Monthly Archives: August 2010

Sounding Off

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This year I'm volunteering for Scare for a Cure, a local interactive haunted house event raising money to benefit the Texas Breast Cancer Resource Center. If you're local to the Austin area, consider helping us out by volunteering, donating items listed on our wish list or by buying tickets and enjoying the fruits of our labor. This looks to be the biggest year yet, featuring an elaborate script, separate win/lose scenarios and lots of effort put in to crafting an awesome haunt you'll not soon forget.

I acted back in '03, when many of the same people were running Haunted Trails, and it's interesting to note that a few folks remember me from then. Granted, my station was a memorable one (cross-dressing belly dancers really scare the conservatives) but I was surprised nonetheless. This year I decided not to act, but to instead assist with sound design. After meeting with the audio team, I'm that much more excited about what we're doing this year.

I'm not used to crafting. While I've done my share of acting, music and more spontaneous art, the process of producing a concrete product from little more than a vague concept is a new and interesting one. Also, sitting in a room with lots of folks just as interested in good sound design as I am was an inspiration.

The timing on this couldn't have been better. Having just started my new job, I've got a bit of disposable income to drop on audio gear upgrades, along with the justification to do so. Now I need to learn about control surfaces, studio headphones, USB audio devices and how well all three play with Linux.

Bring on the power-ups…

I Can Haz Job

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Last Wednesday I received my offer letter, and began working on Thursday. My routine isn't all that different than it's recently been–wake up, take coffee on the patio and work on various projects until evening. Only now those projects are for someone else, and I'm getting paid for them.

I think this will be a great fit for me. It's part-time, leaving me ample time and energy for other projects and business ideas. Hours are flexible as well. Also, I'm working on things about which I'm passionate, and may even manage to swing funding for Spiel development. Unfortunately, there's nothing to which I'm ready to link just yet, but creating that is on the agenda for early next week.

My only concern is that I really need a better life outside of work. I acknowledge that this arrangement is quite sweet and that I'm lucky to have it, but having more money is sort of useless if you don't have an active life on which to spend it. Certainly there's something to be said for financial responsibility and saving, but beyond a certain threshold, such measures stop being responsible and start being score-keeping. And, well, just as I never could get into games like Space Invaders, whose goal was simply to earn more and more points in the face of increasing challenges, the game of have the biggest bank balance isn't much more exciting, though admittedly the power-ups and unlockable items are a bit cooler. :)

Hermes Update

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While I've not been blogging of late, I have been working on other projects. Several months ago, I introduced Hermes, my open source accessible GPS.

While there's still not an official site, the project has seen lots of active development, inspired heavily by my commercial GPS deteriorating at a rapid rate and my inability to afford a replacement. In April, the web interface got a REST-based web service layer. June saw the beginnings of my work on an Android app to communicate with the web service, and in late August, I'm very close to having something that I might wish to use on a daily basis.

It is currently possible to move around and receive real-time feedback about your current street, nearest intersection and nearby points of interest. All of these announcements appear on the notification bar, making it possible to run the app in the background and do other things while receiving real-time feedback. I also recently implemented voice commands. It is currently possible to request accuracy, direction and speed of travel, your current road/path/stream and the nearest intersection via voice commands. As more functionality is added, I hope to make the entire app usable in this way, so you might still have access to location services even in situations where pressing buttons and using gestures is impractical or impossible.

The web service and underlying library have also undergone a variety of changes. Live use has revealed a number of bugs and design deficiencies which are being addressed at a rapid rate. Often I'll find a bug while out and about, swing back by the apartment to try implementing a quick fix only to head back out again a few minutes later.

Another development about which I'm excited is the ability to navigate any network of ways described in OpenStreetMap. The most obvious use for this of course is street navigation, but there's no reason that Hermes couldn't work just as well on a mapped trail or river, speaking the intersection of streams with each other, the boundaries of lakes and other larger bodies of water, etc. While I haven't used the mobile version in these scenarios, I've used the web service to explore some of Austin's creeks and lakes, and am hoping to hit a camping store sometime soon to investigate waterproof phone cases. There are currently issues when non-vehicular paths parallel roads–sometimes Hermes will assume that the bus I'm on is cruising down a bike trail which I assume is alongside the current street–but hopefully this should be an easy bug to fix once others have been resolved.

I'm still not certain when I'll have something to demo. Since this is all volunteer, with my time split up between numerous projects, there just aren't any guarantees.

I have, however, tentatively volunteered to participate in this SXSW panel, which in theory should steadily encourage me to blow people away with something cool in March. :) If you'd like to help make that happen, vote for the panel so it's more likely to be chosen. Regardless, progress will continue. The ability to navigate unfamiliar environments without having to wrangle two separate devices in addition to my phone and anything else I may carry is such a huge benefit, and I look forward to the day when a fully capable smartphone is all I'll need.

The Long Overdue Update

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I haven't updated this thing in a while, though much has changed. Here's my attempt at a rundown:

  1. Of more immediate interest to blog readers (all two of you) I've broken “permalinks.” This probably forced a recent article repost, which I regret. I had very good technical reasons for changing the permalink style, but having done so, I can't think of why I might ever have to do so again. Unfortunately, previous links to posts won't work (I know that this one was heavily linked) but the content is still there.

  2. Several months ago, I moved from Houston to Austin, Even though not everything is going as I'd hope, I'm glad to be back in a city which I very much consider my home town.

  3. Work on various projects still continues. Spiel is receiving more rapid development, and may even be at the core of a commercial product (more on that in a bit.) Hermes is also getting lots of love in the form of an Android app. More on that in another post.

  4. I have a part-time job, writing apps and developing infrastructure for a joint project of the American Printing House for the Blind, the National Braille Press and various other agencies. More on that soon, when I have something to link, but it's basically an open source notetaker running Android and, most likely, Spiel.

  5. Massage therapy hasn't been forgotten. In early June, I had a promising meeting about the business plan wherein I received some tangible pointers on areas to develop. For various reasons, work on the plan has slowed, but work on my website and practice management app has taken off. Massage, as with any other health care profession, is paperwork-intense, which is kind of a pain for me to manage. As such, I'm working on a web application that allows for entry of form templates and completion of forms based on them, archiving of prior versions, rendering of forms to PDF for printing, appointment booking, etc. My only corporate job involved something vaguely similar for a state agency, which nicely acquainted me with the issues of developing something with the characteristics of a traditional paper-based system in the online world. Anyhow, not only will having this already in place make it quicker to start out when I do eventually get loans, but I think that showing off a fairly solid piece of technology and saying that I hope to market it someday might make it easier to receive loans and to be taken seriously.

  6. I recently acquired an Olympus DM 520 voice recorder. Thus far, I vastly prefer it to the older unit I owned, the Edirol R-09. The menus are accessible, battery life is 50 hours compared to only a few, it has 4 gigs of internal storage and charges via USB. No promises, but I'm once again pondering podcasting. I think that, at the very least, I'll want to record a few demos showing off Hermes at some point.

Anyhow, I think that's plenty, neatly encapsulating what has changed but still leaving lots of room for future posts. Whether or not I'll actually write those is another story entirely, but I'll try.