I've been working with the Fujitsu B-PAD for the past month, trying to get our software to run smoothly for a pilot project starting this week. I knew it was a new device, but the other day I was surprised to notice the device's serial number: "80". So short, so sweet.

I haven't been very communicative lately, and when I have, it's been veiled or just silly. I hope to correct that, but time still isn't my friend. I've been busy at work, with our new VB.Net (for Compact Framework) version of the my software, plus this major project I've got going into piloting stage for a major customer. It was made worse since they are piloting three different devices and each has its own problems. My program will soon be used in most of the shops I go to for my daily bread. But more than busy I've been completely stressed out. The limits of my technical abilities have shown in these efforts. I have too little theoretical background to work as well as I should. What I do now is a far cry from the monkey coding that went on at Harper West, where we used boring oldish technology that had the kinks worked, by and large. Now I'm using a new language, on new devices, implementing new operating systems and almost nothing is worked out completely. A couple of weeks ago I was reading example code in c++ (which I don't know) and writing a wrapper for some DLLs in c# (which I didn't know a lick of to begin with), and felt stupid as rock through out. Luckily, things are looking up and everything is coming together, but for a while there I began to wonder what kind of fraud of a programmer I was. There's still a lot of work on the horizon. My program is a pretty hot commodity for us right now.

I'll say more...