A holiday in SA?

This sunday night, we'll be winging our way back to SA. A lousy 28 hours of travelling. :(

Thankfully we've got a booking at the Sheraton in Frankfurt, to sleep off the drowsiness and return balance due to the lack of sleep on the plane. What better way to get rid of 10 hours of stop-over than sleeping!

Then, for 2 measly weeks, we're meant to work remotely on edocs stuff, from the Consology offices? Hello, I work for Consology! Once those 2 weeks are up, we're meant to either fly back here to Natick, MA, or some project in EU.

Direction, or fumbling in the dark.

Obviously, the topic of my career has come up again. While I have been blissfully in tune with my current scope, I was recently doing work that was totally and utterly, well, boring. If you're not learning, you're not really enjoying anything workwise.

For those of you who don't know, heres the scope of my work...

To be vague, I'm a web developer. To be exact, I specialise in client-side markup and presentment in the form of (x)HTML and CSS. "HTML, That's Easy!" I hear you say, and you'd be right. Now ask yourself, is your HTML accessible? Do you rely on table elements to layout your pages? Do you even have a proper DTD entry in your pages and validate your markup against it? If your answers are Yes, No, Yes, you pass. :D

If not, you're probably part of that conciousness (or lack thereof) that believes that IE is a good browser, Dreamweaver is the best web development IDE ever and Accessibility is just a word.

My job of late has been nothing of that, no excitement, no challenges (except the eternal testing of patience). Its been the use of a third-party translation tool (tool's the word!), with cruddy tag-soup that we HAVE to use, and to make matters worse, probably have to change. Like I normally do in any uncomfortable situation, I try escape.

After chatting to the VP of edocs over lunch, I had a better idea of where I wanted to be, and my newly defined role within Consology and Edocs.

I want to be one of the Douglas Bowman's, Eric Meyer's and Dunstan's of the wired world. But at the same time I want to be known as the guy who made web standards possible within a Big-Web-Application™ such as Edoc's TBM product.

Is that too much to ask?

Slap my forehead for me, I missed an informal meeting of standards-savvy developers right here in Boston on the 13th. Guess I shoulda hooked up FeedReader ages ago :(

One step at a time

Information analysis, learning, researching, diverging. It's all got to start, big time. I still want to give Struts / Tiles a shot, learn more about XML / SVG, maybe even some Java. Then Usability, Analysis, Architecture, sheesh. Where will I find the time?