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streaming bathtubgirl
Wednesday, October 4 2000
Work. Things got a little stressful today when it was made clear to me the sort of responsibilities that go with being the lead developer (incidentally, the only developer) for the British version of the site. I had a meeting with the CTO in which he told me that the UK site would be the test bed for a "new architecture" which, though based mostly in knowledge that happens to be my professional expertise, has (in keeping with the usual way things are done in my company) never been revealed to me. Not only that, but our company would have to go hire a bunch of consultants to help me, and it sounded like it was somehow my job to recruit them. Man, I've never complained about my salary, but I'm not paid enough to fret about such trivial manageria.
Then the hyper-quirky architectural guru finally sat me down and gave me a one-on-one introduction to his Microsoft-happy architecture. Though he moved fast, I could grasp it nonetheless. His block diagram required an excessive number of intercommunicating layers and involved a bit too much reliance on gratuitously sexy technology like XML, but somehow I found myself wanting to use it to develop the UK site. This is due in no small part to the evangelical skills of the hyper-quirky architectural guru.
After I finally got out of the last of these meetings (by now it was almost dark), I hurried my bicycle to Venice for another session of preparing Bathtubgirl.com for prime time. It doesn't take long to get to Venice if you're in a hurry; it's all downhill. I like the part of Ocean Park Blvd where it crosses 14th street and begins to go steeply up and down over across the canyons leading from the sea-level Venice lowlands into higher Santa Monica real estate.
Kim went off to do something for about two hours, and this gave me the undistracted focus necessary to accomplish all manner of great things: I installed a new sound card, I got DSL running on both the PC and the iMac, and I got audio and video to stream from the bathtub out onto the web (as opposed to, say, down the drain). Kim's iMac (running System 9) is infuriating. It crashes at the very slightest provocation, locking up in way that requires me to unplug the machine and reboot (if there's a reset switch it's been pretty well hidden). Seeing how little progress Macs have made since I last used one regularly (1997), I'm glad I've moved on to the world of WinTel machines. iMacs are problematic toys by comparison.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?001004 feedback
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