Happy New Year!

It's been a wild three weeks. The last time I wrote here, December 15th, was the day I launched the web application that I had been working on since June. I was at work until 2 AM that night...

PASBC, the Post-Seconary Application Service of British Columbia, makes it easy to apply to most of the public colleges and universities in BC, paper-free.

It was written in Objective-C using WebObjects 4.0.1, running behind Netscape Enterprise Server 3.6 on Windows NT, with an Oracle 8i backend running on Sparc Solaris 7 Server. The app could easily be recompiled to run on a Mac OS X Server box, or a Solaris box. No code changes. Zero, zilch.

We could not have achieved the performance, scalability or design advantages we did if we had writen our WebObjects/EOF classes in Java instead. Objective-C's truly dynamic runtime, and the ability to add "categories" to existing classes made it possible.

On December 20th, I resigned my position as Senior Analyst in the Web Services department at CEISS. I'm going to miss that place, many good friends of mine work there.

I started my new job as a developer for Macrobyte Resources on January 3rd. This is a great opportunity for me, as I'll be working with 10 of the most talented Frontier developers anywhere.

I believe this new job will be the catalyst to many improvements in my lifestyle...

Firstly, I can now afford to leave the basement suite in my in-law's house and rent my own house. This will be very nice for my family as we'll have much more room, and privacy.

Secondly, I'll be working from home, and I have flexible work hours. That means I don't have to get up at obscene hours anymore (like 8:30 AM! BAH!) and I'll be able to spend more time with my family..

Also, I think I'll be able to maintain this site much better than before!.

Right, and inbetween all that action there was Christmas, and we rolled the clock over to 2000! I stayed home with my wife and daughter, and we watched movies (The Iron Giant was one of them) and watched the parties around the world. What a cool day! I talked to my Oma in Germany at 3:45 PM Pacific Time on December 31, 1999. It was 12:45 AM on January 1, 2000 in Germany at the time .