For those of you who might not know, it gets really cold here in the winter. We hate the cold. It just feels miserable. Average high in St. Paul in January is 27 degrees. Average high in Austin in January is 62 degrees. Yes, it gets hot in August in Austin, but I would take really hot over really cold any day. There’s also less daylight during the winter. In Austin, we’ll have nearly an hour and a half extra daylight at the peak of winter. Sunset in December here is at about 4:30pm. So, it’s dark when I get up, dark when I’m in the car going to work, and dark before I get in the car to go home. The only daylight is when I’m in an office building, and it’s too cold to want to go outside and enjoy any of the daylight.

The transition was made a lot easier with my current employer, August Ash, being willing to keep me on working remotely. So I will still have the same job. A huge plus of this setup is that I currently have to commute 45 minutes one-way. So I will gain 7 hours a week not having to drive a long way to work and back.

We have heard nothing but great things about the Austin area. If you have any suggestions about places to go, things to do, groups to get involved in, people to meet, etc., I would love to hear them.

I have a full-time job, a family with 3 children, and I have been doing freelance Magento work on the side. All of this combined simply hasn’t been working for me. It’s too much. My family often gets the worst end of the deal when I’m busy with freelance. It was hard for them, stressful for me, and I needed to make a change.

I decided to stop most of my freelance work to focus on having more time with my family, so I pretty much went all out and stopped doing much of any work outside of my full-time job (including blogging). It has been very rewarding, and I’m glad I made that move. I know that I will never regret having spent a lot of time with my family, but I would definitely regret having not spent enough.

I still do almost nothing but Magento work, so I hope to start blogging more frequently with the things I’m doing/learning at work, so hopefully posts will pick up a bit more soon. I may even start opening up some open source Magento modules in Github soon as well (ones that I wanted to charge for, but I don’t want to deal with maintenance and support).

I hope you have found my blog useful, that’s what it’s here for. I hope to continue making it even more helpful.

Check out the job posting.

First think you’ll need to know is a list of all the possible responses and response reasons. You can get that here: http://developer.authorize.net/guides/AIM/

To get back a specific response, use the test VISA number of: 4222222222222. Find the response code you want to test, and set the dollar amount to the code. So if you used the test credit card number, and made a transaction for $6, you would get back a response of “The credit card number is invalid.”.

You can do that programmatically, or if you are using Magento or some other shopping cart application, you can easily make a $6 product and not charge for shipping or tax.

Here’s what the world map in Google looks like:

Top 10 Countries:

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Germany
4. France
5. Netherlands
6. India
7. Canada
8. China
9. Spain
10. Australia

Thanks again to all of you that have been involved in some way. It’s been fun and enjoyable to do what I’m doing here. Hope you all keep coming back! And, by the way, if you ever have anything you would like to contribute, or if you have any suggestions for a current or future post, please let me know!