Tag Archives: work

Bad and Good News

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Because the good news won’t make much sense without the bad, the bad comes first.

I was laid off last week. I wish the National Braille Press luck with their currently unnamed Braille notetaker/phone/PDA project.

The good news is that I’m now contracting for Serotek, and am assured that there’s no shortage of work. I am of course under NDA so can’t talk about anything upcoming, but one might reasonably conclude from this that there will be many new Android developments following my initial efforts at creating iBlink for Android.

Since NBP is no longer funding Spiel development directly or indirectly, I’ll be adding a donate button to its site in the coming days. I’m still OK financially, but if you’ve used or are interested in my various other projects, then now might be a great opportunity to express that with a donation. :)

Meanwhile, I welcome my new Serotek overlords…I mean, look forward to working more with them in the future. I haven’t been this excited about my work in a long while, and we’re definitely breaking some new and exciting ground both for me personally and in our industry at large.

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. :)

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.