Whoops, I'm a bit late with my report after 7 months of transition away from Microsoft and on to freer pastures. Life, as they say, has been getting in the way.

  • At this point, I pretty much do not touch the Windows box except to put together the Daily Grind and to keep up my business bookkeeping in QuickBooks. My accountant is pretty well tied to the latter. We're planning a physical move across the country later this year, if all goes well, which will probably provide an opportunity for switching accountants and accounting packages.

  • I haven't written a line of code in anything other than Ruby (and more specifically RoR) in the last month. The two active Rails projects I have are moving along fine. I'm getting in good amounts of billable hours at a decent rate, both clients are happy, and I'm on track to complete the work on time and under budget.

  • The "on time and under budget" part is a two-edged sword: it's getting to the point where I ought to be scratching for more work again, though I also need to follow up with the existing customers to see whether they want to extend the engagements.

  • More and more I know what I'm doing in RoR without having to look it up, though I still am far from true expertise in the environment. I still need to really be pounding out more code every day to get to that point. I've always learned computer languages by immersion with reference materials handy, though, so I'm satisfied with this state of affairs.

  • We recently purchased our second island in Second Life, and rentals are starting to throw off some profit at a decent ROI. So while SL doesn't look as likely to turn into a full-time job as it did a couple of months ago, it may yet become a reasonably profitable hobby.