(The description fields on LinkedIn are too limited to share what I want to share! So this is my supplement to LinkedIn)

Finally I've decided to look into building up my connections on LinkedIn. I joined LinkedIn in February 2004 and until recently I've only been accepting connections rather than initiating them. Some exciting things are happening at Crane, so I decided to invest time in LinkedIn to help spread the word.

My bio page is still at http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/bio/gkholman.htm, so I won't copy that information here. You can see the latest at your convenience. For example, there is more detail below regarding resigning my JTC 1 responsibilities, as I'm going to focus on OASIS and ISO TC154 for the next while.

This page is more along the LinkedIn style of "what am I up to and what do I want to get up to?".

Updated: December 28, 2011

The snow arrived Christmas Eve and has been falling practically non-stop ever since, so we've been having a very white Christmas. Driving is no fun, but it is nice to have these scenes for the holidays.

I landed another training gig in London England the week of January 23-27, 2012, teaching the combination XSLT/XQuery class for a repeat customer. I'm looking forward to returning, because each time I teach there I get the impression the students are anxious to learn. My client has been very successful in hiring enthusiastic workers.

I had to turn down a conference delivery because of my upcoming vacation schedule, but they'll keep me in mind for another event.

I get the impression the year ahead might be good for training. A number of people who contacted me last year tell me they are still working on having me in on-site to teach.

The recent announcement at the end of October is that I responded to a cold call from a cloud-based training hosting company and in less than a week I mounted my DVD-ROM video for online access:

Crane's Practical Transformation Using XSLT and XPath Video was published Oct, 31, 2011 on udemy: "The Academy of You" and offers five free hours of online video instruction, plus 19 hours of paid content covering our 5-day in-depth hands-on comprehensive training class.

I'm confident visitors will find the free five hours of interest.  I weighed how important it was to get people to understand how XSLT works vs. trying to sell more copies of the paid portion, and I landed on the side of proselytizing and hoping people would watch the free version just to learn the basics.

On April 1, 2012 we will be celebrating 15 years of our little company. With time on my hands I'm able to keep up with my volunteer standards work at OASIS and TC154. I'm doing fun stuff and releasing free resources related to my UBL contributions.

Why, you may ask, do I have more time on my hands these days? I retired in July 2010 and have been taking on only interesting projects since then. I'm still charging what I used to charge for my services, and it seems sometimes I'm as busy as ever even though I've been able to say "no" unselfconsciously a few times. But I don't mind being busy as I'm now working for vacation money rather than working to live. Since founding our own company in April 1997, XML has been very good to us.

I'm looking for new opportunities to teach publicly and privately, so let me know if you want me to teach in your area of the world. I recently delivered the inaugural delivery of Practical Use of oXygen XML, a departure for us as this is our first ever training class for a vendor's tools rather than a standard technology. After turning down over the last few years a number of requests for such a class, I have more time on my hands these days and so can make the time to develop a new curriculum of two or three classes related to the use of these tools. The "Developer's Version" of the class, two days in length, is done, delivered, polished and ready to go again. I haven't written the "Author's Version" yet.

Monthly invoicing on Tradeshift continues to be smoothly completed every month:

http://www.Tradeshift.com is a totally free invoicing solution for small companies and individuals. Whereas Facebook is the free social network for friends, and LinkedIn is the free social network for professionals, Tradeshift is the free social network for businesses and governments.  Invoicing is also totally free to larger companies, municipalities and governments, but these organizations may need the premium services that are charged and fund the operation of Tradeshift for the little guy. At the core is the use of OASIS UBL document structures, and I'm a co-editor of the UBL specification. Neither the sender nor the receiver need to know they are working with UBL, but if they do know, then they can take more advantage of the information ... it is otherwise seamless and users create, send, receive and manage invoices, orders and in the future other UBL documents.

To help promote UBL and Tradeshift in North America, I helped to found this information portal, and I was pleased to have it shared :

http://goUBL.com is a commercial ecosystem of companies interested in supporting the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) specification. The goal is to provide a resource primarily for the North America market, but members will consider work worldwide when asked.

Earlier this year I managed to get some radio and television press regarding Tradeshift and UBL, which was exciting! Please let me know if you have any questions regarding training or Tradeshift or UBL in general.

Did you hear I finally resigned all of my JTC 1 volunteer responsibilities? After 22 years of working in various subcommittees of JTC 1 I decided to step away from it all to free up some time. And it reduces my expenses since I'm now retired. I'm still keeping up with my OASIS responsibilities and my TC154 Canadian chairmanship, but just not all the JTC 1 work. Now that my focus is moving towards e-commerce rather than publishing, it makes sense to make this change. And it is consistent with my work at Tradeshift and goUBL.com. Even some former publishing customers are talking with me regarding some commerce issues they are facing. It has been very interesting to change my focus from publishing to commerce, while still sticking to my strong suits of XML and XSLT/XQuery.

Finally, thank you for considering being connected to me on LinkedIn!

. . . . . . . . . . . . Ken