What goes in to a “first post”?  Apparently you should tell everyone a little about yourself and what they can expect from your blog.  James Avery has brought up starting a blog several times to me so I decided I might as well try one out.  Not sure if I’ll have a lot of say, but we’ll see.

Who Am I?

First of all, I’m not the only Mike Wood who is blogging.  That Mike is currently James Avery’s boss and used to be mine for a while.  I worked for a company called G.A. Sullivan, which was bought out by Avanade.  When we were absorbed into Avanade I started to get email for the other Mike Wood quite a bit.  He is an easy going kind of guy and I enjoyed working with him.  I left Avanade due to the amount of travel that was involved. 

Now I work for a corporate company in-house and don’t have near as much challenge on the job, but you know, I’m home almost every day before 4:00 pm.  I even usually get home before my wife who is a teacher!  You can’t beat that!  I am pretty much a one man project team currently as I’m doing design, development (of UI, mid-tier, and database), but I’m looking forward to helping the larger team move the existing web applications to .Net from ASP/VB6 COM.  The current project I"m on is already fully .Net, which is why I was originally hired there.

I’ve been working with Microsoft technologies for about six years now, but I’ve been programming and working with computers since I was bout ten or eleven.  I learned Basic on a Commodore 64 and got hooked on programming.  I think my first program was one I typed verbatum from the Commodore 64 manual and it made a balloon float across the screen made of “sprites”.  I picked up Pascal in High School and then a smidgen (most of which I have forgotten) of C++ in college.  My major wasn’t Computer Science, so didn’t really expand my horizons in programming there.  About six years ago, after leaving my first chosen profession, I started working with MS Access applications.  This led to Visual Basic work, then on to .Net.  I’ve been working with .Net since the early Beta’s when I got the chance (misfortune?) to work on a big .Net project alongside MCS prior to the public release of .Net.

As for the rest of my life: I’m married, no kids, one dog and a house in northern Kentucky.  I have several hobbies, most of which I don’t have the time to partake in (or at least it seems that way).  A friend of mine (Levy) told someone once that I do all the stuff we geeks used to do in high school (video games, role-playing, etc.) but grew out of.  Yeah, that’s pretty true.

What can you expect out of this blog?

Hopefully I have something worth while to talk about on technical aspects and then some interesting stuff on the personal side.  I plan on coming up with my own .Text skin so look forward to many changes to the appearance of the site (if you use an aggregator I guess you’ll just miss out. :) ).

Well, that’s about all for now!  I’m headed off to Scotland on personal vacation with my wife this weekend.  We are gone for a week, so don’t expect much till I get back (unless I find a terminal over there and can post something).

Take care!

Mike Wood
(No, the other one)