Back on the bus again.

I just found out today that I am being laid off due to a restructuring, so I am back to looking for work again.

What is particularly sad about this lay off is that I was working with a great group of people, and many of them are also being let go too.

I'm going to use the holiday break to decompress a little, and then get going with the job search again on Monday. I'll also be hitting the books harder too.

Wish me luck.

Fonts, colors, and weight with CSS.

I didn't get a lot of reading done over the last week, but I did dive back in to Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML and got going with Chapter 9. It is slow progress, but progress none the less. It's great learning how to set fonts, colors, and weight with CSS. It will be nice once I get done to finally apply this stuff to my sites. Yeah, I know, once I get done. This seems to be taking a long time, but given the dynamics of everything that has happened in the last few months, I think I am doing quite well.

As for getting started with the robotics, I decided to go through the NXT manual and familiarize myself with everything instead of just loading the software and trundling along getting lost. Hopefully by next weekend I'll have a little bot running around. I'll post some pictures if I get something running.

Settling in.

I am starting to settle in to my new job, and I am hoping to get back to my studies and hobbies in the new future. I know I haven't been posting here that much, but I haven't really had much to say with regards to studies or my hobbies.

I do need to get back on track with the studies so I can improve my sites and actually make them worth viewing. Maybe I should just spend some time reworking the sites off-line, so as to push me to study more. There have to be some tricks out there to get the studies going again.

Any suggestions?

Catching up for the week.

I have been really busy over the last week, so I have not had a chance to post here until now.

Work is going great! I am settling in and I am making good progress and learning a lot. I would like to say I have been making the same progress with my HTML studies, but just haven't had time to sit down with the Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML book lately. I am hoping get in so study time over this weekend. Even though I have a job, I still want to develop and improve my skill set, and I definitely need to clean up my web sites. I also will continue to develop my interest in web accessibility.

I am going to drop the Apache, PHP, and MySQL studies for now, and start up with C# shortly. Studying C# will not only help me at work, but also may be beneficial with my robotics work using Microsoft Robotics Studio (MRS) from what I have been told. I will be using the Lego NXT system to start with because it can be used with MRS and it's easy to work with.

Given that it's now "that season" in the Seattle (cloudy, rainy, dreary) I'll be taking my astonomy interest inside and play with some of the free astronomy programs that come with Ubuntu as well as working with the Astro Link Blog and the Cloudymidnights Blog. I'll also be playing around with my CoCo, though I'll be posting more about that on the 8-Bit Retro Computing Blog.

I think I'll be busy for quite some time. Cheers! :)