but I knew that I could do better.

I formed a master plan.  I would find a job in NYC as a developer at a big financial, work there for a few years, and then come back down to Charlotte to work for one of the banks here.  Mission Accomplished.  I got my chance through the good people at E5 Systems to work for Credit Suisse|First Boston, a large (if not troubled) I-bank in midtown Manhattan.  I was able to join a new development team from the very beginning, and used the ramp-up time to position myself as the development team's IT guy - getting VSS, NUnit, NCover, and FXCop (have they gotten around to documenting the introspection API yet? Thanks Reflector!) to integrate rather nicely inside of VS.Net with the help of a couple add-ins and deployment scripts I wrote, all humming under the protective umbrella of CruiseControl.Net.  It was a regular Team System 2004 if you ask me - minus the spit n' polish of course.

But, even after working on getting that running, even after spending the months after that building extensible middle-tier components for templated email, security, and process - that was a nice change from the repetitive cycle of DB-driven ASP.Net apps - even after all that, I thought I could do better.  But, I had a plan to stick to, and a wife from Charleston who was already asking me when we'd be heading back to the “proper” wide of the Mason-Dixon line.

Well, Wachovia came calling, and here I am now, still a contractor, but doing good work with good people for the last few weeks.  Again, the feeling hit me - I can do better.  I'm not going to start looking for another job - nosir, the pay rate is right, and I can probably get myself into a 7-4 schedule if I can get my night-owl butt out of bead early enough.

No, it's time to fire up some new streams of income - how I'm going to do it, I'm not sure.  Step one, I think, will be to establish a presence for myself that's a little deeper than a blog, but hey - I'd rather have a blog than brochureware.  Step 2 - Well, step 2 is still a little fuzzy.  Step 3, naturally, is profit - although I'd settle for revenue at first.  Profit can come later.

Naturally, as this new wave of gumption has come to me, the MSDN Universal subscription that was bestowed upon me by an old job has run out, leaving me out in the cold - with VS.NEt 2005 beta 2 (supposedly) a month away!  Curses!  Well, VWD Express will do for now, until I can get a copy of Pro beta 2 on a CD or via other means - even if I can't change the colors (how did THAT get broken so late in the game?).

Oh - I promise less rambling and more usefulness in the future, or maybe it'll be up to you (and/or feedster) to pick out the goodness from the cat pictures.  We'll see.

- G