When I first made the step to really living on my own — minus the multiple roommates — and taking care of my own home, I had a lot of questions. Every time I was unsure how to prepare a certain meal, or what could be frozen, or what to plant and when, I ran to the people I considered the experts — my mother, my stepmother, my boyfriend’s mother, and my former co-worker and her mother. No the last one is not a joke. After a while, I started asking less and less questions. Now when I don’t know the exact answer, I have the confidence to figure it out on my own.

Working at DDA is like this. Only instead of asking someone how to prepare a traditional chicken pot pie meal, I’m asking them to review a request for medical webcasting or video editing. Instead of worrying about how not to kill my third hanging plant, I am asking about website development and custom programming services to provide expectional functionality and form to continuing medical education (CME) sites and eLearning platforms.

I doubt that I will start trying my hand at graphic design or search engine optimization (SEO) and I just outsourced the only bit of programming work I may ever come across, but I have learned a great deal, and I didn’t have to waste my cell phones minutes either.  Because at DDA, all of the experts are in-house.

When a family member, relative, friend, or girlfriend ask me for a little help with a website or flash animation need, I will gladly try to help them to the best of my ability.  They know the great projects that I have been involved in at DDA by just checking them out at our portfolio. The problem is that I don’t have all the equipment at home that I do at DDA. DDA is always sure to stay current with the flow of technology and its evolution. HD video is fairly new, but it is the future. That is why DDA made sure to buy all new HD cameras to stay at the forefront of the technological age. At home I have no cameras, no Flash software, no Dreamweaver, and no Photoshop. In fact I don’t have much at all that enable me to easily pull off the quality work that I can when at my DDA computer. The most I can do is hard code HTML programming in notepad and upload through their hosting service. As far as graphic design changes and custom animation in flash, I can’t say I’ll be much help.

Yesterday was a weird but good day for me at DDA. I actually finished several things that had been vexing and hanging around on me for a while.  In fact, all of the things that had been bothering me were finished yesterday.  As I crossed the last item off of yesterday’s task list I had a sense of relief, accomplishment, and slight confusion.

I did some Flash programming to make sure a couple of animations still have their actions and audio sync-up on really slow computers.  I did a Flash animation that returned a box into the form of a website.  I made an interactive quiz.  I also did some programming for a Flash cookie.  So today I go on and start on the new projects I have just been sent to fill the void on my task list.  Looks like a custom Flash video player and a bunch of XML to fill out.  This should be fun.