Software Developer, Media Nut, and Proud Father of Two

I don't know where to start, so I'll just go. Work has been pretty crazy over the last few weeks. Couple that with the work I've been doing for BuyFromAChristian.com and life is even busier. Because of how crazy work and life have been, I have absolutely no motivation at the moment to continue with my pet projects. What does that mean for Autotab? It's going to remain at beta 1.1 for quite some time. Is it dead? Not by a long shot. While there are room for improvements, I currently have no itch to continue developing it at this time. As for any type of blog update, I'm finding it more trouble to take the time to post, as this is my fourth or fifth attempt in about four or five months. I've got things I want to say about media stuff, but that'll wait for another post.

Things here at home have been good, but for me personally, my emotional and psychological state has been like a roller coaster ride. Having to deal with two jobs, one that pays, another that doesn't (yet) has been quite an ordeal. Buy From A Christian was wanting to do a big push on a national scale, so I spent a good month working more hours than I can track to get new features ready and existing ones fixed. Unfortunately, the push that was being talked about for weeks never happened, so after evaluating all that had happened after all I had done, I wasn't happy at all. But, there's no hard feelings and it's not like people were sitting on their butts waiting for something to happen. All of us involved have full time jobs and families to tend to. We all need to eat, sleep, and work, so there's only so much we could cram. Still though, I let myself get hyped about what I kept hearing we were going to do and was pretty disappointed when nearly none of it happened. Life goes on, and I believe God has things in store for us in His timing, not our own.

Other updates from home include our latest technological addition: DVR. My oh my, I will do my best to not go back to the days that I did not have one. Being the resourceful, tech savvy person that I am, I can get my hands on a TV show roughly an hour after it airs on TV. I won't bother going into the legality of such things, but I will say that I do this for active shows, meaning that I won't go download the entire series of Home Improvement or Star Trek: The Next Generation; that's what I have Netflix for. Anyway, so my DVR comes in and makes life so much easier and simpler for us. I don't have to join a queue list or be among thousands of users downloading bits from a torrent. Instead we can now enjoy our favorite shows from the beginning, even if the show hasn't finished airing. We did this with the Lost season finale and it was a perfect reminder of just how great it is to have a DVR.

Lastly, we're shopping around for cellphone providers, and I'm a bit stunned by the prices you have to pay for special features. We have three cell phones on our current plan and it costs us no more than $85/month. We don't use our phones for anything else other than phone calls. Yep, no text messages, because it's something we weren't willing to pay for. Shopping around with different providers, and including text messaging, would cost us over $100/month and I'm thinking, "Um... what??" I guess most people are okay with spending an extra $5, $10, or $15 per month per phone for various levels of text messaging, but I have a hard time swallowing $5/phone for 200 messages (AT&T). Text messages are widely used, so I don't see why such a popular feature would cost so much when you seemingly get so little. I try to get the best deal I can, but none of the US cellular providers have had close to what I'm willing to spend. So how about some incentive? Like family plans allow for X number of text messages between each family line, or even to people on your favorite 5 or 10 numbers? You get unlimited minutes with these people, so why not extend text messaging into this? There have been quite a few moments where sending texts would have been much better than making a phone call, but I can't justify the extra amounts. If it were $5 or $10 for all lines on the plan, we may find a more agreeable situation, but that's not the case.

We're going through May sweeps and major news about TV shows are coming around, so I'll have another post soon about that. Ciao!