Movies I want to see this summer

Is it just me or has it been a really long time since there have been so many great movies out for the summer season. Everyone whines and moans about how Hollywood has past it's prime and the magic is gone. I would have to say that this summer proves the whiners WRONG!

I am so blown away by all the movies I am REALLY excited to see this summer, here they are:

• Ironman - May 2 (Done! Yeah, I will be seeing this one again before it is out of theaters)
• Prince Caspian - May 17 (Seeing this today!!!!!)
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - May 22
• The Hulk - June 13 (ok, not completely sure about this one but Ayden will drag me to it)
• WALL-E - June 27
• Hancock - July 4
• Hellboy II: The Golden Army - July 11
  
• The Dark knight - July 18 (This is the big hitter of the summer - I CAN'T WAIT!!!)
• The X-Files: I Want to Believe - July 25
  
• The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor - August 1
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars - August 15

Wow, I may need to get a second job to support this movie habit. Especially if I want popcorn!

All the summer movie listings are available at Moviephone's Summer Movie Guide

Twenty Years of Thanks Yous

I realized the other day that I have been in the workforce for 20 years now. I have worked at 8 companies in those 20 years. I feel extremely fortunate to have worked at each of these jobs over the years and I have been thinking about how each of these jobs helped to get me to where I am today. There are many things I would like to say thank you for:

Montgomery Farms - Tangent, Oregon (Warehouse Worker and General Warm Body)
Thank you for my first real job. Working at Montgomery Farms was hard physical labor (did I mention dirty and sweaty), but I learned that there were very few physical limits to what I could do and that some days you just have to knuckle down and do work that you don't want to do (sometimes for many days in a row). I also learned that I wanted a white collar job!

Albany Travel - Albany, Oregon (Travel Agent)
Thank you for giving me my first job in Travel. Thank you for teaching me that On The Job Training is happening all of the time and that I needed to pay attention. Thanks for giving the opportunity to succeed and laying me off when I didn't. (This was a huge eye opener for me)

Away Travel - Corvallis, Oregon (Travel Agent - Corporate Travel Agent)
First and foremost thank you for sending me to Scriptwriter School, this experience changed my life (I didn't understand that at the time.) Thank you for the opportunity to close sales (the phone rang faster than I could answer it) and to build my confidence as a Travel Agent.

BTI Travel/Mentor Graphics - Wilsonville, Oregon (Corporate Travel Agent - Executive Travel Agent - International Travel Agent)
Thanks for helping me to round out my experience as a Travel Agent. I got to learn international travel and I got to do travel for Mentor's executives. I had the great good fortune to work three DAC conferences, one in Dallas, one in San Diego and one in San Fransisco. These were great experiences and a chance to do something completely different from my day to day job. Also, thank you for providing me with the stability to buy our first house.

Incredible Universe (Second Job) - Wilsonville, Oregon (Customer Service Agent)
Thank you for teaching me about real customer support. I worked in returns and I got to see the best and worst of customers. I also learned that if you have a good team, it makes even the worst situations tolerable.

Emmett Travel - Tigard, Oregon (Scriptwriter - Corporate Travel Agent - Manager of Information Services)
I have so many things to thank Emmett Travel for. The one thing that has had the biggest impact on my career was paying for half of my ColdFusion training and giving me the time to develop the Emmett website.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Not only did this help me to grow my skills as a developer, it helped me figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. At Emmett I changed my career path from Travel to IT and the Web. This is the biggest turning point in my career to date. I also learned a ton about big projects and deadlines. I very thankful for all of the friends I made at Emmett Travel, I get to see them about twice a year, I always look forward to it.

Emmett Travel School (Second Job) - Tigard, Oregon (Teacher - Who Knew?)
Thank you for the opportunity to teach. I found it to be one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. Someday I hope to teach again.

Xerox - Wilsonville, Oregon (Developer - Technical lead)
First of all, thank you for hiring me. My background was not exactly the pedigree of the normal Xerox employee. I was beyond lucky to be hired into an amazing team that for 2 1/2 years defied the odds and did things that other divisions inside Xerox could not accomplish. I will forever be grateful for my time on the IST/Systems & Tools Team.

Thank you for giving me the chance to take on new projects and challenges. Thank you for all of the great times we had as a team. I made friends in IST I will have for the rest of my life.

ISITE Design - Portland, Oregon (Technical Architect - Development Manager)
I have only been at ISITE for a little over a year. It is an amazing place with some of the smartest people I have ever met. Just being around all these creative people who do just many creative things outside of work as they do at work is inspiring! Thank you for re-kindling my creative spark. With any luck I will have much to report back to this blog about my own projects!

Twenty years from now I hope to look back at all of the great places I have been lucky enough to work in the next 20 years. We will have to see what the future holds.

See you there!

Symmetry

07/14/07 - My birthday is on a symmetrical date indeed, very cool!

My Worst Enemy

Today is my birthday. Normally this would be a time to look back on my life; but today instead, I am looking forward.

In the last few weeks I have begun to make some changes. In essence these changes are nothing more radical than a change of a small belief here, a slight reframing of how I see possibility there. The cumulative effects of this are a bit startling, but very exciting too.

It comes down to this: I am my own worst enemy. I am the biggest obstacle in my life.

You know the old saying "If you think you can't do it, you're right!"; in my case it is more like, "If you are not sure you can do it and you can see your self being really embarrassed by the outcome, you should think about it some more....like forever". I don't mind being the butt of the joke, that is almost my entire shtick. But on the really fundamental things, the things that define who I am and the things that I really want to impress others, more often than not I am too scared to move forward.

This is changing. I have taken a fresh look at certain things in my life and what they mean. I have redefined them. I am choosing what I can do based on the potential of my actions not by what people think. As my good friend Vic says "Who cares what those people think, #@%$ them!".

There is a lot more work to be done of course. I have plenty of kruft to work through, but as of today it is my kruft and I am going to own it.

WePlayVideos.com's New Blog Home

I have set up a separate blog just for posts about WePlayVideos.com.

It is here.

All future posts about WePlayVideos.com will be located here. Thanks!

Bad Travel Karma

Today's trip did not start off well. I thought I had shaken off my bad travel karma, but I was wrong. It was simply waiting for me to look the other way then BAM! Right in the kisser.

The trouble started in security, I am on a three day trip to visit a client and I cannot afford to be without clothes so I went carry-on. Evidentily I have terrorist hair because my hair gel did not make it past security. I was assured that no matter how small the container might be, it was not "travel-size". That's fine I can get more hair gel. Wear it in good health guys!

So I get over my encounter with security and I figure I had better get something to eat. Now before I get started let me give you this piece of advice. If anyone offers you a "breakfast calzone" run the hell away! Don't walk, don't think about it (It is a calzone, but filled with breakfast goodness?), no run away.

Now I, being the epicurean equivilant of a crash test dummy, went for the calzone. (It's hot, it's fast, it's italian, it's BREAKFAST!) So I take my calzone to the boarding area to have a quick bite before my plane leaves. The boarding area is about half empty so I pick a nice quiet seat kind of off by myself to "enjoy" my breakfast.

It turns out the calzone is made up almost nothing but tough overrbaked hard as cement bread. It is attrocious. I am sitting their gnawing on my very poorly chosen 400 year old fossil bonanza when my chair starts to move. The chair I had chosen to sit on was not bolted to the other chairs in the lounge. Oh no this chair was a loner! So just like a see saw my end goes down and the other side goes up. The next thing I know I am face down on the floor on top of my calzone with my laptop bag on my butt. I can only believe this probably made the calzone a little more chewable. My carry-on bag, which had my drink on it was now on the floor swimming in a lake of diet coke.

After stifling their laughter, several people helped me up. Oh, BTW I get to spend the next two hours on a jet with these people. Oh, yeah, I am thrilled about that! Needless to say, I skipped the calzone breakfast.

Whatever I did in a past life it must have been pretty bad...

New Web App Development - Go Live

It is not exactly a full blown launch of the site, but http://www.weplayvideos.com is live. It has a playlist with 12 songs on it and plays videos from the playlist controller.

It was a real race to the finish line with an almost complete database re-design about 3 hours ago. I am going to need to take some time and really look at the table design and see if it is going to serve the new features that will be launching in the next few weeks.

The site is very simple and very pre-launch. The logo is a quick crop from the actual comp I will be using (that is why it has some faint lines around it). I will get the real logo in the next couple of days.

I crowdsourced the logo design, I got almost 60 comps. Here is the contest.

I am going to start a blog specifically for WePlayVideos and will be copying these last posts there and blogging about future development.

But for a moment I am going to bask in the glow of accomplishment. So not to spoil the moment, or this fine fine Smirnoff Ice; I bid you good evening!

New Web App Development - Day 5

They say it looks darkest before the dawn, well it looked pretty dark this morning. It was really starting to look like I would not be able to launch tomorrow. But as the day progressed little by little things got better. By this evening I was starting to get excited about how the site looked. It is an extremely simple site with a simple idea behind it. I intended to blog about the idea and my plans for it but as it is 12:25 in the morning and I am having trouble keeping my eyes open, I will limit it to the basics.

Site: http://www.weplayvideos.com

Premise: My own personal MTV (and maybe soon everyone elses)...

The whole joke is this, what is the difference between MTV and my site? We play videos!

I will elaborate more in the next couple of posts. Today I got the following done:

• Figured out how to switch videos the way I wanted
• Figured out how to make the rounded corners on the playlist controller scalable
• Tweaked the CSS (table free layout baby!) so that it is almost ready
• Added more data to the DB
• Coded the video switching js and css
• Fixed a bug in my master query
• Got the basic site to about 75% complete

The plan is to launch late tomorrow (with zero fanfare) a very basic version of the initial launch site. Tomorrow is just the end of iteration one. I have lots of features to add in coming development cycles.

New Web App Development - Web Resources

In the process of working on this project I have found some excellent resources online, I will share some now and more after monday:

• Crowdsourced Creative Resources (Logo): Sitepoint
• CSS Layout Templates: Intensivstation
• Online Button Creation: Glassy Buttons
• Standards Based HTML templates: Web Standards Project
• Awesome Firefox Debugger Plug-In: Firebug
• CSS and HTML Syntax reminders: W3Schools
  

I have read so much great stuff on the internet today, examples of different hacks or experiments, tutorials and open source documentation. The internet rocks!