I closed a chapter of my life on Friday…  I am no longer an employee of Edstrom.  I left under good terms and provided them with a two week notice.  I can say that I will definitely miss the team (Jayme, Dave L., Dave M., Sean, Mike, and Harish) that I worked with there. 

As for me, the only thing I can say about my future plans is that they should prove to be interesting.  I have a couple things lined up, but I will wait to elaborate on the specifics for now.

In the mean time, I’ve been repaving my machine.  I wanted to start out with a fresh Windows install to go along with my change in life.  I got rid of Windows XP64 and just installed regular Windows XP.  XP64 just doesn’t get the support that it should.  So many programs don’t recognize it as Windows XP and thus it’s not a valid OS.  Maybe vista will give 64bit computing the attention it deserves. 

I decided not to install Newsgator and instead have been using RSS Bandit.  I haven’t used it long enough to have a decent opinion about it, so we’ll see how it goes.  I can say that the little bit that I’ve used it, I’ve noticed some pretty cool features that Newsgator didn’t/couldn’t offer.  It feels both nice and somewhat foreign not using Outlook/Newsgator for my RSS joy. 

As far as development environment goes, I decided not to install Visual Studio 2003, but just go with 2005.  Again, it seems that MS rushed that product through QA, but hopefully the benefits outweigh the random crashes/bugs.  It’s nice not having to install IIS on my dev box.  I plan on installing some alternative technologies (Rails, Python, java?, etc) on this box, to expand my world a little.