I have now been at LifeStyleTV since the middle of February, and things finally seem to at least somehow settle in a bit. The first weeks was a bit chaotic I must admit, but things are much better now and starting to get more regular.

What I do around here depends a bit on what needs to be done, but my main responsibilities consists of two things: Create playlists and develop internal software.

The playlists I create are daily files (one playlist per day) that contains a reference to every video file that our broadcast software will air. One file after another. Station ids, fillers, ads, actual programs, up next “screens”, you name it. For every single thing you see on LifeStyleTV now, I have used the mouse and dragged that thing from the Mac OS X Finder, into a playlist for the day. Hopefully we will get this process more automated in the future, but right now it really is that manual and it takes about 30-60 minutes to do the playlist for one day. And just to clarify, I do not decide the rough schedule (what programs that air). Those I get from someone else. I just fill in the blanks.

What I am developing of software I might write more about later. But just as a quick overview for the curious ones: Up till last week I have mostly been doing research and trying to get back into the world of web, PHP and Mac after almost two years of developing windows applications in C#. I have also looked at various PHP frameworks and for now settled with Kohana (which I will probably blog a bit about). What I will be developing is at the moment a small task management system for internal use. What needs to be done, who needs to do it, what needs to be done before I can do something else, et cetera. In time, however, the thinking is that this will evolve and grow and track more and more information and data about what is happening at LifeStyleTV. In the end (I’m only making things up here now though, but hopefully they will happen some day) it will help us be much more efficient, keep the LifeStyleTV website updated, make it easier to buy DVDs and find On-Demand programs, make the scheduling and playlist generation more and more automatic, et cetera.

That was that for now.

So… what are you doing currently?

Last Friday (January, 29th) I had my last day at SMS Development & Support AS where I have been working for the last 1.5 years. It was my very first job as a full-time software developer and I learned a lot. Both about developing software and about myself as a developer. Good stuff!

Next up I will return to LifeStyleTV where I spent a year as a Media Missionary. This time I will be working there as a regular employee and help out with various things. Mainly I will be developing some internal software systems with some of the others there, but I will most likely also help out with the TV production. I am going down there the 11th of February and I am looking forward to get started.

What am I doing now, during this interlude? Not a lot. Very little. Extremely little. My computer is dead. I’m sick. My energy reserves are non-existent. I’m sleeping, eating, watching tv, reading… and that’s pretty much it… To be honest I am actually kind of happy I am sick now instead of earlier or later. Just hope I will be back to normal before Thursday…

Two of the many very interesting paragraphs from it:

There are three desires I find written so deeply into my heart I know now I can no longer disregard them without losing my soul. They are core to who and what I am and yearn to be. I gaze into boyhood, I search the pages of literature, I listen carefully to many, many men, and I am convinced these desires are universal, a clue into masculinity itself. They may be misplaced, forgotten, or misdirected, but in the heart of every man is a desperate desire for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue. I want o you think of the films men love, the things they do with their free time, and especially the aspirations of little boys and see if I am not right on this.

There are also three desires that I have found essential to a woman’s heart, which are not entirely different from a man’s and yet they remain distinctly feminine. Not every woman wants a battle to fight, but every woman years to fought for. Listen to the longing of a woman’s heart: She wants to be more than noticed—she wants to be wanted. … Every woman also wants an adventure to share. … So many men make the mistake of thinking that the woman is the adventure. But that is where the relationship immediately goes downhill. A woman doesn’t want to be the adventure; she wants to be caught up into something greater than herself. … And finally, every woman wants to have a beauty to unveil. Not to conjure, but to unveil. Most women feel the pressure to be beautiful from very young, but that is not what I speak of. There is also a deep desire to simply and truly be the beauty, and be delighted in.

OK, actually that last one is three paragraphs in the book. But tried to get the similar three points that was mentioned for men (And for men they are each elaborated in three sub chapters).

Aaaanyways, very interesting book. You should definitely read it, especially if you are a guy. Could be interesting if you are a woman too of course, but I can only speak for myself, who is a guy. For women there is actually a similar book called Captivating, which I have heard is very good as well. I haven’t read it yet though… but I will

Highly recommend them! Get them from Amazon, they are not even expensive

• Wild at Heart
• Captivating

What do you think about this matter? Did it sound about right? What is in the innermost parts of your heart?

That diagram is also the source of the name of this blog, just in case you didn’t see it

So, now I am going for WordPress and is hoping that I will manage to stick with it for a while. And hopefully get some stuff out here too. Will try out Scott’s advice on using drafts in Live Writer, etc.

Aaaaanyways, have a look around, drop me an email if you want, comment on stuff, subscribe to my feed, et cetera. Or just ignore me. That is fine by me too

By the way if you are interested in seeing that very good session, you can find them here. I recommend downloading it using the BitTorrent file you find there. If you think it is a bit much, just use a decent BitTorrent client like µTorrent and you can select just that file. However I really do recommend that you download the whole thing cause it is a lot of really great stuff there. For example some very good introduction sections to Test-Driven Development with Roy Osherove.