Rick Caminiti dotCOM

Ok, here’s the skinny: I have several blogs that I currently run and I’m running out of energy and content for all of them. I went into a couple of them solely to make money and although I’ve made a few bucks here and there, I’m sick of “forcing” myself to blog just so I can get a few clicks here and there so I can make 25 – 50 cents.

The reason I say “forcing” is because I’m blogging about stuff I’m not exactly thrilled about. I blog about golf, which I LOVE, but I’m not that INTO golf besides just loving to play. All I can blog about is what I scored and how I bombed a 320-yarder and then flopped the next shot into the water…

I blog about STL sports and tech-gadgetry … I love toys, and I love to see what’s new in the world of technology, but I don’t know sh!t about it really.

Anyway, I was thinking the other day about how cool it would have been to blog about all the stuff I’ve learned as an IT professional in the past few years. I’m a contractor, so I get to see a lot of different places, a lot of different technologies and I’ve learned a hell of a lot over the years. I consider myself a jack-of-all-trades, master-of all.

I like to learn different technologies and try different things and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately… a little bit of everything. So, what I wanted to start writing about are simple things that I learn along the way.

As anyone in IT knows, when you start learning something new, there are always little (and big) roadblocks along the way. “This proc worked in SQL Server, why isn’t it working with Oracle”? “This worked in VB6, why won’t it work in .Net”? “How the hell do I make a modal window in HTML”?

All these roadblocks are what make IT fun… in my world anyway. This is what I love… troubleshooting and learning new things about IT. I’m not exactly a poet or anywhere near a good writer, so I figured why not start blabbing about IT stuff… code snippets, lessons learned, etc?

The blog is intended to be somewhat of a living resume for me. At least, from this point forward of my career. The plan is to write about lessons learned in IT or in Business.

The purpose is three-fold: Have a consistent place for ME to go to remember tips/tricks/hacks and links to helper sites. Have a consistent place for others to go for the same infomation. Have a place to show potential employers what I know.

The goal is to help people, including myself, learn new technologies. I’m a consultant and I get to wear many hats and learn a lot of new technologies. When I start a new one, I usually have a week or so to familiarize myself with the tool and then I am [willingly] thrown into the fire.

It’s when I’m first in the fire that I’m pinging the hell out of google to find help with simple syntactical help or methodology help, etc. All that information that I get when I’m learning the tool “the hard way” is what I’m wanting to focus on here. Also, anything new that i discover about a given tool over tim or anything newsworthy in IT will also be talked about here.

There should be a fair number of posts with video tutorials (this will be my preferred method when things get rolling). I feel like that is the most direct approach and seems to be the easiest way to for readers/viewers to understand what the point is.

When I don’t have videos, I’ll most likely have screenshots or code snippets, but the goal is to make everything as valuable to you (and me) as possible.

The Forum at this point is a sound-board for people to share their ideas and their IT experience and is ultimately a place for YOU to help ME direct and grow this site.

This site is very new and is probably going to look a little different frequently, early on. I’m experimenting with Wordpress right now and will be testing several themes over time. Please share your feelings on the site’s look and feel, and more importantly, if anything seems to be broken.