I'll talk here about the technology stack I am trying to maintain with proficiency by year end. I will do so through reading, experimenting, networking with others, and displaying my work over the web.

Well, my home office is on the bottom floor next to my garage. I live in a small town home and lately, it feels like I'm cooking up a business in the garage. In the past month, I've helped launch on analytic prototype. I've also built a process that will add thousands of new products into the mix for an ecommerce company. In the meantime, I've been reading,reading,reading and experimenting, experimenting, experimenting with different technologies. I've also been faithfully attending three user groups - Ruby on Rails, Java, and Oracle. The money is only trickling now to life support/non-breaking into savings levels but I'm happy and optimistic that my new activities will generate the opportunities myself and my family will need for the future. I'm excited about technology again and that will show in the work I do and the stories I tell when I go out there looking for business. I've been turning down some inquiries about full time employment and have set a timeline til the end of the year to come up with a game plan or to seriously start looking for another full time gig. Ideally, I can line up enough opportunities for some supplemental income and sign on for a low impact full time job for the stability and health insurance. My Cobra runs out next November so I have time as long as I can keep enough money coming in.

So as for the technology stack - I've read through a bunch of chapters on OLAP and Data Mining. This will be my specialty and what I go out and sell. I've already got a solid ETL and canned reporting back ground. I've beefed up my ability to talk about scalability and performance on big systems by reading Scalzo's book on star schemas for DBAs. I've started playing with Google Analytics and this lets me talk about mining clickstream data. On and on... below is the stack.

The Stack - Things I can do or will be able to do by year end.

Data Mining / OLAP using Pentah//SQL Server 2005, Strategy Companion

Reporting using Pentaho or Sagent

Clickstream analysis - Google Analytics

ETL using Sagent, Pentaho Kettle, PL/SQL and Perl, Wherescape

Web apps using JSP/Servlets or Ruby on Rails for building clients/servers. Use of CSS,Box Model,AJAX,XHTML

Web services - Ruby on Rails with SOAP/XML-RPC

Database install and use: SQL Server,MySQL,Oracle

Documentation using UML to Visio and Apple Pages and Microsoft Word.

I'd like Melissa to learn Flash since it looks similar to the skills she uses to creat such great iMovies. I'll wait for the Adobe/Macromedia merger to settle down before I plunk money down on the tool suite.

I'd like to learn Guided Navigation using Endeca, Clickstream Analytics using Omniture, and Operations monitoring using Nagios but these are not on my priority list right now.