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A Day in The Life of a Professional Geek…

4:00am AEDST – alarm, alarm, alarm. Snooze for 5 minutes, then up and check the laptop in the midst of uploading an episode of “The Geek Stories” to Redmond. Failed. Bugger, not happy Jan.  Must find a more efficient way to get these videos posted faster. Sometimes it might just be easier to Blip.TV these suckers.

4:30am AEDST – showered, shaved and in SCRLTT to airport. Missed tunnel entrace, had to divert through Harris Street and Redfern to Sydney Airport. Park, checkin. Strange looks from be-suited and en-tied men wondering why someone would proudly wear a “geek” T-shirt. Smile, and I walk on.

5:15am AEDST – checked in, waiting to board 737-400 for a 1:10m flight to Brisbane Airport. Sleep, breakfast, sleep whilst eating breakfast on the flight.

6:30am AEST – Same longitude, different time zone. Yes, an hour has been lost in this timeline due to the cows in Queensland going off their milk. Long story. Wiki the answer why.

brisvegas

7:15am – in a small hire car (small 4-cylinder, manual transmission Toyota – closest thing to a MINI and the cheapest on Avis’ books) driving down M1 to north of the Gold Coast. Over Gateway (AU$2.50) with a friendly lady taking my money. Roar down freeway past Dreamworld, Movieworld and mortgageworld.

footage review

8:45am – Alive Technology video shoot with Bruce + team. Approx 25 minutes of footage shot; excellent gadgets! Bruce wants a “geek” t-shirt. Frankarr may trade for Mambo shirt 🙂 People have now seen “The Geek Stories” so know what to expect. Heart rate 83bpm with blood oxygen of 97%. I want one of these just for the geek factor alone.

10:00am – back in hire car to Margaret Street, CBD of Brisbane. Roar up the freeway and redline the Toyota to see how fast it can go in second gear. Sorry Avis.

11:30am – Joel, John, Wayne and Joseph all waiting for me for interview. Takes a few minutes to set the scene and for me to attempt to show I might be an OK guy. Feel a little like a storm trooper at a Star Trek convention, but that soon wears off and we get into it. 3 video shoots and at least 1.1 hours of footage. Parallel processors, transactional memory, CLR, compiler lore and incantations. Oh, there are some excellent geek stories here!

1:45pm – lunch with Wayne and John in very fast Chinese restaurant; just like Singapore – even the weather! Discuss more of John’s history with Compilers, Microsoft CLR, PDP-8s, XOR and life in general. Tuscany, riding bikes up hills and stuff.

2:30pm – on return to QUT, discuss with John why people are not going into IT as a profession. Are we turning into a nation of miners and shopkeepers?

3:00pm – more video with Andrew Smith of Studio Solutions in Milton off Coronation Drive. Makes excellent coffee and revives me for rest of the day. Watch video promo for Cairns airport. Andrew tries to rope me in to help with a friend moving house. Politely explain my back isn’t what it used to be, and continue on with interview.

4:00pm – back in the Toyota negotiating football traffic around Suncorp statium, car accidents and general Friday afternoon CBD madness experienced in any city. Toyota airconditioning gets a blasting in 30degC Brisvegas weather.

5:15pm – explain to Berno on mobile why his video is in limbo (check 4:00am entry)

5:20pm – check footage from the day (2 hours in total) and decide what to put where, in generally what order. Sleepygeek. Two comments on checkin about “geek” t-shirt and Microsoft. Brand name recognition cool.

sleepygeek with apcmag

6:00pm – Disconnected from everything for a day is cool. The world could have exploded and I wouldn’t know!

sleepygeek on a plane

6:30pm – board flight to Sydney. 737-800 packed to the gills.

9:05pm – land Sydney. Sydney is 31degC, warmer and certainly more humid than Brisbane: this is not normal for the southern hemisphere

happy scrltt

10:00pm – after negotiating the heavy Friday night traffic out of Sydney domestic, arrive home to a happy family and inquisitive cats.

General Notes

Camera has worked flawlessly. Microphone used today was the gun/zoom mic.

Thanks to Charles Sterling for Alive Technology and Joseph leads for interviews.

Yes, I will be returning to SE Queensland in near future for more video capturing and footage. Next time I go interstate for “The Geek Stories”, I’ll take a little more time and spread a busy day into two so I can really speak to people rather than seagull in.

Blur of Weeks Past, Two Trips

The blur of the last couple of weeks has been intense. New people, new locations, new situations and thinking in a way that I frankly had left behind many years go.

Whilst these weeks have been productive from a pure output perspective, and I think that work-life is sorta in balance: there is still a hole where technology once fit.

Tomorrow I have a quick day trip to Brisbane to capture 4 stories; and then another quick trip to Adelaide to capture at least 4 stories. Sometimes its tough to get the “Microsoft connection” with these stories: especially a new one in the pipeline about online communities and social networking. There are probably some bean counters somewhere adding up the $2.50 of time it cost and $30.00 for breakfast wondering where’s the business case. You know, meh. 

So, like all things in life, unless I do something about filling this gap: it ain’t gonna happen. Time to allocate some days to learning something new and feeling good. Some me-geek-time.

Site Design Temporarily Reset

Time to upgrade to the latest WordPress. Time to remove many old plugins that were causing nastiness. A better designed theme will return, soon. For those reading through RSS, ignore this post.

Some other things are going a bit haywire. In the midst of fixing this now. I must admit I feel better on WordPress 2.1.2.

The RSS feed from this site through Feedjumbler/Feedburner are working OK, links on this site to the Feedburner needs to be created.

Need to find a wide design where I can customise the header image. Need to re-architect the old data from the old mungenet web site. Maybe render this to static elements. Not sure of the approach here yet. Re-add Plugins that do the cool things (history, archives, searching) – oh, and Google Adsense so I can pay for this web site 🙂

RSS is the new Black. Microformats are next.

Taking a leaf from Munge Brother, Uncle Mike, RSS is the new black. Yes, I am a little slow in realising this fact.

With a multitude of sites where my stuff is stored: it’s time to munge them all into one UberFeed. My main feed remains http://feeds.feedburner.com/NickHodgeMungenet

Using Feedjumbler, I’ve got a combined feed going into Feedburner. Now why doesn’t Feedburner offer this service? Yes, it has Flickr and del.icio.us style connections. But what about blip.tv, soapbox and so on? Why not just list all your incoming feeds in one place and output them in a smart way?

So, I had to choose between learning Yahoo!Pipes, write my own munger or use FeedJumbler. Due to time factors, FeedJumbler won out today.

Munging microformats together, without being an XML weenie, is a potential use for Pipes; or at least getting somone who is a little Pipes savvy to make a widget for a site. My head spins just thinking about this (or is it the lack of caffiene?)

That said, the more I look at Yahoo!Pipes, the more I am intruiged by its metaphor, and the potential uses in wiring stuff together. My brain is so mangled (munged?) this Saturday I am putting off learning until my head is clear.