Continued

After more than a year and one merger later, my skills became significantly under-utilized, and by that I mean I was sitting in my cube, surfing the net all day because the focus of the Coop had shifted from ASP to Java. The project for which I was originally hired, had just disapeared.

After much hand wringing, I contacted my recruiter and he quickly placed me in a contract asp development position which happend to be in the St. Louis County Department of Revenue. It started off great. The work was challenging, picking up where two other developers had left off, finishing several internal applications. In a few months, I was working on a cutting edge project involving Oracle, document imaging (my specialty) and the web to make real estate documents accessible over the net.

It was also during this time period in 2000, that I started what would become Project Responder. I refer to it as the Ultimate Volunteer Firefighter's Emergency Response Vehicle and had envisioned this to be two year project, with the truck being unveiled in '03 (more about this later).

Everthing was going well until one Tuesday I was told that I was no longer needed. It seems the County was embroiled in a major public relations nightmare, regarding "drive by" property assessments and several department heads were getting the axe and you know the old adage about something rolling downhill...

The problem was that by this time the web had cooled off to the point of being downright frigid. The recruiters were dry and the employment outlook was bleak. I had two options, 1) flip hamburgers or work at wally world, or 2) start my own web development business. I chose the latter.

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