20 June 2008

Time to focus on consulting

I really enjoy teaching, and I don't regret at all taking the job at Belmont University, and I feel so privileged and blessed to be able to teach my children at home. But Praise God for summer! It's so nice to have a break from the teaching and to be able to really focus on some time series projects for my consulting business.

One goal I have had for more than a year now is to get my courses on the web so that individuals could take the courses on their own computer. But my courses are copyrighted, so I can't just put them up for anyone to see. I've talked to several people, but no one who works in web design could quite catch my vision for the courses. So after more than a year thinking and dreaming and talking to people about this, I finally made a huge breakthrough today!!! I am learning PHP, and I'm finding some wonderful free code, and I'm finally beginning to think that I can really get this done this summer. My goal is to have the slides on the web, with notes and sound files of me talking, and have it all password protected.

I also found my notes on that user-defined holiday project I started while still at Census, and as I went through my notes, I realized that I was even farther ahead on this program than I had remembered!

So a very exciting day all the way around!

ttfn

13 June 2008

Summer Break

I finished all my work for Belmont over a month ago, and it's been a relief. I really enjoy teaching, but I have some really interesting consulting projects, and I still had to get my girls through their school. And today, we're officially finished!

The two younger girls finished up a couple of week ago. My oldest finished up her last set of book reports today, and we put them in the mail.

I finished up my programming project (and was paid promptly). It was nice to be working in SAS again. It had been a long time. It was nice to know I could still work on SAS macros.

It also inspired me to work on my Visual Basic program again for user-defined holidays. I had started it at Census as a SAS macro, but I want to get it into something more practical than SAS. I also want to do some research on different kinds of Easter effects and other related holidays for the Joint Statistical Meetings of the American Statistical Association in 2009.

Next week I hope to sign some contracts for another fun seasonal adjustment project. It looks to be a very exciting summer for me!

ttfn