Hat’s off to all who served.
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Category: Life
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LEVEL’ing Up
Kim and I are becoming empty nesters. Yes, it’s true, our little girls are all grown up. Haileigh is just about to graduate culinary school, and Taylor has just finished her first year in college. When the reality of it all set in Kim and I started thinking what’s next?
Question is, where?
It wasn’t so much what’s next as it was where? We’d been discussing a move out of the great San Joaquin Valley. Lots and lots of places came up; Boulder, Ft. Collins, Seattle, Austin, just to name a few. Yeah, we were open to a big move. In the end we settled on San Luis Obispo as a destination.
Finding a way
How do we get there? Well, you gotta find a great place to work, right? Yes, of course you do. I started looking for work about a year ago. I spoke with four different companies, one I thought I had, the other three were small and didn’t work. So I started looking around the Twitterverse for folks in San Luis Obispo I could connect with and found a great design community, much like Fresno’s. I reached out and found the folks to be quite friendly and helpful. I shared my skill set and asked who in San Luis Obispo might be a good fit. I was given a name.
Hello LEVEL
LEVEL Studios. That was the recommendation. So I decided to check out their web site, and found they’re a bit mysterious. It was hard to tell what they were up to. I found that they work with folks like Apple, HP, and RIM. They also ship a CMS, Switch. Given that, I thought I might find something that fit, so I applied. Lo and behold, I got a call! After a couple of phone interviews I traveled to San Luis Obispo to meet them in person. I went into the interview not knowing what to expect, and was extremely excited about what I heard. These guys do some very serious work, no I’m not going to say what, suffice it to say I was sold, and hoped I’d get an offer. I did.
Tomorrow, Friday, May 28, is my last day with Pelco. It’s been an interesting five years. I’ve see a lot of change during that time; acquisition, layoffs, and re-orgs. Pelco is on the right track. They have strong technical leadership in place and are making bold moves to become an IP company rather that a metal bending company. I have no doubt they’ll be quite successful. I’ll miss the people I worked with on a daily basis, but isn’t it always like that? Onward!
Monday, June 7, is my first day with LEVEL Studios. I’m really looking forward to it. The folks I’ve interacted with are super bright and friendly. The company has that old Visio-family feel I’ve been missing, I can’t wait to experience it first hand. Oh, yeah, and I also get to work on cool stuff, it doesn’t get much better than that!
Hello LEVEL, it’s very nice to meet you.
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Separated at birth?
I had to share this. Kim put this little picture together, I’m on the left at the age of 18, our youngest daughter, Taylor, is on the right at age 18. It’s a bit eerie.
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Rob’s 2010 Summer Blockbuster Must See List
Yeah, I like to go to the movies. Here’s what I’m planning to see, I won’t make them all, but I’ll certainly try.
| Kick Ass | April 16 |
| Iron Man 2 | May 7 |
| Shrek Forever After | May 21 |
| George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead | May 28 |
| Splice | June 4 |
| Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage | June 10 |
| The A-Team | June 11 |
| Toy Story 3 | June 18 |
| Jonah Hex | June 18 |
| Knight and Day | June 25 |
| Grown Ups | June 25 |
| The Twilight Saga: Eclipse | June 30 |
| The Last Airbender | July 2 |
| Predators | July 9 |
| Inception | July 16 |
| The Sorcerer’s Apprentice | July 16 |
| The Expendables | August 13 |
| Machete | September 3 (Originally April 16) |
Just for grins, here’s last years list.
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NY: Help Wanted, Coders
Matt Mireles: “New York City has a shortage of entrepreneurially minded technical talent. It’s not that there’s not enough engineers. Hardly. Columbia, NYU and the rest of the eastern seaboard spits out engineers in spades each year. But somehow those aren’t funneled into, aware of or interested in the NYC startups, at least at the early stage. Local engineers, it seems, want to be employees, not co-founders.”
I’d imagine a lot of kids just out of school would like to learn a bit about the business before they venture out on their own. Maybe they’re interested in working for one of the biggies; Apple, Microsoft, Google, or maybe they’d like to work for one of New York’s own exciting startups like Tumblr, those guys are kicking some major butt at the moment.
It is interesting to see this happening in New York City.
NY Times: ‘Mr. Sofaer says that centralized networks like Facebook are not necessary. “In our real lives, we talk to each other,†he said. “We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn’t all that hard to do. All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren’t really rare things. The technology already exists.‒
Sounds like they’re talking about creating a weblog.
Newsweek: “3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood’s current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches. It is driven largely to sell expensive projection equipment and add a $5 to $7.50 surcharge on already expensive movie tickets. Its image is noticeably darker than standard 2-D. It is unsuitable for grown-up films of any seriousness. It limits the freedom of directors to make films as they choose. For moviegoers in the PG-13 and R ranges, it only rarely provides an experience worth paying a premium for.”
I’m not all that impressed with 3D, I can live with or without it, and to top it off it makes my wife nauseated.
If we have the choice we’ll go to the 2D version of films. I must be getting old.
Chuck Hollis [via Mike Rohde]: “I don’t think I’ll be buying any more desktops going forward. I don’t think I’ll even be buying any more laptops going forward.
They’ve all been largely obsoleted (at least at my home) by a sleek $499 device that doesn’t really have any right to be called a “computer” in the traditional sense.”
Go read what Chuck has to say, it’s a fun story, and I’m sure it’s being repeated all over the world. The iPad will become “the” device for a large group of people. A lot of techies will claim it’s not useful and that’s a perfectly valid assertion. It’s not useful for them, the techno-geek, but for the average person that browses the internet, or watches movies, or reads a book once in a while, it could be the perfect device.
I know for a fact an iPad would be the perfect device for my wife 99% of the time. She mostly browses her favorite sites and checks out Facebook. Once we have the entire gamut of Facebook games running on the iPad, she’ll probably want one.
CNN: “Washington (CNN) — Four Democratic senators called on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday to reconsider the recent changes in its privacy settings and asked the Federal Trade Commission to streamline guidelines regarding privacy on all social networks.” – Oy. That’s the first word that popped into my head. Why does the government need to get involved with this? If you don’t like Facebook’s terms and conditions, or feel you don’t understand their privacy policy, or that it’s too liberal with your data, here’s an idea.
DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT.
Now Senators don’t have to feel the need to get involved.
Problem solved.
You’re welcome.
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Development as “Show Business”
Brent Simmons: “I can’t remember when it first dawned on me that app development is a form of show business.” – When I read this I immediately thought of Ted Johnson. Ted was a co-founder and CTO of Visio. He likened software development to movie production, thus the nifty little easter egg in Visio 2.0. The only one we ever really had.
Meet the Visio 2.0 team
To see this lovely “ego” screen you’d hold down both mouse buttons as the Visio 2.0 splash screen was showing. And, yes, I still believe Visio was the best company I’ve ever worked for.