I’ve been terribly lax about updating my blog lately.
Beth and I went to Buena Vista, Colorado last weekend to scout out places for the 2005 Bradley Family Reunion. I thought it was pretty productive, and relaxing. We enjoyed the Cottonwood Hot Springs on Saturday afternoon.
January, February, and March I’m working on a play called “Orpheus Descending”. I think I’ve got all the sound effects and music together now. We’re doing full run through rehearsals on Wednesday and Friday nights until the show starts. The original director was replaced last week, so now we have a new director.
Online music is finally starting to pay off (a little)! I just got a check for $41.54 from CD Baby for “Digital Distribution”. That means they’ve taken my band’s CDs and made the tracks available on services like iTunes.com. People then downloaded those songs and paid Apple (or whoever), who in turn paid CD Baby, who in turn pay me. I’m not sure what percentage of a $0.99 sale I see, but I think it’s around 7 cents or so, which must mean that people have downloaded 404 Not Found music 500 times or so. Not too bad! Of course, the band split up after our April 1, 2004 performance, and I stopped considering it a business at the same time (meaning, the business entity ceased to exist then, for tax purposes, and I’m not actively promoting our music anywhere).
Now that I’m not a small business owner (unless you want to consider that I’m part-owner of Beth’s editing business), I just have a single job. And work is going quite well. I’m learning so much! And it’s good fun to write software again. I like that I can tackle a problem and actually solve it within a half a day. The kind of (non-trivial) problems I had to solve as a QA Manager were things that take months or years. This week, I’m writing what you might call a “log scraper Yeti adapter”. I tried to explain it to Beth (twice) and just gave up. But if you’re a geek, you might understand it. I’m making an interface between JUnit and log4j so that a software test engineer can write a test case using our JUnit extensions (called Yeti) that monitors log output from some system-under-test. “Log scraper” is just an anachronistic misnomer. This thing taps directly into the log4j log stream, rather than tailing (“scraping”) log files. That’s why I’m calling it “Tapper”. My coworker Chris was quick to realize that Tapper was also the name of an early-80’s arcade game. I’ll have to challenge him to a quick game of Tapper, which you can play online for free.
Well, better go to work and earn some money!