Well…to make a long story short I’m a loser. Not in the classical “parental basement dwelling” sense of the word, but in the “I’m neglecting my blog sense”. So here are the updates. I’ve started my new job at a fantastic company Pearson, as the Senior User Interface Designer. I will get to draw on my years of experience with user experience to help push their applications Power Teacher Gradebook, and Power School, to the next level along with a team of talented developers, and product managers. So far its great place to work and great people to work with.

In other news, and I post this with some reluctance, but I’m not given much choice. My wife’s former employer MusicTalk, Inc. has failed to pay my wife’s salary owed for last year. So far they owe us a total of roughly $20,000. We have heard nothing from their CEO Bobbie Brown, or any representatives of the company’s board of directors. We are awaiting the final judgment from the California State Labor Board, and once that is completed they would have 20 days to appeal. Considering that Bobbie didn’t show up to either the conference or the hearing at the Labor Commission I don’t expect that there will be any appeal, or any word from Bobbie Brown or MusicTalk. We will be looking into what our options are at this point. If anyone has information about this agency, or its business dealings please contact me.

Wow what a week. I start a new job this Monday…tomorrow. I’ll be working for Pearson Education in Rancho Cordova. So I won’t be a contractor at HP anymore. I’ll miss my friends there; Greg Willey, Rick “The beer guy” Sellers, and Dave Glass. This position at Pearson should be a great opportunity for me.

Additionally I went to the BoardWalk in Sacramento on Greenback to support my friend Nate Perkins and his band the Lesdystics! Took a bunch of pictures and they are on my Flickr account. Check em out! This was a lot of fun for me, and I got to test out my Cactus remote triggers and new Vivitar 295 HV flash. What a sweet setup!

Now I have to get back to work on my contract jobs…Yikes.

A few years ago I started researching my ancestry. I’ve been told of our ancestry as being something of a mix of Scottish, Welsh, Irish, French, Prussian, and German to name a few. A bit of a European mutt if you will. So the next logical step was to try and research my last name to see where it leads me. It doesn’t take me long to discover that there a half a dozen variations of my last name: Cory, Corry, Correy, Corey. So I tried looking up a few other names from my ancestry: Hambleton, Doud (I’m actually related to Mamie Doud), Habighorst. Some lead to other information, other lead to more variations. Take Hambleton, Hambelton, Hamletonn, Hamilton, Hambletonne and the list goes on. My first thought was that these were all different families, with similar names. Turns out it even more complex than that. Continue Reading »

It seems that Microsoft’s biggest critics, bloggers, are now being asked to write what ‘People-ready business’ means to them as a way to bolster the phrase and Microsoft’s association with business. This strikes me as a flailing attempt to garner support in people’s minds to think of Microsoft as a business software company. Yes, they own the Office productivity market. Yes, they own the OS market. No they are not ‘People-ready business’. (and no I am not going to link to their site!) Continue Reading »

I’ve finally succumbed to peer pressure…all those billboards and commercials finally got to me. Not really, but I decided to move to a blog format because it should be easier to write and publish my articles.

Not only have I moved to a new format for my writing…I moved my whole site! I’m now on HostMonster.com (which I discovered is the same company as BlueHost.com). So I said goodbye to Bizland.com (too many problems to list). So There’s this new blog thing, I’m adding a gallery for my photographs, and the other section will by my usual portfolio stuff, that I will be reorganinzing in the near future. So in the next few days I’ll migrate my writings to my blog from the existing site. This should be fun.