I was working on my big project today at POP, busily plugging away, and all of a sudden it was 4:30 and time to go home. If I weren't a contractor, I'd have stayed a while longer. I love it when the day goes by so fast. I made good progress today, the first day of really doing serious development on this project. I was really proud of myself for figuring out one thing after another, getting stuff to work, one piece at a time.

On Monday we had a kind of a kick-off meeting to orient me (as the new guy) to the project, and they asked me to start by doing a build plan. I said I'd never done a build plan before and asked if they had a sample. They said no, just put the features into a spreadsheet, prioritize them, and schedule them based on how long I thought they'd take to complete. So I did this, not having a clue how long it would take me to do any of it, and then we met yesterday afternoon to go over it. They thought it was great, and the technical manager asked me if he could use it as a sample for future build plans. I felt like a school kid whose teacher reads my paper out loud to the entire class.

I decided to leave my former web host (iPowerweb) and switch to a new one. I could hardly believe what happened. The Windows hosting service I was registered for included support for traditional ASP and ASP.NET, but although the ASP hosting has worked fine (I have had my family's forum hosted there), my birthday web site is an ASP.NET site, and I couldn't get it to work. On their support site they have a sample aspx file to upload and test to verify that ASP.NET is working properly on the server. I did that, but it wasn't working, so I called their tech support and opened an incident with them. After two days, they responded that they couldn't figure out why it wasn't working. They suggested I upgrade my service (for a fee!) and then maybe it would work. I was flabbergasted. I was trying to think of an analogy. It's like if you had basic cable, which is supposed to include local broadcast channels, and you couldn't get those channels, and they told you you have to buy a more expensive service.

Anyway, I've completed switching to a new web host (M6), and so far I've been really pleased. They respond to my questions quickly and everything seems to be working. I've had to spend the last few days downloading and uploading files, but if any of my one or two fans is reading this, they wouldn't even know that it's coming from a completely different server.

But either way, they (you) really should click the link to tell me where you're from. It's fun to see where people visiting my site are from.