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…