Well, it's been a crazy past couple of weeks for me (actually, it has been a couple of months).  I find it humorous that about a year ago, I wrote about a new job venture I started.  Unfortunately, that did not last long.  Did I do something wrong?  Was I fired?  No, none of that.  My employer just took a different direction on their project and that direction did not fit my career plans. 

Originally I was brought in to help them transition to .NET and re-design their legacy VB6/Oracle system.  As the project progressed,  I ran into a lot of resistance on trying to change the current process.  You may ask, was the process wrong?  No, it wasn't.  All I was trying to do is ask "why do you do it that way?" and try to introduce and have them adopt a predictable, reusable one.  In other words, I wanted to focus on the main business problem than the peripheral technology wars.  That's it.

So along came a hippo....huh?  That's right, a long came a hippo, a flying one at that, that provided an opportunity to be part of something greater than myself or a team.  It was to be part of product and its story.  It has been several years since I've been a part of a software shop atmosphere were a team worked together to a deliver a product that would hopefully solve a user's need.  The more I learned about the hippo, the more I became interested and excited.

So here I am now, a member of the crew.  The what? ... come again?  This paragraph explains it better:

A large plodding mammal in excess of 2-tons with delicate wings sprouting from the rear quarters ain't exactly normal. 
But neither are we.  We are different than your run-of-the-mill website developer.  We believe that a website
should first and foremost meet the functional requirements of the business it represents.  But there's no reason
it needs to look like everyone else's stale site.  Why not give it a little zip, a little pizazz, some personality?

Don't get us wrong, we don't mind, in fact we enjoy, doing traditional sites - after all, we've got to pay the bills like
everyone else (and feed the hippo!)  In fact there are instances when creating a whiz-bang site with twirling logos and all
the bells and whistles just isn't appropriate or feasible.  However, give us a chance and we'll throw in some clever ideas
and interesting graphics that might dazzle you.  We can do things that you never dreamed of - like make a hippo fly.

We're nothing more than some web & designer geeks having a good time building sites and software!  I'm really excited about what will come out of a group of people that love and enjoy their profession...perhaps some WPF and Silverlight? ;-)