There have been good times and bad, and many, many lessons learned. Ultimately, I’m proud of the path I took. Through pure stubbornness, I managed to bypass post-secondary education, by working my ass off to learn what I needed to know to get the job done (often after I had already sold it). In many ways, I attribute my success in this business to this fly or fall approach because it kept me on my toes, always learning, always hungry to improve my skills, and always ready to take on new challenges.

Looking back, I know that I went about things the hard way. A wiser, less obstinate person would have gone about things differently, but then I wouldn’t be the person I am today.

For the last year and a half, I have been working with The Blog Studio. My time with them has been very important to me for a lot of reasons. It freed me of my solitary home office, and got me out into the world, working face-to-face with people again. The life of a freelancer, especially in this industry, can be a hermetic one, and working with Peter, Lucia and Mike was a very welcome and necessary change.

Next week, I start a new era of my life as I leave the world of contract work and venture down a new, exciting path. A remarkable opportunity landed on my lap a couple weeks ago, and enticed me to make some life altering decisions.

On Monday, I will be starting work, as an employee (for the first time since directing cars in the parking lot at the Stratford Festival as an early teen), with Toronto-based Architech. Architech builds kick ass software. They are a team of people who are extremely passionate about building amazing applications for business and I could never make the jump into a full-time position like this without sharing core beliefs and passions like I do with Architech. I’m confident we will have a bright future together.

Needless to say, I’m extremely excited, and can’t wait to see where this new direction takes me.

I’m sure I’m forgetting a bunch, but I think these are the main ones. That was tough ? it’s crazy how some of thes trips are starting to blend together in my mind, and I can’t remember if they were last year, or the year before…getting old.

Update: Oops…umm…forgot our honeymoon…NYC.

However, this year I did find it hard to resist some of the online bargains that were available. For a few weeks now, I’ve been meaning to upgrade the RAM in my MacBook (especially since upgrading to Adobe CS4), and BestBuy had 2GB chips on sale for $29.99.

I’m sold. I add 2 of the chips to my cart, and click checkout. I’m then prompted to login. Now I face the perplexing question, which I face on a near daily basis: “Have I already registered here?”. I’m fairly certain I have, so I begin to work my way through attempting to login with one of my 5 email accounts, and 4-5 standard passwords I use. If your finite math isn’t so hot, that’s a lot of permutations. So far, this poor experience is all my fault, and an issue I really need to figure out how to deal with.

When I finally login it starts to get interesting. I’m notified that for my privacy and security my order history has been temporarily deleted. Ok, I find this a little odd, but I don’t really care about my order history, I just want to order new RAM, so once again I click on my cart, and then checkout. I’m now returned to the security notice. When they said they had temporarily deleted my order history, what they really meant was they had disabled the whole account. My options are 1) enter a past order number to recover my history (if I had a record of my past orders why would I care about being able to recover it here?), or 2) create a new account. Create a new account?! I just signed into my account. For my “privacy” they want me to re-enter all my account, billing, and shipping information?

Wanting to avoid option two, I open up gmail and search for a past order. Astonishingly, I find a thread of emails from Best Buy detailing my last experience with ordering through their website. I had forgotten about this. In short, the last experience, I had ordered an item on sale and opted to use the Pick Up option, instead of having it shipped. Despite selecting a pick up location where they supposedly had ample supply, I received another email several days later saying they couldn’t honour the order, and that I could no longer get the sale price.

At this point, fuming over the past incident, I’m starting to think this is less and less a great deal. But sadly, my distaste for standing in line prevails, I enter the order number, recover my account, and order the RAM. Let’s hope it shows up this time.

Have you ever given your business to a company begrudgingly? Seems like it’s happening to me a lot lately…Rogers comes to mind.

In my opinion, this emphasizes the need for an online place for all of us to network and collaborate. The fact that all these people live and work within a few kilometres of me, and that I, someone who tries to put a lot of effort into staying tuned in, didn’t know anything about them, is a pretty strong indication that we all need to start communicating.

If you’re on Twitter, start paying attention to #tsTO, I think this may be the beginning of something great.