We've moved!

In an effort to reduce our commute into work, and to allow us to be closer to home with a growing family, we've moved our office to North Bend, Washington. North Bend is a picturesque town located 30 minutes East of Seattle, nestled at the foothills of the Cascade mountain range.

Here's the City's website with some links and great photos:
http://ci.north-bend.wa.us/

Here's a link to a Flickr photoset of my photos taken around the area:
Photos Around North Bend

Our new address is:

PO Box 790
North Bend, Wa. 98045

A Few Updates To Version 2

I've made a couple of updates to the searching features in Version 2. Here's a summary.

My Jobs

On the My Jobs table the way you can search for job codes has changed. Rather than making an exact match to a job code, the search will return both exact matches and matches that start with the search criteria.

Here's an example of a search for a job code. Searching for "03" in this example returns 10 rows. Ten jobs in this example have a job code starting with "03".

You can still search for a specific job code.

Search Surveys

I've changed the way the searching on survey data works slightly. In the past you needed to use a wildcard * character to specify that you wanted to search for all instances of a certain word. You no longer need to use the wildcard. For instance, a search for job titles that have the word "account" in them is achieved by searching for account rather than account*

Also, the survey job summary search feature is up and running. This feature had been offline due to some technical issues.

Sign In Page Graphic

Plus, I changed the photo on the sign-in page. Holy smokes, it's been the same picture for years. Time for a change!

I chose something abstract and dynamic. For posterity sake here's a screen shot of the before and after. Okay, it's not a big change but still it's nice to see something new.

104 Days Of Summer!

Just a little post to brag about my kids getting to appear on a major game being released by Disney. One of our good friends works for the company that worked on this game for Disney. My oldest daughter and son were asked to fill in during a photo shoot because a couple of other kids couldn't make it that day. Not only did they do a great job during the photo shoot, they had a ton of fun, AND they actually made the final box packaging. Here are some photos taken with my iPhone so the quality isn't the best but you can see how it all looks.

New Blog Header

I'm going to be working on freshening up the NextComp blog over the next few weeks, starting with a new blog header. The header image will change regularly to reflect the season. Enjoy!

Server Maintenance, Friday, August 15th

We'll be doing some routine server maintenance this evening, Friday, August 15th, at around 9:00 PM Pacific daylight time. The database server will be off-line for no more than 1 hour.

UPDATE: The server maintenance began at 9:20 PM and finished at 10:00 PM Pacific daylight time. It went smoothly and everything is up and running great.

Here's a photo to start off the weekend. I found this amazing creature in my backyard. Happy Friday!

WorldatWork Conference Update and Photo Friday

I received an e-mail from WorldatWork today with the following sentence...

"There are just 114 days, 14 hours and 10 minutes until the WorldatWork Total Rewards conference and exhibition 2008."

They do a great job of keeping the exhibitors informed. I find the countdown gives me a bit of a jolt each time I see it. A little bit of adrenaline kicks in as I'm reminded that the show is coming up, even though it's still months away.

With that in mind, we are working on several updates to NextComp. I'll be posting on weekly basis for the next few months to keep you up-to-date on our plans.


And of course I'll be continuing with the "photo Friday" theme.



This is a beautiful time of year near my house, although the local mountain pass has been closed for days due to six feet of new snow in six days and continued avalanche danger.

Have a great weekend!

Photo Friday

So I'm making a commitment to update the blog on a more regular basis.
I think having some regular features, such as a "photo Friday" will help keep me on task.



Here's a view of Mt Si in North Bend, Washington (my home town). It was a super sunny nice day. I love big fluffy white clouds in the Summer. It reminds me of being a kid laying on the grass looking up at the sky imagining dragons, pigs, and all sorts of other creatures floating along above me.

On a NextComp note, Elliott and I have a version of NextComp Gamma up and running. Some months ago we posted that we were developing a new version of NextComp using the latest in Web 2.0 technology. We originally envisioned using Java and all sorts of open source software to create Gamma. Well, it turns out that we are really ingrained in Microsoft technology and making the switch to Java was just too much of a resource strain. So we are developing Gamma in .NET using the recently released version 3.0 with the AJAX extensions. If you don't know what AJAX is that's understandable. Basically AJAX makes websites work more like desktop applications.

We will have a demo of Gamma ready by August 17th to share with everyone. It's going to be a bit of a limited demo showing the Search Surveys page, but it will be exciting as there are some new features in Gamma that will make life easier for survey matching.

Until the next post, have a great weekend!

Matt