Mobile and Agile

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Originally uploaded by spudnik187.

Forgot to mention earlier that Bryce is now walking and doing so with much joy. He is enjoying, I think, the trouble he is causing for his mother and I.

No Rest for the Weary

Things have been insanely busy at work. This is both a good and a bad thing. Good because we are winning business and growing at a rate which we've not yet experienced. Bad because I see my family once a week. It's good to see what people are made of, however. You never learn more about a person than you do when you see them in the pressure cooker. It seems as though we've made some good personnel decisions because everyone is pitching in to make it happen. I feel very lucky.

Still learning

It became clear to me recently that our company would have to rethink our web delivery strategy. Although we have positioned ourselves somewhat against Flash, I came to the conclusion that it would be the only platform that we knew of that could satisfy our requirements. Being the adventerous type that I am, I quitely started working on a Flash framework that could allow us to deliver our presentations over the web at a reasonable bandwidth while maintaining the functionality of our DVD based presentations. After about a month of trial and error I came up with what seems to be a working model. I have to say that I am very impressed with the Flash platform and its ActionScript coding language. Because of my C++ programming background I was able to pick up AS very easily. It is indeed a powerful platform and I can see why so many people are drawn to it. Hopefully I will soon be able to convert the family website I was working on in HTML to Flash and take advantage of all that ActionScript has to offer. I'm just sorry it took me so long to discover it.

Quick Getaway

It's good to get away from the office sometimes and not think about work. Since I helped start "the company" I've had very few chances to really relax and focus on things other than work. Even on the weekends my mind often turns to work. Yesterday I had a chance to totally remove myself from the day-to-day. Much needed indeed.

Deal with the Devil

Those that know me are aware that I am a huge proponent of open source software for a number of reasons. In particular, I have become enamored with the Mozilla Foundation and their flagship offerings-Firefox and Thunderbird. They are both great products. I have also detested Microsoft Outlook and it's susceptibility to viruses. It isn't Microsoft's fault necessarily, but the fact remains that people write viruses that affect the majority of users. Unfortunately for me, as our company has grown it has become difficult for all of us to stay in sync with regards to our schedules and keeping track of who has to do what. Outlook has somewhat of an answer for this problem. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say that Thunderbird doesn't offer the same solution. In the best interests of the company I have decided to jump to Outlook as my primary business email/task/calendar/meeting management tool. It hasn't been as bad as I thought, but there are a number of things I'm already missing about Thunderbird-namely the junk mail handling. We'll see how long it lasts.

Holiday Spirit

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Originally uploaded by spudnik187.

Guess it's never too early to celebrate our great country. This is my son in his 4th of July garb. By the way, he enjoyed his first fireworks show.

Humble Pie

It's always nice to see a piece of work that makes you remember how feeble your skills are. Keeps you hungry and always wanting to get better.

Nuevo Radio?

Within the last several days, Apple released a point update to its iTunes music jukebox software. Why then would it possibly be the beginning of the end of radio as we know it? Podcasts.

Before I begin, let me reiterate why I think Apple is possibly on of the greatest innovating entities of the modern era. They make complex technology easy before anyone else even attempts it. On to podcasting.

Podcasting, whose name is derived from iPod and broadcasting, has been around for some time now. Think of it as Tivo for radio. A show is produced (the term show is used very loosely, as technically any audio file could be a podcast) and converted to an MP3 or similar compressed audio file. Then, the file is uploaded to a server. That server then uses RSS (RSS is another discussion for another time if you don't know what it is) to "broadcast" the existence of the file over the internet. Once a listeners' RSS reader picks up the RSS feed it can download the file and the user can listen to it at his/her leisure. Seems simple enough from the end user's perspective. Why does it matter that Apple put support for podcasts in iTunes?

Up until this point, the process of getting a podcast from a 3rd party RSS aggregator to iTunes to the iPod has been cludgy at best. Finding podcasts were fairly simple, but most people didn't even know what podcasts were. Enter iTunes. To say that the iPod is the best and most popular portable music players in the market today would be an understatement. Naturally, most people who have iPods use iTunes to manage their music and sync it with their iPods. The iTunes Music Store is also the largest and most popular legal music download service in the market. People have become accustomed to purchasing and managing music with iTunes on Macs or Windows machines. Podcasts are now part of the iTunes Music Store and are very, very easy to subscribe to. One click and you're done. It's so easy it's literally fool proof.

So how is this the end of radio? First, podcats aren't subject to FCC rules and regulations. That alone has serious implications. Second, anyone with a computer and a microphone can have a podcast. Literally anyone can have a podcast about literally anything. With iTunes now providing a directory for podcasts in which normal people like you and I can submist our podcasts, literally millions of people can potentially subscribe to your podcast. Stop and think about that for a minute and you'll realize why the big corporations that run traditional radio are scared. Their cash cow is about to get slaughtered by the new "rebel radio" and there's nothing they, or anyone else, can do about it.

Testing

Testing...

One of the Best

I witnessed one of the greatest clutch performances I have ever seen in a sporting event tonight. Robert Horry, of the San Antonio Spurs, hit 4 key 3 point shots and a monstrous dunk to single-handedly win the 5th game of the NBA Finals for the Spurs. I admire athletes, or anyone else for that matter, who can perform so well under extreme amounts of pressure. Horry all but won the third NBA championship for the Spurs in the last 7 years. What a joy to watch.

Smooth Criminal

Don't know what to think about the Michael Jackson trial. It sounded like there was some fairly damning evidence against him. Of course, the boy's family seemed to be very flaky at best. I think he may have actually been molested, but he, nor his family, had any credibility whatsoever. Either way, Jacko has some serious issues.

Need more sleep

You know you're tired when you wake up on Sunday morning and start scrambling because you think you're late to work.

Catching up

Been a while since I've posted. Not too much going on until today. Apple and Intel? More on that later.

First, work has been hectic. Purchased Tiger for my aging iMac (800 mHz G4) and it has infused some new life into the little computer that could. Wrting this right now on a blogging widget for Dashboard.

Been playing WoW exclusively and loving it. Just got a GeForce 6600GT for the Linux box. Working great.

Big news today. Apple switching to Intel. Couldn't believe the rumors when I heard the last week and I almost still can't believe after I heard it from the horse's mouth. They need to nail this thing or it's going to cost them dearly. In the end, if it makes Macs more affordable for the masses then I'm all for it. That's all for now.

Long time no see

It's been nearly a month since I last posted. Much has happened since then, both in my realm and out. The following is a listing of just some of those things:

Work.
Brother-in-law married.
Work.
World of Warcraft.
Work.
World of Warcraft.

Very busy indeed. Bryce has started crawling, which is quite fun. Things are busy at work. Syringe (my new WoW character) is leveling as fast as he can to catch up with his guild.

I finally convinced the powers that be to get a Mac in the office. Dual 2 G5. Needed it to author a project in DVD Studio Pro. Tiger is awesome. The machine is awesome. Now if I could only get a new iMac for the house. More to come...

Azeroth calls

After much coaxing by my co-workers and friends, I finally took the plunge and started playing World of Warcraft.  I have ridiculed this game, and those who play it, for some time now.  It's really no different from other MMORPGs, but this game has attracted some definite freaks and some people take it far too seriously.  I was challenged to give the game a fair shot before I uttered any more caustic remarks toward it.  I proclaimed that I would not pay a single penny for it unless I could play it first.  Fully expecting that not to happen (there is a free 10 day trial, but only if you know someone who buys the game and hasn't used their card) I was sure I would never have to actually play the game to decide whether or not I would like it.  Only a matter of hours later, my friend tells me that I am free to play on his cousin's account.  Now I had no excuse.  Two weeks later and I'm happy to say I'm very much enjoying the game.  Let me caveat that by saying that I only like running with my office mates and friends.  Through the beauty that is Skype conference calling, we can communicate in real time to plan our attacks, etc.  When I play by myself, my enjoyment factor drops almost to zero.  The bottom line is this: if you have friends that play, play with them.  Get on Skype and have fun.  Otherwise, unless you're a hard core RPG fan, save your money.

Tiger

I was delighted to see Apple has finally announced Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger".  If you haven't read about it, do so.  It is going to change a lot of people's minds about the way they manage data.  This is what I've been waiting for to order a new Mac mini so that I can get Tiger and iLife '05.  Now, all I need is iWork and I'll be good to go.  Can't wait until the 29th.

Great Service Goes a Long Way

One of the workstations at the office got sick from some bad RAM and crapped out over the weekend.  Fortunately, we got 3 year warranties on all of the machines we purchased from HP.  I called their toll free support number and was, amazingly, only on hold for a minute or two.  The polite, yet obviously non-expert, young lady surmised that I should have my RAM and CPU replaced.  She told me that she would have them out as soon as she could, which usually means you'll get it in two weeks if you're lucky.  To my surprise, UPS showed up with RAM and a CPU this morning.  I have to say I'm impressed.  Not that I had heard bad things about HP support, but I just didn't expect it to be this good.  Kudos to HP for not going the way of other large PC manufacturers (whom I won't name) and letting their service drop off the face of the earth.

There is No Spoon

I found a new blog today. From what I can tell it's devoted to all things advertising. Its name is ADJAB. They're running a story right now that claims that The Matrix story may have been "stolen". Didn't everyone know this? I'd heard of this long, long ago. I thought they just picked it up where the original author left off after getting his blessing. Guess I heard wrong. This still doesn't change the fact that they are some of the greatest stories ever told via motion picture.

Ides of Spring

Baseball is upon us. Major League Baseball opened their regular season on Sunday night. I'm actually one of the few people I know that enjoy watching baseball. My Texas Rangers lost a close game to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (or whatever they're going by) last night and are currently in extra innings as I write this. The surprising thing is that these are low scoring games. At least through 2+ games, the Rangers pitching is holding up. Now if they can just keep it up for 160 more games...

Still haven't been able to mess with my quasi-functional Linux box. May not be able to until after taxes, which probably means not until after April 14th.

KDE 3.4...sort of

I installed KDE 3.4 on my SUSE 9.2 desktop. The install process was painless, as I was able to update through YaST now that the 3.4 binaries have been added to the Suse servers. Unfortunately, when I rebooted after the install, I was greeted with several I/O errors and a nice long period of non-responsiveness (I'm sure that's not a word, or even officially recognized use of the English language). This is one thing that will keep the "lay man" from using Linux. They can live with having to find alternatives to their favorite Windows apps, but it takes a minor miracle for most things to "just work" the first time in Linux. That doesn't sit well with the "lay man". Will try to get to the bottom of this and report my progress.