September 12, 2008 – What a Week

Easily the busiest work week ever. On the bright side I’m only working 8am-11pm tomorrow — but have Sunday off! I’m surprised I’ve been a programmer this long and never had to pull an 80 hour week though. Usually I’m only working 40-45 hours at least, so this week has been far from the norm. Feel like I’ve barely seen Marilyn at all though. Can’t imagine how people do this week in week out though — at least without neglecting other things in their lives. It was all for a good reason though! This weekend is IzeaFest, a conference run by Izea for bloggers and advertisers in downtown Orlando at the Grand Bohemian. We were also launching a lot of new products earlier today with a keynote by Ted demoing everything. Talk about high stress level. Getting everything finished (including many hours today alone) and then taking down the current site for upgrades in a small window before the talk — yeah high stress level. At one time during the demo the presenter clicked something wrong causing an expected error message to show up (you don’t have enough money in your account msg) only to have all of the dev teams heart skip a beat until we realized why the error came up (he was logged into the wrong account). So aside from a lot of updates to SocialSpark, we launched CloudShout, a new blog widget platform that uses the blog base currently on SocialSpark already. It’s in alpha now, but it’s looks really cool so far. There’s a demo of it up on the test blog, but it’s only 100% working in FF3, mostly working in other browsers and (of course) will be by the time it’s out of alpha. Picked up a drobo recently as media server, now I’m thinking about getting a mac as a media PC for my TV. The eventual goal of course would be to drop cable tv altogether and watch everything from this PC. At the moment I’m thinking a mac mini with hulu and flex would do the trick. I’m watching some things on Hulu now on my work mac and it’s working out well (with a wireless keyboard/mouse). Queued up all of Serenity to have on in the background since it’s been a while. Anyone ever try making a good media pc have any input? I’m not looking to build a DVR box, that implies that i’d have cable connection of course. The only questionable piece for me right now is the wireless streaming of HD content (within the house). Even streaming HD over draft N is at the limits of what it can do. From what I hear (on wikipedia) though, once N is standardized it’ll be roughly twice as fast as the current draft versions, with an expected date of sometime next year. 240Mbit/s is plenty of throughput for HD content, although G’s 54 (actually 27 max) doesn’t work anywhere near well enough.