kerimsatirli.com

Just about everyone and their sister have been using one micro blogging tool or another and even though I have accounts at Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce, I mostly find myself just reading other people’s tweets and pownces, rather than creating my own. The primary reason for that? Cost.

Twitter has local numbers for the US, UK, Canada and India, Jaiku has one for Sweden and Pownce does not have any number at all and while I could still use a UMTS connection to post updates, I find myself enjoying the service that Treasuremytext offers more and more every day.

Treasuremytext was first launched in August of 2005 by Katie Lips and Paul Stringer and has seen a continuous stream of improvements ever since, up to a point where the interface is as easy to use as it gets.

Ease of use is all I want(ed) for my micro blogging endeavour and as such, I figured that I should give Treasuremytext a go, so from now on, you will see (ir)regular updates at the top of the sidebar.

If there is one thing that I hate, it is most probably getting up early. It is not like I can not get up early, it is just that I have a strong dislike against getting up early.

I am not lazy, but rather nocturnal and a big part of my creative cycle revolves around the late (and sometimes: early) hours of the day.

Some people have suggested that being nocturnal, as far as humans go, is a conditioned behavior and even though I partially agree, I do not care enough to actually change my set way of operating, not unless I absolutely have to.

Having to get up at 5 am (!) to prepare for a set-call at 7 am some 60 miles away from where you actually slept, in my book, qualifies as one of these situations where deviating from your normal way of doing things is acceptable.

Ten days ago, Wiendelt invited me to take part in a shoot for the CliniClowns’ show Neuzenroode, where I acted as the boom-mic operator.

Not even five days later, I got another chance at joining both Wiendelt and GabeB (our resident singer-songwriter) for a shoot comissioned by the NISB, and that is where the story began.

The shoot was split into two days, Monday was in Maassluis, Wednesday was in Zwolle, both locations being a fair distance from Amsterdam meant getting up early, very early, namely during a time when every sane person is actually sleeping.

Still, the morning started off nicely with a fairly sized bowl of cereals and the Foo Fighters’ Times Like These playing on the radio, I already knew that the day would turn out to be good, and it would. I am going to spare you the details, but shooting can be quite entertaining, especially if you have company that can make it worth your while.

Apart from having a great day, I also learned a valuable lesson: cables are never long enough for the task you need them, yet always long enough to get in the way, which can be quite annoying when you have someone moving around your boom-mic all the time and stepping on the cable (I figured out a simple way of solving the problem with the help of a keychain and some ducttape).

That’s it for this entry, the only thing left to say is: thanks Wiendelt and GabeB for inviting me and a very big thank you to GabeB for hooking me up with a place to crash, thereby actually making it possible for me to join the team during the shoot.

I realize that I have been talking about my involvement with xolo.tv for some time now, but I always forgot to really show people what it is that we do. Well, fret not, I am not going to show you, right now, but I am going to share something special with you.

All you have to do is (left) click on this link and a new window will open with the video in it.

A note of advice: the clip is roughly 17mb in size, so you might not want to do this on a mobile connection unless you really are dying get to know the team.

It has been something close to four weeks now since my last intern report and while I initially planned to make this a weekly returning series, it turns out that working fulltime can do weird things to your scheduling as well as your stamina. One of those things is that, after a full day, I sometimes feel so spent that I simply cannot bring myself to write something that is actually worth posting and often just end up scrapping the whole piece.

Lucky me, xolo.tv has what could be considered an implementation of the Google Labs idea, where you get to spend 20% of your work time on personal projects; with the biggest difference being that, at xolo.tv, I actually get to choose what I want to work on, while Google limits your freedom to something that may be used to expand the company’s product portfolio.

Be that as it may, I find myself spending most of my time with treks through the intricacies of ExpressionEngine, which is finding more and more support here every day; if not only for the fact that the system, excuse the strong language here, damn flexible, that we have not yet been able to come up with a problem that cannot be tackled with it.

Apart from my techy backend work, I have also forayed into the area of frontend development and am actually starting the first phase of a huge project this week. Once phase one is completed, I will make sure to post about it here, suffice to say that the project is bigger than most of the ‘jobs I have done in the past and combines a great number of different techniques to form a solution that delivers content across a large scale of mediums, yet is able to target highly specific needs.

While, technically speaking, the project should be considered “work”, I perceive it much more as a reward given to me by the powers that be; the reward itself stemming from work I completed earlier on, where I proved that I could carry my load and come up with solutions that, most of the time, simply worked.

In fact, my direct boss was (and hopefully: still is) so happy about my work, that he decided to give me a recommendation on LinkedIn:

On a related note: it still feels weird to think of someone as my boss. In my short time in the field, I have always been independent. Yes, I have worked with others and yes, I have had clients that required reporting, but I never had a real boss. It is an interesting setting indeed…

As if a recommendation on LinkedIn was not enough, Gabriel Bauer, our resident movie-shooting-director-turned-producer-and-what-not dedicated a whole song to me (well, me and the two other IT guys) and the guy has got talent too (beware, the clip comes in at a hefty 25mb):

That’s it for now, more is coming soonish