I have been on a personal high for the past 2.5 days because I was able to loudly, at work, do a rather big

On Thursday afternoon I completed a major milestone for the project I am working on. 
I have been building a custom membership and role provider for our department and it had to meet all sorts of requirements: 

• Minimum of 14 characters for the password
• Minimum of 2 upper case letters
• Minimum of 2 lower case letters
• Minimum of 2 number
• Minimum of 2 special characters (things like ~!@#$%^&*()....)
• The password can't be reused in the past 10 times
• The password will expire every 60 days
• Failed login attempts 3 tries
• Account get's locked after 90 of inactivity
• Ability to log in with Username/Password or with Security Card.
• User can reset their password from a profile page
• User can sync/unsync certificate for Security Card
• User can view and modify their profile

First I had to build the Database to hold Users, Applications, Roles for application, Users rights to Applications and assigned roles in the application.  After that it was building the libraries to handle all the interaction between the backend database and the front end which was getting the basic login with UserName/Password to work and after that the basic rules about the password. Then it was on to the User Profile page and the Edit Profile pages adding the change password when a user logs in and from the profile page.  The last big task was the security certificate and I gave myself 2 weeks to do this. Initially I had some issue with setting up certs on the web server (1.5 days of work) but once that was done, it really only took me 4 days to do the rest of the coding.   
And all of this was done with C# using MVC (Model-View-Controller), EF (Entity Framework), Ajax, and JQuery which are new to me. 

And on Thursday afternoon at 3:00 pm I was done with the coding. I still had a complete test cycle to go through to find any new bugs that I had introduced.. but that could be done Friday and next week.   

Coincidentally the guys and I had planned on going out to a new micro-brew that had opened near work and so I was now looking forward to a relaxing evening and we even went out for dinner. 

This is what has been consuming my brain for the past month. I would go to bed with code swirling around in my head; I woke up early (sometimes at 4 am) and would be in at work by 7am; I would work through lunch and not leave until 6pm. I would have code in my head during the 45+min drive home and then I would email myself the things I had thought of on the drive home hoping that since I had sent myself a note my head would clear. 

Friday morning I woke with a sense of calm I had not had for quite a while. It was a great feeling of satisfaction that I had done this all by myself. 

Next week I can start the management application for:

• Adding applications
• Add roles for the applications 
• Granting access based upon user requests for access to applications
• Assign roles to users for each application
• Reset Accounts (user, roles, applications)

I was very very tired yesterday. It was a long stressed filled week. 
I am still deep in my project at work and I had a big lack of confidence event mid-week. The current task, out of many before the project is done, is something new for me and I realized on Wednesday that I might be going down the wrong path and I realized this at 5:45pm. I came home and proceeded to spend the next 4 hours Googling for articles on the subject cause a bit of OCD had set in. It was that or stay at work  - very very late. I did find a few articles and even a reasonable tutorial that would, when I read it all, explain to me, where I took a wrong turn. This of course caused me to not get a good nights sleep and to wake up even earlier than normal. I spent almost 9-10 hours on both Thursday and Friday redoing my code. Thankfully it all worked and I certainly understand the subject better. 

All of this resulted in me being very tired yesterday. I stayed home and decided to work in a new knitted scarf.  Last year at Convergence I treated my self to a hand picked color wheel of yarns from RedFish Dye Works. The color wheel I chose was of muted colors (12 colors) of Silk 20/2 weight which is lace weight and I am/was planning to do a nice color gamp shawl/scarf. But since my loom at home currently has cotton waffle weave towels on it AND each skein is 450 yards.. I figured I could do a knitted scarf and still have plenty left over to weave with later. 

I then went looking through my library of knitting books for a nice, lacy scarf that was not a very complicated pattern. I will be watching TV while knitting so I need to balance attention to the pattern to actually watching the tube (though TV's are not tubes any more).  I did not find any thing I liked in a pattern book so I then turned to my knitting dictionary. I found a diagonal fishnet pattern that would light an airy. I had to do some experimenting to get the right weight and needles and how many rows to knit to get a "variegated" look.  As of today I am almost half way done. 

Here is a picture of the scarf in process and I am part way through the 5th of 12 colors. 

As we start September much has happened.

We closed on the second house (in Texas) and now to rent it out. We snagged an extra empty lot next to the new house and that will close in the next week or two. Does this make me a land baron or baroness?

No, I have not done much weaving, again BUT I am ready to start a new design on my rep weave placemats as the first 4 are done. 

I have also really thrown myself into my new projects and work and have found that it is suddenly 6 pm and past the time to go home. Then when I get home, I still have code whirling around in my head which at times does not stop even when I go to bed; and it is there still when I wake up and then the cycle repeats.  To resolve this I have finally installed a development environment on my computer at home. 

Wait - how come she has not done that already being a software engineer?? The reason is that I use a MAC at home and at work we use PC's with Visual Studio, SQLServer and lot's of other PC software that won't run on a Macintosh. 

BUT not any more.

A while ago I found out about Mono Develop a IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for Mac's, Linux, and PC's that will allow you to write C# code for Mac's, Linux's PC's, and Smart Phones (iOS, Android, etc). I played with it when I was experimenting with Android development. Then I set it aside. Recently Xamarin  released a new version and I thought, let's give it a try so I could do some development for myself, at home. 

Saturday morning I installed Mono plus GIT (source control) and SourceTree because I use BitBucket for source control. And Git works very nice with Mono/Xamarin.   I started this all around 7am and had a development environment up and running by 10 am. Then I proceeded to write some code (I was at it for almost 4 hours) and learn more about the design architecture and I am now using at work: Model-View-Controller. Along with that I am getting up to speed on jQuery and Entity Framework.    

Now I don't have code in my head and I can enjoy the rest of my weekend, what's left of it.