I’m happy I made the right choice as Software Development Engineer. The years of curiosity, creativity, and practice in my profession finally caught up to my expectations. And, I finally see myself as an architect, the creator or inventor, of applications.

The tools to produce and company start-up costs are inexpensive nowadays thanks to open source technologies and the Internet, you can cut out the middleman for product and service distribution. When developing applications for the Internet, personal computers, and smartphones you will find endless opportunities if you just open your eyes to creativity. There is nothing stopping from producing something from an idea to a product or service, but keeping yourself consistent with perseverance.

I find that a lot of people around me don’t see what I see, there are a lot of opportunities being an application developer. They seem to be all caught up with social activities and stopped innovating themselves to be lazy and too comfortable with their repetitive routines.

Ultimately, my number one passion is not about getting rich, but to see my ideas help make people’s lives better. That is my secret that drive me forward and I feel it is a key of success and getting rich is just an undisclosed perk that comes with the package.

I decided to switch domains from “diehard.cc” to “babybluebox.com” because of pop culture. The word “diehard” was misunderstood many times and a few people find it as a bad word. I use “diehard” exclusively as my Internet nickname during my teen years, but time has changed and I decided to use my real name on the Internet for formal recognition. Thanks to my work experience in developing web applications and doing personal projects, my real name will help employers track me down as I continue to build cool applications.

It’s been a long time I update this site. I made many changes under the hood and started replacing “diehard” with something else, either my real name or “Baby Blue Box”. The auto renew is off and the “diehard.cc” domain will expire at 2010. I will miss the “diehard.cc” domain because of the popularity among search engines, to help rank linked websites and towards itself.

All the communication devices I ever had was basic. My mobile phone was just a phone and nothing more. The last few weeks my wireless service was switched from Sprint to AT&T (formerly Cingular Wireless). It was time for me to get a better mobile phone with an embedded operating system like Microsoft Windows Mobile, Apple OS X, or Open Source Linux (Ubuntu). Having an “actual” operating system enable more freedom of control and information, and the ease of synchronization to your laptop or desktop computer. The one thing that is so troublesome when switching cellular phones is transferring many contacts. The smartphone is a personal data assistant (PDA) and holding more information than just contacts, such as appointments, tasks, notes, emails, addresses, birthdays, photos, music, and so on.

As an application developer point of view, having a standard platform, a popular operating system, to develop and to hack (modify) it makes it so much fun to create small applications. There is a wide range of applications out there to put on your smartphone for getting things done or for leisure. My initial smartphone, to be an all-in-one phone and freedom of information, is the Samsung Blackjack (SGH-i607). One more thing, I have my eyes set on my next ultimate smartphone the Apple iPhone (the second generation) or the alternative, HTC P4550 Kaiser.

My two summer college courses are doing okay. At my job, the UCF Assessment (OEAS) project is taking much of my time and dedication out of the other two projects, FINDER and SCINET.