You’re pitiful
by Kevin Dangoor
“Weird Al” Yankovic has released what is probably the only song you’re likely to hear this year that mentions the game Halo.
“Weird Al” Yankovic has released what is probably the only song you’re likely to hear this year that mentions the game Halo.
I’ve shipped off The TurboGears Ultimate DVD for manufacturing! Woohoo! The final running time of all of the videos on the disc is more than 5.5 hours. There’s four hours of video that’s not available online.
Putting together that DVD was a grueling experience, due primarily to technical issues. A computer that locks up sometimes… Premiere Pro’s odd habit of producing files an order of magnitude larger than QuickTime Pro does using “the same codec”… and QuickTime Pro (on Windows) gets the occasional buffer overrun (after spending a few hours encoding).
If I do more videos, I’ll certainly get a new computer to fix that problem once and for all. (Where this computer came from is its own sorry tale.) And, at this point, I at least know how to get the files encoded the way I want.
My back of the envelope “business days” calculations say that the discs should be shipping out on the schedule I had planned (June 16th). The squishy toolboxes are not due in until the 19th, but the other merchandise should already be in the warehouse when the DVDs arrive. The DVD is on sale for $22.95 until I start shipping.
Thanks again to everyone who has bought the DVD during the preorder period!
After quite a bit of deliberation, I’m pleased to announce that I’m going to work for Arbor Networks, starting on July 11th after my Month of Insanity is over. Arbor will be a great place to work and they made a terrific offer. I’ve previously worked with half a dozen people there.
Had Arbor not been so attractive, my decision would’ve been easier. I had to really think about what’s best for TurboGears and myself. (Thanks to Appropriate Solutions, Zesty News is continuing on solidly, and I’m looking forward to talking more about that in the coming months.)
Arbor uses Python and CherryPy today, so I’m going to be continuing work on the same technology. Arbor is a good open source citizen, so I may end up contributing more code to TurboGears than I have in the past couple of months. If I no longer need to worry about paying the bills, that frees up a lot of mental space and time.
Arbor’s products are very cool and useful. New internet security threats pop up daily, and Arbor provides a way for companies to spot the threat and neutralize it before it can cause too much damage. There’s quite a bit of interesting UI work, and I’ll get to sharpen my skills with JavaScript.
The timing of the move to Arbor is good as well. It comes post-DVD and book (and the other insanity of this month), so I’ll be largely trading work that I’ve been doing on the DVD and book for work on Arbor’s products. Blazing Things continues on. TurboGears continues on.