mfruhling

Make this available to me on amazon and I'll buy. Unfortunately, I'm not interested in giving my personal details and payment information to your site, considering I don't know much about it.

I'm skeptical you could convince a mainstream homeowner to switch from the router that Verizon or Comcast supplies to them. You would have to 1) Make it wireless, the one I have from Comcast is a wireless router and I don't want to loose functionality 2) Make the new router have seamless setup with some device I can't get to work with my other router....maybe xbox, home automation, etc. 3) Make it dead simple for me to swap the $6/month I'm paying Verizon and start paying you instead...I do not want to call Verizon customer support...ever.

Because Verizon and others have conditioned people to pay a monthly fee, but they don't back that up with any updates for software or hardware, there should be an opportunity to offer a better substitute.

I really like Joe Celko. "Thinking in Sets" opened my mind up quite a bit.

http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Celkos-Thinking-Sets-Management/dp...

Most managerial interviews are based on Behavioral Interviewing. The logic is that how you behaved in the past is the best predictor of how you will behave in the future. If you Google, you'll find lots of typical questions. You should take time to think of specific situations from your past that demonstrate how you handled certain managerial tasks. You'll also find that companies will want to know if you are a "strategy" guy or an "implementation" guy, so it's good to think about what kind of decisions you want to have responsibility over. I think it's okay to say both, but you will need to back up your answer and give examples of how you acted in those situations in the past.

I've done consulting on the microsoft stack and I got between $50/hr and $75/hr on short term gigs. I was also considered on the cheap side by the people who hired me. I think price is greatly determined by whether you're coming from a company or you're an individual. Customers will pay a consulting firm $150-$200/hr or more because they are also buying someone to blame if the project goes wrong. An individual is not going to see that amount. My advice would be to market yourself as a consulting company, even if that is just some of your friends loosely affiliating yourselves with one another. You will get higher rates that way. Another way to higher rates is to have a business domain(s) that you can be considered knowledgeable in. Domain knowledge will separate you from the pack when someone is price shopping, and that knowledge or experience really does make you much more valuable and efficient.

I worked at Black & Decker for 5 years implementing SAP. I also wrote custom software to integrate into SAP when their modules didn't "fit" B&D's needs. A Manufacturing operation is really an incredible orchestration of different people in different departments, but those departments incentives and measurements aren't always aligned with one another. A large ERP system like SAP makes these departments tightly integrated and there is a lot of battling for territory. One department may make and entry to move inventory around for their own purposes and that will affect another department adversely. My experience makes me believe that ERP systems should take a more loosely coupled approach so that each department can have it's on custom software and communicate with other departments via a standard interface like XML. Also don't discount the fact that some corporations benefit from the inflexibility of ERP software. Most high level people I worked with liked the fact that they could dictate from a high level how things were to be carried out, even if they weren't the people who knew the process the best. I can promise anyone who interviews 4 different people in a manufacturing plant, at different managerial levels, about processes in the plant, will receive at least 3 different answers. Every guy there thinks he knows what is best and he controls his fiefdom how he sees fit. Very often the Corporation uses software to dictate to him how he will do his job, and that person will usually bitch about the ERP system because if they bitched about the plant manager they would get canned. You are tackling a huge problem and I would be interested in keeping up with your progress, so if you need anyone to bounce anything off of...feel free to drop me a line.

Generic Information Systems from Villa Julie College in Maryland. The courses taught me Visual Basic and SQL. I've taught myself everything else and have so much to learn.

Maryland is great. You can live in Columbia, MD and be between Baltimore and D.C. The IT salaries are very competitive and the cost of living is dramatically cheaper. Tons of great schools and Universities. Mountains 3 hours to the west, beaches 3 hours to the east. It gets a little too cold Dec.-Feb..