Tell them, my song.

This will probably be my last post for this year, but it will most certainly be my last post before the holidays.

Traditionally, I don’t work or do anything work-related from Christmas Eve to New Years Day. For me, Christmas Eve is kind of holy and it is the day that I spend at home with my woman and maybe one or two other very close persons. I’m not religious, but it’s hard to leave behind old habits and traditions that I grew up with. In this case, I never even tried.

So, religious or not, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

On a further note, there have been some new and interesting developments in my life and it now is getting serious: In the beginning of 2009, I will start my own company, focused on software development, network and web services and, if there’s a demand for it, technical writing.

The launch window couldn’t be any better. I will be working closely with an old school friend of mine who’s been running an own and successful IT business for more than a decade. He now needs a second developer to work on his software product and to migrate it to a new platform. This is where I enter the stage and this is going to be my first contract and customer. I will have to dive deeply into the old Visual Basic 6 and today’s Visual Basic.NET for this gig, but I’m sure it won’t kill me to spend more time with Microsoft technologies again. The good news is that I always liked the .NET platform, although I’ve only seen it through the eyes of C# so far.

So 2009 will be a lot more different than 2008, which mostly saw my departure from the United Nations and a recovery period from that organization, and in 2009 I will finally be leaving the employee-life itself behind. I’m a bit nervous, and maybe a bit anxious, but I know that this step has been long overdue and that it is the right thing to do for me.

So, good luck and much success to myself and everybody else who is going to be in similar shoes next year!

Or as the Klingons say whenever they enter battle or start a daring endeavor: Qapla’!