I'm down at Niagra Falls, this second time has been spent on the American side. It's something about watching the rush of water that is inspiring and renewing. It only takes 8 hours to get here and the drive is fairly straight forward and scenic. Last night, I figured out how to edit my Frontpage created website through NVu, an open source web page editor that works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I am going to stick to using it even though I own Frontpage 98. You'll slowly see content on my website shift. I think I may also use the tool to publish my website to another provider and move off of this 2 ISP situation I am currently in. So now to the subject at hand.

I have three daughters age 6,1,and 2 months. Inevitably one or all will be wanting to follow in their dads footsteps. In any case, all of them will benefit from understanding the proper, no compromise thinking that should go into decision support systems. In the mean time, I have many years to figure out activities for them and cleansing and shaping my own character for them to follow.

I've got a nephew who graduated valedictorian from his high school class and is starting in his first year already wanting to follow in my foot steps. I hope to get him over here for a few years of community college while I train him in the black art of programming.

My wife has a good deal of domain knowledge about dentistry. I'd like to expand on a project several classmates and I worked on for our masters degree to build a dental offiice software package for third world dental offices. In today's world, that means a web service which many dentists can access with a simple internet phone card.

As long as I can remain in independant consultant, I will fill my idle time planning and executing on these things rather than worry about where my next paycheck is going to come in. I'm confident in the short term that I'll be able to fill the paychecks. I'm happy with the base of experience I've built on. I've found myself able now to focus on learning skills that I would not normally use as an employee of a company. In the long term the consulting paychecks will be replaced by the seeds I plant today towards growing a family IT business with a focus on learning how businesses work and building decision support systems that serve those businesses better, faster, and stronger than anyone else can build them.