Sorry I havn’t posted anything for a couple of weeks. I have both been busy at work and home. It almost seems like I have no time anymore. Let me catch you up real quick and hopefully I will be able to catch up on post so that you can read all the exciting news in depth.

I had a guest blogger as you can see from the previous post. This is a new area for me as I orginally intended this blog as a personal outlet. I now see that in the technology arena I am in sometimes it doesn’t hurt to bring in other folks and hear their ideas. The last post was a test of that. Since this site is getting a lot of hits from others besides my family I thought it wouldn’t hurt. Let me know if you liked his post or not and I will evaluate bringing in other talent again.

I went to Devconnections 2010 in Las Vegas last week… yeah I said VEGAS!! it was great I got to meet a lot of people in my industry which is rare and had time left over to take in Vegas and all of it’s wonderful sites. I had never been to Vegas as an adult so it was very exciting for me. I hope to go back again soon. DevConnections allowed me to learn a lot about web development, web services, and silverlight 4. You will be seeing my site switch from php/wordpress based to asp.net/silverlight based in the near future. I have secured serverspace with rackspace.com and am currently working the final stages of my own asp powered CMS. I will be selling this CMS as a value add to the customers that I already host to allow them a more robust system under their current hosting contracts. So those of you who host with me know an email is coming

Our new baby is coming soon as well 7 weeks and counting. My wife had me put up a be back banner on her page southernmama.com as well as create an e-invite platform for her babyshower coming May 8th. We have decided on the new baby’s name but I will not ruin the suprise here yet. Daniel keeps asking when “Baby ____ is going to come out and play” we can only laugh and reply soon.

Work is going well we are hiring new people and others are leaving. I will have my hands full soon, if I didn’t already, with training and managing. I am hoping that I will be able to do more managing and actual coding instead of data entry type stuff with the addition of new staff. We will see. I have been delving hard into sharepoint and want to switch our external site over to it but given our current constraints I don’t see that happening anytime soon. I have however been able to build a full youtube clone as well as a twitter-ish clone within sharepoint and I am working with SP webservices more. I just can’t get enough of this stuff even now I should be asleep but just can’t help myself researching and playing in tech. It is great to have your hobby also be your job

Well that’s all for now hopefully you are fast asleep or doing whatever is usual at this time in your timezone as for me I am going to search about CDN’s and silverlight smooth-streaming.

Thanks for reading
David Bates

As the title suggests someone very close to me passed away last week. My grandmother Doris Jones died on Feb. the 23rd. Her health had been declining for several years and she really started to decline in health about 3 months ago. She died from complications from COPD a very harsh disease that bassically renders your lungs useless.

My G’MA as we lovingling called her was someone I greatly admired and loved. She helped to raise me and was there for me during every event of my life. She will be missed greatly.

Her funeral was held over the past three days and was fitting. Her friends and family where beside of her and she was laid to rest beside of her husband Charlie Jones (POP’s) I had created a video tribute to her and will try to post it here over the next couple of days.

I would like to thank all of you who sent cards, flowers, visited, and even tweeted to me to help me through this time.

Goodbye G’MA and may God be with you.
David Bates

I use twiterholic.com for grading my tweets, the facebook tool seamed to work great as well.

Originally posted as a comment
by dlbates
on The Next Web Network using DISQUS.

Dang, First Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, and Blogspot. When will we be able to stop these guys? Not only that but they seem to always attack DNS except for the denial of service attack on twitter. I just hope for our sake it is not a group of people and just one hacker so we can shut them down.

Originally posted as a comment
by dlbates
on The Next Web Network using DISQUS.

This seems exactly like the kodak patent. Kodak patented a way to view photos taken on a screen which is commonplace and a required feature on every camera device. Almost all camera companies pay some royalty to Kodak for use of this technology. This doesn’t seem odd to me as five years ago a newsfeed was not a common item and social media was barely beginning. I think it is smart of Facebook to do this and will ensure their longevity in the marketplace

Originally posted as a comment
by dlbates
on The Next Web Network using DISQUS.

Or watch him die, your choice.

Story:

I came home the other day and my wife informed me that the downstairs toilet was stopped up. This was strange to me because I had just remodeled the downstairs bathroom and put a 3″ pipe from the toilet to the sewer so I had never anticipated it becoming stopped up. Curiously I went at the toilet with a plunger and after about 30minutes had no success. Now we have been potty training my son Daniel and he is fascinated by the toilet we have caught him trying to play in it and even trying to wash things in it but he has yet to master the art of the potty. So instinctively I started to assume that he had throne a rag down in the toilet and that must be what is causing the stop-up. I told my wife my thoughts and she agreed so the next day I went to my Mom’s to retrieve my arsenal of toilet tools including a 25′ snake and a plunger that looks more like a bicycle pump that is supposed to build up pressure and push objects through. The snake would only go a little ways down and would stop dead and the special plunger was no help either so I decided that the problem must lie further down the pipe and took the toilet up from the floor. I continued to try and snake the pipe itself and it went through it just fine… So now my curiosity was up and I turned the toilet on its side and was shocked when I saw a rubber ducky staring at me from the S-bend in the toilet. now mind you this is in the porcelain part of the toilet and was further back than my hand could reach. I tried everything snake, plunger, electric cable, close-hanger, knife, praying, water, and even dismantled the top of the toilet in the hopes it might give me better access. Nothing worked, nothing would even budge the ducky he was wedged in there. So after about three hours I gave up and tonight we have went and bought a new toilet to replace the one in our bathroom.

The Challenge to You:

Since I have no other possible ways to get the duck out and I am no longer concerned about the toilet itself I am starting to entertain very destructive ideas for the duck. They include items such as gas, M-80′s, Lead (propelled by a gun), and very large hammers as I said at the start of my post the ducks fate is in your hands you have 36 hours from the time I post this until I either dismantle the toilet gently saving the duck or he meets a of an unsavory flavor. I would like you to comment on this post or send tweets to @davidbates telling me if the duck should be saved or how he should die.

Update:
Ducky is now Dead See http://dlbates.com/DuckyDies for videos of his demise

I start my days around 5:00 each morning the first thing I reach for is my Iphone to check on emails and tweets that may have happened throughout the night. I then head downstairs and get ready for the workday so I don’t wake the wife and Daniel (They are not morning people). Once ready I check my phone again as I am about to leave Wi-Fi access for at least a 30 minute drive. I live in Madison, NC and work in Greensboro. My drive depends heavily on traffic and weather, leaving at 5:30 or 6:00AM normally get’s me to work in about 30 minutes.

Once I arrive at work I grab for a MT. Dew and unlock my machine… I never reboot my machine unless there are windows updates so it is always ready to go and set to where I left off the day before. My programs that are running upon startup normally consist of Chrome, Tweetdeck, Outlook, Flash, and Visual Studio… depending on my work the day before I may have SQL or a spreadsheet open.

Again I check email and twitter to see if anything has gone on during my drive that I need to react to. I then check my task list which is a SharePoint calendar with some extra columns for priority, comments, and requestor to see what task I need to work on next. I switch between my task list and my dry-erase board depending on my workload as I have found under heavy loads the dry-erase board made me more productive. I normally use my task list however. Having just checked my task list I can see that I have 11 High’s for both external and internal development so I jump on one and start coding.

Since I work in MarComm and not IT I find that sometimes respect as a true developer is hard to come by and I am new to the group so I still have yet to earn some of the respect. However this affects how I have to approach certain tasks and can sometimes either help or hinder a situation. I have to be very careful to put on the bully face when needed but also have to be uber-friendly which I inherently am anyway.

So while coding I will normally have to attend around 2 meetings per day sometimes this is a waste and I continue to code on my Ipone but other times I find the meetings enlightening especially the ones that decide who owns what or who controls what process.

So enough of the ambiguitis stuff and onto the meat. When I say coding I normally am required to design, build, or correct errors in XSLT/XML, SQL/VB, SQL/C#, Flash, or Java. The changes can range from making a color change to full-blown design of new collections of data. I find myself working most in SQL/VB and XML/XSLT as that is what my predecessor chose to use. I am a C# guy myself as I started programming in C and then moved into Cocoa on the Mac before becoming a web-dev.

My current biggest project is the addition of video at work both internal and external. So my Flash skills have come into play there. I hope to write up so good material for deployment in an enterprise and even develop some best practices for video.

However what gets me the most praise at work is my ability to solve problems, not always solving coding problems but by taking a look at the whole picture and be able to develop a system that works for the environment it is in. I find it odd when I solve a problem and they say no one else has thought of that… it’s so simple. I love it.

I leave my work around 4 each day but most times I don’t actually get to leave until about 5 as I get caught up in a project and don’t know when to quite or something breaks last minute in the day. Either way I reverse my morning routing where I check my Iphone when I leave and when I get home. I then try and spend time with Daniel and wife until around 9 when it is time for me and Daniel to watch some youtube and go to sleep.

So that is what I do as a web-dev, I code, I listen, and I fix problems. What a better way to work than that. I really feal that I am doing what makes me happy as I can’t get enough of it. Right now I am at home on a friday night writing this post about work when I should be asleep… What can I say I am a true G33K and there is no place like 127.0.0.1

Goodnight
David Bates

I started my journey on Tuesday at 4am and flew to Atlanta we stayed in ATL just long enough to huff it across the terminal and catch our flight to Denver. The flight to Denver was over 3 hours long and we flew over 500MPH. The coolest part of the trip was watching the GPS while we flew. Cities flew by as though they were street names, it was very cool. We landed at about 11 our time and we grabbed our rental car and headed for the hotel.

It is about a 20 minute drive from the Airport in Denver to the hotel in Broomfield. While driving to the Hotel we both noticed that there where no mountains. In fact we both looked at each other and said “Where are the friggin Mountains?” There was not a single mountain in site for the entire drive and me and Kim both were disappointed that we would not see any. So we got to the hotel and checked in.

Pictures of trip to Denver from Airplaine:

Once we got settled at the hotel we then drove to work. We were told before we left that there would be a cookout at the facility at 2:00 so we rushed over so not to miss it. We got there at the perfect time I went straight through the line being sure to meet the people that was supposed to show us around. The menu was hamburgers and sausages… yes sausages and they were delicious. They even had put Jalapeño’s on the line. While I was stuffing the sausage into my mouth we met the main guy we came to see, he asked how our trip was and if we liked Broomfield. I said the food was great but that we were disappointed because we couldn’t see the rockies. Surprised he exclaimed… What do you mean you can’t see the mountains? I then asked if he had a place close by that we could go to see them and he said sure just turn left out of the parking lot. Now I gave him a strange look because I had just drove from that way and I figured that if there had been a mountain there I would have seen it… Right? So I agreed to follow his direction once we got out of the office. We spent several hours then touring the facility and video taping several areas of the building. The office had a meeting at 4:00 though and after that all of the workers were dismissed so me and Kim took off to find some mountains, and mountains we did find.
This is the view just to the left of the parking lot for RFMD Broomfield:

It turned out that it was just foggy when we drove in and the mountains were covered. I guess it was God’s way of giving the mountains a majestic reveal.

That night we had the most amazing dinner at Carraba’s and I went back to the hotel and got in the Jacuzzi… Wonderful

Day 2:
On day 2 we got up and drove quite a ways to the nearest IHOP and as we were telling each other that we had traveled to far we noticed this great spot to film the mountains from… take a look below and see if you agree:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8NOd81sF6o

we then ate at IHOP and went in to work. we filmed until about 2 and then headed for the airport.
This time we were routed through Cincinnati to get back to Greensboro but it was a fun flight.
A Pic of the flight back:

All in all it was a great trip and I had a great time.

Thanks for reading:
David Bates