Happy New Year From Alaska

Snowy Bench In Alaska

I worked New Year’s Eve, though it wasn’t entirely productive. I was using a really old temporary machine until they could supply me with something workable. It only had 250 Mb of RAM… translation – it was SLOW! I would click or ALT-TAB to change windows and it would literally take up to one minute to redraw the screen. Pretty painful. Anyway, yesterday was one of their senior programmer’s last days and I got his machine. So of course I spent the remainder of the day trying to get it restored and ready for work. I also finally got a 1000 foot view of “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” from my supervisor. It’s always nice to have the big picture of what you are actually working on.

We currently have two products. One is a POS system (point of sale) for hair and beauty salons. From what I understand it is fairly generic and customizable for use in any hair salon. The other product and the one I am working on is a custom built POS system for Regis Corporation. They are one of the largest companies in the hair styling business and own brands such as MasterCuts, Supercuts, Regis Salons, Sassoon Salon, etc. They are an international company and I was told that they have over seven thousand salons in the U.S. and abroad. Our initial beta test salons will be getting our software in the first part of 2008 and are located in the U.K. and Germany.

I was a little skeptical at first and thought the idea of creating software for hair salons was a bit humorous. Now that I have seen the software and know a little bit more about what we are doing I’m actually pretty excited about it. The group of engineers I am working with are all fairly young and pretty talented from what I have seen. I am sure I will learn a ton of new stuff while I am with Rogers Software Development. Of course I also hope that I will be with them for a while; the job hopping is getting old and wearisome.

I hope this was not too terribly technical for my family and friend readers. It should give you some idea as to what the heck I am doing up here, though. So I’ll close with this…

HAPPY NEW YEAR!